Last year, I acquired a few new cameras. One of them was a Yashica FR1 (or FRI, as it’s often written as) with a selection of lenses. It was a random opportunity. And I took it. Here are some first images taken with the 24mm lens I bought with it.
Feeds from people participating at the IndieWebCamp Düsseldorf, May 2025.
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
2019 Year in Review
Now that a lot of people are publishing their year in review posts, I decided to write my first one, too, this time. And if only to be able to look back later on what I did and thought about in 2019.
Writing a full “decade in review” post seemed a bit too excessive to me, th...
🔗 March 2019 – Daniel Pietzsch’s Photo Journal
March was a mixed bag. I was doing lots of trips back and forth between Ratingen and Düsseldorf, preparing the move into our new apartment. Plus, I started a new/old job again, being busy working full time again.
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
Thoughts on Writing: Shitty First Drafts
I don’t know about you but many people seem to think that accomplished writers are able to sit down at their desks and immediately start writing in beautiful, fully formed sentences and paragraphs. In reality, though, nothing could be farther from the truth. As Anne Lamott p...
📄 Dark mode
While this site is new and super-simple, I thought I add an automatic “dark mode” real quick.
Added syntax highlighting now, too. Since Jekyll generates the necessary markup out of the box, it was simply a matter of choosing an additional stylesheet, including it, and making a few more adjustments.
📄 Responsive images
I have now added the ability to display responsive images. And I write a little bit about how I do it using the tools I run the build this site.
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
Thoughts on Writing
Since I started writing on this site about three years ago, I have been thinking a lot about writing as a craft. What are the qualities of good writing? Are there any recipes or best practices to become a better writer? What are the tricks and habits of great writers? And so...
A CSS-only Carousel
I've recently read about and discussed CSS Scroll Snapping so often that I felt like I should build a CSS-only carousel based on it. There it is:
Link to Codepen
Here are a few things to note: #
Accessibility is in line with all other CSS-only experiments: it can only be ...
Dealing with Ads in 2020
As you may know, I currently work for a news company in Germany, the Rheinische Post Mediengruppe. My task there is to concept and build the frontend for a bunch of news sites in the form of a white label framework. Sadly, but not surprisingly my client is still depending on...
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
Sharpen the Contradictions
In a recent conversation with Tim Ferriss, Ben Horowitz, a co-founder and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, shared a line he likes to use in management:
Sharpen the contradictions.”
...
📄 Hosting on GitLab Pages
A quick overview of how this site is hosted at the moment.
I was actually thinking that I might have seen enough Opeth gigs by now. But no! Last night in Cologne was the best one I’ve been to (yet)! Great setlist, great light show, and – as always – great musicianship. Very happy we went.
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
Construction vs. Growth
For those of us who work on and with the Web, the idea that the Web has its very own inherent qualities is not new. Whether you read John Allsopp’s seminal article “A Dao of Web Design” or watch Frank Chimero’s elaborate talk “The Web’s Grain”, the fundamental concept is the...
It’s the time of year where I generally push my films to ISO 1600. And that means I now need to slightly readjust my brain again for guessing exposure.
And in April it’s all back to ISO 400 again.
🔗 February 2019 – Daniel Pietzsch’s Photo Journal
A tiny bit of street photography again.
📄 Fuck you, Instagram!
I made a little bookmarklet to disable and hide Instagram’s login prompt and re-enable scrolling, so I can keep browsing Instagram web pages when I am logged out. I call it “Fuck you, Instagram!” or “FUI” for short.
📄 Recent film development fuckups
In the last two weeks, I had some bad film development results. This is a little article about what I think went wrong.
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
Frequency
How often should you publish work on your site? Once a month? Once a week? Daily even? When you ask other creators or look on the Web for advice, you will get the most diverse answers to this question.
People who post daily will tell you that, of course, you should post dail...
Went to see Machine Head yesterday. It was the “Burn my Eyes” 25th anniversary tour and so they played that album in its entirety, in the almost original lineup: Logan Mader on guitar, Chris Kontos on drums, and of course Robb Flynn. Would have loved to see Adam Duce, too, but I guess one can’t have everything. Anyhow: I had a great time, even joining a few circle pits.