Daniel Pietzsch

Soundtrack for the weekend:

Body Count - Cop Killer (Live at Hellfest 2018)

Sepultura - Anticop (Live)

Here’s a Twitter thread (scroll up and/or down from the linked tweet) of some 300-plus-and-counting videos of police brutality: https://twitter.com/greg_doucette/status/1268391718086422528.

This is only from this past week.

Not any of these assaults is even remotely justified. Absolutely unbelievable – in the worst possible way. And this is just a small subset of the incidents that have been published or have even been recorded. Any single one of these violations on its own is outrageous! And all this is happening during peaceful protests against police brutality.

2 songs. 1 issue. 25 years apart. 0 changed.

Rage Against the Machine – Killing in the name.

Body Count – No Lives Matter

This is a test post from iOS using the Working Copy app. Also trying out an external markdown editor called Pretext.

I bought yet another pedal…

Just started bulk-loading another 30.5m-spool of APX 400.

I think this film bulk-loaded is the best deal in black and white film photography. One spool is €48 at Nordfoto and gives you 18 roles of film with 36+ exposures each. That’s not even €2.70 per canister. It’s a steal. And it’s a great film.

Some music I’ve been enjoying recently:

• KATATONIA – “City Burials”. Their new album. What can I say? Of course, it’s great!
• MONOLORD. Listening to all their 4 albums. It’s low, slow and heavy. And I like it.
• PORTISHEAD – “Dummy”. Just a wonderfully quiet and melancholic album.
• VLTIMAS – “Something Wicked Marches In”. All-Star Death Metal. David Vincent’s vocals are just superb!
• CRAFT – Everything. This Swedish black metal act is growing on me.
• SOEN – “Lotus” and “Lykaia”. Still regular listening to those albums.
• OPETH – “In Cauda Venenum”. Ever since seeing them live last time, I can’t get “Allting tar slut” out of my head.
• RUSSIAN CIRCLES – “Blood Year”. Their latest album. Would have loved to see them live last month. But as everything was cancelled, this will need to do – which is not bad at all.
• TOOL – “Fear Inoculum”. Still in rotation.

Yesterday, I spontaneously acquired a new (used) darkroom enlarger that was on offer locally:

It’s a Kaiser VP-6000. And it included everything I need to make prints from 6x6 medium format negatives. So now I can finally start printing the photos I have been making with my Rolleiflex!

To get a little impression of what Düsseldorf looks like during the Covid-19 pandemic, you can check out Andreas Schiko’s blog where he currently posts photos of empty Düsseldorf streets.

Ok, my “Fuck you, Instagram!” bookmarklet stopped working again. Bloody annoying. At least permalinks still work on their own and right-clicking hasn’t been disabled (yet?). So “Open Link in New Tab” still works.

The URL for subscribing to a YouTube channel via RSS:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=ADD_CHANNEL_ID_HERE

You get the channel_id from the URL of the channel.

As much as I like Jekyll, Liquid is bloody nonsense.

It’s probably just me.

But I find its strange syntax and very limited functionality so frustrating. I always wish I could just use plain Ruby and not have to struggle every time I want to do anything in my view templates.

I’m currently watching the documentary about Dieter Rams by Gary Hustwit and it’s absolutely wonderful. Still free to watch today.

📷 “July 2019” is now up in the Photo Journal (48 photos). 📷

It turns out, lazy loading does work with responsive images in Firefox 75: for this to work, you currently have to put the loading attribute before srcset in the attribute list of an img tag. This is a bug, and will be fixed in a future release.

So, I changed my markup accordingly – both on this site and the photo journal.

As for Firefox’ implementation itself: I find it currently too lazy. A new image is only downloaded when it’s already inside the viewport. This is going to result in visitors (unnecessarily) having to wait for an image download, especially when the image is larger and/or their internet connection is not the fastest.

Chrome’s implementation on the other hand is more appropriate in my opinion: it starts downloading images marked with loading=lazy well in advance – a few full “screens” before they are actually reached via scrolling.

Anyhow: happy this got implemented in Firefox now, too, despite its implementation needing a bit more refinement in my opinion.

Ok, my “Fuck you, Instagram!” bookmarklet works again. Thanks!

Firefox 75 was released, promoting the native image lazy loading feature. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to work with responsive images (using srcset and sizes). It’s definitely not working here nor on my photo journal site. Am I just doing it wrong? I couldn’t find information about this issue, yet.

