Plenty of folks run businesses with just a smartphone and a computer and an Internet connection. Heck, there are lots of folks running successful YouTube channels with little more than that.

Give me... violence.
Kill the... silence.

That's S!CK — https://youtu.be/5IS53CZjT6o? (the music video by The Warning)

To the OP: Gary Larson is one of the all time great cartoonists. Thanks for resurrecting this from the archives! Of all the things I miss from local daily newspapers that were once worth reading, cartoons and editorials are the things I miss.

Once you know a few simple rules, being American and hearing non-Americans speak English gets a lot easier. For instance, vowels in American English are different from the vowels in most European languages, including British English and most other English-speaking countries.

British English, Spanish, Italian, French, and Portuguese all use the Latin vowel sounds Ahh, Ehh, EEE, Ohh, and OOO, with Yih or Ih often used for Y. H comes out Haitch, and J comes out 'h' in some cases. Bilingual Mexicans generally speak English more like Americans, because many of their teachers are American. There are, of course, many exceptions.

In college, I worked summers in textile mills back when there still were textile mills in SC. I was working with a Pakistani and two working class Brits, one from Oldham and one from Accrington. Occasionally, they had a visiting manager from Manchester. The four or five of us were repairing and re-conditioning textile machinery made by the British company my Dad worked for. The mill "fixers" (maintenance workers) working with us were native South Carolinians of Scots-Irish and Irish descent. They had spent 98% of their lives within 50 miles of home. It was as if they spoke a COMPLETELY different language from the Brits. Many of them had no more than an 8th grade education. The Pakistani sounded more like the Brits, because he learned English from British-sounding teachers and college professors as he grew up.

Anyway, I often played translator within that group. I understood all their accents, and most of their word usage differences, because I'd taken a LOT of English lit classes by then. They would laugh uproariously when I would translate, "Dat dough-un lukk rahht. Gee-me dat dere wree-inch" ("That doesn't look right, hand me that wrench," in "mill worker-ese") into, "Ah dough-aunt like thaaht. An' me thaaht spannah," in the particular regional British vernacular of my coworkers.

English has many variants all over the world. To this day I marvel at how we can speak the same language and yet make no sense to one another. Throw in its usage as a second language, and things can get interesting! Thank goodness for subtitles on TV shows from Britain, Australia, India, and New Zealand.

Yep! There are times to block that data, and times to keep it. When I post phone photos here, I remove the GPS data. But for an insurance company accident report, I leave it in the files!

I wish I'd learned Spanish instead of French! I've never needed to use French, but have had plenty of instances where I could have used Spanish.

I'm a huge fan of music, from classical and jazz to hard rock and most everything in between (except bubblegum pop, rap, and Nashville country). One of my favorite rock bands is The Warning — three sisters from Monterrey Mexico who grew up bilingual in a private Catholic girls' school. They have been writing and performing all but three of their songs in English, since they were in elementary school and middle school (9, 12, and 14)!

In English-speaking interviews, they sound like Midwestern Americans. The drummer sings lead on a fourth of their songs, in English or Spanish, while drumming. She is Drumeo's 2023 Rock Drummer of the Year... at the age of 22.

At 13, 16, and 18, they released a critically acclaimed "rock novel concept album," Queen of the Murder Scene.

https://youtu.be/s6b_FgQnXL8? Links to Hell You Call a Dream — Live at Pepsi Center in Mexico City, 10/28/2023 (The Warning's tenth anniversary show). This illustrates the live wall of sound they create with just three people.

Being bilingual is a superpower for them. They are performing sold-out shows all over Europe and the UK right now. They've played in Canada, the USA, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, and this summer, they go to Japan. Album #4 is on the way in June.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Warning_(band) will start you down their rabbit hole if you are a rock fan.

That looks like a classic Southern breakfast diner… It's obviously deeply embedded in the local culture.

Indeed, THANK-YOU for your service.

I love local diners, especially the ones in mid-size towns and cities of the Northeast where I ate when I was traveling to train school photographers. Some of those had extensive menus, bakeries, salad bars, and ridiculously low prices for decent food. They were great when I needed to fly my expense report under the accountants' radar.

