Music. Photography. Thoughts.
Wow, how time is flying – it’s Tuesday evening, and tomorrow at 13:00 (1pm) Bella will be with us since 2 weeks already. She continues to be a constant joy, is interested in the neighbours’ cats (but they are not so amused to find a cat who lives here), and she loves to play and purrs like a kitten…
Took this photo on Sunday short before sunset:
And like always, thanks for viewing, and for reading.
One week and some 5 hours ago, Wilma moved in with us. And it has been a constant joy to have her around. By now she trusts us enough to let me get close with my noisy macro lens while she is having a nap, like this:
Okay, she got some chicken today, I guess it can’t get much better 😉 So let’s hush, and let her zzzzzzz…
Wispering: Like always, thanks for viewing
Bella isn’t allowed to roam around outside just yet, so at the moment it’s often eat, sleep, and I also try to play around with her a lot.
We’d ordered a cat tree for her, which is now also her viewing platform sometimes:
And today I took a photo of her while I was outside on the veranda, and Bella was in Zuleikha’s room:
Like always, thanks for viewing.
Still trying to figure out GrapheneOS on my late brother Willi’s old Pixel 3a phone. Turns out that with the sandboxed Google services activated, you can have the best of both worlds – one profile with free and open source apps, one with all the usual Google Android Apps in case you want these. With the same background picture of our late cat Tuna from 2020, that looks like this:
As you can see, you can even have the famous Google camera. What I have not found yet is the original Pixel launcher, guess you’d have to use a lookalike like Lawnchair2 or so to get the same look and functionality like on a Pixel with only the Google Android on it.
But this here is way more secure, as all of these apps are sandboxed and don’t have system-wide privileges, unlike with Google’s version of Android. I’m tempted to use it on my main cellphone as well…
Oh, and although installing GrapheneOS is easy especially with the web based installer, there are still some nice video howtos from people like Side Of Burritos, Cozy Living Machine, or Naomi Brockwell. Just in case you want more than just *my* opinions…
As always, thanks for reading.
When Cookie (or Samson) left us at around half past nine pm today, it was dusk already – and I had a zoom lens on my camera which couldn’t open up further than 1:4, so I had to crank up the ISO to 6400 to take his photo with 1/10th of a second at a focal length of 35mm (like 70mm on film):
I converted the raw photo to a .tif using the OM System raw converter, and then chose the preset 019 “Fine Art” in Silver Efex Pro2 which brought back a lot of detail. Final editing of the Exif data in RawTherapee in Linux.
Like always, thanks for viewing. And good night Cookie.
Went to the neighbours today and found out who the real family of “Cookie” is – the poor guy has problems with his left eye and should probably see a vet. So I took this photo of him and asked around:
Turns out that his real given name is “Samson”, and that the family is the same where Wilma and the small grey/white guy (we call him “Crunchy” so far) also live. Plus at least one dog.
Nice to meet them.
Today I took Mitchie’s camera – an Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark 2 which had her Panasonic Lumix 20mm f/1.7 lens mounted – to photograph my own E-M10 Mark 2 which has the Zuiko Digital 50mm 1:2 macro lens (from the Olympus 4/3rds system) mounted. Converted it to black & white, and cropped it into a 3:2 format:
The above image is stored on cupoftea.social which is a smaller server connected to Mastodon. And like always, thanks for viewing.
Two photos:
Took a cell phone as camera remote again, as you can see. Like always, thanks for viewing.
Not too long ago I took a photo with using the “grainy film 2” filter of my Olympus camera, directly in-camera, pre-“shot”. And I thought that it didn’t look too bad, so today I played around with a photo of myself which my former colleague Gunther took of me after I had set up lights to take/make portraits of some of these colleagues. So I re-“developed” the photo from the raw image using that filter, and afterwards I adjusted both the luminance and the contrast a bit, “to taste” as they say. And here’s the result of that photo from July 24th, 2018:
Thanks Gunther for taking my photo, thanks to the Fediverse for storing it ( on the small server where you can find me @wjl@cupoftea.social ) – and as always, thanks for reading and for viewing.
Congrats go out to Peter Hickman who won this year’s “Senior TT” race, and who also scored a new lap record (on a stock machine, not on his superbike!) of over 136mph on average on the Snaefell Mountain Course which is a bit over 60km for one lap. Congrats again to Michael Dunlop as well, who now has 25 TT wins if I counted correctly.
Thanks go out to the Debian girls & guys who at this time are still busy (in Cambridge, England, and all over the world) to release Debian 12 aka “Bookworm”. You can read about their progress in the Micronews site if you wish. Once they are ready, the download link on Debian’s main page will lead you to version 12, as long as it’s still 11.7 it’s still ongoing work. Thanks folks; you rock!
We were busy shopping and treated ourselves with some ice-cream afterwards. And like so often, we also brought some nice little bits for our neighbours’ cat whom we call “Cookie” – and who regularly falls asleep after eating:
I am by the way now also “microblogging”, but not on Twitter – I’ve never even tried that – but on Mastodon. The small server where you can find me hosts the picture above, since I cancelled my Flickr Pro account and therefore I’m now restricted to a maximum of 1,000 photos there. If you want you can also follow me there, but I don’t post that much and that often (yet) as this is all still very new for me. I’m an old school “blogger” as you can see here… 😉
And finally – in case you’d like to visit the Isle of Man for next year’s Tourist Trophy races (take two weeks off in case you want to see everything), here are some great tips from Frank, a Douglas Councillor who named his YT channel “amadeusiom“:
I thanked Frank for his very nice reports from besides the tracks, and for his helpful tips, and I asked him if I may embed them here, to which he kindly agreed. Thanks mate!
Thanks to everyone for reading and viewing, like always.
Update from Sunday morning: here it is, as expected:
You can read all about it and how to get it at https://bits.debian.org/2023/06/bookworm-released.html
Again, thanks for reading.