In the beginning of 2008 Bubli and I found a little plush rabbit in the forest around the Tiergarten in Nürnberg. It was hanging from a tree and looked a little bit lost there and so we took him with us to take care of him and Bubli took him to Prague then where she lives. There Adam, that’s the name Bubli gave him, got homesick and so she send him on a journey to Nürnberg as a geocaching Travelbug. The journey started on the 29.06.2008 and ended last weekend on the 6.12.2008 when we got him back on a geocaching event on Nürnberg’s Christkindlesmarkt. He traveled exactly 877,8km and was for example in Munich and Dresden before he reached his final destination in our hands again in Nürnberg. The complete journey log can be read here.
I’m wondering how long it takes until he’ll get bored here and wants to travel again

Last friday was a public holiday in Germany and so a friend and I decided to do a long weekend trip to Brussels in Belgium. We arrived on thursday evening in Brussels at the railway station Brussels North when it was raining cats and dogs. After a few minutes walk we arrived at our hotel which was located quite central, so that we were able to reach a lot of interesting places by feet like the Comic museum, the Musees Royaux des Beaux Arts, the Kathedrale St-Michel and of course the Grand Place. Besides some museum visits we did nice sightseeing and a little delicious shopping for fries and chocolate.
On sunday we took a train to Brugge which takes about 1 hour from Brussels and is a really nice little town with impressive buildings and romantic walks. Unfortunately it was raining all day so exploring the city was impressive but also very wet.
On monday it was time to say goodbye to Brussels - at least for my friend because she had a flight, while I needed to take a train (long story). I say “I wanted to” because the belgian public transport was on a strike and there were no trains arriving or leaving Brussels. Not even international ones. My only chance was to take a hotel again for another night and leave on the next day and so I did.

Since I own the Nokia N82 mobile phone I was curious to see how the built in camera would compete with my Canon 10D DSLR. Of course I did not expect that the N82 would have any chance at all so it was more a just for fun comparison than a real contest. I did not want to do any post processing of the pictures and so I shot JPG photos with the 10D with slightly bumped up contrast and sharpness. I increased that on the cell phone too which was a mistake, because the photos came out too colorful but anyway, it was no laboratory test but just for fun. The cell phone has an aperture range from 2.8 to 5.6 but I could not see which aperture was used when I was taking the photos. So I nailed the DSLR to F4 which is the widest aperture for that lens I used (Canon EF 17-40@4L) and the worst picture quality then.
The focal length of the mobile camera is 5.6mm which compares to 35mm on a full frame sensor and to about 22mm on the Canon 10D.
First of all, lets see how the sensor sizes of the two devices compare to each other. The Canon EOS 10D has an APS-C CMOS sensor with 6MP while the Nokia has a 1/2.5” CMOS sensor with 5MP. Size wise they compare like this:

As you can see, the surface of the N82 sensor fits multiple times into the size of the 10D sensor while the megapixels are nearly the same (5MP vs 6MP). That should lead into a lot more noise in theory and it really does in practice too
On the left side you can see the 10D version and on the right side the Nokia N82 one. If you click on the photos you can see a full size version of the pictures. Here we go ...


Something that you can even notice on the thumbnails is, that the photos taken with the mobile are a lot more colorful and with more contrast and might even look better. That immediately changes when you look at the full size pictures. The cell phone creates a terrible noise in the sky and the dynamic range does not even come close to the one from the Canon 10D. You can see that in the shadows on the first and last picture and in the highlights on the second one. A lot of details in the shadows and highlights are getting lost on the photos of the Nokia N82 compared to the ones from the Canon DSLR.
Something else that you cannot notice on the thumbnails is, that the depth of field on the cell phone is a lot larger than the one of the DSLR. If you want a blurry background to accent the main motive you always need a DSLR. The trees in the background on photo number two are blurry on the DSLR and sharp on the cell phone and it’s the same with the background in the hedgehog photo.
When you compare those photos you might come to the conclusion that the DSLR photos look a bit dull compared to the cell phone photos. That’s in the nature of DSLR cameras because they are very cautious when it comes to sharpening, saturation or contrast, to not destroy information in the photo like drown shadows or pulled out highlights. You can see some post processing here and here.
Well, all in all the cell phone did a way better job than I expected and on photo number three even as good as many compact cameras from my point of view but of course at the end it cannot compete with a DSLR (that costs a lot more by the way and cannot lead you to a geocache like the cell phone did after that little photo session ).

