Fascinating thing about London is that you can find anything here. As long as you're looking for something, have ambitions and generally things to do (people to see), London is your place. Recently I discovered a local photography studio with darkroom, few minutes of walk from our current place in Bethnal Green. If you're into analog photography, this place is truly magical.

Yesterday I spent 8 hours (mostly) in the dark, sniffing chemicals and trying to distinguish contrasts on a negative black and white picture in red light. This blog is all about it.

Place's name is Four Corners. It is located very conveniently, and despite heavy Saturday rain, I managed to get there before getting completely soaked. Two rolls of exposed Ilford HP5 film and pack of fiber based photographic paper were expecting to cross their paths with help of underground facility I was about to pay visit into. Place itself is not huge, but packs a nice variety of things and activities. They got their own exhibition space, offices, terrace, rental services, video editing studio. They also got underground labs and darkrooms for all things analog.

I used to print black and white during my happy Soviet childhood. As my dad just shared with me, he used to print black and white even before their village got electricity. There would be diesel generator and heavy set of limitations of "no more than two lamp bulbs per house". He and his friend basically hacked the system in 1960th by implementing an additional electricity socket in the transformator, and would perform heavy printing while nobody would watch it. Photo enlarger is the only piece of printing that really requires electricity. So here it is - since I was something like 4 years old printing was exciting part of my quality time with dad. And it would take a whole weekend. Usual schedule was as following:

• Day 1. Prepare chemicals, process film, put it on the curtain strings to dry. Then, when it's night, set up our darkroom in the kitchen (food and chemicals, I know). I was very proud to be big enough to spend night not sleeping but doing something cool instead. We'd usually split the job in a way that dad would expose paper, and I would be in charge of developing, stopping and fixing pictures. I would also participate in discussions which picture deserves to be printed, and how large it should be. We would finish by placing all prints to dry on sheets of old newspapers.
• Day 2. Check out on prints, and collect those that dried up. Decide which prints go into which album. Distribute good ones to albums and make labels. Proudly display result to mom.

Things haven't really changed since then, despite 20 years of time and a very different country. Equipment is sort of different, and there is just more of it. There are tools for every single aspect of printing, including special can opener for film cassettes and cabinets for film drying. Dave Than from Four Corners was kind enough to spend quite a lot of time on the day, showing around, setting up my printing place, teaching how to use tools and machines, bringing up neccessary chemicals and explaining how to use them. In the end this pretty much was a crash course into film processing and printing. This is something you don't get from a normal printing course, which cost more, and expect you to turn up with already processed negatives ready to be projected onto paper. Not going to diminish value of such courses - printing is hard and definitely deserves such attention.

Processing film is pretty much straightforward, but took me about 2 hours to finish. Nowadays everyone is using something called Paterson Tank - it is indeed a sealed tank to soak your film in differend kinds of chemicals. The trick is to load it with film. In total darkness. Dave asked me when I used to do this last time, and after learning that I indeed only seen it on YouTube videos, handled me a roll of exposed film, Paterson tank, showed to me how to load film on reel, and suggested that I'd train this for a while - first with lights on, and then in the dark. Once you get film into the tank, it is very much safe from light. The trick is to get it there in a first place.

Another issue that came out while I was already in the pitch black film loading room (size of a large cabinet), is that my film was still inside the cassette. There was a special tool (Ilford branded) that looked like a can opener. To this moment I never opened film cassette before. There is first time for everything. Wasn't hard in the end, and in general the whole film loading thing felt like learning how to ride a bike.

Once the film is processed and well rinsed, it was time to dry it up (special machine) and cut into pieces (light table and scissors). A professional would also take notes at this point, pre-select frames for print and maybe even put some notes on how the printing should be done in terms of exposure. When I was a kid, we'd never cut film, but instead used special film holder with the enlarger that would hold a whole roll. However, this feature was absent from De Vere film holders, and this was good reason to split film into small enough pieces.

