Daniel Pietzsch

Portrait of Daniel Pietzsch

Hi. I’m Daniel Pietzsch.

I’m a freelance web developer based in Düsseldorf, Germany. I’m also a passionate film photographer, a husband and father, a musician and metalhead.
Use , to get in touch.

Recent Posts

Articles and Notes.

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.

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”.

My first ever pedalboard is taking shape:

My looper, phaser, fuzz, and octaver pedals on a pedalboard. An expression pedal on its right. And my feet at the bottom of the frame, featuring socks with cheeseburgers pattern.

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!

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 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.