Books of 2024/2025
My reading goes in phases; the last phase was a lot of phantastic Science Fiction.
Blindsight/Echopraxia, by Peter Watts
In one unimportant tangent, we built AIs, which improved beyond our understanding, and now we have a quasi-religious order to figure out whether their output is brilliant or gibberish. How prescient a comment from a book from 2006.
Apparently, the author is a biologist, which is refreshing with its unexpected metaphors and surprising insights. That's exactly my kind of dense, science-philosophy-fiction. It reminds me of Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312 in its wild inventiveness, and that is about the highest praise I have for a science fiction book!
Shards of Earth/Eyes of the Void/Lords of Uncreation, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
What a beautiful ride from a scrappy salvage barge, gradually and inexorably towards the destiny of the entire universe. A perfect space opera.
All three books were somewhat slow to start, but impossible to put down once they did. Some recurring characters felt perhaps a bit forced when they re-appeared a tad too often. But the payoff was always worth it, so I don't begrudge the fan-service. And finally a space opera where humans are not the center of the universe.
Most of all, I admire the richly textured word, with various truly alien species and customs. Knife-wielding lawyers! Unspeakable Clams! Immortal Lobster-people! Yet all with thoughtful motivations and cultures that a make of mockery of normcore Star Wars/Trek. Just beautiful!
Rubicon, by J. S. Dewes
A mil science fiction tour de force, about a future war in which soldiers are reincarnated into clones whenever they're killed in action. For Sergeant Valero, this has happened 96 times already, and it's getting old.
But then she's transferred to a new company, and there are evil robot aliens, rogue AIs, and a surprisingly human story of overcoming depression, finding friendship in harsh places, and perseverance.
Suffice it to say I couldn't put this book down at some point, and had to continue reading at every waking moment. Absolutely brilliant!
And then there's that ending...
Notable Shoutouts
to the Fallout and Murderbot TV shows, which were delightful. The book series Arcana Imperii series by Miles Cameron, and Singularity Sky/Iron Sunrise by Charles Stross were great reads, too.
My own Calendar (with typst)
I've been printing my own family calendar over the last year. However, most of the calendar templates I found online are ugly or boring. So obviously, I had to make my own:
Look, it has my local holidays and vacations!
The fun thing is, this was generated with typst, which is a TeX-like markdown language that I wanted to play with for a while. But in contrast to TeX, it is easily programmable:
Typst was a complete joy to work with. It combines the notational ease of markdown with the layout chops of TeX and a simple, sane programming model.
Windows 11
My friends and colleagues often complain about Windows 11. Personally, however, I much prefer it to Windows 10. In particular, here are some standout features:
Windows Explorer now has tabs! Coming from macOS and Linux, I so missed explorer tabs that I added them to Windows 10 with a plugin. I still feel handicapped whenever I have to interact with an older Windows box that doesn't have them. But Windows 11 does. Next, please fix the inevitable hangs in Explorer, please.
Windows 11 includes a very useful clipboard manager! Just hit ❖-V instead of Ctrl-V, and select any of your previously copied snippets. I use this all the time, to copy items from multiple places into a common list. Or to share that link I copied half an hour ago.
The Windows 11 screenshot tool is hands-down the best screenshot tool of all the operating systems I know. Why? Because it captures the full screen content at the time of capture, including the mouse pointer, hover states, tooltips, and everything else. And it copies the capture immediately to the clipboard, ready to paste into documentation or notes. I hit ❖-⇧-S many times every day. Another useful feature is text recognition that is now part of the screenshot viewer and image viewer.
At work, I spend many hours every day in Microsoft Teams. Teams is not a high point in Microsoft's portfolio. But at least I can mute and unmute my microphone from anywhere in the OS with ❖-Alt-K. This is highly useful whenever I want to present something, without having to manually switch to Teams and back just to unmute myself. Oh, and after a year of waiting, the "new" Teams finally re-learned to spell-check more than one language at a time this year. About time.
