Recent content on Eliseo Martelli
Last Thursday, my brother and I were driving and decided to put on the FM radio. We don’t usually listen to it because of the audio quality, but it suited the chill drive. After a few songs, we heard something that sounded off. Synthetic. I looked into it later, and it turns out my intuition was right: we were listening to a song built by artificial intelligence. The song is “Dimanche…
Why bother? Why go to that event if people are rude, it’s a hassle, and in 10 years I won’t remember most of it anyway? I know this feeling. It’s the cosmic version of nihilism. You zoom out too far, and your life starts to look like static. And yes, objectively, we are small. A blip. But here’s the part that matters: even if you’re insignificant to the universe,…
Last week, I wrote that my AirPods Pro case was dead . The battery wouldn’t hold a charge, and Apple’s only solution was to charge me €100+ for a replacement case. Instead of throwing it away, I decided to try fixing it myself. It cost me €20 and took about 15 minutes. Here is how to do it. Finding a battery I bought a replacement battery on eBay for €20. You need one specifically for…
For a few months now, I’ve struggled to look, but I’m still interested in seeing. Maybe I need more interpretability in the things I do?
I got my AirPods Pro in February 2021. They’ve been my daily drivers for over five years, which, in the world of tiny lithium-ion batteries, is basically ancient history. Now, the case has finally given up. It doesn’t work unless it’s plugged into a charger. The moment I pull the cable, it’s a brick. It’s the classic symptom of a completely exhausted battery. If you’re in the…
Today I aspire to be calm, to listen and to be heard, to brush off my shoulders all the weight I’ve accumulated over the past few days, and to be a better version of myself for the people around me.
Sometimes you go out into the streets with a camera, walking, suffering through the heat and cold, dealing with pain, and maybe you shoot nothing. Sometimes I wonder why I decided to dedicate a big part of my life to this craft, but then there are days when I get to play soccer with kids on the street, or I get to talk to strangers. I don’t even consider myself a good photographer, but the…
I usually don’t think about these things, but last night, the moment I realized it, I died inside for a second. I carelessly found myself standing in front of that door.
You’re listening to a song you love and want to save it. You click the favorite star and… nothing. You wonder if you missed the button. Did the app freeze? You’re about to click again when, SECONDS later, the star finally turns red. This is the current state of Apple Music (Version 1.6.5.10) on macOS 26.5.1. Most apps use “optimistic updates.” When you like a post or…
I continue, mistakenly, to define myself by what I produce.
These last few days have been very demanding. I need to thank the people who stood close to me a hundred thousand times. All in all, today was a good day.
Sometimes I find cinema, museum, exhibition, or theater tickets in my drawers and I’m always afraid to throw them away. They are tangible proof of having “felt” something.
I still struggle with always trying to find rationality in irrational moments. My whole life is rational. But when I lose this sense of being rational, that’s when I show myself.
I was looking at a scar on my arm earlier. It has been there for years, looking like a burn, but honestly I don’t remember how I got it. Today I’m not afraid of getting burned; it wouldn’t be rational to fear a normal bump in the road. Now I’m taking a lot of leaps of faith. I’m living.
Yesterday morning I watched a puddle drying up, taken by force by the sun’s rays. A “necessary” violence to make room for the next puddle. Transformation is an act of rupture, and at this moment, I feel I am in a phase of transformation. Today I feel a bit like that puddle: a bit mortified, a bit disappointed, and a bit of a disappointment. Does evaporating mean failing?
It’s as if I have a constant need to explain myself. Lately I’ve been writing a lot; usually, I write technical stuff, but maybe letting my thoughts flow (beyond just through photography) isn’t so wrong. I’m sorry for those who endure me and are reading these words, but, as I said a few days ago, I’m trying to smile more often. Over the years, I’ve adopted the…
Today I spent the day in bed. I didn’t even have the strength to watch the world go by outside the window. I cried over improbable songs, probably because of a slight fever. I glanced at my photo archive and felt a sense of emptiness. I no longer recognize myself in the photos from a few years ago. It’s a bad feeling, not being able to find yourself anymore. It’s true, a thousand…
It took me a few days to pretend to move on, and a few years to smile again. I filled my days to the brim so I wouldn’t think. Today I am who I am thanks to all the people I have close to me, and every day I would like to thank them.
Over the last two days, I was reflecting on the meaning of being enough, especially after speaking with a great photographer. We live in a world full of abstractions; even basic communication relies on the abstraction of language. Even “being” is an abstraction. An abstraction of oneself.
Sometimes I wonder why I spent days of my life questioning whether I was actually capable of smiling. But when I look at the sum of my choices, the thing we call life, I feel incredibly grateful for all the years I didn’t smile. Now every single person in my life is essential. Now I smile.
