Only Nikons I own are 35mm film FM2 and F4. The bodies feel like tactile bliss. FM2 has a dry lubricated system with crazy titanium honeycombed etched shutter and F4 is the last pro DSLR they made with no menu system.
On the digital front I found Fuji X-Txx series to be like tiny Nikons in their usability with all common controls on dials.
I'm (at least) a third-generation Nikon shooter, and I still have my grandfather's FTn. For its era, predating CNC and CAD, it is very comfortable to use, but the leather "eveready" case shell is welcome.
(One reason I shoot Nikon is because I can still shoot his glass on modern bodies. Indeed, that's what my D5300 spends a lot of its time wearing these days.)
True revolutions in consumer imaging excepted, I doubt I'll feel more than an occasional gadget fan's urge to replace my D850 and D500 as my primary bodies. Oh, the Z series has features, I won't disagree, even if I'm deeply suspicious of EVFs and battery life. But the D850 is a slightly stately, super-versatile full-frame body, and the D500 is a light, 20fps APS-C, that share identical UIs, lens and peripheral lineups, and (given a fast card to write to) deep enough buffers to mostly not need thinking about.
For someone like me who cares very little about technical specs, and a great deal for the ability to hang a camera over their shoulder and walk out the door and never once lose a shot due to equipment failure, there really isn't much that could matter more. I may have 350 milliseconds to get a flight shot of a spooked heron, or be holding my breath and focusing near 1:1 macro with three flash heads twelve inches away from a busily foraging and politely opinionated hornet. In those moments, eye and hand and machine and mind and body all must work as one to get the shot, and having to think at all about how to use the camera essentially guarantees a miss.
Hence the five years of work I've put into not having to think about that. I suppose I could've done more than well enough with any system, sure. But my experiences with others have left me usually quite glad Nikon's is the system I invested in.
Old school Zeiss glass is like butter for any camera body. My dad told me to stick with Nikon and spend my money on lenses first. He was not wrong. You can put 25 year old professional lenses on a mid-market Nikon body and the images will be stunning with very little effort.
Oh, tell me about it. Sure, you can only stop-down meter Pentax 645 lenses on F mount since the aperture levers go opposite ways, and I don't know any of the YouTubers who are the only ones left doing that kind of engineering. So what? With anything that doesn't move around a lot, and the sensor crop working in your favor to deliver only from where the glass is sharpest - sure, you're not doing wide angle that way, but where else are you getting a razor-sharp 120mm f/4 macro for a hundred bucks?
The 105mm f/2.8 VR II Micro-Nikkor is still better for the field, of course; that kind of work requires a lens which can talk to my body and flashes, and the stabilizer is actually useful. But for folks not chasing wasps around or the like - and willing to be a little old-fashioned about their working, in a way that will teach you about photography some of what a Piper or Cessna does about flying - there really is no better way to get anywhere near that kind of performance at a similar price point, and a well-maintained lens of such stately age is a joy to work with besides.
Oh, I've tried them a time or two. In the store they look great. The trouble is that I don't really shoot in camera stores often, and when I'm shooting wild wasps in close macro, I'm not autofocusing or even manually focusing but rather holding my breath and timing the insuppressible tiny movements of my body, and the contrast of the ommatidial boundaries in the wasp's eye as perceived through the carefully trained and practiced sensitivity of my eye, as I've learned to anticipate the moment in which my desired composition exists. This way, as the shutter release closes and the shutter itself opens, what's captured is a perfect portrait shot of the wasp, with the tack-sharp, razor-thin macro focal plane exactly where I want it - which almost always is indeed exactly at her eyes.
After all, most of the time she's watching me every bit as closely as I her, and I like to be able to show that. From the ways people look at and talk about that work, the effort has not been wholly wasted, but it is a more demanding task than I expect a median EVF, or if I'm honest really any even remotely affordable model, to handle. My eyes barely handle it, such that even in the D850's bright and generous viewfinder, the way I perceive this kind of focus is not as a clear sense of seeing those fine divisions between optical elements, but rather as minimizing a sort of unpleasant perceptual "static" or "interference," and it doesn't work at all even in my dominant eye through the lens of my glasses. (My cameras' eyepieces have diopter inserts adjusted to match my prescription.)
On reflection, maybe that's why the EVFs I've tried (Nikon Z5 and Z7 iirc, so previous generation) felt like they had a kind of weird shimmer I didn't like. I assume the Z8 does better, and sure, all the focus peaking and trick shot stuff in the viewfinder is nice. I'll even grant it feels like looking at the future. It's just that, so far at least, I find I seem to prefer looking through a camera.
I don't want to sound negative, but I genuinely don't get the premise of Tailscale.
VPN as a service sounds wrong from security perspective, as you are giving away all the keys. The same goes to the VPN providers for Internet access, but that at least is not trusted as much as Tailscale is.
These internal services that are annohnced are just... Services you can run on the Internet with TLS.
> VPN as a service sounds wrong from security perspective, as you are giving away all the keys.
yes, that's the value proposition. storing keys securely isn't free. if your threat model makes you trust your vpn provider less than yourself, by all means do it yourself.
