Zoe's first day at school. I went photographing with Florian at Zeche Zollverein in Essen. It was my mum's birthday. Saw Gatecreeper and Converge live in Dortmund with Bernd and Fred. We went to a horse race. And Bernd and I went on a multiday hike in Austria, where I broke my arm.
The latest photojournal entry has been out for a few days.
The summer vacation in Annecy. Düsseldorf fun fair. A trip to the Eifel with Udo. And a trip to Berlin with Zoe.
I created a new photo journal entry.
A family trip to Belgium, Folkerdey, quite a few things in between, and of course our camper motorway crash false start into the summer holidays.
One more month of photos.
The circus came to town. Frankeninferno. Camping in Perlenau. And a visit to the Neaderthal museum.
There’s a new photo journal entry up!
The birthdays continue. It's Easter. Another studio visit. Beyond Tellerrand conference. A poker night. And the all the stuff in between.
You like photos? Here are some more!
Three birthdays and a studio visit.
I’m on a roll!
Ski vacation in Austria and Elfi's birthday.
Here are some fresh and ice cold photos!
Starting the new year in and around Düsseldorf.
What!? A new journal entry!
I have a new band called "Forkalyst". And you can find out more in this post.
Unfortunately, we had to cancel our gig in Wuppertal this Friday due to illness.
Struck A Nerve – the Death Metal band I joined last year as a bass player – will be playing live for the first time in November. Here are the Infos:
Bands:
24. November 2023
Underground
Bundesallee 268 - 274
42103 Wuppertal
Start: 20h
Price: €12 VVK, €18 AK
Now, I only need to get my arm fit again…
I have now integrated the photo journal feed directly into the main feed.
This saves me from manually creating a link post each time the photo journal has been updated.
And I updated both feeds. If you now have a whole bunch of unread articles in your feed reader, I’m sorry.
Now served from a VPS and via HTTPS
This website has a new page where you can read about what's currently going on in my life.
Another accident happened: I broke my arm while hiking.
The music section for the most part now features the Bandcamp embed instead of the one from Spotify. I find this to be much better, because you can listen to a whole album, even without account. And I actually prefer Bandcamp and have been using it more and more lately.
Uff, it’s been a week already, since I had a great day with Florian at Zeche Zollverein in Essen – photographing and talking. He has the evidence over on his fantastic photo blog:
Panoramic summer impressions.
Trying not to fall behind more than one year.
Two parties, some rare visitors, a camping trip, a Krimidinner, and some horse riding.
It’s the month of July.
On Sunday, June 25th 2023, we were involved in a car crash on the Autobahn. While our camper is beyond repair, we were very lucky and escaped with only minor injuries.
Irrland and southern France.
54 new photos.
Prompted by Jeremy’s post on the topic, I’ve been trying out the brand new view transitions API for multi page apps – i.e. normal websites.
Since my previous CMS forestry.io stopped working, and its successor TinaCMS doesn‘t work with my setup, I replaced it with Decap CMS (previously Netflify CMS). I needed to add some CSS overrides, though, so it actually works on a small phone-sized screen – which to my suprise it didn’t out of the box.
Anyhow, I’m pretty pleased with the replacement and this is the first post using my new CMS.
Since the beginning of April, I’ve been taking a break from freelancing. That means I currently don’t work for anyone else. And it’s been glorious so far! Instead of doing software development all day, I’ve really taken it easy and have done things I enjoy, wanted to do for a while, or simply had to get done – with plenty of time to do so.
Various activities in Düsseldorf and a work trip to France.
More photos!
I finally made some prints again. Needing a present is always a good motivator.
I probably do not do this so often, because it’s time consuming getting everything ready, and I don’t always have the motivation for it, and/or the bathroom is not unoccupied early enough.
Producing a print by hand is so satisfying, though.
Both images are in the April photo journal entry.
At the Aquazoo Düsseldorf, Easter, COVID infection, and a jam session.
And here’s the brand new entry for April 2022.
Mostly photos from my birthday party.
Ups, forgot to link to the March entry of the photo journal here.
After contemplating about responsive images - especially for my photo journal - I had a look at my current approach and whether it makes sense to add image variants in AVIF format to the mix. And my current answer to this is “no”.
With smartphones getting bigger and screen resolutions becoming ever more dense, is it still feasible to serve a whole bunch of different image sizes on a photo sharing web site?
Flying a kite, flea market and a pizza dinner.
Keen to catch up.
It’s the January post. With New Year’s leftovers and family photos.
A very short post for a change.