Sometimes I have to annotate PDFs, especially for signing forms. Windows now includes a very competent little PDF annotator in Edge, of all places. It's not as good as macOS's Preview.app, or Okular. But hey, at least it's there.
A few weeks ago, my Surface tablet somehow broke its Windows installation and got stuck in a boot loop. System restore didn't work. Safe mode didn't work. Finally it booted me to a defeated screen saying "it seems you're f*cked". But right after that, the very new Quick Machine Recovery kicked in, re-downloaded a new copy of Windows, and recovered the machine and all my data. It took half an hour, but it worked perfectly.
I'll stop here. There are a few more notable features, but most of them are more widely known. For example, there's now a handy search feature in the Task Manager. The On-Screen Touch Keyboard is now almost as good as a mobile keyboard. The new Terminal app doesn't stink any more. the RDP client is faster and better-looking. And of course WSL keeps improving.
Next up, can I please have proper color management in the Windows shell, so app icons don't look all clownish on my wide-gamut monitor? It's 2025, and most new screens now come with decent DP3 support, so it's about time.
Phone Reliability
One of our Pixel 6a phones recently had its battery bricked by a mandatory software update. Conveniently, Google only "found out" about this issue a few months after the warranty period ended for anyone who bought the phone when it was new. Lucky for us, we had bought ours later, when its predecessor broke on vacation and couldn't be repaired. So ours was still covered by its warranty, and we got a full refund.
I noticed that issues such as this have caused all our phone replacements in the last years:
- This Pixel 6a got a mandatory update that bricked its battery, and can't be repaired before we go on vacation. So we now have to buy a new phone.
- A Pixel 5a's screen broke on vacation and local repair shops refused to repair foreign devices. So we had to buy a new phone.
- A Pixel 4a suddenly refused to charge, and I didn't want to wait two weeks to get it repaired. So I bought a new phone.
- Added: The other Pixel 6a's power button fell out, and the repair broke the screen.
However, before we used Pixel phones, we had Fairphones, which had quite a different record:
- A screen broke when I dropped it face-first on a radiator. I got a replacement screen fast-shipped within 24h, one day before we left on a trip. The replacement screen with priority shipping cost €98.
- A battery became very weak, and we got a replacement part for €27.
- A charging port became unreliable and we got a replacement part under warranty.
- We replaced a broken headphone socket. The replacement part cost €36.
Whenever we had to replace a phone, it was because the old one could not be repaired in time. With the Fairphone, we could repair the phone easily, and thus didn't have to replace it. Needless to say, the next replacement phone will be a Fairphone.
Addendum
As it happened, I was able to buy a replacement battery for the Pixel 6a from IFixit, and was able to repair the phone. However, two weeks later, the power button fell out of the other Pixel 6a. The replacement part was cheap, but the repair required prying off the display again, which caused a tiny preexisting crack to shatter the entire screen. A replacement screen was neither available nor economical, so the phone had to be replaced.
The Perfect 23mm Lens
What's in a perfect lens? Is it sharpness? Contrast? Microcontrast? Bokeh? Whatever does that even mean?
Today is new lens day. To test my purchase, and get it out of my system, today, I will measure my new lens. It's the Fujifilm XF 23mm f/1.4 R LM WR, a preposterously complex lens for a ridiculously high-resolution camera. Will it prevail against my older Fujifilm XF 23mm f/1.4 R? How will it fare against my travel zoom, the Fujifilm XF 16-80mm f/4 R OIS WR?
First up, resolution: I printed a test chart on A3 paper. First I tried printing the PDF directly with Preview.app, but noticed that the chart itself started blurring lines at 1250 L/PH1, which implies that Preview.app prints at 1250/8.7in≈150DPI2. Not satisfied, I exported the test chart to a high-DPI tiff, and printed with Canon's print application, which appropriately resolved the finest lines on the test chart.