If you ever come through Greensboro or High Point, NC, stop at a Carolina's Diner. It's a local chain with predictably decent diner food and a '50s – '60s atmosphere.

I took a solo camping trip from SC to CA and back in the summer of 1978. AAA maps got me everywhere. It took a lengthy process of making notes each night by camp lantern listing every route number and turn... But I only got "lost" a couple of times. Both times led to decent photo opportunities, so I didn't care.

Now, however, Siri is a blessing.

5% is generous for text documents. It's useless for calculating photo printing.

The "toner low" warning is to let you know to have a spare ready. In other words, "Please go buy a new toner cartridge now, so you don't run out."

Anyone remember the holodeck from Star Trek? Someone will always be trying to create another reality...

As for killing off "single purpose cameras," that happened a long time ago. These days, the device we carry in our pocket is likely a "smartphone," which is like a supercomputer connected to every other computer on the planet via cellular and WiFi Internet services. Its camera is capable of stills, video, FAX, barcode reading, and more. Add a few million potential applications via software, and you have a revolutionary tool.

Many of us still have dedicated photography tools, but even they are likely to be combination stills/video recording devices.

We’ve had good experiences with Wasabi batteries and chargers.

That is usually the case when "in-lens IS" is involved, especially with older Canon and some Sigma and Tamron IS/VC lenses.

Where it gets especially weird is when you have in-body and in-lens systems from different manufacturers. Generally, in-lens systems work best at focal lengths longer than 140mm full frame equivalent. In-body systems work best at the shorter range of full frame equivalent focal lengths. That knowledge may help you decide which to turn on or off, and when.

The exception is when you have a long lens on a body made by the same manufacturer, and both are stabilized AND engineered to work together in tandem. Lumix makes some longer lenses with integrated OIS (optical image stabilization). Their latest bodies are also very well stabilized, and they have a "Dual IS II" system that takes advantage of both in-body and in-lens systems. You can leave both forms of IS ON when using Lumix or Panasonic Leica lenses on Lumix bodies, and the combination will give you the best of both worlds — IBIS will handle the shorter range and ILIS (OIS) will handle the longer range of focal lengths.

That's the point a lot of folks miss... "Rules and precepts" are useful tools, but not the "be-all, end-all" factors in creative expression. There comes a point when you internalize all that stuff and it stews around in your head until you are presented with scenes that benefit from bits and pieces of it, and perhaps from an intuitive exception or two. I don't put too much emphasis on any one structural guideline. It's like being a craftsperson in any field, you have a tool set. Each tool in the set is good for something. You learn how to use it properly. Then maybe a particular scene requires (or "enjoys" combining several ways of thinking you had not yet associated as complementary in some way. Along that path, you break a rule or three, and the result is mesmerizing in surprising ways.

It's like musical composition. Certain musicians have an uncanny knack of combining multiple genres together into a new structural form. It retains elements of the old genres, yet has a characteristic sound and approach all its own. It works precisely because of the blending of styles, and the combining and breaking of multiple rules or… (ahem) precepts. Jazz and progressive rock ensembles have done it time and again.

Read the manuals for lens and camera. They will explain in excruciating JEnglish what you need to know.

Correct on both counts. The point is emphasis. Light comes first. Without understanding the various qualities of light (specularity, collation, diffusion, intensity, color, direction, angles of incidence and reflectance, etc.), the triangle is not as useful as it could be. The properties of the light in use must be considered when deciding upon proper exposure...

That's one of the frailties of human existence... We simplify things to a point that does not always work.

Take auto exposure — It's pretty good, most of the time. But in certain situations, it is useless. Try photographing a blonde bride in a white dress against a white fence in bright sun using auto exposure. Or photograph an African American in a black graduation robe against a stage full of faculty in black robes against a black curtain. No way is an autoexposure system going to work there!

There is a certain amount that must be understood about light and the various qualities of it before the triangle makes complete sense. An argument can be made that it is a pyramid-shaped balloon, and that light is the air in the balloon. Fill the "balloon" with light, and the scales on the three triangular axes on each side of the pyramid. shift to accommodate the intensity (EV) shift.