About how my "reviews" can sometimes seem unfair, when they are really not meant to be.
A trip to Berlin. Zoe turns four. A work event. Friends turning forty. Family holiday in Italy. A band reunion of sorts. Christmas and New Year's. And the usual documentation in between.
239 new photos from the past.
After watching “The Queen’s Gambit”, I got interested in chess again. I played a little bit when I was a kid, but never much or in any serious fashion. And so, recently, I created an account on Lichess.org.
Our three weeks summer holiday, weekend camping trips, some bike riding and other activities in Düsseldorf.
Finally, after a year, I made an entry to the photojournal again.
The last month has been unusually concert-heavy. I saw
This site now has a /feeds page, which lists all the RSS/Atom feeds.
The text for movie posts is now hidden at first, if it potentially contains spoilers (I simply used the <details> element for this). This also applies to the Atom feeds (for movies and for everything). The text is also no longer written in the description and og:description meta tags. All of this should make it harder to accidentally get spoiled.
The Planck is the only computer keyboard I use now. I do not want to – nor can I – use a standard keyboard anymore. My MacBook Pro’s keyboard that I’ve used for years? Of no use: the staggered keys, the size (way too big!), the low key travel, the non-customisability. Everything’s alien now.
I recently dusted off an old Raspberry Pi and installed Samba to serve all the movies we have on two external hard drives on our local network.
Finally developed some rolls of film again. It’s been months since the last time.
Made 1.5 litres of fresh fixer, got the 5-reel tank out of the cupboard and developed some HP5 @1600. One of those rolls was from back in December.
A second batch – 5 rolls of APX 400 – is also already hanging to dry. Feels good to make progress on that front again. (But let’s not talk about the scanning backlog or posting to the journal, ok!?)
Another fun daily movie guessing game. And an instant favourite!
🇫🇷 @Red Fang, c’est un groupe né à Portland, dans l’Oregon. La formation se compose de Brian Giles au chant et à la guitare, Aaron Beam au chant et à la ba...
Red Fang on this year’s Hellfest. The band rocks hard. The crowd goes wild. And all beautifully filmed and edited with great sound.
If you’re short on time, watch “Wires” in the middle of the set. Perfect!
Guess the metal song from the intro in as few tries as possible.
A household favourite at the moment and part of our morning routine.
Last minute – on Sunday – I bought a ticket for the TOOL concert last Tuesday at Lanxess Arena in Köln. A great decision! What a fantastic (live) band!
Loved how they partly looked at each other to coordinate (or recoordinate) some parts, and how everyone operated their own pedal board and effects. And, of course, how they played their instruments. And I was pretty close at the side of the stage to see a lot of what was going on.
Easily one of the best gigs I’ve been to, and absolutely worth the money!
Apple Music’s Zane Lowe joins Jack in Detroit to discuss his new album 'Fear Of The Dawn,' Third Man Records, and more. Add 'Fear Of The Dawn' to your librar...
Always inspiring to listen to Jack White. And I learned there’s a Third Man Records Store in London now. For sure going to visit that one next time I’m there!
A great analysis of my favourite song from the latest Meshuggah album. Love how he uses his fingers to illustrate it all!
I rarely dissect Meshuggah songs like this. But it’s good to sometimes have other people doing that for you.
This month – April of 2022 – I set a new record: our current flat is now the accommodation that I have been living in the longest since moving out of my parent’s house. We’ve been living here for three years now.
“Consequences be fucking damned”, ey!? Made a corona test this morning after having symptoms, and sure enough, it’s positive. Not feeling great today. But not feeling too bad, either. Feels like a cold so far. You get what you deserve, I suppose.
Went to the Ghost concert at Lanxess Arena in Köln on Tuesday. And this was absolutely fantastic. So many great songs, well performed. Plus a great show. I’m usually not too much of a fan of big show elements, but this was honestly good and not over the top, so the music and its performance was still the focus. And I was also sceptical of that big venue. But we were on the floor and it was not remotely sold out, so we could get really close.
The support acts Twin Temple and Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats were a great choice, too!
We and our friends – and the whole arena really – had a great time! Although it was admittedly a bit careless regarding Covid. But, I don’t know, I think we really just wanted to go. It felt good to visit a concert again, consequences be fucking damned!
So, I forgot to cancel my Apple Arcade trial. And on the weekend I had a look for a game to play. And now I’m already addicted to Mini Motorways. 🤷♂️
A little update about my mood and why I haven’t posted in a while.