UPDATE: I needed to put the loading attribute before the srcset attribute on my img tags.

📷 And another Photo Journal entry: June 2019 (42 photos). 📷

Current film stock:

This site now uses lazy-loading for the Youtube video embeds. Meaning, a preview image is loaded, and only when you click that is the actual video embed requested.

After posting a few Youtube videos to this site recently, I noticed this was loading a whole lot of quite large third-party resources. And this was happening without even playing a video – very likely resulting in visitors having to download a non-trivial amount of megabytes of no use. The site was slow to load. My Lighthouse score went way down.

So I fixed it.

To lazy load the videos I wrote a Jekyll plugin for a custom Liquid tag, that will take a Youtube video URL as parameter and spit out an iframe tag that uses its srcdoc attribute to at first only load the video’s preview image and display a “Play” button.

📷 New Photo Journal entry: May 2019 (39 photos). 📷

Featuring IndieWebCamp Düsseldorf and our first camping trip that year.

Grmpf. I just noticed my “Fuck you, Instagram!” bookmarklet became useless. Instagram won’t let you click and open an image from a person’s index page. They now immediately prompt you to log in. And while the bookmarklet currently still removes the log in modal, any further attempts on clicking an image are ignored. So, this current version does not work any longer. 😠

At least, one can still right-click and hit “Open Link in New Tab” (in Safari that is). But that’s pretty tedious.

I wish more people simply had a website or blog without this sort of nonsense.

Spent the evening working on this site a little bit:

• Added article teaser images to index pages.
• Made the “Read More” links more prominent.
• Added OpenGraph og:image and og:type meta tags.
• Adding loading="lazy" to the Youtube iframes.
• Making the Youtube embeds grayscale on index pages unless you hover over the article.

So, here’s a drumcam video of Danny Carey playing “Pneuma” off the latest Tool album:

Seeing a drummer play songs live always makes you appreciate the skill even more than simply hearing it. Even with someone like him, where by merely listening it’s already immediately obvious that most people – including me – probably wouldn’t even be able to count this song correctly let alone play drums to it and keep a band playing together.

I also think it’s a first, I’ve seen that type of high-quality video of Danny Carey.

And great song by the way. My current favourite from “Fear Inoculum”.

📷 New Photo Journal entry: April 2019 (34 photos). 📷

My first ever pedalboard is taking shape:

In addition to the looper, the phaser, and the Little Big Muff fuzz I mentioned before, I now also got an EHX Pitch Fork and an expression pedal.

It’s all attached to the pretty much smallest pre-build board I could find: a Fame Spaceboard 50S.

And I think I now want to buy a single dedicated power supply, which can power all those pedals. Because it’s currently a little annoying having to power the pedals all individually.

Anyhow: happy progress!

Listening to this over and over and over again…

Jack White: Over and Over and Over

Last week I discovered Royal Blood and was blown away! Just check out this festival gig:

They’re only a duo – a drummer and a bassist (!) – but produce an impressive (and innovative) sound. Have not seen anything quite like it. It’s like The White Stripes meet Muse and it’s brilliant!

I just learned about the CSS scroll-behavior property and immediately applied it to a site. Super simple JS-independent smooth scrolling. :-)

Ok, enough with the meta-posts. Here’s some actual content for a change. It’s on the other site, though: Photos from March of this year are up in the photo journal.

Added syntax highlighting now, too. Since Jekyll generates the necessary markup out of the box, it was simply a matter of choosing an additional stylesheet, including it, and making a few more adjustments.

I was actually thinking that I might have seen enough Opeth gigs by now. But no! Last night in Cologne was the best one I’ve been to (yet)! Great setlist, great light show, and – as always – great musicianship. Very happy we went.

It’s the time of year where I generally push my films to ISO 1600. And that means I now need to slightly readjust my brain again for guessing exposure.

And in April it’s all back to ISO 400 again.

There’s a new entry up in “The Photo Journal”: February 2019.

Went to see Machine Head yesterday. It was the “Burn my Eyes” 25th anniversary tour and so they played that album in its entirety, in the almost original lineup: Logan Mader on guitar, Chris Kontos on drums, and of course Robb Flynn. Would have loved to see Adam Duce, too, but I guess one can’t have everything. Anyhow: I had a great time, even joining a few circle pits.

Here’s the full show on Youtube.