It’s hard to believe the Bohemian Rhapsody movie is 7 years old. It’s a music documentary about a band that plays the music of Queen, charting their rise from unknowns to playing sold-out gigs, just like the real Queen band.
Anyway, that’s enough of a commentary about what a fantasy the movie was. The trailer was pretty good and Brickfilm Day did an outstanding reproduction of it. This post has been sitting in my drafts folder since 2018, so it’s about time I published it. I’m impressed all the videos are still live after 7 years.
Here is the original trailer. I love what they did for their Live Aid appearance.
I’ve been using Borgmatic, a Python frontend to BorgBackup, to handle backups of my photo archive.
For a few months I had trusted macOS Time Machine to do that job, but somehow, the APFS container or something got corrupted, and I had to format a 12TB external drive to fix it. Time Machine was interrupted while making a backup and corrupted an index irreparibly. We have occasional power cuts so I did not want that to happen again.
So, back to BorgBackup. I had used it before but I wasn’t happy with how I had it configured. I don’t remember what it was now, because the reasons are lost in the mists of time. I decided to look into Borgmatic to help run BorgBackup and it made configuring it fairly easy.
Borgmatic is a configuration-based tool, so you create a .yml file defining the directories to backup, where the backup repo lives, and then run it whenever you want to create a new backup. I have it running once a day because my photo library doesn’t change that often.
Browsing BorgBackup repositories was a weak point of the system, but there are two good options:
I tried Vorta before, but you need to mount the repository to browse it, and I didn’t want to go down the route of installing a macFUSE kernel mod. However, I see from their website some promising news:
Thanks to the new FSKit backend in macFUSE, supported file systems can now run entirely in user space on macOS 26. That means no more rebooting into recovery mode to enable support for the macFUSE kernel extension. Installation is faster and setup becomes a seamless experience.
If you’re only extracting backups, you can safely ignore the popup that demands you give Vorta full-disk access.
I noticed that the Vorta app behaves like a popup window on macOS. It’s not possible to CMD-TAB to it, and it has no menu system in the top admin bar. It’s not even in the Dock. You’ll have to run it from Spotlight/Alfred/Raycast and it will be shown.
From the Archives tab, it is possible to “Extract…” from a repository that doesn’t require mounting of the backup and that does work. If you have a large repository you may see the infamous spinning colour ball if you’re using a Mac as it gets all the file info. Give it time. It may take more than a minute to show you a file listing.
I’m also investigating a web-based borg-ui that runs in a Docker container. That allows me to restrict access only to the directories I want to back up or restore, or as I have configured it now, it only has access to the backup repositories and a restore directory. I don’t need to restore files very often so I can shut down the container and only launch it when I need to.
Browsing or extracting files using Borg-ui is just as slow as in Vorta, but it has a spinning animation in a modal popup to stop you from trying to restore twice.
If you’re not familiar with Docker, give Vorta a go, but borg-ui is definitely worth a look too. Don’t depend on either of them to do your backups. That should be automated so you don’t need to remember to do it.
You should of course have a remote backup, and for that I recommend Backblaze. I’ve been using them for years. Thankfully I’ve hardly ever had to restore more than a few files from them but I check it semi-regularly. Sign up through here and I’ll get a free month if you pay for it!
Running a photography club competition used to mean juggling spreadsheets, chasing emails, and manually tallying votes. I built Photo Competition Manager to change that.
This free WordPress plugin handles everything your club needs: member management, secure uploads, flexible voting, and beautiful results displays.
This will suit a photography club that uses WordPress for their website and that has a projector for their meetings. If you already run a photo league with projected images or prints but collect votes from your club members using pen and paper you’re the perfect candidate to try this plugin.
This is the very first release of this plugin. It has been used a couple of times to run several test photo competitions and one monthly league competition. However, bugs happen. I would love if your photography club used this plugin but I will need feedback to improve it. Run a couple of test competitions first to get used to how it works.
Getting Started in Minutes
The setup wizard creates all the required pages automatically. Select the pages you need, click a button, and you’re ready to go.
Manage Your Membership
The Members page is your central roster. Add members individually or bulk import from CSV. Assign grades, track status, and send magic-link upload invitations with a single click.
Each member gets a unique upload URL—no passwords to remember, no accounts to create. They click the link and upload.
Create and Track Competitions
The competitions dashboard shows a list of competitions, allowing you to edit them and send out upload emails to members. Only one competition may be active at a time, but a competition may have more than one category.
Create competitions with custom categories (Colour, Mono, Projected, etc), grade divisions (Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced), and submission quotas. Each competition can have its own rules without affecting your defaults.
Watch Submissions Roll In
As members upload, the submissions page displays thumbnails of every entry. You’ll see who’s submitted, which categories are filling up, and whose photos are still missing.
A Frictionless Upload Experience
When members click their magic link, they land on a clean upload form. They select their category, choose their image, and submit. The progress banner shows upload status in real time.
The plugin handles validation automatically—file types, dimensions, and quota limits are all enforced before the image is accepted.
Complete Control Over Voting
The voting controls page is your competition command centre. From here you can:
Open and close voting for each category independently.
Toggle the results display on or off.
Enable slideshow mode for in-person club nights.
