Great Thunberg is badass!

During the recent vacation, Zoe took a photo of me with my Instax Wide. And this now is my avatar for the summer.

Overall I can recommend this movie. It’s well made and interestingly filmed. It revolves around the topic of coping – or not coping – with the loss of a loved one (especially on the birthday of the first child) and all the psychological and emotional challenges and dangers t...

This is the first Gojira album in a while that keeps getting play after play. They really managed to create a long-player that I enjoy back to front. After “The Way of All Flesh” – which I listened to a lot a decade back – none of their albums were like that for me. So, it’s likely that “real” Gojira fans do not like this one. But I think it’s fantastic!

HostEurope currently doesn’t offer automatic usage of Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates with their Webhosting products – and probably never will. But here’s how you can make it work and navigate HostEurope’s manual and not so straight forward process.

Normalerweise kein großer Sport-Gucker, aber die Fußball-EM verfolge ich dann doch mal wieder ganz gerne.

Another one of Jasper’s tips. I knew the band already – and I’ve seen them live twice – but haven’t checked out their latest output.

Djenty, heavy, proggy stuff, with a great singer. Reminds me of Tesseract and Devin Townsend – which I both like – and probably a bunch of other artists, too. But that’s not to say they don’t have their own sound. They have! And I’m into it. And with proggy stuff like this, there’s often lots to discover after repeated listens. The refrains are sometimes a bit too “nice” for my liking, but apperently this didn’t stop me from putting this on again and again.

Bandcamp

This is a classic isn’t it? It was my first watch, though. And I tend to like movies that play in space. This one was no exception.

It was maybe a bit too much action the whole time, but other than that, a solid movie with a more classic storytelling (fair enough, since this was released in 1997).

One scene that was involuntary funny to us was when the captain watched the horrifying things that happened to the previous crew on the video log and then says with a straight face: “We’re leaving!” We had a good laugh.

A rewatch. And totally worth it. I like the whole menacing atmosphere – both on earth and in space. The story is great, too, altough I’m still not quite so sure whether I understood everything.

With almost three hours in length, this is a movie I did not find too long. On the contrary: it could be even longer to explain things in more detail. I think the plot would have made a great TV series.

And I’m also not quite sure what the movie is supposed to tell the viewer. But my current short interpretation goes like this:

• Love is a strong – or even the strongest – force in the universe. Maybe…
• What does it matter to save humanity when you yourself are not with your loved ones.
• Humans will even (almost) fuck-up a realistic chance of settling on another planet because of stupid selfish reason.

I could totally see myself watching this a third time.

I managed to catch up a little with my photos: here are 159 exposures from 2020.

The whole strange year in one big entry.

I recently learned the intro solo to Metallica’s “One”, so I thought I record that as well.

This bit lent itself well to looper usage – which I use in this video to record the rhythm guitar.

It’s just played freely, so it turned out a little slower than the original. Also, playing without metronome or drums shows here, as a few sections are rushed.

This time, it’s simply recorded together with the iPhone video using the headphone microphone – on my leg, and directly in front of the Katana Mini amp.

To counter the complexity that is Blood Incantation, I need some easy listening. In comes this Gatecreeper album.

They also have this chainsaw sound going. Great riffs. A great vocalist. Nothing really new. But all I really need.

Bandcamp

Chrome will try out letting users subscribe to RSS feed right in the browser.

This is a welcome experiment, after all main browsers removed RSS-related features in recent years. I wish they came back. It’d be great if RSS feeds were surfaced via a consistent UI and the ability to easily subscribe to feeds without the need for additional software (at least to get started).

I don’t have high hopes, though.

Today, people have many ways to keep up with their favorite websites, including subscribing to mailing lists, notifications and RSS. It’s a ...

My new friend Jasper recommended this band to me. And so this album has been in rotation ever since.

It’s technical death metal in a raw old school sound, interspersed with these atmospheric outer space parts. Not quite sure what this reminds of. Maybe Cynic!? Anyway, it’s a great album with (still) lots to discover.