I took pictures of the marked 3:2 area on the chart. Since all my lenses are easily sharp enough to resolve the maximum 20 L/PH on the chart, I aligned the chart to the center quadrant of a 3x3 grid on my camera display, and cropped appropriately in post.
Each of these crops is at 1:1 resolution of the original capture, at the center of the frame, with no sharpening, straight from the raw file. Exposure was adjusted to a consistent 95% L in HSL. The red line indicates the level of resolution where the lines are just resolvable3. The resolution scale is in 300x L/PH. For instance, a resolution of 14 corresponds to 4200 L/PH, which is slightly short of the 5150 pixels in the 40 MP image. Since the color filter demosaicing is not entirely lossless, this is an excellent result.
On average, the new lens resolves a good 10% more lines than the old 23 prime, and perhaps 20% more than the zoom. In the real world, these numbers mean nothing. All three of these lenses are easily sharp enough for everything I might throw at them.
Next to the resolution is the contrast level in ΔL4 (HSL), measured at the right side of this pack of lines, which is a good proxy for contrast of high frequency detail, or microcontrast. A lower black level means more microcontrast. Indeed, this is where the new lens shows a clear improvement over the other two lenses, with visibly more contrast in fine details.
Also notable is a visible magenta color cast on the old 23mm prime wide open, and a minor blue color cast on the new 23mm. In normal images, color fringe suppression will mostly get rid of these, so these are not usually worrisome.
And then I repeated the procedure in the image corners. I took the same pictures, but this time the resolution chart covered the top-right quadrant of my 3x3 grid:
As expected, resolution and contrast fall off towards the image corners. For the new lens, the falloff is about 20% resolution, and 40% microcontrast at open apertures, lowering it roughly to the level of the old lens' center. For the old 23mm prime, it's about 40% resolution, and 40% contrast at open apertures, which is visibly soft. The effect diminishes rapidly for smaller apertures, however, and is mostly gone at f/4. Consequently, the 16-80 f/4 merely loses a small bit of contrast.
In summary of these objective measurements, the new lens is ridiculously good. In the real world, I would expect to see a minor difference in microcontrast, mostly visible in the image corners. But stop down, and all three lenses will perform very similarly.
As a sanity check, here's the central resolution target, shot a bit closer, to get a feeling for how the above measurements look like on larger structures:
As you can see, the differences in resolution are not a big deal in the real world, and even the contrast levels for larger subjects are not as different as the measurements might suggest. The color fringing wide open is still visible, however.
Next, let's look at the lenses' bokeh. For an objective measure, I took a picture of various film boxes along a measuring stick. Focus was at 50cm distance, with the close box at 25cm, and the far one at 75cm. This should give a good indication of the out-of-focus rendering on both sides of the focus plane.
You can see a slightly harsher bokeh and very minor color fringes in the old lens at f/1.4. But from these images, I don't see a compelling reason to choose one over the other. Curiously, at f/4, the 16-80 seems to show slightly less blur than the two primes.
For an assessment in more realistic conditions, I took a few photos of flowers and point lights. The flowers give a good indication of the focus transition from in-focus to out-of-focus, while the point lights show how specular highlights are rendered.
The transition pictures once more show a tendency for colored seams on the old prime, which is absent on the new one. This makes the new lens' bokeh seem a little smoother. Apart from that, the differences are very minor. As expected, there is no significant difference in detail between these shots. The point lights essentially confirm this, with a bit more color fringing on the old lens.
In conclusion, I found the new Fujifilm XF 23mm R LM WR slightly sharper than the old Fujifilm XF 23mm R, with noticeably less color fringing, and slightly better microcontrast. Once stopped down to f/4, these differences become insignificant. At that point, both prime lenses retain a very minor resolution advantage over the Fujifilm XF 16-80 R OIS WR.
Thus my curiosity in the technical quality of these lenses is satisfied, I verified that my lens is functioning properly, and I can now go out and shoot pictures.