You’ve probably read four hundred seventeen reviews of the AirPods Max 2 already. I’m not here to tell you they’re “life-changing” or wax poetic about unboxing experiences. I’m a critical Apple fan with a collection of decent IEMs and headphones, and I have strong opinions about where these fit in the audio landscape. Let’s address the elephant in the room…
I recently watched a video by Tsoding where he rendered a full 3D scene using just a plain canvas 2D element, without any WebGL or Three.js. The core of the video was a simple formula to calculate the position of each pixel: given (x, y, z) x' = y / z y' = x / z It tickled the part of my brain that loves graphics and it was enough to make me want to try the same thing on my homepage portrait. I…
A picture of the darkroom Yesterday I spent my afternoon at Spazio Gnu , a shared photography space in Turin, Italy. As someone who spends a lot of time working with digital tools (mostly programming, photo editing, and video editing), stepping into a space where there are no “undo” buttons or history states was a refreshing shift. For this session, I used a DURST M700 enlarger, along…
Over the past week, I’ve been making an effort to strike a balance between my digital and analog life. Between finally having the time to do some personal projects , and my usual photography walks, I started to rely on the gym as my analog escape, thanks to my friends . I just want to put on my headphones, listen to some Burial or JPEGMafia to tune out the background noise, and lift. The…
A week ago, Francesco and I bought a couple of R36S handhelds. Or at least, that’s what the listing said. What we got was the Y3506_V05_20251215 revision. It’s a clone of a clone. If you’ve played with these cheap Chinese SBCs before, you know the drill: you flash a standard image, and the screen stays black because the driver is slightly different. It’s a hardware lottery.…
After two wonderful, albeit intense years, working with Consortium GARR on bioinformatics tools, it’s time for a new challenge. I’m officially back on the market. Being a developer, passionate about automation and reproducibility, with a strong background in “DevOps”, I couldn’t just write a CV in a word processor and call it a day. It has to be version controlled,…
If you’ve ever looked at a build log for a complex project, you know the feeling. It’s a wall of text-thousands of lines of dependency resolutions, compiler warnings, and progress bars. Somewhere in there, a missing header file is hiding, but finding it is a chore. At work, we’ve been building AI-Harness (part of the broader Rebel ecosystem), a tool designed to autonomously fix…
Many of you might know that I’ve recently started shooting more film, and I’ve fallen in countless deep rabbit holes, like scanning . But one of the most exciting aspect of film photography, for me, is the darkroom process itself. I’ve already experimented developing Harman’s Kentmere 400 but I have to perfect my process for it. Today I want to share my approach to…
As 2025 comes to a close, I’m taking a moment to commit this year to the archives (pun intended). It’s been a year defined by contrast. On one hand, I’ve seen growth in my personal and professional life, but on the other hand, it required navigating through plenty of friction. I’ve had the opportunity to reconnect with old friends and enjoy company of my collegues. These…
The Christmas season is here, and with it the tradition of gathering the family for a movie. We have all been there: you navigate to the cinema’s booking site, find that perfect row in the center of the theater, and click to select your seats. But instead of confirming, the website throws an error: “You cannot leave a single seat empty” or “Please select adjacent seats.” It…
First things first, let me take this out of the way: I am not a professional camera technician. However, I have had to adjust the rangefinder horizontal alignment on several Leica cameras, and I have found a method that works well for me. Proceed with caution and at your own risk. Poking tools inside your camera carries significant risk. If you are uncomfortable with precision adjustments, please…
I recently decided to add a Leica Elmarit-M 90mm f/2.8 to my kit. I found a copy at New Old Camera in Milan for €650, a steal, frankly. The catch? A “non-original red dot” with a bit of excess glue. A cosmetic imperfection that shaved €500 off the normal price. Perfect for me. It arrived yesterday. I unboxed it, then 10 hours later I dropped it. There is a specific kind of silence that…
As software developers we are keen to discuss APIs, interfaces, and the beauty of well-crafted systems. We appreciate clarity, intentionality and the power that comes from a focused set of capabilities. The Unix philosophy, taken as a cultural norm of minimalist and modular components, brought us the Unix operating system. The unix philosophy is pretty simple: Make each program do one thing well.…
If you shoot film, and later you scan it, especially into formats like DNG, you end up with a file that is poor in metadata. Your scanner software (like VueScan) knows about the scanner perhaps a Plustek 8100 and the scan settings, but it has no idea what camera or lens took the original photo. This leaves a gap in your digital library. To fix this, I use ExifTool to add the relevant EXIF tags to…
I’ve recently integrated a new piece of hardware into my film photography workflow: a Plustek OpticFilm 8100. After watching the second-hand market for a few weeks, I found a unit on subito.it for €200. It’s not the best scanner ever, you can find some other scanners from the same manufacturer with the infrared channel (used for identifying dust on the negative), but for that price, I think you…