Gitpod streamlines developer workflows by providing prebuilt, collaborative developer environments in your browser - powered by VS Code.
Wow! I’m going to experiment with this a little. I already created this very post using Gitpod. With the iPad (and the Planck keyboard, of course).
Getting a “Accessory Unavailable: The attached accessory uses too much power.” warning? Here's the fix!
New challenge. New possibilities.
Having seen “An Impossible Project” at the Metropol on Wednesday made me realise again how much I like going to the cinema. At least to those of the little, artsy kind. Like the “Filmkunstkinos” here in Düsseldorf.
The whole experience is just so much richer than at home: you get to see the film on a big screen in a dark room, with loud sound and without distractions. It’s much more immersive and I’m always much more into the story being told.
Plus, the locations here in town are all very cosy and inspiring. You get to smell the popcorn. They sell great beer. And you get new ideas for what to watch next. And usually those cinemas are frequented by interesting folks, too.
We all tested negative on Tuesday. And that means life for us is largely back to “normal” again. So far. It steel feels like things can change again at any minute. 🤷♂️
In other good news, my shoulder is constantly getting better and I can do most things without pain now.
We waited three days for the results. And since 1pm today it’s certain that Zoe and Nicole had – or still have – COVID. Very likely the Omicron variant. My own PCR test result was negative.
That explains Nicole’s somewhat heavy cold symptoms last week. But both are now feeling ok again. To be honest, Zoe only had some heavy coughing the night from Monday on Tuesday. Otherwise she seemed happy and healthy as ever. (Fingers crossed, no long-term symptoms will develop).
Maybe I’ll still get it (or have it already). We’ll see. (Nicole and I have spent our time mostly in separate rooms for the past few days.) We’ll all get another test (non-PCR) on Tuesday. When those are all negative, we’ll hope some normality will return.
We’re definitely happy we decided to already get boostered end of last year.
I have settled on Kodak HC-110 to be my one and only black and white film developer. Here's why.
So my shoulder seems to get better slowly but steadily, thank you!
But the corona situation is frustrating. Now the PCR pool test today was negative while we know of one kid, that also was part of the pool, that had a positive self-test in the afternoon. And last week there was a positive PCR pool test with all the children’s individual tests afterwards being negative. And now I’m questioning all the tests!
So we’re thinking about leaving Zoe out of kindy this week altogether again, just to be safe and not risk an infection. I think at least half of the children in her group have it right now. And with seemingly unreliable tests, it seems like the more cautious action.
My shoulder already doesn’t hurt as much. But I still can’t put socks on by myself.
So, ok, next week is not off to a great start, either. Fell while skateboarding today, and now my right shoulder hurts and I don’t want to move it. Then, this time there have been Covid cases in kindy. Luckily Zoe and the two of us are fine (so far), but it sucks for all the parties that are directly affected. And now the kindergarten is understaffed; and we’ll first try to get another PCR test for Zoe before sending her again (and wait for others to test, too). That means work-juggling continues.
Sorry for the negativity. Maybe now 12 hours of shoulder pain is making me a little grumpy. 🤷♂️ (don’t feel sorry, I fell while skate-boar-ding🙄.)
It’s been a bit of an chaotic week here. Zoe being sick at the beginning of the week, and then two positive Covid PCR pool tests in kindy (at least one of which was false alarm) meant she was home four of five days. Works just fine with two working parents. Not. Hopefully next week will be better.
I recently bought Pixelmator Photo for iOS and now I can finally do all my image editing on the iPad.
Which is missing for me from Apple’s “Photos” app is a “Retouch” tool, which I use for dust-removal – and for which I had to use the Mac-variant for. Until now. Because Pixelmator Photo has it. I don’t know what took me so long.
I DIYed me some wind-noise reducers using a sock and a bit of velcro.
With my new bike, I started riding a bit faster and one thing that bothered me was all that wind noise. So I looked for possible solutions and came across these catears. But before ordering something pre-made so seemingly simple, I wanted to try making something like this myself.
So, I cut a sock, glued on a bit of velcro and wrapped the whole thing around my helmet strap. Et voilà.
And it indeed works and reduces the wind noise significantly. And it does not look too strange IMO.
Life and death, sun and snow, at home and on the go.
I managed to create an entry in the photo journal. The first set of film photos from this year.
Just got my booster shot. It’s only been a little over four months since my second Pfizer/BioNTech vaccination dose. But they say to not wait any longer. And I figured being protected for winter makes more sense than being ready in spring.