There is a communal darkroom and a couple of "private" darkrooms in the basement of Four Corners. Communal darkroom is large, I counted 6 spaces with enargers for printing, common sink for chemicals and baths, and 3-level waterfall for proper rinsing of your final prints. There was another couple printing their pictures, but they left in the afternoon. I was the only guy for the rest of the day there, figuring out things and just being fascinated by the process. Suddenly there was quite a lot to do. My general process was like this:

• Pick a strip of 6 frames and try to pick a picture to print by holding it agains a bulb of red light
• Put film into holder, adjust frame and install it into enlarger
• Try and figure out exposition time by looking at how bright the frame is. Adjust exposition time and light intensity (iris?).
• Cut the photo paper in half - I got 8x10 inch large paper, which was generally a bit ambitious (and expensive).
• Expose paper by using handy timer gadget connected to the enlarger
• Develop print in a first bath. Try to figure out if the exposition time was correct. Try not to ruin the print by overdeveloping.
• Stop developing in the clean water bath.
• Move print to fixer bath. Move prints that been in the fixer long enough to the second level of waterfall.
• Move prints that been long enough in the 2nd level waterfall upstream
• Move prints from the top level of waterfall to the drying sieve
• Repeat

I was running around darkroom for most part, and wasn't really effective at all. In 4 hours I managed to print around 20 pictures from 2 rolls of 36 frames long film. That was about time when I realised that it's time to try and finish things before studio would close. This was also time when I started thinking that prints will not dry up in time for me to pick them home.

There was indeed a tool for that. It was a print dryer - hot drum and fabric that would (slowly) spin your prints and give them injection of heat. It was very effective too, and soon I got my hot fresh prints, very dry and ready to be taken home.

Things I'd do differently next time:

• Process film at home. This is not hard, and once I have Paterson tank and a bit of chemicals, this should be easy to perform at home. This will also save a good hour in the darkroom that can be dedicated for printing. I mean, 4-hours slot cost £25, but this easily turns into 8 hours if you're going to process and select pictures on the spot.
• When processing film, use a few drops of water agent when doing final rinsing, as was suggested by Dave and ignored by me. This should prevent drops of Thames water from staying on film and leaving nasty traces of calcium.
• Pre-select frames for printing at home, and prepare photographic paper of a proper size. Maybe get a cutter.
• Get smaller sized baths for developing and stopping. Large bath for fixing was actually quite handy, since you'd want to avoid piling up of prints in fixer.
• When using drum dryer, put the emulsion towards the fabric, not towards the hot drum. Yep, that will ruin the print, and will leave parts of this print sticked to the hot drum.

Thanks again to Four Corners and Dave for being calm and understanding with me having not much clue about things. I'll be back in that darkroom!

####Links

• A few scans of my prints can be found here. I think I'll move to 500pixels now for this sort of thing.
• Four Corners site

Yubikey is a tiny USB device with a single button. Once you plug it into computer, it will pretend to be a USB keyboard. When you press (the) button, it will output a seemingly random string of characters into selected input field.

It can also let you to forget all passwords and keep your memory cells occupied with more important stuff. Like birthday date of your spouse or when is the next episode of Silicon Valley.

Here's my personal experience of using Yubikey for a week. It will probably lack some details like security algorithms used by Yubikey internals. But you should get pretty good idea on what it is and if it's of any use to you.

The very basic and highly promoted use case of Yubikey goes like this:

• You activate 2-step authentication on Gmail
• Once Gmail require you to authenticate, you type in your usual user/pass combo, and then plug in Yubikey
• Yubikey generates one-time password (OTP), which is then approved by Gmail

At this point you might say that there is Google Authenticator app for generating OTP:s, and you're using it already. The difference is that you a) need a phone for that, and b) OTP generated by Yubikey is so much more stronger. And, unlike codes via SMS messages, it doesn't require any cellular coverage.

The very first thing I did after getting my Yubikey Basic Standard key is opened Google Account Security settings, went on to the 2-step verification tab and tried to add new hardware security key. To my great surprise, Yubikey wasn't recognised by Google. Few minutes of reading documentation produced following important details:

• It only supported by Chrome browser
• Your key must be compatible with a special protocol called FIDO U2F (which can be checked by presence of a golden key logo on a button)

Turned out Yubikey Standard wasn't compatible with FIDO U2F. "Bummer", I thought, "What a useless piece of hardware".

That was the first lesson - not all Yubikeys are created equal. To be completely fair, if you read on into the spec matrix, there is a row titled "Google Accounts Compatible". And there is a special version of Yubikey that supports only FIDO U2F and is cheapest of them all.

"So what is this thing and what can it do?" I asked the Universe and delved into documentation.

