June was lovely with its long and sunny days. This one includes a few frames from around home, but mainly from our long-weekend camping trip to Holland.
Feeds from people participating at the IndieWebCamp Düsseldorf, May 2025.
Current film stock.
This site now uses lazy-loading for the Youtube video embeds. Meaning, a preview image is loaded, and only when you click that is the actual video embed requested.
After posting a few Youtube videos to this site recently, I noticed this was loading a whole lot of quite large third-party resources. And this was happening without even playing a video – very likely resulting in visitors having to download a non-trivial amount of megabytes of no use. The site was slow to load. My Lighthouse score went way down.
So I fixed it.
To lazy load the videos I wrote a Jekyll plugin for a custom Liquid tag, that will take a Youtube video URL as parameter and spit out an iframe tag that uses its srcdoc attribute to at first only load the video’s preview image and display a “Play” button.
🔗 May 2019 – Daniel Pietzsch’s Photo Journal
IndieWebCamp Düsseldorf, our first camping trip this year, and all the other bits in between.
Grmpf. I just noticed my “Fuck you, Instagram!” bookmarklet became useless. Instagram won’t let you click and open an image from a person’s index page. They now immediately prompt you to log in. And while the bookmarklet currently still removes the log in modal, any further attempts on clicking an image are ignored. So, this current version does not work any longer. 😠
At least, one can still right-click and hit “Open Link in New Tab” (in Safari that is). But that’s pretty tedious.
I wish more people simply had a website or blog without this sort of nonsense.
Spent the evening working on this site a little bit:
- Added article teaser images to index pages.
- Made the “Read More” links more prominent.
- Added OpenGraph
og:imageandog:typemeta tags. - Adding
loading="lazy"to the Youtubeiframes. - Making the Youtube embeds grayscale on index pages unless you hover over the article.
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
My Visual Studio Code Setup: Extensions and Themes
And then, the display of my MacBook Pro broke. So after five years, it was time to get a new machine, after all. Every time this had happened in the past, I took the opportunity to start from scratch and do a fresh install of all the software I in fact use and need. Conseque...
So, here’s a drumcam video of Danny Carey playing “Pneuma” off the latest Tool album:
Seeing a drummer play songs live always makes you appreciate the skill even more than simply hearing it. Even with someone like him, where by merely listening it’s already immediately obvious that most people – including me – probably wouldn’t even be able to count this song correctly let alone play drums to it and keep a band playing together.
I also think it’s a first, I’ve seen that type of high-quality video of Danny Carey.
And great song by the way. My current favourite from “Fear Inoculum”.
📄 Corona Virus
A few words on the current corona virus situation.
🔗 April 2019 – Daniel Pietzsch’s Photo Journal
The first month living in the new neighbourhood. And so this post contains shots around there, at home, and of course random shots in between, which is the result of me taking my cameras everywhere I go.
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
Thoughts on Writing: Diamond Polishers and Vomit Drafters
They say that writers come in two flavors: Diamond polishers and vomit drafters. Let me explain.
Have you ever been sitting at your desk, trying to write one single paragraph, but then found yourself meticulously fiddling with every single shred of a word and each and every ...
My first ever pedalboard is taking shape.
In addition to the looper, the phaser, and the Little Big Muff fuzz I mentioned before, I now also got an EHX Pitch Fork and an expression pedal.
It’s all attached to the pretty much smallest pre-build board I could find: a Fame Spaceboard 50S.
And I think I now want to buy a single dedicated power supply, which can power all those pedals. Because it’s currently a little annoying having to power the pedals all individually.
Anyhow: happy progress!
📄 Webmentions
This site can now receive Webmentions. Either directly or via Twitter (with Bridgy’s help).
🎧 Over and Over and Over – Jack White
Listening to this over and over and over again…
📄 Guitar Gear Excitement
Recently, I really got into guitar gear – especially effect pedals.
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
Thoughts on Writing: What They Say
You might have heard of this quote from Marty Neumeier, author of The Brand Gap:
A brand is not what you say it is. It’s what they say it is.
...
Last week I discovered Royal Blood and was blown away! Just check out this festival gig:
They’re only a duo – a drummer and a bassist (!) – but produce an impressive (and innovative) sound. Have not seen anything quite like it. It’s like The White Stripes meet Muse and it’s brilliant!
Today, the Trident Era Ends
When I was a child, I was always fascinated by stories about ancient civilizations. I devoured books about Atlantis, or the story of Heinrich Schliemann's discovery of Troy, stories about the Greek, the Romans, the Inca Empire, or Ancient Egypt. And I was always fascinated b...
I just learned about the CSS scroll-behavior property and immediately applied it to a site. Super simple JS-independent smooth scrolling. :-)
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
My RSS Feed Collection of Personal Websites
Yesterday, Chris Coyier asked a question on Twitter:
“Who’s gonna read your personal blog because it has an RSS feed? I’m gonna read your personal blog because it has an RSS feed.” Chris then attached a screen recording of him scrolling down his massive list of RSS feeds of...