Tagline: Pages from my logbook.

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?

Tagline: A brutally honest review of Apple's premium headphones

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 first: they cost a ridiculous amount of money for a consumer headphone. €579 / $549 is not a casual purchase. So are they worth it?

The Noise Cancellation

Comparing the ANC to the original AirPods Max, Apple's claim of "1.5x better" is the kind of vague marketing figure Apple loves. In practice? It works. The low-end engine hum and midrange chatter of a crowded place genuinely fade out better than they did in 2020. You can hear voices are more muffled in a way that actually registers.

Is it the best ANC out there? No. If you ask me, the original AirPods Pro 1 still had the most natural implementation of ANC Apple ever shipped. The Max 2 might be technically superior at blocking decibels, but the Pro 1 felt less pressurized and more balanced.

Transparency Mode

This is where Apple usually left everyone else in the dust, but IMHO AirPods Max 2 feel a bit metallic.

It's something I also notice on the original AirPods Max and the new AirPods Pro 3. Transparency Mode is clinical, and it lacks that "ear-opening" naturalism of the past. To my ears, the AirPods Pro 1 still hold the crown for the most convincing transparency. They’re the only ones that truly made me forget I was wearing anything at all.

The Sound

Compared to the AirPods Max 1, the bass is richer without muddying the mids. Instrument separation is surprisingly precise for a consumer Bluetooth headphone. Listen to well-mastered lossless tracks and you'll notice a wider soundstage than most Bluetooth gear has any right to claim.

But here's my biggest gripe: Apple still won't give us a proper EQ.

We get "Adaptive EQ" that allegedly tailors to your ear shape. For €579, I want to tweak the frequency response myself. Is that really too much to ask in 2026?

The H2 Features

The H2 chip actually delivers some new experiences. Here's what actually matters day-to-day:

Conversation Awareness: This feels like witchcraft. Start talking and your music immediately lowers while the mics pipe in the person you're speaking to.

Adaptive Audio: A middle ground between ANC and Transparency mode. It handles sudden loud noises (sirens, car horns) while keeping you aware of your surroundings.

Lossless via USB-C: The USB-C port supports ultra-low latency lossless audio when wired.

The Disappointments

The case is still ridiculous. They kept the Smart Case. It offers zero protection for the headband, collects dust, and looks like you're carrying a bra around. The material is as shitty as the iPad's Magic Keyboard / Smart Folio.

The weight hasn't changed. If you suffered from crown fatigue or clamping pressure with the original, the Max 2 won't solve your problems. They're still heavy.

No power button. You still can't just turn them off. You have to put them in that stupid case to force deep sleep. It's 2026 and this still bothers me.

The Verdict

These are brilliant headphones if you fit the profile. But they're infuriating in ways Apple refuses to fix.

If you own the original AirPods Max: Skip the upgrade. Unless your battery is completely dead or you need USB-C lossless, the audio bump isn't worth the massive upgrade fee.

If you own AirPods Pro 1, 2, 3: Keep them. The Pro 2 do 90% of what the Max 2 do for less than half the price. The only reason to switch is if you genuinely need over-ear form factor.

If you're buying your first premium over-ears: These are worth considering. They sound incredible, ANC is solid, and they'll easily last five to seven years (I'm still rocking my AirPods Pro 1, for example). Just budget for a real case and accept that Apple won't let you touch the EQ settings for now.

The Crash

But here's something worth mentioning: they crashed on me. Completely. Wouldn't play any audio, refused to respond to controls. The only way to get them working again was a full reboot. It happened once during testing, and while it's not a pattern (yet), it's worth noting for a €579 product. I'd expect better stability from hardware at this price point.

You might also appreciate my thoughts on Apple's software quality and how their hardware sometimes masks software corners they cut.

Testing the Sound

I put these through my usual testing playlist to see how the these headphones handle different extremes:

La Sera Dei Miracoli - Lucio Dalla

Dalla's classic is a sprawling, messy arrangement. I use this to see how well headphones handle chaos, the piano, the backing vocals, and his soaring voice all fighting for space.

