Make/Model: MINI Cooper John Cooper Works 2018
Colour: Thunder Grey Metallic with red roof
New?: New
Engine: 2.0l Turbocharged
Power/Torque: 170kW (228 BHP) / 350Nm (258 ft/lb)
Average Fuel Consumption: 5 - 7.5 l/100 km (Highway - City)
Performance: 0-100km/h in 6.3s, 246 km/h top speed
Transmission: 6 speed manual
Owned: April 2018 - Sep 2020

Notes:
Update: 20 Sep 2020 I returned my MINI JCW Monday last week, in favour of a new BMW M235i. That concludes the two and a half years I have spent with the last of three MINIs I have owned in succession. How was the experience? Ignoring the other crap, the car was probably one of the most practical cars I have ever owned.

It has good acceleration - not truly quick, but quick enough to make you smirk. It has a huge boot (or trunk for you North Americans), enough to fit about three computers, a chess table and lots of other stuff at once. It is extremely light on fuel - though that being said, they nerfed the tank size so the effective range has been decreased.

Sometimes when I wander the streets in search of beauty, I come across man's efforts to improve our function, our world. But looking at our attempts I wonder whether we are not doing more harm than good.

Compare that to a scene just 200m away... Surely we can do more to improve the visual impact our urban areas have?

I recently purchased a brand new 15" MacBook Pro 2017 with TouchBar fully maxed out. It has the latest software patches.

This is the third time in a month that I am greeted by this display when I open the lid after not being used for a couple of days, connected to the USB Type C charger:

At a recent lunch at the International Buddhist Temple in Richmond, I was presented with a menu I presume to be in Mandarin.

Clearly I cannot read Mandarin, so I decided to use Google Translate on my phone to translate the menu in real time:

I recently fooled around with photographing a hamburger in my studio, and at the same time playing around with the high resolution mode on my Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II camera. Unfortunately, when I took the photo, the studio flash did not seem to get triggered when in high resolution mode. So all I got was a black frame. I decided to take a look at it in post processing nevertheless.

Turns out that the highest pixel value according to the histogram and pixel readout is 1. Most are 0. Since an RGB image is represented by 8 bits per channel (Red, Green and Blue), it means each channel can have 256 different values. I was curious to see how much data was still lurking in the darkness.