The vast majority of people have been lulled into a coma in the area of personal data security, believing and repeating the mantra, "I have nothing to hide." Maybe not 'hide' as in 007 skuldudgery or some dark secrets from 1978, but your data is yours and at increasing risk in the all-digital, all-archiving, and highly insecure world.

Australia's ABC News has some articles on this that are interesting:
• »your identity pieced together from stolen data (May 2023)
• »one man against the tide of breached data (Sep 2023)

I regularly watch videos by a handful of (good) photographers on YouTube. Sometimes years of old habits and older misinformation come crashing down. One such lie is always shoot on as low iso as possible. I recall talking in a group of friends around 1990 - and we "wished" for a camera with a lens that was super-wide to long telephoto (17mm to 500mm) with flexible iso. Well, today we have that! And it can fit in your pocket! Examples are the »Lumix TZ-80 and many similar models. Nevermind all the fancier "proper" cameras.

With digital we still readily revert to old film habits and rarely explore changing the iso to suit conditions. This video from »Simon d'Entremont reset my thinking and I can see the difference in my images already. If the magic flexibility we long ago so wished for has been granted, let us use it.

Modern Linux is so nice. Not that I needed it, but RAR support has been in Linux since the start - Windows only recently got that, and then only by including an open-source archiving library. Printing to PDF from any application (browser, etc), has been built-in with Linux since the early 2000s.

Then you look at desktops. Windows - you get one, which may warp and vary (and suddenly sprout ads) according to their whim and fancy with every update. Mac - you get one, and thou shalt only perform thine computing along their blessed and chosen way, or not at all.

Meanwhile with Linux, you get a choice of at least 20 desktop systems and they are all customisable! Gnome, KDE Plasma, MATE, Cinnamon, Xfce, Lxqt, Budgie, and some etcetera. And if a full "desktop" isn't what you like, there are a slew of Window Managers like i3, Openbox, and yet more etcetera. You may choose what you prefer and then tweak it to suit you even better.

I've picked up a trend in the camera industry. If you looked 10-15 years ago, the drive was to get a better camera down to the cheapest entry price, enticing a lower tier of buyers. Example: the Canon D1200, D200 type things. A large-ish sensor (bigger than my older 'pro' Canon had), smaller, lighter body, all the main features aside from the advanced stuff, and a crappy but functional kit lens… all for $500.

Then along came Sony and mirrorless, and also the huge advances with smartphones. So now the trend has turned. Cameras are becoming a rarified specialty item, a high luxury. Even the pocket-sized compacts, a rapidly vanishing species, are getting expensive.

Over in the proper full-size camera camp, things are even worse. Sales are down, and I mean way down. They are making superb cameras - Sony A7Riv, Canon R5 & R6, Fuji X-T5, Panasonic S1 or S5. These fall in the $4K to $9K range, for just the body! No lens yet. Even the models further down the catalog may drop towards the $2K mark, but now rarely break in below it.

Lenses have also shot up in price. Mirrorless has almost become an excuse to double the price for an equivalent lens. Take Canon's legendary "magic drainpipe', the 70-200 f/2.8 IS. In EF-mount this used to be $1800 new, then over the years it inflated to maybe $2400. The new RF-mount one is so close to $4000 that I simply will not ever even consider it.

$500 for a body and kit lens - those days are gone.

Cameras return full-circle to being the domain of the well-heeled. The hoi-polloi»* have their smartphones, capable as they are.
“James, would you bring the Canon around the front please. And I think I'll have the eighty-five mil one-point-two today.”