Look at this photo. And listen to this music. If that ain’t perfect, I don’t know what is…
Thanks Ron!
Ltnh: Ray’s game of harmonic notes
I wrote about ‘my’ version of Ray’s game in April 2018, and shortly after that, Ray uploaded a video compilation of his collected tracks to Youtube – watch and listen:
Awesome. And what an honour to be a small part of it. Thanks Ray & everyone, and thanks to you for watching and for listening.
One of my most used tools
A few days ago I showed you a self portrait which I took while working, lit by one of my studio strobes with a beauty dish attached to it. Counter shot, directly out of my camera, so not lit is this:
I have these since over 10 years now, and reviewed my first one three years later for Lighting Rumors, here. They still work as on the first day, and I have taken very lovely photos with them, not only for money like the high school class lately, but also for memories like this one:
I don’t know if these are still made, maybe under different ownership in China, because the original manufacturers site seems to not exist anymore. But if you find some of these on the used market, they’re worth it, at least for this amateur photographer.
As always, thanks for reading.
New region “Kölsch”?
Had to smile this morning – I wanted to see KDE Plasma, so I downloaded the current UbuntuStudio which is based upon KDE to have a look. Put it onto my USB stick, booted from that, and while looking at the different settings, I found this:
Funny to read that date and time as “Samsdaach, dä 10. Juuli 2021 09:18:42 UTC (long format) 🙂 I guess some people in Cologne would probably love to have that on their screens 🙂
The backgrounds which are available are also very nice – you can for instance select a “picture of the day” from sources like Flickr, or like in this image, Unsplash:
Very nice. UbuntuStudio made that task bar at the top I guess, normally KDE has it on the bottom – and yes, they have styles which look more like Windows or even the Mac (or Windows 11 with a centered task bar on the bottom of the screen).
Looks very nice, and like I remember it from long ago, KDE is still very configurable, much more so than Gnome or any other desktop. Oh, and UbuntuStudio brings KDE Connect as a default, so you can integrate your Android phone right away.
Very nice. If you don’t mind short release cycles (this one is supported until end of this year), have a look at the current UbuntuStudio or any other up-to-date distribution (like Arch or Fedora) with a KDE Plasma desktop. I liked what I saw so far.
And as always, thanks for reading.
You play on
What an awesome track from Anne and from Benjamin – just had to grab one of my instruments and to play… listen to “You play on” on Wikiloops please, and if you like it give some thumb ups to the musicians. Thanks!
P.S.: got a remix from David after an hour or so already – thanks a lot my friend!
As always, thanks for listening.
Tried the Brave browser
I’ve read a few good reviews about it lately, so I decided to try the Brave browser on my OS of choice (Debian GNU/Linux, currently the stable 10.0 “Buster” version). The brave website discovers your OS and offers an appropriate download method, on Debian it’s the way it should be: with installing another repository plus a key for it, so that updates and upgrades are automatic from then on. Cool.
It works very well so far, and it looks nice as well (haven’t imported any bookmarks or anything from other browsers yet):
Its background pictures cycle, and the statistics and the clock also look very nice. From first impressions, I like it a lot – plus it seems to have sane default settings as all the reviewers wrote already.
Nice. And Chromium based, so it’s also fast. I’ll report more when I have more experience with using it for a while.
And as always, thanks for reading.
The last days of work…
… at least for *this* employer. In about 6 weeks and 2 days it will be over …
Self portrait, lit with 300Ws studio strobe, manually (zone-) focused (love that feature on the 17mm M.Zuiko lens), 12s timer, “developed” with RawTherapee 5.8, Kodak Tri-X film simulation, cropped square, 1/20s to keep some of the outside daylight…
As always, thanks for viewing.
Up in D Dorian
Sat down with my guitar to try out recording with the new Ardour 6.8, then decided to speed up the whole thing, and to continue with an off-beat metronome, and with my bass. I uploaded the whole short uptempo track plus one with my bass only to Wikiloops, now hoping for remixes onto this shorty:
As always, thanks for listening.
Ardour 6.8
Just read about it this morning on my mobile phone, but as a supporter of Ardour I had it since yesterday already – and installed it on both Linux and Windows:
I sat down with the guitar to record a bit with it, but got interrupted after 15 minutes or so – can’t always record with a microphone. But Ardour works as a charm, I’m using it since at least 2017 and couldn’t wish for anything else really.
A download of the binary file costs an amount of your own choice (starting at 1$/1€ I think), but it’s worth it. If you’re on Linux, you might have an older version from your repositories, or even this one from third party offerings like KXStudio and the likes.
Enjoy…
Photo session
Yesterday I took a day off from work – I was asked to take photos of the Abiturfeier – high school class receiving their final exams certificates – again, like last year. And also like last year, Zuleikha helped me, taking all the group shots with Mitchies camera while I took single portraits using mine. Here’s a setup shot she took with my camera and lens, and me holding the ColorChecker:
photographer: Zuleikha
And I also took her picture ‘on stage’…
… and in between shots:
Of course we can’t show the photos we took here because we didn’t ask if we could, but it was fun like always. Now these photos will go back to school, and from there to the students and their parents. Wishing them all the best for uni or wherever they might go now…
As always, thanks for reading, and for viewing.