Category: English
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September — volunteer stuff, coding, and more dust biting
First: On September 29, we lost another member of the extended family. This should explain why this instalment is somewhat late — the ceremony was last Monday. So, what else transpired? As I said in the last instalment, I was working on a Windows service to automate the handling of subscription requests from the blog…
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On how we deal with time
The concept of time, how we perceive it, and what we can do with what is given us. The day before I started writing this, someone talked about “killing time”, and was then asked by someone else what that actually means. This set off a train of thought… and like trains of thought tend to…
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August: a quest, and clouds on the horizon
August started off calmly. I did some overdue bike fixing (lost fairing bolt, slight but noticeable radiator leak), then gathered my stuff, and went on a four day motorcycle trip. My first vacation alone in over 35 years. The Protagonist’s Quest This went approximately as well as could be expected. On the first day, I…
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July: aaand we’re back!
Many good things happened, most of them caused by an increase in mental energy. The effect of the medication I stopped back in May is wearing off, and I really feel like doing stuff again! So, what did I do? First thing is, Janny wanted something to watch birds with, but also possibly planets and…
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The Poor Man’s Home Photo Studio
I have a little budget-on-a-shoestring photo studio setup here. It went through several stages, mostly stages of woe, until I settled on what I use now. I started out using various cheap RF camera triggers, and corresponding receivers for the flash units, a flash meter, two secondhand flashes, cardboard home-made light shapers (soft box, snoot,…
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How I photograph paintings – on a budget
As you may have read somewhere else, my beloved is a painter (she’ll deny it, but it’s true). She works with oil on canvas, and has recently also picked up aquarels. My task is to photograph her pictures as accurately as possible, for her portfolio web site. Mind you: this is not a howto! What…
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Jazz cave re-lit, social media cleaned out – Peter’s February in review
My study annex music room annex studio (basically a renovated loft where too many things happen on not enough square metres), which I affectionally call the Jazz Cave, had received a new floor last November. But the lighting was still crappy — LED strips which were now 10 years old, and two of those were…
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The Gear Factor
No, this is not the eternal Canon vs. Nikon debate… if only because I avoided that route altogether (more on that later). This goes into the question itself — does it matter what gear we use? Without further ado, here’s my version of The Answer: 1. It depends on the photographer’s personality Some of us…
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Polymorphism, inheritance, and interfaces
Someone had trouble figuring out why .NET comes with all these interfaces for collections, so I thought, let’s write a concise blog post about that. Okay, that was a joke. I don’t do concise. And then I found out that I needed to explain interfaces, and polymorphism, and therefore inheritance, as well. So, rather than…
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Heavy machinery
On how the Dynax 7 refuses to give up its crown without a fight In a prior article, I summed up the difference between the Minolta Dynax 800si and the Dynax 7. The Dynax 7 is my favourite Minolta autofocus film camera, with one caveat: it appears to have a well-earned reputation for dying horribly…