Windows, are you kidding me?

I understand the recycle bin can get too full sometimes. And I would accept that in this case Windows refuses to throw more trash files into the bin. But file name too long? Come on ...

Weekend in March in Pictures

As I'm utterly busy at the moment, I just want to share a few pictures from Monrepos Castle where my BF ans I spent a lovely afternoon a few weeks ago. As you can see, everything was covered in snow back then. Fortunately, sping has kicked in since ...

Another Solitude Moment in High Dynamic Range

I finally converted persuaded my boyfriend to start photography and he's really getting into it. Now we can take pictures together and we really enjoy it a lot. On the last Sunday of February we visited Solitude Castle again for taking photos. Since I have taken so many pictures of Solitude Castle already, I tried to focus on some new HDR shots. Here they are ...



I think it is hilarious that this small castle has a bus stop right in front of it.

Oh, Windows, I miss you so ... NOT

Being a passionate Linux user, I'm missing out on all the "fun" that windows brings into our boring lives. Thank God I have Windows at work where it unfolded this sparkling gem of wisdom today.

15 Elves in the Christmas Bakery

Yesterday, my BF and I were invited by another gay couple for their traditional "Zimtstern backen" (baking of traditional swabian star-shaped cinnamon christmas cookies). Some other straight couples and friends where there as well, and we were baking different christmas cookies together.


Another "task force" was decorating the living room, and another team was doing some magic in the kitchen downstairs and fixed a dinner for all of us. And after Dinner we sat together in the beautiful living room and ate our cookies and drank self-made egg liquor (we had to get rid of all the spare yolks) while the first snowflakes this winter were silently falling down outside, in the very cold night. When we went home, the hosts gave every couple a delicious traditional sweet yeast loaf with fruits and almonds.

I'm in such a christmas spirit now. That was just a perfect afternoon / evening / night.

Long time no see

Today I was doing research on the Internet for my master's thesis (roughly about fuzzy search). I found a company that obviously is the market leader in that area. What a surprise that this company is just a few miles away. Even a bigger surprise: The person who is responsible at this company was the student sitting next to me during high school. And not only that, he's also been a very good friend, and I've even been his best man when he wedded his beloved wife quite a while ago.

What a pleasant surprise. I sent him an email right away. And after about 10 years without much communication, he will be coming to Stuttgart on Monday morning to meet up with me. I'm really looking forward to meeting him again.

November Rain

Jebus, what a crazy month ... Especially Friday 13th and the weekend was pretty, pretty, pretty bad. I thought all the Friday 13th stuff is just common superstition, after getting an "expensive" letter from the tax authorities and a pink slip from my boss due to a company closing because of the financial crisis I started to realize that it could be more. But when I heard the bad news that my grandpa had died, I knew Friday 13th is a bitch.

So never mind the darkness
We still can find a way
'Cause nothin' lasts forever
Even cold November rain

Well, looking forward to Christmas and a three weeks vacation, which is needed indeed...

Splendor in the Grass

I might have already said that I just love Pink Martini. But I can't stress it enough: Pink Martini is awesome.
I can hardly wait until their new album "Splendor in the Grass" will be published in a few days. I've already fallen in love to this album by the three preview tracks on Pink Martini on MySpace.
Not only that Thomas Lauderdale, the creative head of the ensemble, is also openly gay, and China Forbes is an awesome singer, they're also so inspired and amazing, and the "background story" of the band is very interesting, too.

Rigi, Rings, 3rd of October and other things

Ok, I admit, I've been neglecting my blog a little bit lately. But here's a quick catchup for the very few regular readers left...

Last Month, my BF and I exchanged rings as a sign of our connection and love. I've never been in a relationship that serious, but it feels very good.

This week, we've been hiking on the Rigi, the place on top of the Queen of the Mountains where I've been so many times in my youth that it actually feels like home. And I was happy that my BF liked it very much as well. We had excellent weather and a great time. On the Rigi there are no cars allowed, so the air is clean and fresh and it's like paradise.



On the second day we walked to a nearby village. One part of the trail is the "Felsenweg", where you have a beautiful view over the Vierwaldstätter See (a very beatiful lake in the valley).


This was the view from the balcony of our room at the harborage.


On the way home we made a stop at the beautyful city Lucerne.


There was a fair in Lucerne and I found a beautiful reflection of the ferris wheel in the windows of the art museum.


Today, it's 3rd of October, it's the German 4th of July. Except it's not that cool. However, my dad turned 60 last week and celebrates it today...

Tethering from your Nikon to your Linux PC

If you're using Windows, you can buy some software from Nikon to have Photo Tethering (I guess it's called Tethering). I.e. you take a picture with your camera and it pops up on your computer screen. It's used in studio photography and very useful. I missed it very much during the last three days of product photography.

I wanted to have that on Linux as well. There is an excellent library called gphoto2, that can do half of the trick (i.e. it can download a picture right after the shot), but it can't display it. So I played around a little bit and wrote that script:

#!/bin/bash

case "$ACTION" in
    download)
        pkill qiv
        qiv -l -f -m "$ARGUMENT" &
        ;;
    "")
        me=$(cd ${0%/*} && echo $PWD/${0##*/})
        gphoto2 --capture-tethered --hook-script=$me
        ;;
esac

To "install" it, place it somewhere on your path.

To use it, connect your Nikon camera to your computer via USB. Go to an empty folder in a shell and just start it:

rian@thunder:~Pictures/example$ tether

Then take pictures. They will be displayed on your screen and stored in your current folder.

For this to work, you need the image-viewer qiv (or use any other viewer and adjust the script) in its most recent version (older versions don't support the -l switch which autorotates the image), if you're using ubuntu jaunty, you need to install qiv from karmic.

And you have to install gphoto2 to access the camera as well.