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About a year ago I got a fancy Canon Pro 200 photo printer. Since then, I've been learning how to print photos at home. Here's an unstructured list of things I learned: Make sure your screen isn’t too bright. There’s no hard and fast rule for screen brightness (contrary to popular belief 1 ). If the screen is too bright, everything looks more saturated and contrasty; thus, you’ll edit with reduced…
It is so rare to hold a piece of true high tech in your hands: Modern cameras cram almost physics-defying sensors and lenses into a consumer-affordable device 1 . But do we need all that? That's the question asked by the Pixii camera, a boutique French camera, that foregoes most of these modern amenities and boils the camera down to the bare essentials: A lens, an aperture, a shutter, and a…
I've been feeling unmoored lately. I changed roles at work, from a very comfortable programming position to a challenging new management role. At the same time, AI is threatening to take away the fun part of programming, and leave my profession a hollow shell. So when I relax and edit photos after work, it is with some pent up anxiety and insecurity. Thus when Apple added their latest “liquid…
So I was annoyed with my Apple computer , and decided to try Linux again. I even got a fancy Framework Desktop to do it! After a week, the hardware arrived. To be honest, I was a bit under-whelmed. It's a cute little black box, but at the end of the day, it is just a black box. Somehow I had hoped it would look a bit more classy. Oh well. At least it's very quiet. Since I wanted color management…
Yesterday, my wife wanted to use Discord on her Apple laptop. It was right there in the applications folder. But MacOS couldn't find it. Launching it manually took several minutes, for some reason. We wanted to download a clip using yt_dlp (a Python program). Terminal told us, this would require dev tools (which it doesn't). So we installed Python from python.org instead, which worked. Except,…
When we render a photo, we mimic the psychovisual effects of image brightness. I recently realized that we do this to trick our brain into a perception of brightness, even though the image is not actually very bright. Here's my current understanding of this aspect of image formation: A camera records brightnesses up to ~30,000 nits of e.g. sunlit snow. Your computer screen, however, displays only…
My reading goes in phases; the last phase was a lot of phantastic Science Fiction. Blindsight / Echopraxia , by Peter Watts In one unimportant tangent, we built AIs, which improved beyond our understanding, and now we have a quasi-religious order to figure out whether their output is brilliant or gibberish. How prescient a comment from a book from 2006. Apparently, the author is a biologist, which…
I've been printing my own family calendar over the last year. However, most of the calendar templates I found online are ugly or boring. So obviously, I had to make my own: Look, it has my local holidays and vacations! The fun thing is, this was generated with typst , which is a TeX-like markdown language that I wanted to play with for a while. But in contrast to TeX, it is easily programmable:…
My friends and colleagues often complain about Windows 11. Personally, however, I much prefer it to Windows 10. In particular, here are some standout features: Windows Explorer now has tabs! Coming from macOS and Linux, I so missed explorer tabs that I added them to Windows 10 with a plugin . I still feel handicapped whenever I have to interact with an older Windows box that doesn't have them. But…
One of our Pixel 6a phones recently had its battery bricked by a mandatory software update . Conveniently, Google only "found out" about this issue a few months after the warranty period ended for anyone who bought the phone when it was new. Lucky for us, we had bought ours later, when its predecessor broke on vacation and couldn't be repaired. So ours was still covered by its warranty, and we got…
What's in a perfect lens? Is it sharpness? Contrast? Microcontrast? Bokeh? Whatever does that even mean? Today is new lens day. To test my purchase, and get it out of my system, today, I will measure my new lens. It's the Fujifilm XF 23mm f/1.4 R LM WR, a preposterously complex lens for a ridiculously high-resolution camera. Will it prevail against my older Fujifilm XF 23mm f/1.4 R? How will it…
In the world of photography, there is one brand that stands apart from the rest: Leica. It exudes an air of quality, refinement, and heritage. These cameras signal wealth and sophistication, and serve equally as cameras and as fashion pieces. Many of the greatest photographers in history shot their work on Leica. They are very expensive, too. That cachet is strongest with their rangefinder series…