I wrote a blog entry about the N82 and Mac OS in the PC/Mac section already. Today I wanted to test the GPS capabilities of my new toy by finding a geocache. You can read more about geocaching here. In short, it’s about finding hidden little (or sometimes even big) “treasures”, so called Caches, via GPS. There is a page www.geocaching.com where all caches are collected with their GPS coordinates and short description. So what I did was, I downloaded a free geocaching application called Geocachenavigator and installed it on my cell phone. Then I went to geocaching.com and looked for a cache in my environment. I found one and started the music player and then the geocaching application on my phone to enter the Cache id. Geocachenavigator is opening a connection to geocaching.com then to get the exact coordinates of the cache and told me it’s about 2,8km away from my current position. So I started to walk following the compass the cell phone was showing me (the photos are just examples and not real screenshot of my cell phone).

When I came close to the cache I switched from Compass mode to Radar Mode, which is way better when you are close. It tells you with the precision of one or two meters where to go. When it showed 0m to me, I started to look around where it can be. I was standing on the side of a bridge

After looking around for about 20 minutes, interrupted by people asking me if I lost anything or so while I was crawling under that bridge, I finally found it! Yay! You can see a little movie of my success when you click on the photo above. The movie is taken with the cell phone too of course. This was my first cache at all as a geocacher with an own GPS and stupid unexperienced as I am, I had no pen with me to sign the log that was in the cache ... anyway, it was fun.

Maybe hardcore geocachers have a different opinion but from my point of view you can use the N82 for geocaching quite well. In my case I had no clouds and no big trees coverings the satellites though. Maybe it’s tougher for the built in GPS receiver with a covered sky but since I even have GPS in my living room when I’m close to the window, I think it should work in a forest too if you don’t have a totally covered sky.

*wow* I was really lazy in the last view month. Okay, here is a new blog entry.
I’m back from my two week vacation in france. My stages were Metz, Paris, Orleans, Clermont Ferrand (Royat), Nimes, Avignon and Lyon. Here are just a view impressions....


it was around 3300km with a rented car and it’s really unbelievable how people drive in Paris. I’d never drive with a car into the center again and I think without the navigation system we would still sit in the car and drive through paris now.
The vacation was a lot of sightseeing in the cities but also a bit of hiking and even a bath in the mediterranean sea - very interesting and way too much to list all I’ve seen here.

I bought about 10 new CDs during the last few weeks. Some samplers and some new projects I had discovered. Here are three of them that are really worth to mention them:

Pride and Fall - In My Time Dying
That album is very harmonious from the beginning to the end. I don't know the first two releases of them but this third album is full of really excellent stuff. It's dark but I would not call it depressive, even though you can hear that the band had a very tough time during the creation of the album and that they put a lot of their suffering (divorce, suicide of a friend, the dying dependent label,...) into their songs. I already liked In My Time Dying after the first time listening which often is an indication for me that I'll get bored by it soon - not so in this case. It's getting better each time listening.
The song "Blood" is available for free here.

Edge of Dawn - Enjoy the Fall
That project was a recommendation I got on last.fm by another user (thanx again Winnowill) and it's a side project of Seabound which is a very impressive band too but I still like Edge of Dawn a bit more because it's a bit darker and rougher than the Seabound songs and I believe I can hear more passion in the EoD songs. The text writer and lead singer is a psychiatrist and the lyrics are really worth a closer look.
You can listen to the song "Damage" for free to get an impression.

Dismantled - When I'm Dead
This is the latest and the last album of Dismantled, because the mastermind behind it decided stop making electronic music and turned to something more in the indie rock area. I discovered the project on amazon, because a lot of people who bought CDs that I already have bought Dismantled too. It was a good decision. It took me a few times listening but now I can't get some of those songs out of my head. It's hard for me to compare it to something else even though I had Marilyn Manson in my mind during the first minutes but that was wrong. Dismantled has it's own sound.
The song "Start Digging" is available here

Happy New Year!

a friend is going for vacation over christmas were she can not take her dog with her. So I have the pleasure to take care of Bimo for a few days.
He is quite an old man already and there seems to be nothing that can agitate him - not my horrible doorbell, not the yelling kids in the stairwell, not the barking rat in the park that pretends to be a dog too. Nothing. He is always cool.

After more than 30 month of usage the battery of my Archos Gmini 400 MP3 player went dead and I had to make a decision - either paying 230€ for an iPod Classic, paying 90€ for an Archos Gmini XS202s (quite similar to my current player but less features) or trying to repair the old player by exchanging the battery which would cost me 20€ and some work because the player is not designed to change the battery.
Since I actually planned to buy my next player when 30GB flash memory players are available, I went the third way and ordered a battery at eBay.
As you can see on the pictures, the surgery was a success and took just a few minutes. I hope the new battery will last until a 30GB flash player becomes available

Covenant has released a DVD set of their Skyshaper Tour which was about 18 month touring from russia to europe and then to america (north and south). The DVD set consists of 2 DVDs and 1 CD.