Most important discovery was free app, provided by Yubico and called YubiKey Personalization Tool. It is available for both Mac and Windows, and once you have it, the world of possibilities is suddenly open. It'll also unleash tons of security specific terms on you - the very top level of choices will be: Yubico OTP (you can probably guess what it is by now), OATH-HOTP (tricky), Static Password (guessable), Challenge-Response (no idea), as well as extra settings and tools.

You'll also discover that Yubikey Standard has 2 programmable slots. First slot will be pre-programmed to produce one time passwords, and second slot will be waiting for your decisions to make it whatever you think it should be.

Let's go back to the Yubico one-time-password option for a moment. Yubico wants web developers to easily enable 2-step authentication for their online apps. It works via something called Yubico Cloud. Once you generate OTP string from the key, it is submitted to Yubico, which respond with either yaarp or naarp, thus letting the app know if the authentication was successful.

The key moment here is Yubico Cloud. In order to authenticate your key, it needs your, well, virtual key (string of characters), stored in the hardware key. By default everything is pre-generated, key is uploaded to Yubico Cloud and ready to use. You are free to regenerate private keys for OTP feature, which might be a good idea if the hardware key was compromised during delivery. After generating new pair of keys, you can use the same app to upload keys to Yubico.

Once again, to be completely fair, you don't have to tie yourself to Yubico Cloud servers. There are open source options to host your very own verification server.

Another easy win is static password feature. Yubikey can be programmed to simply output up to 38 characters - or actually scan codes, since it pretends to be a keyboard. I ended up programming strong static password into slot 2, and it is now available with long tap on the button.

Here is a full guide how to trigger slots on your Yubikey:

• Slot 1: short tap on the button
• Slot 2: long tap (2-3 sec) on the button

What else can you do with strong static password? Well, you can follow advice of this guy and protect your 1Password app with a 2-part master password, consisting of strong part stored on the hardware key, and easy part stored in your memory. This way you will end up not knowing the full password to unlock all of your secrets (he still recommends printing full master password out and storing in a safe place). If the key is compromised, the evil party will only get part of the master password. They still might torcher you and get second part of the password, but that's another story.

There is an interesting ongoing discussion on AgileBits forum between users asking for native Yubikey support in 1Password, and devs explaining how Yubikey actually works. Basic argument against having support for Yubikey OTP is that this will require internet connection, and you can use Yubikey anyway for static password by simply activating input field on the screen and pressing button on the key.

I guess, the most exciting thing about Yubikey is that it is fully transparent, reprogrammable and can be used in many different ways. It makes a lot of sense in corporate IT environment, since you can setup your very own authentication cloud and distribute keys to your employees already pre-programmed and ready to use. One thing to remember is that Yubikey doesn't have any internal clock, neither a battery that would power that clock. This is somewhat compensated by a special apps on your computer that can generate timestamps.

And by the way, Fastmail supports Yubikey logins natively.

####Read

• I know none of my passwords - story how to use internet without worrying about security
• After Snowden, The NSA Faces Recruitment Challenge. NSA now competes with companies like Google and Facebook for bright minds of US citizens (and loosing this game)
• Amazon tests delivery drones at secret Canada site after US frustration.

As if to underline the significance of the move, the test site is barely 2,000ft from the US border, which was clearly visible from where the Guardian stood on a recent visit.

• The ‘Tsar Bomba’ Was a 50-Megaton Monster Nuke - story of testing most powerful nuke in war history

The five-mile wide fireball reached as high in the sky as the Bear bomber. The shock wave caused the Bear to drop more than half a mile in altitude before Durnovtsev regained control of his aircraft.

• This goes into category of best stories on April 1st - CERN researchers confirm existence of the Force

####Do

• Smithsonian offers you a unique holiday opportunity with insights into Russian Space program and trip to Baikonur to witness proper space rocket launch. Space is limited.

####Tweet of the week

• On home automation and robot overlords

####Personal notes

• Spent almost a week using Yubikey. Turned out to be an exciting piece of programmable hardware. Expect a proper blog soon.
• Slowly getting into a field of native iOS programming with React Native. Once you get your mind around flexbox model, things become pretty straightforward. Amazed how much of UI elements are ready at your disposal right from the start. Meanwhile community is making and sharing its own custom UI components ready to be plugged into your app.
• It's long holidays in Britain (and pretty much anywhere in Europe). Chocolate dinosaur eggs are a very important part of this celebration of Christ.
• We got third mic to our home made recording studio in the shed. Expect some dramatic sound quality improvements in the next episode of Radio Badger podcast, which is recorded and will be out soon.

