Year: 2015

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Blog news

WordPress 4.4 “Clifford” is out, and together with it came the Twenty Sixteen theme which I’m using here. I changed the almost black border to a white one, everything else is standard until now.

Screenshot from 2015-12-09 19:09:59

Zuleikha changed her layout, too as you can see above. And Mitchie is also working on an old/new page, see below…

Screenshot from 2015-12-09 19:09:46

Click on the screenshots to visit their pages.

Thanks for reading.

P.S.: still playing around with that theme… so be prepared for further changes 🙂

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The camera. The lens.

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E-M10 with 20mm lens

In my last blog posting, I praised the virtues of Mitchie’s Panasonic Lumix 20mm/1.7 lens – and not for the first time. Together with the Olympus OM-D E-M10 which I’ve got for my birthday this year, it’s – for me – the ideal combination for general photography.

I took this photo with my Olympus E-PL5 camera which has exactly the same sensor as this E-M10, and with the Olympus 45mm/1.8 lens – another one you’d really need for portraits, or for product shots like this one.

Together – again, for me – they’re unbeatable. Except of course when I give this lens back to Mitchie, and use my Panasonic Leica 25mm/1.4, and the 14mm/2.5 as well.

Owning all these, we’re “happy campers” as the Americans say.

Oh, in case you wonder about the lens hood: this is a third-party one. The brand name is JJC, and it’s made of metal. Very cheap, very nice.

And just in case you’re also wondering about the lights I used here: these are two Simock studio strobes with 300Ws each, one from front/above with a 20″ beauty dish at 1/8th power, the other one from behind the camera, a bit to the right, at 1/32nd. Again: very cheap, very nice. Triggered by Yongnuo CTR-301P radio remotes. Aperture measured with a Sekonic light meter. Custom white balance made with a ColorChecker – so the picture is just like out of the camera.

Having the right tools is always fun.

Thanks for reading.

Update from Friday, December 11th, 2015:

Imaging Resource just finished their test of this camera’s successor, the Olympus OM-D E-M10 Mark 2. And they call it “the most capable all-around camera in its class“. The same was (and still is) true for mine, which is an incredible offer right now as I write this. It’s 599€ vs. 427€ for the body. These prices will change over time of course, but I’d know which one to get.

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Another photo of Tuna the cat

Took this one for Zuleikha yesterday, so she could blog about it:

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Tuna the birthday cat

By the way, I used Mitchie’s Panasonic Lumix 20mm/1.7 lens here, at an aperture of f/2. Still love that one – it’s the perfect lens for the µ43rds system IMO, and this and the Oly 45mm/1.8 would be more or less all you need for a starter kit for general and portrait photography. Highly recommended (and I get nothing for recommendations).

Alternatives would be the 25mm lenses from both Panasonic (f/1.7 or f/1.4) or Olympus (f/1.8), or the 17mm/1.8 Olympus. But 40mm-equivalent is very close to the sensor diagonal, so I consider this one as the real standard lens for the system.

Thanks for viewing.

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lonien.de is 15. Or was it 16?

Today I was working on our server a bit, updating and checking things, and everything runs smoothly. I was wondering about the past a bit while I did all this, and so I checked.

Netcraft first “saw” us in the year 2000, which means that I used Netcraft’s services to check on us. The Internet Archive, and its Wayback Machine still have some stuff starting from 2001, and our site looked like this, or like that. I also had my own hosting company during 2001, called “fairhosting.de”, but nothing much of it is left, and that was later taken by domain grabbers. From 2005 Netcraft’s site saw us hosted by other companies.

So while the oldest history might be from early 2000, I think I actually registered the domain in 1999 – would have to check with Denic to find out. And, as I wrote on one of these early pages, the internet as we know it now was barely 10 years old (that means the mouse-clickable web, some other stuff like internet news is older).

Fifteen years only, and even less since people started to stare at small screens while walking the cities. Feels much longer tho – but imagine how life was before that (hint: it wasn’t worse).

Thanks for reading.

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Thunderbird, also known as Icedove

Fully agree with Cory Doctorow on his article on Mozilla Thunderbird. It’s important to have a good email client, and this is definitely one of the best so far.

It’s not really new that the Mozilla Foundation thinks they have more important things to do than to keep working on Thunderbird, but Cory got new information from here, and they got it from there (in fact this comes from the usenet newsgroups, but who in the world (except me and some other outliers) is reading these?).

I’m using Debian, which uses a rebranded version of Mozilla’s Thunderbird which they call Icedove. And Debian have their own Wiki page about its future, and as you can see, it’s still maintained, until now “upstream” is mostly Mozilla. And while this might change in the future, well, it’s still an open source project, and the Wikipedia page linked to above calls Icedove a “fork” of Thunderbird already, tho this mostly had to be done because of Mozilla’s restrictive branding (and update) policies.