> These internal services that are annohnced are just... Services you can run on the Internet with TLS.
I don't want the internet to even know I'm running a service if I only run it for myself.
Admittedly I use it for home stuff only, not a business, but I can much more securely provide a service on my tailnet by leaning on Tailscale to handle it for me than I can myself, without a significant amount of effort. I want to leave securely deploying services at work, at work, and lower my administrative overhead at home.
For a lot of businesses of a certain size, I'm sure the math works out similarly.
selfhost headscale or netbird or nebula for basically the same thing pretty fully in your control. The appeal is it's a an encrypted mesh network with a very performant point to point with relay if needed vpn backing it up. This lets you keep things reasonably private and much higher performance than the traditional vpn to the office router/infrastructure at office vpn. it lets you create an overlay network that matches your vlan rules keeping everyone segregated in their lane no matter where their devices are. Services on the internet with TLS are a bad idea for many, many things (both attack surface wise with everyone in the world being able to hit the service, but also with how questionably secure massive corporate technical projects often are, which can only change slowly due to business concerns (i.e. spending the dough to change this means no profit for the quarter and significant downtime because it was built wrong over a couple decades but manages to power the a lot of the business activity flow))
> VPN as a service sounds wrong from security perspective, as you are giving away all the keys.
Tailscale’s Android and Linux clients are open-source[0] and based on WireGuard (which AFAIU is now part of the Linux kernel[1]). With other VPN software you may be owning the keys but you cannot verify what the program does.
Tailscale requires a coordination server to function. This component is not open-source, but there is an open-source reimplementation called Headscale[2] that you can host on your own server.
Additionally, there is "tailnet lock"[3]:
> Tailnet lock lets you verify that no node is added to your tailnet without being signed by trusted nodes in your tailnet. When tailnet lock is enabled, even if Tailscale infrastructure is malicious or hacked, attackers can’t send or receive traffic on your tailnet.
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> These internal services that are annohnced are just... Services you can run on the Internet with TLS.
I haven’t used Tailscale in a professional context, so I cannot comment on the usefulness there, but I am using it (with Headscale) in my homelab. It makes it very easy to access all the services spread onto multiple boxes from everywhere, let them all use the same AdGuard Home DNS server without having to configure them individually and tunnel all my traffic through my home internet connection using an exit node[4].
I normally use croc[5] for file transfers between boxes, but when I had to fetch some files from my Windows game streaming computer, it was easier to just use Taildrop because Tailscale was installed already.
> Tailscale’s Android and Linux clients are open-source
All of their client code is open source, save for the bits required to ship to/comply with any app store requirements. The "Linux" client also builds and runs cleanly on many other Unix-like OS's, and they've put a lot of effort to work around a lot of non-standardised stuff on various Linux distros to ensure smooth UX. It felt like hard work just reading about the issues they've ran into.
> based on WireGuard (which AFAIU is now part of the Linux kernel)
Tailscale has its own user-mode WG client library. In fact, you can use Tailscale as a library in a Go program, they have numerous examples for cool hacks such as authentication proxies (your VPN connection becomes your auth token, no other login required).
> I haven’t used Tailscale in a professional context, so I cannot comment on the usefulness [...]
I have and it's amazing. Stuff just works, and it naturally fills roles you wouldn't even expect it to, such as asset/inventory management (being THE source of truth to answer: "is this box even online"). We also use it to throw distributed LAN parties (not every game can be hosted on a headless box, sometimes there's nobody with a PC on a public IP, etc). It does something useful for everyone.
I had to resort to my own Invidious instance plus Sponsorblock.
Its looks is very much like OG Youtube and it is unusually fast: no overdone JS. You can also sync it up to Clipious on the phone and get a clean, bloat free Youtube experience without ads or slow page loads.
Currently 3D printinga lot of Lego rail on my FDM printer. Although not perfect, it does snap onto original rail and to its 3D printed peers. Lego pieces do snap to the dimples as well, although too tight.
Main use case for me is to lay some track between rooms for kid's trains.
What tripped me when shooting and developing film is that it usually works in negative. With digital you are always looking for overexposure, while negative film is OK with overexposure. Light builds silver density, while lack of it leaves a clear base with no information.
Then you get an analogue NOT operation when printing the negative on the enlarger. Two negative processes make a positive.
Film photography is very interesting as it combines art with optics and chemistry. Just pure magic seeing the image fade into the paper when developing.
Anecdotally, I heard that this is the reason why, as recently as 10 years ago, a majority of movies were shot on film: it handles highlights so well. It took a while for digital to catch up.
Oh yes, I dabbled a bit into using motion picture film stock for photography. It is fun to shoot it by the frame and not in feet, if you have a lab close to you to deal with the process.
Vision3 50D was recently(for film) introduced in 2011, and I had amazing results with it. Super smooth with very good latitude.
Did not know English, could not read anything, but still spent hundreds of hours first playing, and then tinkering with it.
There was no OS to mess up, and it booted instantly to a Sinclair BASIC prompt.