At most companies I have worked for, there was some internal Python code base that relied on an old version of Python. But especially for data science, I'd often want to execute that code from an up-to-date Jupyter Notebook, to do some analysis on results. When this happened last time, I decided to do something about it. Here's a Jupyter cell magic that executes the cell's code in a different…
Meta just invested 30 Billion Dollars into AI accelerators 1 . That's roughly equivalent to one Manhattan Project worth of money. Meta must expect a comparable return on that investment. But with that kind of money, that return must be disruptive. And yet, AI does not feel disruptive. In my life, I have witnessed a few consumer technology disruptions: portable computers, portable telephones,…
Even though I did read some fiction last year, non really stuck with me. It appears that I am more interested in non-fiction these days. Strange how these things go. Quest for Performance Quest for Performance: The Evolution of Modern Aircraft, by Laurence K. Loftin I have searched for a book like this for a long time: a history of airplane technology. The book details technological milestones and…
For the last dozen years, I have used Emacs as my text editor and development environment. But this era ended. In this post, I outline how I went from using Emacs as a cornerstone of my digital life, to abandoning it. In an ironic twist of history, it was Visual Studio that drove me to Emacs in the first place, and what ultimately pulled me away from it: In 2011, I was working on the firmware of a…
From January 2021 to the beginning of 2023, I worked on a legacy code base at Fraunhofer IDMT in Oldenburg. My task was the maintenance and development of a DNN-based speech recognition engine that had become terra incognita when its original developer had left the company a year before I started. The code had all the hallmarks of severe technical debt, with layers of half-used abstractions, many…
I was an Apple fanboy some years ago. Back then, whenever something was odd on my computer, I was surely just using it wrong. Nowadays, I see things the other way around: We're not "holding it wrong", the computer is just defective. Computers should do our bidding, not vice versa. So here's a bunch of things that I do to my computers to mold them to my way of working. Keyboard Layout I switch…
Around this time of the year, I usually write a blog post about my favorite books of the last year. But this time, not enough of them really stood out. So instead, here's my favorite pieces of media I consumed in the last year: Firepower This is the story of how gunpowder changed the world. We get to see the familiar history of central Europe, but told unusually, from the bottom up: how seemingly…
It's that time of the year again when all image editing programs come out with new versions. This comes at an inopportune time, as I feel restless of late. So, naturally, I had to try them all. Or maybe I just wanted a justification for buying DxO PhotoLab, because people on the internet speak so well of it 🙄. For the following comparison I downloaded trial versions of ACDSee Photo Studio…
You know what I like to see when I import photos from my Fujifilm camera into Darktable? Each RAF file has tags with the aspect ratio, DR mode, and film simulation, is exposed correctly, cropped correctly, and has the correct film simulation applied. However, that is not the default. Darktable, like most raw developers, is camera-agnostic. agnostic ăg-nŏs′tĭk noun [...] One who is doubtful or…
A while ago, I bought an RNI film pack for Capture One. That's a set of presets that makes your digital photos look similar to analog film scans. However, since then my other image editor, Darktable just released a new version, I'm now back to using Darktable instead of Capture One, thus without access to those presets. Here's how to export Capture One presets to LUTs, to make them accessable to…
Hologrammatica In the last years, I have almost exclusively read books in English. Science fiction, in particular, seems to happen exclusively in English (and perhaps Chinese ). So much so, that I have come to associate German only with bad translations and personal communications, whereas English was the language of science, engineering, and fiction. In 2021 however, to my surprise, I stumbled…
When I recently installed Windows 11 on my desktop, my photo editor Darktable suddenly got much slower than it used to be. When I looked into its preferences, I noticed OpenCL was no longer available. As it turns out, some versions of the AMD graphics driver apparently no longer ship with OpenCL support on Windows. However, they do ship with the necessary libraries, it's just that these libraries…
When I bought into the Fuji system, I selected the XF 18‑135 f/3.5‑5.6 R LM OIS WR as my main zoom lens. This is a lens with a very wide focal range, that is commonly called a “travel zoom” because you could travel the world with just this one lens. And indeed I happily did . In 2019, Fujifilm released a second travel zoom lens, the XF 16‑80 f/4 R OIS WR. Ever since, I have wondered how this new…
