Web guy. Amateur wildlife photographer. Founder of jungledragon.com. - Medium
This in-depth travel report covers the 17th episode of wildlife travel by Henriette and Ferdy. This year’s adventure concerns a 3 week birding roundtrip through Vietnam where we also target some rare endemic primates as a side quest. Our reason to pick Vietnam is that we’ve not done much birding in Asia so far. We visited Papua, Indonesia in 2023 , but technically it is part of the Australian…
This in-depth travel report covers the 16th episode of wildlife travel by Henriette and Ferdy. Our latest journey marks our 5th visit to Colombia. Our reason to keep coming back is best explained by this map: Source: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Map-of-ecoregions-of-Colombia_fig2_283077766 (edited by Ferdy to make colors more distinct) Colombia’s multiple ecoregions produces biodiversity…
A Next.js/React web app to visualize Philips Hue light bulbs Earlier this year I upgraded my man cave , which includes a sophisticated Philips Hue lighting setup: 7 color spot bulbs on the ceiling rail, 3 on the macro desk on the right As I learned that the Philips Hue Bridge features an API that allows one to programmatical read/write light state, I figured to combine a few goals. I was in the…
Working around the limitations of S3 Introduction Every year around the December holidays I embark on a particular backup routine. The emphasis is on backing up a large S3 bucket which contains the media files of JungleDragon , the wildlife community I founded. The bucket currently is 612GB in size containing ~900K files. The chance of S3 objects getting lost is almost infinitely small but the…
Male of the Wilson’s Bird-of-Paradise — by Ferdy Christant This in-depth travel report covers the 15th episode of wildlife travel by Henriette and Ferdy. Trip destination In recent years we heavily focused on exploring South America leading to four trips to Colombia and one to Ecuador . This year we felt a visit to Asia is overdue. Our last Asian destination was Sri Lanka in 2014. In our search…
Weeping man studying unexpected Google Maps API charges How it happened, how to solve it, lessons learned Introduction A while ago I was reviewing my credit card statement. This is not something I regularly do as here in the Netherlands it’s an uncommon payment method. The only recurring charge I expect is from Amazon Web Services (AWS), but since I get monthly emails containing the AWS charges…
Upgrading the Digital Command Center One of the perks of our home is that it has a downstairs office. It is used heavily for working from home, personal computing and occasional studio macro photography. As we were doing lots of home improvements during the last 6 months and this room was to be cleared out for full repainting, I had the opportunity to dream up several improvements. This article…
This in-depth travel report covers the 14th episode of wildlife travel by Henriette and Ferdy. Our latest journey marks our 4th visit to Colombia, making it our most visited destination. For the interested, here are the travel reports of our earlier tours in Colombia from 2016, 2017 and 2018: Colombia 2016 Travel Report Colombia 2017 Travel Report Colombia 2018 Travel Report Why Colombia again?…
Lepanthes “Los Cedros” , a temporary name for a new species of miniature orchid we helped to discover on our trip. Photo by Ferdy Christant This is the 13th episode of wildlife travel by Henriette and Ferdy. A trip designed to satisfy our hunger to keep exploring the biodiversity of the Andes region, which we last visited in 2018 ( South Colombia / photos ): Colombia 2018 Travel Report In 2019, we…
The Big Hobby of the Tiny 1. Introduction Roughly one year ago, I involuntarily triggered a personal butterfly effect by dipping my toes into the field of extreme macro photography . An impulse action that has ballooned and escalated in ways I could not foresee. This article documents my extreme macro journey as well as my setup in such detail that it also is somewhat of an extreme macro mini…