Some old and some never seen clips of Cooper riding a fixed gear in NYC. I hope you enjoy. Looking to shoot some more in this style. Who should I film? Beco...
This video was recommended to me tonight. Good choice! Thanks, algorithm! This is some extremely skilful cycling – and filming! Plus it’s in black and white and the dude is carrying an analogue Leica.
I looked him up, too, and of course there’s more of this. Oh my. Another rabbit hole.
I can totally relate to this guy being so excited about film photography. And it was great to get a tour of a professional film lab.
Ordered some 300+ prints the other day. It’s always something different holding physical photographs in your hand. Even when it’s relatively cheap ones, like these.
I usually use ALDI Fotos and I have been very satisfied with their service so far. The main argument for them is that they can print on matte paper with a white border. And it turned out they can even print my panoramic images with only little cropping.
I should really make more of a routine of ordering prints. The more photos I get out of my computer and into the physical world the better. Gotta feed the archive!
I bought an Apple Watch. And I want it to replace my iPhone.
IndieWebCamp Düsseldorf 2021 is a gathering for independent web creators of all kinds, from graphic artists, to designers, UX engineers, coders, hackers, to share ideas, actively work on creating for their own personal websites, and build upon each others creations.
Oh, there’s an #indiewebcamp in Düsseldorf next Wednesday, and I won’t be able to attend. :-(
Bought concert tickets for “Der Weg einer Freiheit” in Köln in November. It’ll be the first concert after a looooong break.
In September I spontaneously visited Berlin for 10 days. To see the city – which I don’t really know – and to hang out with Tim and Sophie. And I had to do a bit of remote work, too.
Here’s a current screenshot of my iPhone’s homescreen. It’s been looking like this for quite a while now and so I wanted to log this.
Oh man, I’m so behind on my photos. I’ve developed and scanned everything until and including June. But there are now 25 more rolls to scan and currently 13 rolls still to develop. And I haven’t edited much from this year, either. Makes me a bit nervous about being able to keep up with my photo journal in any timely fashion. But I need and want to! But I will probably end up posting a whole year again, as I did with 2020.
Today, I at least finally ordered myself a 5-reel development tank, which will make film-developing quite a bit quicker and more convenient, compared to using two 2-reel tanks.
I have a new bike. It’s a lightweight singlespeed roadbike.
Got the second COVID-19 vaccine shot Wednesday evening. And other than a sore upper arm again, I haven’t had noticeable side-effects.
An almost three hours long interview. Highly recommended, if you’re a Tarantino fan. The last 45 minutes or so could be safely skipped, though, unless you’re much into Bruce Lee and some legal controversy surrounding scripts for some film and/or series (yawn).
Got our first COVID-19 vaccine shot (BioNTech/Pfizer) yesterday. Having a bit of a sore upper arm, but that’s it for side-effects so far.
We’ll get the seconds dose in four weeks, and so should be “fully vaccinated” by September.
Great Thunberg is badass!
During the recent vacation, Zoe took a photo of me with my Instax Wide. And this now is my avatar for the summer.
HostEurope currently doesn’t offer automatic usage of Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates with their Webhosting products – and probably never will. But here’s how you can make it work and navigate HostEurope’s manual and not so straight forward process.
Normalerweise kein großer Sport-Gucker, aber die Fußball-EM verfolge ich dann doch mal wieder ganz gerne.
The whole strange year in one big entry.
I managed to catch up a little with my photos: here are 159 exposures from 2020.
Today, people have many ways to keep up with their favorite websites, including subscribing to mailing lists, notifications and RSS. It’s a ...
Chrome will try out letting users subscribe to RSS feed right in the browser.
This is a welcome experiment, after all main browsers removed RSS-related features in recent years. I wish they came back. It’d be great if RSS feeds were surfaced via a consistent UI and the ability to easily subscribe to feeds without the need for additional software (at least to get started).
I don’t have high hopes, though.
New pedals! The compressor is mainly planned for use with the bass. And the Eyemaster gives me the HM-2 Swedish chainsaw sound. Gonna learn some Entombed I guess!
KEKS LENS kodak lens 30mm f/10 keks lens is a lens recycle from disposable camera and transform it to a body cap lens. it could be one of the best weapon for street photography. The Fixed aperture and focus free makes sure you can capture the moments you want. (Available in LEICA M, L39, FUJIFILM X, SONY E MOUNT) www.instagram.com/keks_lens/
Interesting lens. Only 30 USD. Here’s a review. Tempted to just order one.
