Spherical aberration. Not only about spherical aberration, but also about the problem of focus shift when stopping down - the latter is not so intuitive to understand, because why should the point of best focus shift in the plane, just because you stop down - after all, only the depth of field is increased. But it's never quite that simple, especially with fast lenses.
Archive 16. February 2011
BoPhoto.com: M8 coder - simple manual handcoding of M lenses. Another useful template to apply lens coding. Some Zeiss and Voigtländer lenses have a small gap at the bayonet, where you can even use paint for the marking, which then holds better and doesn't wear off as quickly. Or you can make the markings on thinner paper and clamp it between the lens and the body. It's a bit fiddly, but perhaps practical for occasional changing.
Get inPulse and Hack Your Watch. Looks pretty cool, just a small computer and a display, programmable, connected via Bluetooth. Could do some nice tricks with it. Maybe even display the time.
PyPy Status Blog: PyPy Winter Sprint Report. Most important point: fast-forward is in Trunk, so the next version of PyPy will definitely have 2.7 compatibility.
And for those who want an overview of various S3 file systems: Comparison of S3QL and other S3 file systems. The list also includes commercial packages and a simple feature comparison is made.
s3fs - I should also check this out, as it allows me to mount Amazon S3 on the server and access it from the outside via WebDAV, indirectly also to S3. For my pictures, it might be sensible in the long run to have two offsite backups with different techniques. For this purpose, I should also take a look at the s3fslight fork, as it is said to work better with rsync and that would be interesting for automatic backups. Both store files directly in S3, so they can be trivially downloaded. On the other hand, both have problems with the eventual consistency feature of S3, you have to run the synchronization multiple times, especially when you make many changes. Therefore, I should also take a look at s3ql, which forms a complete file system that only uses S3 as storage. This makes it more difficult to access file contents outside of s3ql - but there are also things like deduplication and encryption (in cloud storage, it seems more sympathetic to store things encrypted rather than unencrypted, even if you can trust some providers more than others).
nginx HttpDavModule. I want to check it out to get easier access to my server from OSX - might be quite interesting for some things (e.g. backups of my pictures to my server to have an offsite storage location).
Newspaper: Guttenberg plagiarized parts of his doctoral thesis - and now everyone with the princes: "everything just stolen"!
MobileMe sucks hamsters through straws
Twitter / Search - mobileme. It's really shitty when you have to search on Twitter to find out that MobileMe is crap again and you can't log in - because the stupid Apple status page provides no information again. The way Apple operates MobileMe is highly unprofessional. Unfortunately, sync methods other than MobileMe are pretty crap if you want to sync various Macs and iOS devices. And since I naturally searched on Twitter too late again, and had already tried to fix my problem with the support information provided by Apple, I will probably have to reconstruct my MobileMe access on my Air tomorrow or so. Because of course, checking various problems with MobileMe is only possible in a destructive way. Thanks Apple for this waste of time.
LR/Blog - Send images to your blog from Adobe Lightroom. I had already found another plugin for this, but this one is more flexible and supports other blog types as well (down to "naked" MetaWeblogAPI). However, I don't know if it works with Lightroom 3 and newer WordPress versions ...
Tom Otterness: Superwoman
And here are a few examples with the same M8 and the 2.8/50 Elmar - but in the use for which I bought the camera. Black and white, as photos should be. Straight out of the camera, just the standard "B&W with blue filter high contrast" preset from Lightroom. Normally I would spend a bit more time on it, but I just wanted to put a few pictures online. It's silly to only use cameras but never show photos ...
Organ Pipes
I just love the pattern of organ pipes. And hey, if you want to test a camera in Münster, organ pipes are always ready as a subject. And they won't run away if the photographer is too slow to focus again ... (Leica M8 with the 2.8/50 Elmar and yes, I have to get used to the parallax again, the M8 only shows a very small section in the viewfinder at greater distances, you have to mentally calculate)