Ever since seeing them live last time, I can’t get “Allting tar slut” out of my head.
🎧 In Cauda Venenum – Opeth
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I’m a freelance web developer based in Düsseldorf, Germany. I make a RSS feed reader called FeedCity. I’m also a passionate film photographer, a husband and father, a musician, metalhead, and movie fan.
- Author
- Daniel Pietzsch
- Rights
- © 2019–2025 by Daniel Pietzsch, licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0
- Public lists
- HWC DUS IWC DUS 2025
🎧 Blood Year – Russian Circles
Their latest album. Would have loved to see them live last month. But as everything was cancelled, this will need to do – which is not bad at all.
🎧 Fear Inoculum – TOOL
Still in rotation.
📄 Corona update 3
It’s been a while since I wrote about “the situation”. In summary: we’re mostly at home, but not really quarantining ourselves.
Yesterday, I spontaneously acquired a new (used) darkroom enlarger that was on offer locally:
It’s a Kaiser VP-6000. And it included everything I need to make prints from 6x6 medium format negatives. So now I can finally start printing the photos I have been making with my Rolleiflex!
To get a little impression of what Düsseldorf looks like during the Covid-19 pandemic, you can check out Andreas Schiko’s blog where he currently posts photos of empty Düsseldorf streets.
Ok, my “Fuck you, Instagram!” bookmarklet stopped working again. Bloody annoying. At least permalinks still work on their own and right-clicking hasn’t been disabled (yet?). So “Open Link in New Tab” still works.
The URL for subscribing to a YouTube channel via RSS:
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=ADD_CHANNEL_ID_HEREYou get the channel_id from the URL of the channel.
📄 Düsseldorf Webcams
The city of Düsseldorf offers some surprisingly high-quality webcams. Embedded here for my own convenience, so I can watch them all at once.
📄 My fluid website layout
I'm using a viewport-based CSS layout for this site. What this means and why I do this is all explained in this post.
I’m currently watching the documentary about Dieter Rams by Gary Hustwit and it’s absolutely wonderful. Still free to watch today.
📄 Thoughts on lazy loading images
My current thoughts on this feature, its advantages and disadvantages, and why I have currently enabled this on my personal sites.
📄 Photo Journal Design Update
In the last week, I updated my photo journal’s design. There are no more borders around the images, the photos are more aligned to a grid and have varying sizes. It’s all more well-aligned and therefor looks cleaner.
🔗 July 2019 – Daniel Pietzsch’s Photo Journal
📷 “July 2019” is now up in the Photo Journal (48 photos). 📷
Funfair, Nord Open Air and life in between.
It turns out, lazy loading does work with responsive images in Firefox 75: for this to work, you currently have to put the loading attribute before srcset in the attribute list of an img tag. This is a bug, and will be fixed in a future release.
So, I changed my markup accor...
Ok, my “Fuck you, Instagram!” bookmarklet works again. Thanks!
Firefox 75 was released, promoting the native image lazy loading feature. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to work with responsive images (using srcset and sizes). It’s definitely not working here nor on my photo journal site. Am I just doing it wrong? I couldn’t find information about this issue, yet.
UPDATE: I needed to put the loading attribute before the srcset attribute on my img tags.
📄 Corona update
More personal thoughts and updates on the Corona virus situation.
🔗 June 2019 – Daniel Pietzsch’s Photo Journal
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.
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.
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.
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).