I’m not much of a developer (not enough time to care for everything in life), but I still hope that I – and Cory – are not the only ones who care for a good and solid email client. There are others of course, but I always liked Icedove (and also Enigmail). I’ll follow this on the Debian maintainers’ newsgroups and mailing lists, and probably come back to it when there’s more information from Mozilla. Just that some tool might not look promising in an economic way doesn’t mean that it’s not a good and solid product which many people love to have, and looking for shareholder value isn’t always the right path into the future, in fact it’s rather short-sighted in most cases. Working where I am (a former IT giant which today is a mere shadow of what it once was, and could have been), I know what I’m writing about…

Thanks for reading.

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Sennheiser HD598 SE

This one has a bit of history, for context…

First you’ll have to know that when I was younger, I used to be a musician. I played bass guitar (and my brother Willi even had an acoustic double bass). I was in the studios (EMI Electrola, no less) at the age of 19, so I’m used to good amps, speakers, and headphones and know how music sounds either directly or through very high end equipment.

Some years ago, we needed headphones for Mitchie, and so I bought what I knew was good: AKG K-240 – we’ve used that one in the studios a lot. But for Mitchie it was a bit big and heavy, so later I ordered a slightly smaller K-141 Mk2 for her, and I took the big one.

Alas, it broke. Without any apparent reason. And I thought wow, they used to be a lot more sturdy during my times. Mitchie had some smaller earplugs which she preferred, so I got her K-141.

But that one has a problem as well – it loses its colour on your ears, and it even gets sticky during summer when it’s hot – can’t be healthy, and I thought damn, they now cost more in Euro than they used to cost in German Mark, and still they’re much worse than they were in the good old days. Definitely some cost savings through cheapest material going on here, so AKG doesn’t seem a good choice for the next one…

The next ones were Sennheiser in-ears. I was used to and knew Sennheiser as well, but I’ve never tried in-ears before. And I must say I don’t really like them as much as my brother does. They’re like a plug in your ear, something which disturbs me – don’t know if I could get used to that.

At work I have a Sennheiser HD201, and I bought a second one which Zuleikha uses at her digital Yamaha piano, so she can practice without disturbing anyone. Looks like this:

7df_6181234-zuleikha

These are cheap (around 20€) and sturdy, and they’re good for the purpose like at work or on the piano. But I still was thinking about some better ones.

Our friend Thorsten from Bonn knew that I was looking and found the perfect ‘Black Friday’ deal for me. These ones:

hd598se

These are called Sennheiser HD598 Special Edition, and right now while I write this they are offered for 229€ at Amazon Germany, or for $164.72 at Amazon.com. I’ve paid 99€. So how are they?

In a word: fantastic.

I’ve read that they would lack some bass, so what I tried first was – of course – some bass. Started with Ham Hocks and Cabbage from the Christian McBride Trio album Out Here, and wow – that is some double bass! Nothing missing at all, and I thought hmmm whoever thinks these lack bass probably never heard, felt, or even played one. But maybe they meant something like dynamics? Ok – next I tried Panther from Marcus Miller‘s The Sun Don’t Lie. And again, wow, shake yer booty baby, this was almost unbelievable. Hm, something more melodic? Next was A Remark You Made from Weather Report, with the unforgettable Jaco Pastorius, and by now I was convinced. This was music like it should sound, nothing missing and nothing added, just perfect.

Ok, something else. Maybe guitar? I started Ulf Wakenius‘ Bretagne, followed by their very percussive Breakfast in Baghdad. The guitar was perfect, as was Vincent Peirani‘s accordion (and scat vocals), and – again – the double bass played by Lars Danielsson. For comparison, I chose the same song with vocals by Youn Sun Nah, and after that it was Momento Magico, which Ulf Wakenius composed just for her.

Wonderful. Smooth and high-endy, very detailed but never too much of anything, so you can just close your eyes and concentrate onto the music. Definitely the best headphones I’ve ever had, and that by a large margin. Oh, they’re comfortable as well, so maybe I’ll try them on the TV (which is attached to an Onkyo stereo receiver) next. The “SE” (for Special Edition) in the headphone’s name stands for the fact that these are black instead of brown, and they come with two cables – one with 1.2m and small plug, perfect for computer or mobile devices, and one with 3m and big plug (and adapter to small) for the tele or wherever you need some distance.

Perfect. Thanks again to Thorsten for finding that offer. They’re better than my AKG were, so even for the higher price they’re recommendable – but for under 100€ that was a steal definitely. Thanks mate!