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Fotozondagavond #14: Yummie ("Lekker")
June 25th, 2007
I was hoping to show some nice pictures of outdoors activities, but hey, it was raining!
Anyway, I turned 40 today, so the obvious yummie thing to show is CAKE.
These are rare images of a piece of home-made mascarpone cake (comparable to tiramisu, but, er, quite different) before I got my grubby little fingers on it. The white balance is not optimal, but I didn’t want to waste time adjusting my camera: there’s a time for fiddlin’ and a time for ladlin’…
Now that was yummie!
More “lekker” stuff:
Fotozondagavond #13: Free for All
June 17th, 2007
FJ seems to have taken a hiatus and left us without a topic for this week. This meant each of us had to come up with something original by ourselves.
As fate has it, I’ll be turning forty next week and it got me thinking about mortality, aging and all that. One of the things I’ve always wondered about is whether I would turn gray or bald. So far, I’ve collected a few white hairs, but most of them grow out of my nose, so that doesn’t say much. My maternal grandfather was balder than Yul Brynner (though not as mean-looking) and my paternal gramps had a head of (albeit slightly thinning) gray hair. I’m starting to look more and more like my father (gray rather than bald), so I’m guessing I won’t lose my hair just yet, but you never know.
So, armed with curiosity, camera and my trusty Gimp I hacked up some before and after shots:
(click to enlarge)
Er, right. I think I’d rather turn gray…
Now I’ll send the “after” picture to Elisabetta by MMS, just to freak her out :-P
Other stuff I’ve been doing:
That sucks!
June 11th, 2007
From the Helsingin Sanomat:
A total of nearly 200 observations have already been made of a skin-piercing blood-sucking moth calyptra thalictri, which is relatively new in Finland. […]
Yikes! Unlike mosquitoes, where it’s the female that’s thirsty for blood, with calyptra thalictri, it’s the male that does the dirty deed. It normally sucks juice from fruit and tears from the eyelids of large animals, but it seems the little critter is forcing its way into the mosquito’s niche. Although painful, its bite is apparently not dangerous since the moth does not carry or transmit infectious diseases.
Still,
Once it ate my clothes.
Now the moth that flies at night,
Sucks my juicy toes.– Steven
We already have the dreaded tiger mosquito in our country, I wouldn’t be surprised if we can welcome Calyptra T. soon as well . Sleep tight and yes, it seems the bed bugs do bite…
Fotozondagavond #12: Youth Sentiment
June 10th, 2007
Youth sentiment. Wow! Things that wax me nostalgic. Too many to list. Most of my sentiments/nostalgia stem from infancy. Of course, the “When I was young, everything was better” is a big lie. People were lying and dying, as much as nowadays, if not more. Certainly, ignorance is bliss and even though knowledge is supposed to set us free, we’d like nothing better than to voluntarily shake the weight of truth and insight from our shoulders and once again put on the warm fuzzy shackles of childhood.
To quote Ambrose Bierce (with whom I share my birthday, though we were born 125 years apart):
- INFANCY, n.
- The period of our lives when, according to Wordsworth, “Heaven lies about us.” The world begins lying about us pretty soon afterward.
Anyway, today I had time and inspiration to hook up on three themes: music, places and, er, for want of a better word, “art”.
Not-so-heavy Metal
June 8th, 2007
So, Elisabetta had a scooter accident last year and broke her elbow. She required surgery to bind the bone fragments together. Elbows (and other joints) are particularly tricky as the muscles tend to pull on the bones more than in other places.
Anyway, I had seen the X-rays, but never the actual metal wires in her arm. Last month they took it out and we took the pieces of titanium home. Anyway, for your entertainment:
And no, the coin did not come from her arm…
Fatlabel - modify DOS volume labels on Linux/UNIX
June 6th, 2007
When inserting USB keys and memory cards on my Linux laptop they are automatically mounted and labeled with whatever name is on the (v)fat volume. I sometimes like to change that. Strangely enough, there is no standard utility for Linux/UNIX to change the volume name of a (v)fat partition.
Not that it’s difficult… I found a good explanation of how the (V)FAT boot sector is structured and managed to write a little perl script around it to manipulate the volume label.
Links:
- Download area, containing CPAN-ish source, Debian and RPM packages.
- Subversion repository
- Man page
Documentation is included. After installing, ”man fatlabel” should give you the dirt.
Fotozondagavond #11: Patterns in Pavement
June 3rd, 2007
Patterns in pavement… Mmmh. During a little get-together in Amsterdam yesterday evening, I realised I hadn’t done anything on the subject yet. George gently reminded me that digging up old photos from the archives is not really in the spirit of this thing. Dang! So, my trusty old Nokia phone doubled as a paparazzi camera while we slouched off to the bar.
It’s quite possible you’ll find a similar picture on FJ’s blog… Oh yeah, his fourth picture is no pavement! ;-)
More patterns at:
