At Home with Tech

May 7, 2023

How a Bio Site can Unify your Personal Brand

If there are multiple versions of your personal brand online, maybe it’s time to bring it all together. Here’s how to do that with a Bio Site.

In addition to my At Home with Tech blog, which I host on WordPress, I also have a more professional presence at barrettlester.com. I built that website using Squarespace. (Of course, I’ve also got LinkedIn for my professional life.)

My thinking has always been to have two parallel but separate paths for my online branding. One for weekdays… the other for weekends.

There is Only One True Version of You
That said, I’m acutely aware that there really isn’t separation when it comes to anyone’s personal brand. So, I’m mindful to ensure my home technology blog stories as a dad are complementary to my professional presence as corporate video production leader.

And whether it’s LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or TikTok, everything we post online molds our identity. So why even try to separate it?

Instead, perhaps we should try to bring it all together with the links in one place. That unification is what Squarespace has offered me.

Build your Bio Site
In fact, Squarespace has been bugging me for quite a while to do this by setting up something called a Bio Site. It’s a free option that creates a new mobile-first, one-page website where you can aggregate all of your social media links and website links.

Think of it as a link-centric, ‘everything you’ profile. (And yes, there are other bio services out there.)

But since Squarespace’s free offer was right in front of me, I decided to go ahead and stand up my new ‘All Barrett’ destination at biosites.com:

My new Bio Site is bio.site/barrettlester.

My Bio Site is Live!
You can see that I’m still organizing my existence into two pieces. My work life is on the top, and my home life inhabits the bottom half the page. (I’ll continue to work on better integrating a more holistic identity.)

Yes, my Bio Site was easy to create. Yes, the design is flexible. Yes, I can change and add to it as I go along.

But do I really need this?

The Total You
Well, I can certainly add the link to my email signature. It’s also intended to be useful in places like Instagram, where you can only post one clickable link.

It feels a bit like a digital business card, but it’s really more of a digital ‘life’ card to share.

It’s everything that’s you.

Bring It Together
I like the simplicity. It’s one-stop shopping.

Sure, you can unify your online identity in other ways, but if you’ve already scattered your existence across the web, a Bio Site can be a good way to bring it all together!

April 30, 2023

How to Quickly Turn a Scanned Negative into a Positive Image on a Mac

If you think a 90-year-old negative is a lost cause, think again. Here’s how to bring it back to life.

Sure, photo negatives aren’t cool anymore. They represent 19th century technology. Most of us aren’t housing a roll of Kodachrome in our camera bags these days. I get it.

But there’s well over a century of family history locked away in millions of shoe boxes in the back of closets… all in those negative strips. There should be a way to rescue them.

Correction:
There should be an easy way to rescue them and quickly bring the negative images back to life into positive form.

I’ve been traveling that complex journey for the past months since I’ve taken ownership of all of my family’s photo archives (shoe boxes) after my father passed away.

Digital Conversion
So, I bought a slide and negative converter to handle the bulk of the work.

It’s the Wolverine Data F2D Titan Film to Digital Converter.
(on Amazon for $149)

It’s fast. It’s a one-click solution. The results are mostly solid.

But the Wolverine couldn’t capture the full real estate of the larger negatives dating back to the 1930s (2 ½” x 3 ¾”).

I turned to my old flatbed scanner to handle the large negatives. But then I needed a way (an easy way!) to transform each negative into its positive doppelganger.

Adobe Solutions
There are any number of tutorials on YouTube that demonstrate how to do that in Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop, and they all promote the concept of how easy and fun it is.

‘Fun’ is code for it’s not really that quick. Sure, it may be relatively easy, but it still requires about five minutes of fiddling to bring the image to life in the positive universe.

A few minutes may not seem like a lot of time, but fiddling is not a precise exercise, and five minutes can easily turn into fifteen.

Apple Photos (OS X):
As a Mac user, I wanted to see if I could find a native solution without having to rely on the muscle of Adobe. The good news is I found a couple good options.

If you already use the Apple Photos app on your Mac, you can do the conversion right there. It’s not quite one click. But it’s straight forward. Let’s give it a shot using a negative of my grandmother Rae from 1935 with my father and uncle. (My dad is the tiny one!)

Upload your negative into Apple Photos.
Select it.
Click on ‘Edit.’

Select the ‘Curves’ drop down.
You’ll see a histogram of the photo with a straight white line positioned diagonally from bottom left to top right.

To invert the negative image to its positive version:
Click on the bottom left of the line and drag it all the way to the top left. Then click on the top right of the line and drag it to the bottom right.

Voilà! Your negative image is now inverted and displays in positive form.

Then, you can continue to tweak the image from there as you choose. (And that’s where you can go down the rabbit hole of tweaking.)

Using Apple Photos to perform this trick is actually quite similar to Adobe Lightroom’s interface.

Preview App
You can also use Apple’s ‘Preview’ app to bring your negatives back to the positive universe.

It’s a near-identical exercise:

Select ‘Tools.’
Then ‘Adjust Color.’

Can You Invert a Negative Image in One Click?
Okay. None of these options are one-click solutions. So, Is there one? I figured any number of online photo management websites must have a negative-reversal filter built in.

I checked out Shutterfly, Google Photos, Amazon Photos and Canva.

Nope.

Yes, there are apps out there that promote the ability to reverse a negative in one click. But after giving it some more thought, I just didn’t want to add yet another piece of software into my workflow.

So, I canceled my adventure down this particular rabbit hole. Enduring a few clicks to turn a negative into a positive image will suffice.

Diagonal-Line Maneuver
The truth is I already do most of my photo management work in Adobe Lightroom. The diagonal-line maneuver in the Tone Curve section works just fine (just like with Apple’s ‘Photos’ and ‘Preview’ apps).

The good news is there’s a choice on the software to use if you don’t want to take the Adobe path.

And now I need to get back to work on my time machine. There’s still almost a century of negatives to go through.

I’m bringing the past back to life, one image at a time.

I’d say maybe that’s worth the five minutes.

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April 23, 2023

Photos from our Weekend Stranded on an Island

When you’re cut off from the world by a body of water, anything can happen. Here’s little more from our adventure on Rose Island…

Well, we weren’t exactly stranded. We intentionally decided to spend a couple of nights on Rose Island in Newport, Rhode Island. No, we weren’t exactly the keepers of the Rose Island Lighthouse, where we stayed along with another couple who were in the apartment above us. But we were on our own to handle any unforeseen circumstances.

We’re Going on an Adventure!
Sure, we were tethered to civilization via cell phone, but remember, we were on an island in the middle of the Narragansett Bay. That’s the vacation my family chose. Well, actually, it was my idea, based on a predisposition that our experience might contain a little adventure. (I guess that’s my inner Bilbo.)

I think my lighthouse fascination has developed over time from the movies I’ve seen that feature a lighthouse.

Those weren’t actually serene movies, were they?

False Alarm
So, when we were paid a little visit by a rescue boat from the Newport Fire Department, during breakfast on our first morning… should I have been entirely surprised?

Probably not. It’s actually the perfect plot set up for our own lighthouse movie, coming to a theater near you in 2026. (I’ve still got to write the script.)

For the record, even though the fire alarm had been tripped, everything was absolutely fine.
It was exciting to host this great team of Newport firefighters for thirty minutes. And our own hosts responded appropriately and generously to the situation.
Still, I would say this piece of our lighthouse vacation falls under the category of ‘unexpected adventure.’ Right?