Figli Delle Stelle - Alan Sorrenti

I hate that I love this disco track. It’s perfect for testing high-end treble. If the headphones are too sharp, the hi-hats and falsetto will pierce your eardrums. Here, they sparkle nicely.

Oh my god - Adele

A solid pop track for testing vocal presence. The AirPods Max 2 put Adele right in the center of the room, isolating her voice cleanly from the heavy bass drops without muddying either.

Bury a Friend - Billie Eilish

Eilish's production is absurdly bass-heavy with ASMR-style vocal whispers. If the sub-bass is too muddy, the track becomes unlistenable. The low-end surprisingly tight here.

Shape of My Heart - Sting

Yes, it's cliché, but that acoustic guitar riff and the delicate snare hits are great for checking instrument separation. You can actually hear the fingers sliding on the strings.

Tagline: Rendering a 3D portrait from a single photo using Gaussian Splatting, Canvas 2D, and zero dependencies.

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 wanted to create a 3D portrait that could be rotated and viewed from different angles, all using just Canvas 2D and some math.

Some months ago, I was playing around with Apple's ml-sharp, which can reconstruct a 3D point cloud from a single photo.

At that time, I didn't have a use for it, but it seemed like the perfect tool for this project.

This technique is called Gaussian Splatting. It uses millions of semi-transparent 3D blobs, each with a position, opacity, color, scale, and rotation. Render them back-to-front and you get surprisingly good results, especially on faces.

One photo in. One .ply file out.

I ran ml-sharp on a portrait of me and got a .ply file with ~689,000 gaussians. Most of them were background noise. I loaded it into superspl.at/editor and cropped everything that wasn't my face.

Still way too many points. And the raw .ply format is huge. None of that is useful for a grayscale web viewer.

689k gaussians at 60+ bytes each isn't something you ship over the wire. I wrote a Python script to cut it down.

The core idea: not all gaussians matter equally. A tiny opaque one is a sharp detail — an eye, a lip edge. A huge transparent one is blurry fill. Score by opacity / volume, importance-sample down to 15k, and you keep what the eye actually sees:

volume = np.exp(s0 + s1 + s2)
importance = opacity / (volume + 1e-8)
importance /= importance.sum()
idx = rng.choice(len(x), size=min(N, len(x)), replace=False, p=importance)

Then quantize positions to uint16 and pull grayscale brightness from the DC term of the spherical harmonics. Pack it all into a tight binary struct:

def quant(a):
    lo, hi = a.min(), a.max()
    return lo, hi, np.round((a - lo) / (hi - lo) * 65535).astype(np.uint16)
 
dt = np.dtype([("x", "<u2"), ("y", "<u2"), ("z", "<u2"), ("a", "u1"), ("b", "u1")])

Five fields per point, no JSON, no headers.

To view it, I wrote a single TypeScript component, no dependencies. Each frame it rotates the points around Y then X, depth-sorts them furthest-first, draws each one as a 3×3 square into an ImageData buffer with alpha blending, and flushes with putImageData.

The projection is just perspective division:

const rx  =  x[i] * cosY + z[i] * sinY;
const rz  = -x[i] * sinY + z[i] * cosY;
const ry2 =  y[i] * cosX - rz * sinX;
const rz2 =  y[i] * sinX + rz * cosX;
const d   = rz2 - CAM_Z;
const sx  = (W * 0.5 + (FOCAL * rx)  / d + 0.5) | 0;
const sy  = (H * 0.5 + (FOCAL * ry2) / d + 0.5) | 0;

Mouse gives ±4° rotation. Touch drives a sinusoidal pan that coasts a little after you lift your finger. An IntersectionObserver kills the animation loop when the element isn't on screen. The circular crop is rounded-full overflow-hidden on the wrapper.

15,000 points is genuinely not that many. I expected it to look sparse. It doesn't, the face reads clearly, rotation gives real depth, and it moves in a way a flat photo can't. Surprised at how well it held up.

