Tuna the cat, from November 30th, 2019

My proclaimed “month of the kit zoom” will end today, and I haven’t taken many photos this month. So when I saw our cat on that towel beside my computer desk (in our living room), I thought let’s take a picture…

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Tuna the cat, Moerfelden-Walldorf 2019

So – that’s my kit zoom at 17mm again, a bit like 35mm on film (tho the format is 4:3 instead of 3:2).

This evening I’ll go and play the bass somewhere, but I don’t know if anyone will take photos of that using my camera – let’s see.

And as always, thanks for reading, and for viewing.

New desktop background

I just set this as my background at home:

Background picture on my 1920×1200 monitor

It’s this photo which I took myself in 2018 in Paris, with the standard lens (25mm/1.4) on my Olympus E-M10 camera. Looks black & white but isn’t. The topic is Sacré-Cœur de Montmartre as seen from Musée d’Orsay.

As always, thanks for viewing, and for reading.

To ground myself

I have all of my own albums (which you can see on the right side of this page) in my car – in fact that is part of the reason that I’ve made these albums – to be able to put some music on a CD, and to listen to it while away from my computer.

And I also “discovered” several new and – as I think – great singers both on Wikiloops and elsewhere (like on Youtube).

But to ground myself, so to speak, to get back a feeling where true North is, and to compare whatever I do with what else is out there, I also have some copies of commercial albums which I own in the car – and from time to time I like to listen to these, especially when it’s music with just a voice and some acoustic instruments for example.

Like Youn Sun Nah. This morning I listened to her “Same Girl” album on my way to work, and it’s so incredibly good. Listen to this as an example, where she’s also with Lars Danielsson, one of my favourite bass players:

Nah Youn Sun – Breakfast In Baghdad

The composition is by Ulf Wakenius, who’s also the guitar player here. Everything here fits, and sounds amazing.

Highly recommended stuff, if you like something like this. I also have her “Voyage” and “Lento” albums, which are equally good.

As always, thanks for reading. Enjoy the music.

Tuna the cat, on November 18th, 2019

Tuna the cat from today – short before she got about 3/4 of a chicken leg…

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Tuna the cat, Moerfelden-Walldorf 2019

I took this with the help of one of studio strobes, “bounced” into the corner above my computer desk. So I had 1/160th of a second at f/5.6, and with ISO200 (the camera’s native base ISO). The lens was at 17mm again like in my last photo. Oh, and this time no post processing at all – straight out of camera .orf to .tif to .jpg. Added only meta information to it (like a title, and some key words).

As always, thanks for viewing.

Bill Evans Trio – Nardis

Here’s something rare – an interview with Bill Evans. And then they play Miles’ tune Nardis in front of a small private audience in 1970:

Bill Evans Trio – Nardis.

Enjoy – and see and hear Eddie as a young man (I was 13, he was 26 while he played this).

DW – Meet the Germans

If you’ve never been to Germany or are just trying to understand us “Krauts” a bit better, our public radio station Deutsche Welle has some funny videos about it – called “Meet the Germans”. Here’s the first of several I/we saw (and liked):

Seeing the funny side of the German language | DW English

Found on the DW News Youtube channel. Enjoy.

A short history of free – and commercial – operating systems

Like the English Wikipedia with its “Featured articles“, the German one also has its “Artikel des Tages” on its start page – each day a different one. I love these, you learn a lot about the world with just looking (and reading if you’re interested of course).

And today’s featured article, or “Artikel des Tages” on the German Wikipedia is about BSD, the so-called “Berkeley Software Distribution” (I’ll link to the German pages here, for English just click inside of Wikipedia if you like).

BSD and its kernel are one of the two mainline free Unix kernels, the other one was/is System V. Both are monolithic, and both stem from the AT&T (later also Bell) labs. BSD was/is used in early and recent operating system versions from Apple, but after Steve Jobs left the company, he founded another one called “NeXT“, and used a microkernel called Mach which was developed at the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) for his operating system NeXTStep. When Apple bought NeXT in 1996, part of the deal was that Steve Jobs should come back and become Apple’s CEO. What they developed then was/is known as macOS, and that’s today’s commercially most successful Unix variant for personal computers (actual version is “macOS Catalina“). And even iPhones and iPads (did I write that correctly?) are based on this architecture, tho the end user doesn’t see much of that.

BSD itself split up into three mainline “distributions”, or “flavours”, so to speak, named NetBSD, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD, each with slightly different goals but from the kernel side pretty much identical. These can also run programs compiled for Linux.

As for the Linux side: that’s younger than its BSD siblings, but older than anything with Mac in its name. I run Debian on my systems which is developed not by a company but by a team of volunteer developers (both hobbyists and employees of big companies) world-wide. The advantage of this is that decisions are based on team votings, and that the system cannot be bought and commercialized (or even be closed down) by any big company.

In case you’re interested in Debian’s history: 13 years ago after I met him at a Linuxtag meeting in Karlsruhe I email-interviewed Ian Murdock (the “-ian” part of “Debian”), and you can read that here on my site (RIP Ian, and thanks again for everything).

So much for a short history lesson, and about free software for today. As always, thanks for reading.

Sunday pre tea time

Uploaded a short bass-only track to the ‘loops:

The same is available without the clicks as a HD track. Harmonies are on Wikiloops (click the track id to go there). As always, thanks for listening.

Piano practice on a dull Sunday mid November

I haven’t taken many photographs this month yet (which for me is the month of the kit zoom if you remember that), so when Zuleikha started to play her piano I asked whether I could take a photo of it, switched on a light, and took this in black & white with a simulated orange filter at ISO 6400 with around 1/13th of a second:

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Piano practice on a dull Sunday mid November, Moerfelden-Walldorf 2019

My lens was set to 17mm, a focal length which I don’t have except with this zoom lens. Ideal for indoor portraits which also show some context, like the piano in this case.

As always, thanks for reading.