In 2018, I ordered my first custom guitar, a Lakewood. That guitar is a story for another day too, but one thing we did on it was to engrave the name of my second daughter onto the fretboard. However, this meant I only had a guitar named after one daughter, not both. This could not stand. (As excuses go for buying a new guitar, I still think this one holds up well.)
Every lens in the L-Mount lens table used to be added by hand. All of it: find the manufacturer’s spec sheet, pick out the weight and dimensions for the right mount, type the numbers into a YAML file, hunt down the launch price and release year, download a product photo, cut it out, convert it to a transparent PNG at the right size, put everything into the right folders, and check that nothing broke. Maybe twenty minutes per lens on a good day. There are over 170 lenses in the table now.
The Interactive L-Mount Lens Table has grown to over 160 lenses since I introduced it last year. With that growth, some rough edges that were tolerable at 60 lenses became annoying at 160. So I spent some time on quality-of-life improvements for the table, and for the site as a whole.
Some interactive charts to explore the L-Mount lens database visually.
Click on legend items to filter it; double-click on them to only filter for the item; click & drag in charts to zoom into a specific region and double click on the background to reset zoom.
Click on any bar to see the lens table for that brand sorted by release year.
I have been an avid user of Micro Four Thirds cameras and lenses ever since I bought a Panasonic GX7 in 2013. One of the nice things about M43 is the availability of many lenses from many different manufacturers. On the flip side, it can be quite overwhelming to choose, especially as a Newbie. Which “normal prime” should I choose? What telephoto zooms are available for which budget? How heavy are they?
About one and a half hour drive from Barcelona, the Mirador de la Figuerassa is a panoramic viewpoint at more than 1500m height. It overlooks the “Pantà de la Baells”, a fresh water basin, and the small city of Berga on the other.
You also have a fantastic view of the Pyrenees snow-topped mountains in the background. The views are quite spectacular.
Over the holidays, we had the chance to visit the “Festival des Lanternes” in Montaubaun, which is just about a 40m drive from Toulouse in the south of France.
The Lantern Festival is based on an old Chinese tradition and more than 2500 giant lanterns are installed in one of the main parks of the city from December 1st until February 5th.
Following the recent trend, you can now also find me on Mastodon. Goodbye, Elon.
Warner Brothers just premiered the latest trailer of the upcoming Christopher Nolan film Tenet – in Fortnite. This got a lot of attention in the media. As a marketing coup, it’s safe to say that it has worked spectacularly well given all this additional buzz and exposure.
Here, I am more interested in another angle: how much of that is a gimmick? Would any media outlet still report excitedly about a movie trailer being shown exclusively in a video game in 2-3y? Will watching an entire movie from within a video game become the norm? And how much of that means that we are all about to dive into the “Metaverse”?
A few months ago during the final season of Game of Thrones, I’ve read many article claiming how it would be “the last show we watch en masse together”, given how it is more common nowadays for people to being able to watch whatever they whenever they want. A kind of bitter-sweet sadness of no longer having these cultural high-points of “all of us are in this together”.
I am using a static website generator called Hugo now. So far, I am liking it. It’s fast and since the generated site is static, it also loads very fast in the browser. On the flip side though, it’s not as convenient per se to make updates to the site.
At first, I just used FTP. So the workflow basically was:
This summer I bought a new full-frame camera (a Panasonic S1). Since then, my interest into photography and the desire to learn more have grown quite a bit. I started carrying a small camera with me at all times. This has gradually turned into a small street photography project I would call “Commuters”.
Any game that has a competitive element will face the problem of how to select the right opponent for a player. This does not only apply to video games. Chess, Tennis, Champions League etc. all apply varying methods of measuring the “skill” of a player or team and aim to provide a good match.
Tom Whitwell has been sharing his “52 things I learned” lists for a few years now on Medium. They are truly a treasure trough of surprising, intriguing, shocking, and funny facts and figures I enjoy a lot.
Some highlights from this year’s list:
Or:
When it comes to idea generation, particularly in teams, we immediately think of brainstorming as the go-to technique to generate lots and lots of ideas. So far so good. But surprisingly few people know even the basic rules of brainstorming, let alone how this affects groups and is affected by groups in turn. To give you some examples that may sound familiar, here are things I’ve seen happening many times:
The beauty of a static website is course its simplicity: you don’t have to deal with SQL servers, rights-management yada yada.
The problem with resurrecting your old webhosting site is, of course, legacy.
In this particular case stupidity and legacy. I transferred the static generated Hugo page to my webspace and the designated /www directory, which was, supposedly, completely empty. The problem: the site wouldn’t serve. Unless I specifically addressed the sites index.html.
I’ve been meaning to blog for a while. At the same time, I did not want to go back to Wordpress & Co and the whole set up and headache it involves with databases, overkill amount of plugins etc… I wanted something simple.
It quickly was clear that, for my needs, a static website generator would be best. And there are literally hundreds of projects out there.