Disable uploads once the submission deadline passes.
Show a QR code for members to scan with their phones to vote.
In the competition settings, you choose between token-based voting (unique links per member) or password-protected public voting. The voting controls page features a full-screen slideshow mode where members can vote together during meetings.
On the night of the competition we do the following:
Close uploads and hide results.
Show the slideshow with a 10 or 15-second delay as a preview.
Display the QR code and make sure every member can scan it and open the voting page.
Open voting and show the slideshow again.
When everyone has voted, close voting.
2 members of the club will then go through the images and offer a critique, using the slideshow again but in manual mode this time.
Repeat for the next category.
When all the voting is done, toggle the results page on and display the “top 3” results, and then the anonymous results page on the projector.
Finally, an email is sent out to all members showing their score, ranking in their grade and the votes they received. Names are not attached to the votes for obvious reasons.
Voting By Phone
Members can vote on the competition using their phones after they have scanned the QR code on the voting controls page.
Results That Make Sense
When voting closes, the results dashboard breaks down every score by member grade. See vote distributions, identify your winners, and export everything to CSV for your records.
The frontend includes a responsive top-3 podium display perfect for announcing winners, plus full results tables with filtering by grade and category.
Built for Photography Clubs
Photo Competition Manager was built specifically for the way camera clubs actually run competitions:
Magic-link authentication means members don’t need WordPress accounts to upload.
Grade-based scoring supports clubs that split their membership by experience level.
Slideshow mode turns any screen into a projection-ready display.
CSV export keeps your archives intact.
Get Started Free
Photo Competition Manager is free and GPL. Install it from the WordPress plugin directory or from the plugins page on your WordPress site in the usual way. Navigate to the Competitions menu to get started.
We have an 11-year-old chihuahua and while he enjoys going for walks, he’s happiest when it’s a short walk. Actually, he’s happiest when he’s cuddled up next to us in a blanket, but we all need exercise.
Diego in Dún Laoghaire
When it’s a longer walk, we bring his buggy and he sits in it, looking around, happy to be with us and king of all he observes from his high vantage point.
When our previous dog, Oscar, got too old to walk much we did the same for him, but he had to make do with a child’s stroller. We didn’t know you could get doggy buggies back then!
So here’s a fun milestone nobody wants to hit: my hearing’s genuinely gone downhill. I’ve suspected it for years (you know that thing where you keep asking people to repeat themselves and they start giving you that look?), but it all got properly real earlier this year when tinnitus decided to move in permanently. A trip to the audiologist confirmed what I already knew. High-pitched sounds have basically ghosted me. Turns out I’m now officially a candidate for hearing aids, which feels like one of those adulting moments nobody warns you about.
My Samsung phone has an “adapt sound” feature that allows you to train it on your hearing, and the graph it created for me a couple of years ago looked very like the one the audiologist created.
Anyway, enough about my failing biology. How’s your hearing holding up? I stumbled across this completely unscientific but of course compelling YouTube video that tests what frequencies you can still detect, and let me tell you it was humbling. I couldn’t hear anything past about 6400Hz. It could be my headphones, I suppose, but I know it’s not. Not really.
Look, I’m not here to lecture you, but seriously: wear ear plugs. Protect your ears. Future you will thank present you for not being stubborn about it. Learn from my mistakes and all that.
Why it acts like both a wave and a particle and gets stranger still.
If you remember the double-slit experiment from school, this video is a super accessible refresher and a reminder of just how weird light really is. It behaves like both a wave and a particle.
But it gets even stranger. When scientists tried to record which path the photons took (slit 1 or slit 2), the wave pattern disappeared. Even more baffling, this happened even when they recorded the path after the photon had already hit the screen.
Stick around until the end of the video to see the quantum eraser in action. So very weird.
Oh, and of course the related videos has a video by Sabine debunking the quantum eraser idea.
Ha, what a rabbit hole. What she says makes total sense. I’m going to watch her bomb video next.
I asked ChatGPT to explain what’s going on. It went way over my head. Further study is required.
Sean Tucker gives some great advice to landscape photographers, likening landscape photography to fishing in street photography. Fishing is the act of finding an interesting place on the street and waiting for someone to walk through. I’m more of a hunter. I keep walking, looking for an interesting subject or situation, rarely stopping. You’ll see many examples of that in my Edinburgh photos.
“It’s a great place for landscape photographers to start. They’re used to fishing, to framing a composition first and waiting for the weather or light to come to them.”
I’m always wondering if I should post photography stuff on this blog here, or should I write my words about photography on my photoblog? What say you, gentle reader? Should I care at all? It’s a personal blog after all.
This episode of Recovering Queen was such a delight to listen to. They’re covering the wonderful Bicycle Race, a definite 10/10 Queen song. I love their banter about the song itself and the cover at the end was fantastic!
“IT’LL be dark at 5pm before you know it” one parent dropping their child off at school cheerily said to themselves as the telltale sign that an Irish summer is over, Enoch Burke hovering at school gates, has arrived once again.
“Fuck sake,” confirmed much of the nation as the emergence of a wild Burke haring back to its unnatural habitat of outside a premises they haven’t worked at since 2022, signaled the summer is well and truly over.
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