Reviewing 2021

It's January 4th and all of my clothes have shrunk. Even the ones I didn't wash. All at once. I have no idea what's going on.

Slowly getting the hang of the pandemic, I managed to work consistently for the year, not get covid and even travel a little. In 2021 I also took part in a medical study and lost a bunch of weight, then over xmas put it all back on again*

Had family visit, visited family, visited some friends, spent a few days working in London (which was terrifying due to everyone's general ignoring of the mask mandate on public transport), mused on different approaches to covid management and helped Anthony with his first EP.

Singapore's way of dealing with vaccine passports/testing/track and trace/etc is good. Very good. Somewhat shady the way the ruling party uses the data, but technically it's great. How it works there is that if you choose not to vaccinate or cannot do so you are only allowed to enter shops/malls/coffee shops/etc with a negative LFT from that day. If you are vaccinated you can enter regardless. If you're not vaccinated and don't have a test you can only get takeout.
There's a single app called TraceTogether, it has records of either your vaccination history or your latest tests, and it has a QR code scanner and an NFC scanner. If you don't have a smartphone you must use an NFC token called a TraceTogether token.
When you enter a building, you scan the QR code by the entrance and show your app to security - the screen goes bright green and is animated and contains in large text the place you're at and the time/date. This means a single person on the door can wave people through very quickly, only stopping to deal with those without smartphones/with medical records.

Such a difference to the approach in Berlin where security has to scan the QR code in your covapp, wait for a response from their device verifying your personal QR code, then ask to see your ID and compare your ID to that on their device, then if you actually want to help with contact tracing you need to scan a QR code for a different app and show it to security once you're checked in. Which is slow and annoying.

Took a bunch of photos in Singapore which you can see on my photography website linked below if you so wish. I've mostly been using my Lumix as it's small and easy to attach to clothing so it's always with me, has an excellent zoom and using Topaz Denoise AI and Topaz Sharpen AI I've found I can get results almost as good as my main DSLR, which is still my Canon EOS 5D Mark IV. However, I also felt this was making me a little bit lazy so I dragged my EOS with me to Singapore and tried to use it as much as I could.

I managed to ditch flickr and export my photo library into a somewhat defunct open(ish) source platform called Koken. It's no longer maintained it seems, but it has an API which, albeit poorly documented, works. So I wrote something that would export all of my flickr albums into folders with content. Then in Koken I create a corresponding album and drag-drop to upload and process all of my pics. Took a bit of time but managed to get this to work pretty flawlessly, including meta data.
Then it was just a case of tweaking my website for the new API and cleaning up a bunch of stuff. You can see the result here: https://scottjoyce.net. Bonus, it meant instead of linking off to Flickr as I used to I can actually integrate the entire photo archive into the site properly.

So Novak these days lives in a data centre in the UK. To do this I upgraded her to SSDs and now use the old spinning metal drives to power the photo archive. I had to do it that was as there's over 40,000 original photographs in the archive now and it's almost 200GB on its own.

Anthony's new EP is available on all streaming platforms, knocked him up a little website to tell you about it at Blood Williams

*I didn't really. Don't worry :)