The spam volume received through the contact function and the newsletter function has recently crossed the threshold of “annoying” into “actively degrading my life.” The signal-to-noise ratio in my inbox is now approaching zero, and sifting through junk to find legitimate messages is no longer a sustainable task. Effective immediately, I am temporarily disabling all…
Yesterday I went to see the Lee Miller exhibition at Camera here in Turin (for the second time). It was a good show, with nice pictures and nice tension, that Lee Miller carried from the fashion world into war. What really struck me wasn’t one of her photographs, but it was watching people watching her photographs through their phones. There was specifically a lady that took a picture of every…
Today I was using Apple Podcasts on my iPhone, and I noticed something that made me do a double take. The text in the player, in the section where you ca change the playback speed, was rendered in a light gray color on a slightly less light gray background. It was so faint that it was nearly impossible to read. You can’t even say if the “Enchance Dialogue” option was selected or…
Spotify’s vision has always been to be everywhere you are. By bringing Spotify into ChatGPT, we’re creating a powerful new way for fans to connect with the artists and creators they love conversationally, whenever inspiration strikes. Sten Garmark, Spotify’s SVP of Global Head of Consumer Experience. When I’ve read this quote, I found it rhetorically fascinating. It blurs…
A few weeks ago, I expressed my concern about the loss of iPadOS 26’s essence as it transformed into a fully windowing environment. Today, Apple has partially addressed my call: Slide Over is back, baby! With the release of iPadOS 26.1 Beta 2, Apple has restored Slide Over. This new version of Slide Over resides within an updated “container” paradigm, which differs from the…
Over the years I’ve been to plenty of photography exhibitions, from small local artists to the big international names, and something that struck me was that for every artist who brings genuine artistic weight and perspective, there’s a flood of unauthentic work, that often feels copy-pasted. You get the same compositions, same edits, same color gradings, same gear, and so on. Maybe…
Safari in macOS 26 has broken something fundamental: the stability of the interface. Since 2021, Apple’s browser carried an understated feature IMHO: Compact Tabs. Even if they weren’t universally loved, they embodied an important principle for me: technology staying out of the way. Compact Tabs kept Safari’s chrome minimal, they gave you “your content”, without any of the fuss, and more…
With iPadOS 26, Apple has made the iPad more powerful than ever, but the cost of doing that was loosing access to Split View and Slide Over. For years, these gestures made it possible to use two apps side-by-side or to pull in a floating panel with virtually zero mental overhead. They were a fluid, lightweight and functional para-windowing model that worked really well in a touchscreen first…
Hey, it’s been a while since I last wrote about Apple products, and the last time I did, I was pretty critical of the state of the software. Today, the software doesn’t seem to have improved much, but as a nerd, I couldn’t resist getting my hands on the new iPhones, and doing a little trip to the Apple Store. Today is the day of the launch of the new iPhones, and since I had a…
I wonder what’s up with the marketing team at Samsung. Lately I’ve seen some of their ads popup on YouTube, I think they just released some phones, I don’t closely pay attention to them as a company since I think their phones are unusable, as of my recent experience with a Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, an A56 and an S24 Ultra. I don’t know what is the appeal for this kind of…
Anecdote time. I recently bought a Leica, and suddenly my perfectly organized photo library became a guessing game. Why? Because manual and vintage lenses don’t talk to the camera, so EXIF is incomplete—or just plain missing. Which Summicron? Was that the Brightin Star or the Zeiss? What focal length? So, I built LensRenamer . LensRenamer is a macOS app that batch-writes lens metadata—make, model,…
At the start of the week, I added a new phrase to my vocabulary: “Sgnacca il butun,” a quirky Piemontese expression meaning “push the button.” I had a meeting Maria from work after four long months. It’s fascinating how time apart makes reunions feel both familiar and fresh. I can’t wait to “chiamare una giornata” (literally, calling it a day) with…
I returned home for the holidays a few days ago and decided to update my parents’ Mac mini, which was stuck on macOS 12 Monterey, to macOS Sequoia using Open Core Legacy Patcher (having successfully done so on other Macs). Unfortunately, yesterday, I made a foolish decision to update to macOS 15.4.1 via OTA. After the usual reboots, I was unable to get past the login screen on the Mac mini…
I’ve finally finished reading Tamara Shopsin’s LaserWriter II after a reading block that lasted for about two months, and it made me do some reflections on what is happening with consumer electronics. This book is a love letter to a specific moment in tech history, shaped by Apple not just with products, but with culture. Apple didn’t make the first consumer laser printer; they…
Since I started browsing minifeed.net more frequently, I’ve found myself reading more and more articles and subscribing to more RSS feeds, this also makes me feel more connected to the indie web. Today, I came across this excerpt from thejaymo.net ’s blog that truly resonates with me: A blog in 2025 should be a destination. They don’t just distribute — they accumulate. They hold…