With version 3.0, my favorite photo editing software Darktable started the journey towards a scene-referred editing pipeline. Which means that most edits are no longer bounded between a fixed black zero, and a white one, but can range between zero and infinity, like light itself. This is the norm in video editing and video games, but unique in photo editors at the moment. The scene-referred…
Some of my photographic lenses are reknown for their outstanding sharpness, others are said to be mediocre. But somehow I never quite saw a big difference in sharpness between them. Do older lenses have less resolution than the newer ones? Can a dedicated prime lens resolve more detail than a multi-purpose zoom lens? Let's find out. These questions recently came to a head for me, in the choice…
Chickenhawk Most first hand accounts of wars I have read are written by a somewhat amateur author. Not this one. Robert Mason infused his terrifying tale with plenty of drama and humanity, and managed to write one of the best personal military history I have ever read. Part of it is surely the subject matter, as I am a huge fan of aviation and its lore. And part of it is that I haven't yet read a…
About half a year ago, my second child was born, and all that precious free time I had used for photo editing evaporated. So I started looking for faster photo editor, as a temporary replacement for Darktable . Based on my research last time , I chose Capture One . During the last six months, I got to know the program well, and want to share my thoughts on it, and how it compares to Darktable.…
My Pixel 2 phone received its final software update the other day, and its battery took the occasion to really show its age. So it was time for a new phone. Which is not a decision to make lightly, considering that I spend multiple hours per day using it. And this time, I was inclined to give the iPhone another go, mostly because of Google's gross lack of human decency in the last few years. So,…
Most cameras have the option to capture raw images, i.e. un-processed image data right from the image sensor. In theory, these images are pure physical measurements of light, and should therefore be very comparable between cameras. But are they? To investigate, I took a raw picture of a color target with each of my five cameras, and compared their output. Capturing accurate colors is a…
A common trope in discussions about cameras on the internet is: “sensor size trumps all”, and as a corollary, “smartphone cameras suck”. Which is obviously false to anyone who has ever taken a good picture on a smartphone (with its tiny sensor). The argument, however, goes like this: Bigger pixels 1 can capture a greater dynamic range, and bigger sensors are made from bigger pixels. Therefore, and…
After years of using Linux on my desktop, I decided to install Windows on my computer, to get access to a few commercial photo editing applications. I'll go into my grievances with Linux later, but for now: I tried to install Windows, you won't believe what happened next Like I have done many times with Linux, I download a Windows image from my university, and write it to a USB drive, then reboot…
Assembling scientific documents is a complex task. My documents are a combination of graphs, data, and text, written in LaTeX. This post is about combining these elements, keeping them up to date, while not losing your mind. My techniques work on any Unix system on Linux, macOS, or the WSL. Text For engineering or science work, my deliverables are PDFs, typically rendered from LaTeX. But writing…
This semester is weird. Instead of holding my "Applied Programming" lecture as I normally would, live-coding in front of the students and narrating my foibles, this time it all had to be done online, thanks to the ongoing pandemic. Which meant I had to record videos. I had no idea how to record videos. This is a writeup of what I did, in case I have to do more of it. You can see the results of my…
This video series was produced in the spring of 2020, during the COVID19-pandemic, when all lectures had to be held electronically, without physical attendance. It is a tutorial, in German, for parsing text files, and basic unit testing. If the videos are too slow, feel free to speed them up by right-clicking, and adjusting play speed (Firefox only, as far as I know). You may also download the…
It bit me again: I got software envy. What if I could develop my pictures faster with a different RAW developer? What if they looked better than they do now? Questions like these keep me up at night. The Problem Choice. There are so many RAW developers out there. And they all have rabid fan bases, and apparently unique rendering. How to choose? Here are my house rules: Must run on Windows or Linux…
