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 me@danielpietzsch.com, to get in touch.
So, no German Corona Warn App for me: my iPhone 6 Plus is stuck on iOS 12. And you need to be able to run iOS 13 (which came out last year) and above to run it. A shame.
I’m probably in the minority of iPhone users on such an old device, though. Still, I wonder how many people have a similar problem (at least Android devices only require Android 6, which is five years old). And how many people won’t even bother installing it.
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.
The current situation in the US is absolutely insane! In a lot of cities and areas police forces are violently attacking protestors and press. And their racist, evil, idiot president only keeps adding fuel to fire, insulting protestors and anyone else not getting in line with him. His recent speech was unbelievable: disrespectful and dangerous.
How can one not sympathise with the #BlackLivesMatter movement? Generally, and especially right now. George Floyd was – unnecessarily, intentionally, almost casually – killed by a white police officer. And he was only the most recent case of many many many others in the past.
I made my first set of black and white prints with my new Kaiser VP-6000 enlarger. It’s been a bit of an experimental session figuring out all the settings and my personal preferences. But so far I have been very happy with the results.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the last week, I updated my photo journal’s design. There are no more borders around the images, the photos are more aligned to a grid and have varying sizes. It’s all more well-aligned and therefor looks cleaner.
It turns out, lazy loadingdoes 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.
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.
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 fewYoutubevideos 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.
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:
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”.
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.
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!
Last year, I acquired a few new cameras. One of them was a Yashica FR1 (or FRI, as it’s often written as) with a selection of lenses. It was a random opportunity. And I took it. Here are some first images taken with the 24mm lens I bought with it.
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.
I made a little bookmarklet to disable and hide Instagram’s login prompt and re-enable scrolling, so I can keep browsing Instagram web pages when I am logged out. I call it “Fuck you, Instagram!” or “FUI” for short.
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.
I have a new site! It’s truly indie now. No more reliance on Tumblr. And I’m pretty happy about that! So, danielpietzsch.com is going to be my virtual home for the foreseeable future.