My current favourite is the 18-minute long closing track “Awakening From the Dream of Existence to the Multidimensional Nature of Our Reality (Mirror of the Soul)”.

New pedals! The compressor is mainly planned for use with the bass. And the Eyemaster gives me the HM-2 Swedish chainsaw sound. Gonna learn some Entombed I guess!

Interesting lens. Only 30 USD. Here’s a review. Tempted to just order one.

KEKS LENS kodak lens 30mm f/10 keks lens is a lens recycle from disposable camera and transform it to a body cap lens. it could be one of the best weapon for street photography. The Fixed aperture and focus free makes sure you can capture the moments you want. (Available in LEICA M, L39, FUJIFILM X, SONY E MOUNT) www.instagram.com/keks_lens/

Over the weekend, I made new prints in my darkroom. And in this post, I'm showing them.

This wasn’t bad. I certainly like the acting of the two. But 60+ instead of 80+ minutes would’ve made this more gripping. I’m sure this film was a big influence to the makers of Host.

Command discovery of the day: zless – for directly viewing zipped text files. Now I can stop manually gunziping and lessing server log files like an idiot.

file perusal filter for crt viewing of compressed text

Instagram seems to have definitively locked out people without an account. I couldn’t open a single page for weeks now.

A shame some people only post there. But I’m not going to get an account.

Here’s my take on the melody and solo part of Spiritual Beggars’ Look Back. I love that melody.

But I’m actually not a very good lead player, so the solo part is a bit so-so. And it’s only loosely based on the original anyway. But hey, I’m doing these mostly for fun, and to be able to look it up later again. So that’s my excuse for being lazy.

I used the Pitch Fork pedal to shift down my guitar by one octave to simulate the bass track underneath. And I used my looper pedal to record this and play it back as the backing track.

The lead uses the EHX Cock Fight plus expression pedal for the Wah, distortion, a bit of delay and reverb.

Oh, and this is played in standard tuning while playing all the notes like on the recording. It’s very likely they had their instruments tuned to C standard.

Pedalboard-shot:

Insgesamt ein gutes Buch. Habe nicht allzu viel Neues gelernt, da ich viele der Ratschläge und Lebensweisheiten seit längerer Zeit sowieso beherzige. Aber es ist doch ab und zu nett von anderen Leute mitzubekommen, dass sie ähnlich denken. Offensichtlich geht es in dem...

This was a waste of time. It’s just not something I enjoy (anymore?).

Honestly, the only thing that made me laugh was how strangely similar this one actor looked to a young Jackie Chan.

What can I say? I’m always nicely entertained by Tarantino’s movies. The plot, the characters, the dialogues, how it’s filmed etc.

I have seen this before, but that was long ago. Didn’t regret this rewatch at all.

This will probably come in handy one day!

I’ve reviewed a whole load of the new crop of shoe mount light meters recently. I’ve liked something about all of the meters I’ve tried too.

How come Rails’ String#blank? never made it into Ruby itself? So frustrating! And I thought, Ruby was about “programmer happiness”!? Well, guess what, Matz: I’M NOT HAPPY!!!1!!

I’m simply into old school Swedish death metal right now.

Bandcamp

I got a ukulele for my birthday. And here’s a little phrase I came up with recently.

This is a TV series. But ten episodes is like a very long movie really. Anyhow, we’re not going to continue watching this when or if another season comes out.

Overall I liked how this was filmed and edited and the acting was very good, too. And the main topic is interesting as well: racism and its nasty repercussions in the US of the fifties (and earlier).

But mixing this with supernatural elements missed giving the subject the seriousness it deserved.

Some episodes managed very well to portrait all that racism – big and small – the family members are subjected to. But then, the violent scenes were often just over-the-top cruel in my opinion.

In addition I found this had too many plots.

I’m ticking titles off my list of “classic horror movies I’ve never seen”. And again, I understand why this is a classic. Enjoyed this one a lot. Story, filming, editing, acting, special effects and stunts: all superb. And you wouldn’t necessarily notice this is a film shot in the seventies. This must have been way ahead of its time. And that poster is the menacing cherry on top.