Archive for August 2009
I’m using a US-keyboard since the German layout hides the important characters
needed by programmers all the time behind impossible three-finger gestures.
To be able to quickly enter umlauts on the US keyboard, I’ve been using the USGerman layout found here.
In Snow Leopard, this layout bundle causes a horrible bug in the keychain, essentially preventing you from doing anything that requires your password.
To work around that, I created a new layout bundle from scratch using Ukelele. It works just as well and doesn’t crash the keychain.
You can find it on my github page: http://github.com/janv/usgerman/
Berlin always fascinates me. I’ve wanted to live and work there since I was a child.
My parents got to know each other and still have friends in Moabit.
Because of that I’ve been visiting the city almost every year of my life.
This year was the first time I brought my D90 and D40 with me.
The city has a different vibe, depending on the season and the places you see.
These three images capture how the city felt last week.
17.08.09
Earlier today I uploaded some changes to this Wordpress installation.
The first is a small layout update, introducing the sidebar on the right, the second is the installation of the Nextgen Gallery plugin.
With Nextgen I want to present my photos in a way different from flickr. This also marks the beginning of broadening this weblog’s topics.
I won’t restrict it to programming and software development any longer. My interests are much more diverse, so why not present all these ideas here.
The 12€ Camera Strap post was the first into the topic of photography and it certainly won’t be the last, since this has become one of my most important hobbies over the last year.
[singlepic id=17 w=400 float=center]
9elements, who are totally awesome btw., released an impressive HTML5 Canvas demo yesterday:
HTML5 is getting a lot of love lately. With the arrival of FireFox 3.5, Safari 4 and the new 3.0 beta of Google Chrome, browsers support some great new features including canvas and the new audio/video tags. Most interesting: modern mobile devices like the iPhone or Android-based phones also support new standards in favor of Flash. The future looks bright for HTML5.
Take a look at http://9elements.com/io/?p=153
A certain type of camera straps has become popular recently. These straps are worn diagonally over your chest and allow the camera to slide freely on the strap. If you’re not shooting, the camera rests on your hip, doesn’t strain your neck and leaves both your hands free. If you need it, you can grab the camera quickly, without strangling yourself with the strap.
Two products are build after this principle: the R-Strap and the Sun Sniper. Both have two big disadvantages though.
First, they attach to the tripod mount of your camera using a special screw. The tripod mount is not build for stress like this! Having the camera dangle and bounce from a strap attached there might very well destroy it. Further, the screw can come loose if the camera twists around. Both products take measures against this, but a certain risk remains. Second, both straps are pretty expensive at around 50€
In this post I’ll give instructions on how to build such a strap by yourself with material for 12€. This strap not only works similarly to its 50€ brothers but is of very high quality as well and can be trusted with heavy equipment.
more…