####Read

• Why giving basic income to even the richest makes sense - The Water Room Analogy
• An open letter to banks by creators of 1Password. The reason for this publication was tweet by one of the banks that "your password should be commited to memory rather than password manager". In all the fairness, my current bank in UK doesn't even support one-time passwords - access to the online account is protected with two passwords maintainer by user.
• 67 Things You Learn When You’ve Lived In London For Five Years

The Central line in the evening rush hour is actually an underground Bikram Yoga club. Get into it!

• How doctors choose to die
• There should be no disabled users on the web - write up by @hoppycantstoppy on current state of things on accessible web and why you should care

####Watch

• Time Couch - VR demo. YouTube now supports 360 spherical videos which you can control using mouse / keyboard (or Oculus, if you have one).
• Pedro and Frankensheep - Sleep Guinea Pig Sleep. Short animation on life.

####Learn

• React Native is released and you can implement native iOS apps now by re-using skills of Javascript and React

####Play

• Pillars of Eternity is released. Made by the guys who delivered Fallout New Vegas, in true old school style of gameplay. At the same time graphics updated to the level of year 2015. Camera is fixed on a classic RPG game angle, the only accepted way of manipulating camera is zoom in and out. Game mechanics is again classic D&D, if you played Baldur's Gate you'll feel like at home. Made possile with Kickstarter campaign.

####Install

• Flickr Tab extension for Chrome

####Listen

• Radio Badger podcast new episode 14 is on Soundcloud. Expect me, @robbiemccorkell and featuring @charypar talk about pi day, synesthesia, Apple, memory chip hacking, quantum physics, React and upcoming micro pig event in Hackney.

####Personal notes

• We had a new London React meetup this week at Facebook Euston shiny office. Expect blogpost and videos soon, as well as story of our React based project still evolving into something huge and powerful.

####Read

• The Cold Rim of the World - The rise and fall of Pyramiden, a Russian mining town located in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard
• UK government's styleguide on Git commits
• Roads were not built for cars: how cyclists, not drivers, first fought to pave US roads. Ano in related stories - The forgotten history of how automakers invented the crime of jaywalking.

The National Automobile Chamber of Commerce, an industry group, established a free wire service for newspapers: reporters could send in the basic details of a traffic accident, and would get in return a complete article to print the next day. These articles, printed widely, shifted the blame for accidents to pedestrians — signaling that following these new laws was important.

• How Motion Picture Film is Made - story of Kodak motion picture film with detailed insights into the Kodak factory and current perspectives of analogue filmmaking.

For the upcoming documentary Everest: Conquering Thin Air, the filmmakers needed a stronger base for the shooting conditions on the mountain. Martin suggested polyester, usually reserved for archival film because of its toughness and higher propensity to cause a camera jam. “When they were shooting in Everest, they wanted something that was going to hold up to the elements so we made them polyester film with our emulsion set from our 500 tungsten camera negative film”

####Watch

• Andrei Tarkovsky: The Essential Documentaries On Russian Master. Impressive collection of documentaries and interviews on making of most films by Tarkovsky, including Solaris, Stalker and The Sacrifice.
• HD version of my Nordic Prelude short film is now available on Vimeo. It is also available in 3D and 4K on request. Expect timelapses from our roadtrip to Koli, Lapland and rocks of Nordkapp.

####Personal notes

• It is my third day without a phone. Few days ago I tried to clean a lens of iPhone 5S camera from inside, and while the operation went successfully, the phone doesn't start anymore. This led to an interesting (although forced) experiment when I trying to have a life without reassuring feeling of a phone in my pocket. Going to put all notes into a separate post - it's going to be an insightful write up.
• Had an induction in the local photography darkroom. Analog photography is dying, but thanks for places like London there's still plenty of spaces, interesing people and possibilities to excersise long forgotten craft. Booked my session in April, the plan is to process and print two rolls of 35mm film. The place is crawling with rolls of medium format film, making 35mm look very small in comparison. If all goes well, I'll get Mamiya camera next year.
• Stereo pictures from Budapest now processed and uploaded. You will need red-cyan 3D glasses.