Tagline: Where's the undo button?

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 with a box of FOMA Fomaspeed Variant 311 High Gloss RC paper (8x10 inches), some rolls of home developed film, a pack of Ilford Multigrade filters, and a few trays of chemicals.

I ended up walking away with a total of 8 prints, which I consider a solid outcome for a first attempt at silver gelatin printing.

Spazio Gnu's darkroom is organized into two (and an half) areas:

• A dry area, where you have the enlargers and the workbench to handle the negatives and the paper.
• A wet island at the center of the room where you have water and trays to develop the prints.
• A drying area with a roller dryer to speed up the drying process.

The process of making a print requires a lot of patience and attention to detail.

One of the first steps is to mix the chemicals. Chemicals used in the darkroom are typically divided into three categories: developer, stop bath, and fixer.

• Developer: This chemical makes the latent image appear on the paper. I used ILFORD MULTIGRADE developer, mixed at a standard ratio of 1+9 with water.
• Stop Bath: This abruptly brings the development to an end and prevents contamination of the next bath. I used ILFORD ILFOSTOP at a 1+19 dilution.
• Fixer: Makes the image permanent. ILFORD RAPID FIXER, mixed at 1+4.

Before committing to a full sheet of paper, I made a test print to find the correct exposure. By using my hand to cover part of the paper, I exposed the sheet in 5-second increments (from 5 to 25 seconds), creating a gradient of exposures on the same strip. Examining this test print allowed me to estimate the correct exposure for the final image. I ended up choosing 15 seconds as the optimal base exposure.

Because FOMA 311 is a variable contrast paper, I also had to select the right filter to achieve the desired contrast. The ILFORD MULTIGRADE filters range from 00 (very soft) to 5 (very hard). I predominantly used a grade 2 filter, which produces a good range of print tones for an average negative.

On one of the prints, the subject was rendering a bit too dark, so I decided to experiment with a technique called "dodging." Dodging involves using your hands or pieces of card to hold back light from selected areas of the print during exposure. By physically blocking the enlarger's light over my subject for a few seconds, I was able to lighten them and bring out more detail in the shadows.

After exposing the paper, the real magic happens in the wet area.

I slid the paper into the developer tray. While the image begins to appear almost immediately, the print needs a full 50 seconds in the developer to fully mature. Then, using tongs, I transferred it to the stop bath and rocked the dish for about 30 seconds. Finally, it went into the fixer to make the image permanent. (While ILFORD notes fixing takes only 30 seconds in fresh solution, I left mine in for about a minute to be safe).

After a quick wash in running water to remove any residual chemicals, I ran the prints through the roller dryer.

Holding 8 physical photographs that you crafted entirely by hand is a highly rewarding experience. Each print has its own unique character and subtle imperfections, adding to its charm. Seeing an image slowly emerge in the developer tray is a tactile experience that no digital workflow can replicate.

Tagline: Starting from 49.99/year, and your data.

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 current state of digital fitness tools makes that surprisingly difficult. Rather than acting as a simple tools that do one thing well, the modern fitness app has become a bloated, privacy-invading ecosystem.

I tried out a few popular fitness apps, and the experience was underwhelming.

One of the biggest mistake gym apps make is demanding too much cognitive load before you even log a workout. During onboarding, they want you to set up an entire multi-day split, enter exact body stats, and sit through tutorials. When using the app at the gym, resting for 60 seconds between sets, I need a frictionless interface. Everything else just interrupts the physical flow.

Human physiology isn't a simple math equation. When an app rigidly demands that you maintain a streak or push through six consecutive training days without rest, it ignores the realities of life and fatigue.

Fitness apps collect incredibly intimate data, from geolocation to biometric vitals, yet many operate with broadly-worded privacy policies that allow them to share this information with third-party data brokers and advertisers.

At the end of the day, a fitness app should be a good appliance: it should capture the data perfectly, feel great to use, and then get completely out of your way.