Over the weekend, I made new prints in my darkroom. And in this post, I'm showing them.
file perusal filter for crt viewing of compressed text
Command discovery of the day: zless – for directly viewing zipped text files. Now I can stop manually gunziping and lessing server log files like an idiot.
Instagram seems to have definitively locked out people without an account. I couldn’t open a single page for weeks now.
A shame some people only post there. But I’m not going to get an account.
I’ve reviewed a whole load of the new crop of shoe mount light meters recently. I’ve liked something about all of the meters I’ve tried too.
This will probably come in handy one day!
How come Rails’ String#blank? never made it into Ruby itself? So frustrating! And I thought, Ruby was about “programmer happiness”!? Well, guess what, Matz: I’M NOT HAPPY!!!1!!
I don’t know how parents regularly have their child(ren) sleep in their bed. Nine times out of ten we get beaten, kicked and headbutted. Best case, we get woken up multiple times per night. Worst case, we additionally get hurt. Plus, Zoe also wakes up way earlier than usual. The snuggles make up for the abuse a little, though.
Messing around with the website again. Now having pages grouping all blog posts (articles, notes and links) at /blog and all media posts (music, movies and books) at /media.
Makes it easier to scroll through all content at once.
Noch vor fünf Jahren führten Diana Knigge und Phillip Alexander Schubert, beide Mitte 40, ein Leben im sogenannten Wohlstand: eigenes Café, schickes Auto und...
Ein Paar aus Ratingen lebt und reist seit 5 Jahren im Wohnmobil. Gute Idee, wie ich finde!
Here is the signal path and pedalboard settings for how I recorded “Bridge of Sighs”:
The audio in the video is a combination of the Garageband recording and the sound recorded by the iPhone.
I still wish more people/bands/utilities/companies/restaurants had RSS feeds, so this wouldn’t even be necessary.
Oh, sweet: NetNewsWire – my RSS reader of choice – added the ability to subscribe to Twitter timelines.
Videos are now served via HTTPS. This fixes playback in Google Chrome. For now, I uploaded a manually generated Let’s Encrypt certificate to my HostEurope webspace for that subdomain. So now, videos should finally be working for most people!
Gestern auf die “Heavy Metal”-Playlist von Amazon Music gestoßen. Als erstes kommt Iron Maiden, dann Metallica, und danach – natürlich – als drittes – ganz klar – gleiche Liga! – …
… Guano Apes! 🤷♂️
Argh! I didn’t know Chrome doesn’t allow mixed content (HTTPS + HTTP) anymore. So, I should get SSL sorted for my newly created videos.danielpietzsch.com subdomain.
Update: Sorted!
Das Kind hat woanders übernachtet. Endlich mal wieder in Ruhe Sonntagmorgens im Wohnzimmer Death Metal hören.
We got tested for Corona virus today. The results were negative.
In Germany you can currently get one free test every week. While we thought it’s pretty unlikely we’re infected, we thought it couldn’t hurt taking advantage of this (after all, we do occasionally meet a few people).
We used “Mein Corona Schnelltest”, and the whole process – registration, test, and test result retrieval – was quick and straightforward. Our test centre was set up in a mall where a shop used to be. I thought it’s worth sharing these two photos.
How I now host video files outside of GitLab Pages
How I use our little bathroom to make gelatin silver prints.
We’ve been making these veggie burgers with beetroot-based patties for a while now. They are delicious.
So I think the search for a great patty has ended.
Right now, I’m unsure about whether I will continue my photo journal in its current form.
A little bit of moaning about the current situation.
This is the story of the birth of the web, its loss of innocence, its decline, and what we can do to make it a bit less gross. Or if you prefer, this is the video in which I say the expression “barbecue sets” far too many times.
Not your usual explanation of the history of the web and the IndieWeb.
GitHub and GitLab now both offer dark mode. My eyes thank you!
Summarising my feelings about the recent US presidential election.
I have now enabled gzip compression on this website. This means all text resources are now served compressed, which results in quicker page (down)loads.
I removed pagination from a few index pages. Because: who needs pagination when you have compact index pages and all images are lazy loaded? Right: no one! Kinda fixes static page search, too.
Ich habe heute Die Ente gemalt.
I bought more pedals. And so I needed a bigger board, to be able to fit them all. Here’s what it looks like now:
Oh FFS! Instagram now requires you to have an account to view anything on their website. You can no longer visit profiles of people or businesses let alone permalink pages.
I hope Instagram will revert this. Or everybody will just stop posting exclusively on that stupid platform (yeah, right!)!
Frustrating nonsense!
