John Spahr

Hey, everyone. While I may primarily be a Mac user these days, I do spend a decent amount of time using a Chromebook. I’m not a huge fan of Chrome OS, but it works well enough, and it certainly runs better on lower-end computers than Windows does. Anyway, the point of this post is to share a cool Chromebook Easter egg, so here it is: pressing Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Reload (as in the key) will make your window do a barrel roll , similar to the famous Google Search Easter egg. This is no great secret, but I thought that I would share it anyway. I had no idea it existed until I happened to randomly press all of those keys down, so I was pleasantly surprised. Looking back, this was partly because Easter eggs seem to be a bit less common in modern software than they perhaps used to be. Thankfully, as proven by Google’s work here, they definitely don’t seem to be a lost art. Personally, I have hidden several messages and whatnot in my software projects over the years, and while I won’t reveal how yo

Hey, everyone. I had been interested in getting an Orient Bambino dress watch for quite a while, so I recently acquired one for my collection. I opted for the confusingly-named “2nd Generation Version III,” as it had a lot in common with my vintage Benrus alarm watch. I really liked the look of that older watch, but its requisite servicing proved to be prohibitively expensive. So, this Orient seemed like a good option until I could afford to repair the Benrus someday, and I decided to pick one up. Upon receiving the Bambino, I fully appreciated just how similar it is to the Benrus. They both have that 60s look, featuring heavily domed crystals, sunburst dials, rectangular hands, and straight lugs. Granted, the Bambino does have some very noticeable differences, such as its 40.5mm case diameter, dial markers, and color, but I think that Orient did an excellent job of replicating that vintage watch aesthetic. Bambino Benrus Aesthetics aside, the Bambino is still a very solid dress watch

In a recent post, I wrote about the first film camera that I ever used: the  Kodak Cameo Motor EX . I had mentioned that I was getting a roll of film that I shot on one of these cameras developed, and I’m pleased to say that I finally have the photos back in the form of both prints and scans! So, here are some of the results from this roll of Kodak UltraMax (400 ISO) film: Overall, I’m pretty happy with how these photos turned out. Admittedly, some of these shots could have been framed better, and a few could also probably benefit from some edits. However, depending on who you ask, that’s either the fun or infuriating part of film! You never quite know what you’ll get until you develop it. Anyway, I hope this gives you an idea of what this camera can produce, and thanks for reading.

Hey, everyone. While I've not been doing much software development in recent times, I have been wanting to make a few updates to GoFrench for a while. So, since I had a bit of free time today, I decided to go ahead and work on GoFrench for a bit. The updates I have made are pretty minor, but they should make the GoFrench experience more cohesive and intuitive. Most notably, I made a few styling updates to the link menu to improve visibility. This is by no means a major update, but my hope is that it will make learning French easier and more fun this year. As always, you can find GoFrench here .

About a year ago, I reviewed the 2014 Mac mini on this blog. Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that it was still an excellent machine for productivity tasks, but it could also handle some more intense things you threw at it. Thus, it became my daily driver up until I upgraded to a 2017 MacBook Air a few months ago. That being said, I’ve still been using it some, so I thought I’d briefly share how it’s holding up these days. Here are my thoughts on this miniature Macintosh one year later! Performance  Over the last year, I’ve been impressed by how much this Mac can handle. It’s rocking a 2.6 GHz dual-core Core i5 with 8 GB of RAM and a Samsung 860 Evo 1 TB SATA SSD. What all that jargon essentially means is that it’s a moderately powerful little computer, although it certainly isn’t going to put newer Macs to shame. Regardless, I’ve been able to do lots of coding, video editing, and schoolwork on this computer, and it has generally worked pretty well. Granted, it can take a while to

It was on the warm and pleasant day of July 6, 2018, that I shot my first roll of film. I distinctly recall that we had decided to go on an adventure on that morning rather spontaneously, as we had no obligations to worry about that day. Our destination would be a beach town called Culver, and its main attraction was some lake that I can’t remember the name of. Anyway, in the hurry to leave before lunch, I grabbed a few random items to entertain myself on the fairly long ride there and back. I seem to remember bringing an old flip phone, some very old Palm PDA booklets that I found around the house, and one especially important item: my mom’s even older and super compact Kodak Cameo Motor EX film camera. Indeed, I was just as much of a nerd then as I am now. As for that Kodak Cameo, I had found it in a drawer perhaps a few days before. Surprisingly enough, my younger self seemed to have not had any problems loading a roll of film for it, and the camera actually functioned. Unfortunatel