This just caught my eye while working. Had to change the lens from the 17mm to the 50mm macro so I could get close enough:
As always, thanks for viewing.
Dying rose
A proper cat fight
Today the two neighbours’ cats who sometimes visit us got into some kind of turf war – don’t know if it was the weather, or us treating them all nicely, but somehow they wanted to check out property questions, or whatever. Zuleikha made videos short before it, and when they finally decided to argue, I was sitting there with my camera in my hands, with the 17mm Olympus lens mounted and the camera set to black & white:
Don’t assume from this last photo that “Milka” (the white and colourful one) somehow “won” this fight – perhaps it hasn’t even ended or even begun yet – because he/she was the first one to leave after a while. But “Cookie” as Mitchie called that Asian brown one went just a few seconds later, so maybe they fought it out somewhere else as well. Or they are kind of friends, who knows?
Anyway, it’s nice to have those visitors, we’re always glad if one (or both) of them show up.
As always, thanks for viewing, and for reading.
Mobile phone as a dashcam, part two
It doesn’t really work…
Today I’ve tried it on the bicycle, and came home with mixed results: my bicycle has a steel frame and no dampers, so that’s too hard even for the (electronic) image stabilisation in the Google Pixel phone. And then there’s wind noise, hadn’t thought of that as well… so I’ll show a few photos I took using my camera instead of videos:
As you can see I didn’t clean my bicycle before trying it, I really wanted to test just the mobile phone holder on it, and if I could take videos. Well, no, not really – so that holder would only be good if you’d want to use the phone for navigation (which should never happen on a bicycle anyway – can’t go that far from home)…
The bicycle is a very nice T-300 from Fahrradmanufaktur, a bit like this one, but instead of a Gates belt drive mine has a capsuled normal chain drive, like this one. Very nice bicycles, easily recommendable – and I really should use (and clean) mine more often…
Back to the car: we took the car out to Rödelheim, and I’ve tried to take videos from that drive again – but today as it seems it was perhaps a bit too hot to do that – the phone switched off in both directions after some 17 and 10 minutes, respectively. I couldn’t really read the cause of that, because I had to concentrate on the road, so heat is my guess… have to try if it does that when used as navigation device (with Android Auto, or with Google Maps) as well… if yes, then another mount for the car’s cooling slots would possibly have been a better one. But no, I won’t return anything because of that. “Lehrgeld”, as we say here in Germany. Education isn’t always free.
As always, thanks for reading.
Mobile phone as a dashcam
We – the collective “we” – are documenting our lives using mobile phones by now, all around the globe, using them for photos, videos, everything. And lately I saw some videos where people used mobile phones instead of action cams, like on bicycles, motorcycles, and in cars. So I thought “Why not?”, and since we all have these devices already, we might as well use them.
So I bought a car holder, an adapter for power, and tried it today. We were driving from one of the big supermarkets in Germany (Aldi) to another (Rewe), which took about 8 minutes, and I’ve used two recent tracks from Wikiloops on which I’ve played the double bass, “Colours“, and “Going down” for the video:
https://www.flickr.com/gp/wjlonien/782b8f
Got another holder for the bicycle as well – and maybe I’ll try that one tomorrow…
As always, thanks for reading, viewing, and listening. And of course thanks to my friends over at the ‘loops as well 🙂
Both visitors
Yesterday we’ve had both neighbours’ cats visiting us at the same time, Mitchie calls them “Cookie”, and “Milka”, and they’re both tomcats (I think, haven’t really looked that closely). She took a few snapshots using her mobile phone, a Google Pixel 4a 5G, and then sent them to me via Signal:
Still missing “our” Tuna each day… couldn’t think of a better and more loyal chief mouser…
Oh, and by the way – have a look at today’s album of the day on Wikiloops, from our friend Christophe:
More visitors
I’ve written about the neighbours’ cats already, and that some of them are now visiting us – which they do on a more or less regular basis now, at least two of them, “Milka”, and “Cookie”. They even come inside now that our old friend isn’t around anymore to turn them away. But we won’t ‘lure’ them in, or bribe them with food – we’re sure they would be missed by someone… anyway, here are some photos I took since late April:
It’s nice to have them visiting us, but as I wrote above, no food, and the cat toilet and other stuff are packed away as well. At the moment, this isn’t a home for cats, sorry… still missing our Tuna too much…
As always, thanks for viewing, and for reading.
Two photos from last week
April 20th, 2021:
Today (April 25th, 2021):
As always, thanks for viewing.
Sunday morning visitor
We sometimes have other cats visiting us, and until recently Tuna was always showing them that they’re not welcomed around here. So those visits are rare, but some three or four different cats turn up once in a while.
This one is a bit shy (or still afraid of Tuna?), and usually gone as soon as we open the veranda door – so I took a zoom lens to take some photos through the closed door. Changed in post: set the camera’s white balance to “cloudy”, added a touch “clarity” and removed a touch of “haze”.
This one treads lightly:
As always, thanks for viewing and for reading.
P.S.: We have several cats visiting us as I mentioned above, and one day after this one came, a white one with grey patches (Zuleikha named her ‘Milka’ already) was here – and she even came in, and checked the whole flat. I’m sure that she could still smell traces of our Tuna, but no cat toilet, so the place seemed safe…
… and then there’s a tomcat whom Mitchie calls ‘George’, a tabby like Tuna, but he didn’t show up since a while, same as the Maine Coon one (one of two, we know the ‘owners’) which I had seen before sometimes.
Mouse population is growing with our chief mouser’s absence, so happy hunting to all neighbours’ cats…
Rest in peace, Tuna
Oh man – it’s so hard to write this…
On Saturday, March 13th, 2021 at 10:30am, our little furry friend of 11 years passed away.
Tuna (which was the name Zuleikha gave her) chose us as her family, not vice versa. She must have “belonged” to someone else before since she had a flea collar when in July of 2010 I took the first photo of her sitting on our fence like this:
About three months later she came in, ate, slept, and stayed pretty much forever. Until that Saturday 2 weeks ago.
I have countless photos and also some videos of her, some of which are in an album on Flickr, so go there if you want to see them. For here, and for now, I’ll only show you our “Easter Greeting” photo from last year:
And the one which is still my background wallpaper on this Debian Linux machine on which I’m currently typing this, and also the company’s work notebook which runs Red Hat Linux. It’s Tuna on a hot day on our veranda, taken with my 25mm lens wide open:
We buried her last Wednesday at an animal cemetery in Frankfurt Rödelheim, which is the closest to us with a distance of about 20km.
I’ll add a photo of the grave when it has a surrounding like the others.
Don’t know what else to say except that I’m deeply grateful for the 11 wonderful years that she’s spent with us. Thank you my little friend, and rest in peace…
A short walk with Tuna (our cat)
Today I wanted to take a walk again, so I took my camera as usual, and headed out. A few minutes before I did, I had let the cat out at the opposite side (our veranda), so she was through the fence… and when I went I thought why not head into that direction, maybe I’ll see her? And sure, I did. So instead of walking very far, I waited what she was about to do, and simply followed her around some other house, and so on… so here’s Tuna, outside:
After returning home I let her in again – she was waiting in front of our veranda door when I came into our living room – fed her, and the she seemed to think about what just happened…
And of course, after eating, and cleaning up herself a bit, a cat has to rest…
That was a nice short walk. Interesting to see where she’s roaming around…
And as always, thanks for viewing.