Weeknotes 19: Meant to Be Used

• Mom and Dad stopped fighting! You can finally use Sonos Voice Control with Spotify as of this week. It’s one of the least fussy interfaces in what it accepts, and it responds as Giancarlo Esposito for some (delightful) reason. Grateful for whatever cursed defensive patent trading happened behind the scenes to make two things that have always worked together in every other respect finally do so here too.

• Weird restrictions like this always make me think of the Web 2.0 days where everything was a beautiful jumble of services working together against their will. Yahoo Pipes! HousingMaps! Heck, let’s just bring back frames.

• Rented a Sony a7CR to fiddle around with for a few days. Wild that you can walk around with a 60+ megapixel full-frame sensor in your hand.

• Shoutout to LensRentals for being a reliable and affordable way to try out preposterously expensive toys. I’ve somehow been a customer for over a decade.

• 48-hour review: Image quality was excellent. The interface does not at all map to what my brain is used to from Canons and Leicas. The flexibility of changing lenses is nice, but the opposite of what I’m looking for in a travel camera; my years of carrying a bag full of lenses, filters, and hoods are over.

• Hard to imagine replacing the Q2 as my favorite piece of kit. The Q3 does fix my biggest gripe (you can charge it over USB-C) at the expense of adding a fold-out screen I vigorously do not want (and being basically impossible to purchase anywhere.)

• As I start carrying a camera around more again, trying to take after Harper:

  My goal is to break my cameras while using them. My biggest fear is that they will get broken while they are sitting on a counter or a shelf. They are meant to be used.