Here are the charities I donated money to at the end of this year:
Ihr möchtet ungern als Familie "posen", wollt jedoch gerne die Zeit festhalten? Hier eine kleine Familienreportage (Remscheid und Umgebung).
In October, Sina came over and shot a whole bunch of photos of us. So, feel free to stalk us over on her blog.
A family photo from summer. Made by Udo Fischer.
Meetings with friends and family. And some impressions of Düsseldorf.
Finally finishing 2019.
First photos with my new Rollei 35 S. A concert. A demonstration. And everything in between.
I shall not fall behind more than one year! My photo selection for November 2019.
I bought my first bass guitar: an Epiphone Thunderbird. Should have done this earlier, because it’s so much fun!
Back to “normal” life.
The holiday month. Photos of various stops in the alps. But mainly street photographs from Venice.
Sitting on the balcony. It’s finally cooling down again at night. Listening to Purple Hill Witch. Drinking a cold beer. Culling photos for the September 2019 entry. It was the holiday month. Struggling a little going through that many images.
Mit der Petition wird die Durchführung einer Studie zum "Racial Profiling" bei den Polizeibehörden des Bundes und der Bundesländer gefordert.
Unterzeichnet!
An update on how we have been doing recently.
Now that Zoe and I got our first band photos, we should probably start an actual band, too.
Photos by Sina Frantzen.
My pedal board has a new layout.
Now that I’m running iOS 13 on my new iPhone, I’ve installed the Corona Warn App.
Recently, I had my Mac’s keyboard replaced. Because, unsurprisingly, I started having regular double-types, which got increasingly annoying. Luckily, Apple acknowledges the problem and offers a free repair program.
Last week was unusually purchase-rich for me, buying three new items.
A family gathering near Brussels, commuting photos and the usual documentation.
📷 “August 2019” is now up in the Photo Journal: https://photojournal.danielpietzsch.com/2019/August. 📷
Desperately trying to catch up… ;-)
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.
Furthermore, the seemingly extraordinary high development costs of €20 million - plus an additional €48 million running costs until the end of 2021 - makes me wonder whether the money could have been used more wisely. Time will tell I guess.
It was moving to see some 20.000 people showing up for the #BlackLivesMatter protest in Düsseldorf yesterday.
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.
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.
2 songs. 1 issue. 25 years apart. 0 changed.
Rage Against the Machine – Killing in the name.
Body Count – No Lives Matter
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.
Describing my workflow of how I use GitLab, Jekyll, Working Copy and other iOS apps to publish to my static website.
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…
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.
Version 1.0 of my pedalboard is done. Here it is:
It’s been a while since I wrote about “the situation”. In summary: we’re mostly at home, but not really quarantining ourselves.
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.
The city of Düsseldorf offers some surprisingly high-quality webcams. Embedded here for my own convenience, so I can watch them all at once.
I'm using a viewport-based CSS layout for this site. What this means and why I do this is all explained in this post.
I’m currently watching the documentary about Dieter Rams by Gary Hustwit and it’s absolutely wonderful. Still free to watch today.
My current thoughts on this feature, its advantages and disadvantages, and why I have currently enabled this on my personal sites.
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.
Funfair, Nord Open Air and life in between.
📷 “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.
More personal thoughts and updates on the Corona virus situation.
June was lovely with its long and sunny days. This one includes a few frames from around home, but mainly from our long-weekend camping trip to Holland.
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.
IndieWebCamp Düsseldorf, our first camping trip this year, and all the other bits in between.
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:
og:image and og:type meta tags.loading="lazy" to the Youtube iframes.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”.
A few words on the current corona virus situation.
The first month living in the new neighbourhood. And so this post contains shots around there, at home, and of course random shots in between, which is the result of me taking my cameras everywhere I go.
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!
This site can now receive Webmentions. Either directly or via Twitter (with Bridgy’s help).
Recently, I really got into guitar gear – especially effect pedals.
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. :-)
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.
March was a mixed bag. I was doing lots of trips back and forth between Ratingen and Düsseldorf, preparing the move into our new apartment. Plus, I started a new/old job again, being busy working full time again.
While this site is new and super-simple, I thought I add an automatic “dark mode” real quick.
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 have now added the ability to display responsive images. And I write a little bit about how I do it using the tools I run the build this site.
A quick overview of how this site is hosted at the moment.
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.
A tiny bit of street photography again.
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.
In the last two weeks, I had some bad film development results. This is a little article about what I think went wrong.
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.
More posts in my previous blog. Or you can browse the photo journal.