To quote Wikipedia : Open Source Open-source software (OSS) is a type of computer software in which source code is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose. In practice, this generally means software developed by hobbyists in their free time, as opposed to professionals at a company.…
This video series was produced in the spring of 2020, during the COVID19-pandemic, when all lectures had to be held electronically, without physical attendance. It is a tutorial, in German, for building a small Qt GUI that visualizes the ongoing pandemic on a world map. If the videos are too slow, feel free to speed them up by right-clicking, and adjusting play speed (Firefox only, as far as I…
Sapiens More than any other book this year, Sapiens changed my view of the world. Or at least that's what it felt like while reading. It seemed as if every page contained a new and mind-blowing shift in perspective, such as casting money, democracy, and capitalism as "religions", and questioning the value of civilization in terms of individual human experience. My mind was reeling from the…
Darktable is my favorite RAW editor. It's a program for developing digital negatives ("RAW files") to JPEGs. But, I've long struggled with matching the quality of the out-of-camera JPEGs of my Fuji camera. Let me explain. Today's cameras capture an astounding amount of detail, far more than monitors can display or printers can print. And then they crush it down to a printable and viewable JPEG…
There was a time, maybe from 2009 to 2011, when Apple computers were glorious. They were elegant devices, beautiful to me, and powerful. Never before, or since, have I loved a machine as I loved that MacBook Pro early 2011. I miss that, being able to love the elegance and power a machine. Nowadays I mostly use KDE Linux, which I can tolerate. Things occasionally break, stuff sometimes doesn't work…
A few days ago, a new version of Darktable was released. Darktable is an Open Source RAW image processor, and one of my favorite pieces of software of all time. It may be THE most powerful RAW processor on the market, far exceeding its proprietary brothers. But in the social media discussions following the release, it got dismissed for being unintuitive . Which is silly, ironic, sad; why should…
We went on a once-in-a-lifetime vacation this year. Six weeks in the USA, roving New England in an RV, and going on a helicopter tour around New York City. I have spent months thinking about the perfect camera for going on this trip. I went on several vacations with various permutations of cameras and lenses as a test-run. I data-mined my existing photographs to find the perfect setup through…
Our first stop in speech analysis is usually the short-time Fourier transform, or STFT 1 : Top: an STFT of speech (it's me, saying: "Es war einmal ein Mann"). Bottom: the signal's waveform. As we can see, this speech signal has a strong fundamental frequency track around 120 Hz, and harmonics at integer multiples of the fundamental frequency. We perceive the frequency of the fundamental as the…
A periodic signal has a harmonic spectrum. In the extreme case, a click train signal has a comb spectrum: A click train (left), and its corresponding comb spectrum (right). But why? After all, a solitary click has a uniform spectrum. So why should the sum of multiple clicks have a non-uniform spectrum? A click (left), and its corresponding spectrum (right). The answer exposes a lot of detail of…
Now that I am officially a failed scientist , I might as well talk about my research in public. I spent the last few years analyzing speech recordings. Particularly, voiced speech , where vibrations in the vocal folds excite resonances in the vocal tract, and a tonal sound leaves our mouths and noses. As humans, we are particularly tuned to recognizing these kinds of sounds. Even in loud…
As part of my PhD, I am supposed to publish three papers. So far, I have been unable to do so. But this is not about me, I will survive regardless. This is about the systems behind our papers' rejections. Because they are... bad . Political . Un-scientific . Our first manuscript was submitted for publications, and got a middling review. If we wanted our work to be published, we were to expand on…
So I bought a new camera. Now I need new lenses. In this post, I am looking for a standard zoom lens, i.e. something that covers a bit of wide-angle, all the way through the normal range, up to a bit of telephoto. In Fuji's lineup https://camerasize.com/compact/#721.706,721.421,721.359,721.426,721.448,721.388,ha,t][these needs are met by the XC 15‑45 mm f/3.5‑5.6 OIS PZ (€ 150, 136 g, 4.4 cm) the…
A common internet wisdom about photography is that bigger camera sensors capture more light. So if you want to work in low light, you need a full frame camera, and a bigger sensor always produces better image quality. I have struggled with this a lot. It just doesn't make sense: Lenses can focus light on any surface, so why should the surface size matter ? The answer turns out to be...…