Femous

Femous

Hey, I’m Frank Emous — creative tech tinkerer exploring Detail for iOS, Detail Capture, and Subwave.

  1. 5 days ago ·  Video

    Enshittification and the SaaS Reckoning

    Moneybird sent Frank a cheerful anniversary email: ten years as a customer, and, by the way, the price is doubling in two weeks. That single email opened up a broader frustration with what writer Cory Doctorow calls enshittification, the gradual degradation of digital products as the pressure to extract more revenue overrides the original reason the thing was built. Dropbox is the clearest example: a few years ago it was rock-solid for moving large video files; now it quietly offloads everything to the cloud, prompts you to back up every external drive you plug in, and nudges you toward a higher storage tier. The product has drifted, and the price has not. The SaaS math compounds fast. Dropbox, invoicing software, Adobe, Microsoft 365 with a terabyte of OneDrive nobody uses, Netflix. Each feels manageable month to month, but Frank's rough estimate puts the total around a thousand euros a year flowing toward tools that have either gotten worse or are barely used. The response he's started taking is replacing paid subscriptions with open-source or self-hosted alternatives wherever possible. He rebuilt his own website and Sana's photography portfolio using Claude, cutting several hundred euros a year down to about fifty, with a setup where new galleries can be added by handing Claude a batch of photos and a single instruction. Frank and Sana also get into how they actually use AI day to day: Frank uses Claude Code to run multiple tasks simultaneously across sessions and built a small app to control his Blackmagic cameras remotely over Bluetooth; Sana throws festival lineup flyers into ChatGPT to get clean formatted text and uses it to soften emails when Dutch directness would land wrong with contacts in Japan. They close on a live test of whether Apple Pages and Microsoft Word can genuinely collaborate through the .docx format (they can), and whether that's enough to justify dropping a Microsoft 365 subscription you're only keeping for Word and a storage plan you never fill. Published on Subwave https://subwave.app/@femous/post/enshittification-and-the-saas-reckoning

    Enshittification and the SaaS Reckoning
  2. 11 Aug ·  Video

    Testing a Three-Camera Multicam Export on a Budget

    Two Blackmagic cinema cameras, a laptop's built-in FaceTime HD camera, one XLR microphone, and a Thunderbolt hub. That's the entire multicam studio setup, and it costs a fraction of what a single Sony rig would run once you add capture cards and accessories. The Blackmagic UltraStudio recorders are Thunderbolt devices, so they daisy-chain into a single hub and effectively become a multicam switcher on the cheap. The microphone connects directly to the Blackmagic camera via XLR, which means studio-quality audio with no separate audio interface. The trade-off is manual focus, since these cinema cameras have no autofocus, but autofocus hunting mid-shot has its own problems. The recording side runs through Detail Studio, the Mac multicam recorder. Detail iOS runs on iPhone and iPad and, on a 2025 iPad with an M3 chip, tears through auto-editing and transcription in seconds. The gap is that these two apps don't natively talk to each other, so I built a converter tool to bridge them. The test: record a five-minute, three-camera session in Detail Studio, export it, AirDrop it to Detail iOS via the converter, and see if the project loads cleanly and edits properly. Routing footage through Detail iOS is worth the extra export step because of raw speed. For unscripted footage with no teleprompter, plenty of rambling, and the usual filler words, the auto-edit strips out the umms in seconds. Five minutes of three-camera footage goes through the converter, into Detail iOS, and the result is a clean, editable project ready to cut. Published on Subwave https://subwave.app/@femous/post/testing-a-three-camera-multicam-export-on-a-budget

    Testing a Three-Camera Multicam Export on a Budget

About

Hey, I’m Frank Emous — creative tech tinkerer exploring Detail for iOS, Detail Capture, and Subwave.