DVD1: A road movie of the tour. You get impressions on how some songs were created and the ideas behind them, what the artists do when they are not on stage (I was very impressed by the sound diary of the lead singer - storing sounds instead of text or pictures) and how they clean their tour bus. Between the interviews you can see some snippets of the live concerts.

DVD2: This is called a bonus DVD but thats pure understatement. It contains 13 live songs played in Köln (germany) + 3 bonus songs from the WGT 2004 in Leipzig (germany). That DVD alone is something other bands would sell as a full priced live DVD.

CD: is a live CD but a different collection of songs than you can find on the DVD.

I was not able to find a free mp3 sample but there are a few songs on myspace.com (also known as the biggest collection of ugly homepages ever seen on earth. Really. I never saw a personal homepage there that had at least a tininess of style).
Anyway, you can hear the song 20Hz there too, which is one of my favourite Covenant songs.

Diary of Dreams has released their 14th album (if I counted it right).
It's the third part of a trilogie started in 2004 with Nigredo, continued in 2005 with MenschFeind and finished now with Nekrolog 43. The album is dark. It's not only dark from the inside but also from the outside. The CD is black on both sides (you can see that on the left picture below, which shows the underside of the CD). I bought the limited edition which is limited to 5500 copies and comes in a so called Ecolbook (never heared that word before) which is a small hardcover book with more than 30 pages of really cool photos, a prologue, the lyrics and of course the CD with a run time of more than 70 minutes.
The album is a lot calmer than Nigredo or MenschFeind and it's not that easy to approach to it. It took me four times listening to it until I discovered it's brilliance. They do music to pull and guide you through a different world for a while. It can be very relaxing to let yourself fall into that - if you are in the right mood.

Hope dies last they say. I beg they are right.

Unfortunately I did not find a free sample of any of the Nekrolog 43 songs, so here is remixed version of Giftraum from the Nigredo album.

last thursday was a public holiday and so I took vacation on friday and monday and travelled to Florence with a friend of mine. She has already been there once but for me it was new. I've been in Venice once but that sums my Italy experiences up already.
First I had doubts about the weather and temperature in november but it was more than perfect. We had 18-20 degrees and sunshine all the time and the vacation was a perfect mixture of hiking in the beautiful landscape of the Toscana and gazing the art and architecture in Florence. We had only a few days and that is actually not enough to see everything but here is what we saw besides our hiking tours:

• Florence Oldtown incl. Cathedral, Ponte Vocchio, Santa Maria Novella, ...
• Giardino di Boboli which is an extremely beautiful and huge garden in Florence
• Gallery Uffizi (tons of sculptures and oil paintings)
• the birthplace of Leonardo da Vinchi in Vinchi (about 30 minutes away from Florence via train)
• Leonardo da Vinchi museum in Vinchi (30 minutes by feet from his birthplace)
• Fiesole Musei an archeological excavation in Fiesole (about 20 minutes by bus from Florence)

Have you ever wondered what a MacBook would see if it's looking through it's built-in webcam into a mirror? Looking at what it sees?
Okay, maybe you did not but I did ...

I'm back from my business trip to Prague
To sum things up, hotel was great, food was very good, workshop was interesting, weather was nice. Nice town, great people - I'm looking forward to be in Prague again!
Unfortunately I had no time to take photos and so the only thing I can show is that nice little mole guy below, that Katarina gave me as a gift.
Very cute and meaningful too but that's an insider. Thanx Katarina, I'm very touched.

A friend of mine and I decided to use the nice weather to do the long planned shooting of her horse Cedric.
Well, I have to admit I don't have a lot of experience in taking photos of "running away" models and so I tried a lot of panning pictures. I don't have any experience with that too and so I produced some nice megabytes of blurred trash. Below you can see one of the better panning pictures.
The shooting was really fun, even though the pictures will never make it into the National Geographics magazine. Maybe next time

mind.in.a.box released their third album and surprise, surprise, it's awesome.
While I still like their first release (Lost Alone) the most, Crossroads is close to their debut (quality-wise, not sound-wise)
Like each MIAB album it takes some time to soak through, from your ears into your soul but once it's there, it has a steady place.
Here is the club version of amnesia, one of their new songs.