Skip to content

Category: Matthias Welwarsky

Published on Leave a comment on ur iphone, ur holdin eet wrong

You know, when the new iPhone 4 was shown to the world, The Steve raved about how the sleek design was achieved by totally making the antennas part of frame. I scratched my head and said to myself, wow, if this works it'll be quite an achievement. Antennas don't like touching. Especially not near the ends where the electric field builds up.

Now, looks like I was too pessimistic about the matter. Of course the antennas do work. You just need to always hold the phone in your right hand. And be cautious where the pinky finger goes. No, NOT right there.

The response of Apple to this matter is just hilarious, as Engadget notes.

Published on Leave a comment on Tour Eiffel

Tour Eiffel
Originally uploaded by thinkfat

On Sunday evening Eva and I returned from a long weekend in Paris. We went there with our friends Andrea and Sergio to spend some time in Paris for leisure and to take photos, of course. Sergio and I also went on a night tour with a photo guide, Gilles, who showed us around and gave tips for nice motives in the City of Lights.

I will be posting some photos on my flickr account during the next days.
Enjoy!

Published on Leave a comment on Carnival Monday Marathon

P1120749.JPG
Originally uploaded by thinkfat

I like carnival parades! There's no other opportunity to take photos of smiling people, enjoying themselves, in colorful costumes, actually wanting to be seen.

This was my second year joining the crowd in Mayence during the Carnival Monday parade. I love to go there. It is a relaxed and joyful atmosphere and you can get really close to the people, interacting with them. The security is minimal, everybody is just having fun and does not mind a photographer running across the street, diving into the parade, taking images like crazy.

I used only the 45-200 zoom and it did not disappoint. It's fast to focus, light and sharp and the OIS really helps. I filled three memory cards with almost 1000 photos. The set on flickr contains approximately 120 images which I liked most. Many of them are Jpegs right out of the camera, just resized for presentation, some I had to lay hands on, some were developed from RAW.

Come, see and enjoy!

Published on Leave a comment on Good Food: Ngoc Lan

In a previous post I ranted against a local "Subways" shop as a prime example for bad food in Darmstadt. I want to share an example for good food today.

Asian restaurants are often laden with kitschy decoration and the menu is mainstreamed to comfort the local taste. Also you have the same dishes with only small variations everywhere. Traditional style cooking is rarely found anywhere.

A very nice example of stylish interior and excellent cooking is the "Ngoc Lan", small Vietnamese restaurant located a bit outside the city centre. You find it at the corner of Bismarkstraße and Steubenplatz, see the map embedded below.


Größere Kartenansicht

We come here once every while and the quality of the food is always great. The cooking is very traditional compared to the standard issue Asia Kim or Dong Dong in more prominent areas of the town. Well cooked, spicy and with fresh herbs, the menu lists many unique meals very different from the usual "fried noodles with chicken/pork/beef". A selection of well mixed, fruity Cocktails can be had as well.

The single room is bright and nicely decorated, calm in minimalist way but not frugal. Go there after dark to experience the full effect of the lighting. There is parking space behind the restaurant, about 15 places in the lot. No need to make a reservation, in fact we never found more than a couple of tables occupied whenever we came there. Which is a pity, because it means it won't stay open for much longer. So go there and enjoy before the place closes for good.

Published on Leave a comment on Pockets Picked in Paris

Apart from the obvious Pun, this is what unfortunately happened to me a few days ago. I was buying some snack before entering the train back home at Paris Gare de l'Est and was probably spotted tucking my wallet away. I put it in an outside jacket pocket, a circumstance that immediately retaliated itself as I stood waiting by the platform for my colleagues to arrive.

I was approached by an Asian looking women of middle age and asked for the train to Basel. It struck me odd to be asked for this for my obviously tourist look (after all I was carrying a backpack and a camera bag) but not odd enough to raise my suspicion. While talking to the woman, which took a good amount of time I felt something brush my backpack but again it did not alarm me enough to make me look around. I think I was set up with a classic distraction manoeuvre to give the thief opportunity to pick the wallet from my pocket. It can not have taken him/her more than a couple of seconds despite the pocket being zipped shut.

I did not notice the loss before the conductor asked for my ticket, a good while after the train left the station. I was baffled, but quickly recovered and phoned the emergency hotline of my bank to have the banking and credit cards suspended, avoiding additional financial losses apart from some cash that was in my wallet.

Still, I've now lost my ID, drivers license, credit and banking cards and a couple of other documents that can all be replaced, still there is a significant amount of time and money to be spent now to have them all back. Definitely gives you a sour taste being ripped off like this.

What to learn from this? Crowded places should keep you alert. Strangers approaching you should make you look around for other strangers standing close. Wallets should not be kept in outward pockets. Documents should be kept apart from the money to limit the damage and the amount of time to spend recovering from the loss.

2

Published on 2 Comments on Don’t be evil, but a little dense, maybe?

Look what the cat just brought in. Holy cow. Only miscreants and evil-doers fear Google tapping their into their privacy, but the Righteous have nothing to worry about. And it's all the governments fault, anyway.

But this doesn't come as a surprise, does it? Google is an information broker so how can they share anyones concern about information not being another good to sell. However, it's primarily information about people that they collect to drive their advertisement business. This is hardly neutral goods.

I'm wondering if with all this business background Google can still be the best resource when it comes to Internet research. Either the web complexity has grown to a point where they cannot come up with good search results any more or they weigh the results too much towards what their customers think you should be seeing, anyway I found it's becoming increasingly difficult to have good search results with Google. Too many hits are on proxy sites that just pretend to have the keywords you look for and instead reflect to some shady online shops claiming to sell "cold fusion energy cheap"?

Published on Leave a comment on So Google has their own DNS now

Google announces their own public DNS now. Some seem to think it's a good move and a fundamental threat to ISPs who are diluting the neutrality of the net. However, I tend to side with the conspirationalists who see it as an attempt of Google to gather even more information about what people do online.

Using the Google DNS you basically allow them insight into any connection your PC performs while it is online. Not about the data exchanged, but at least about what other computers you are connecting to, and not just during web browsing, but also email, instant messaging, chatting, peer-to-peer networking and so forth.

Of course my ISP provides their own DNS and uplink routers are normally configured to use the ISP DNS servers, but I bet Google's Chrome OS will by default use Googles DNS. Guess what I'm not going to use on my private machines.

Now, unfortunately ISPs are known to tamper with DNS queries of their users. If you ever tried to surf a non-existing site you probably found your browser displaying some "navigation aiding" by courtesy of your friendly Internet provider. While meant to be helpful towards their users it bears a threat as well. There you have an infrastructure which is specifically built to intercept connection attempts. While I can't say I actually appreciate this, the way Google harvests data is seriously creeping me out just as much.

Published on Leave a comment on Some photos from the summer

I only recently found time to process and upload some photos I took during our summer holiday this year. Instead of going abroad we decided to travel Germany, there are quite a few places we've never been. This year we went East, visiting Thuringia and Saxony. I've uploaded a selection to Flickr, with more to come. Enjoy today some impressions collected visiting Dresden, which marked the end point of our journey.

Published on Leave a comment on Control is an illusion?

In a recent interview with the Digital Photography Review web magazine a Nokia representative talks about convergence devices like the N86 mobile phone incorporating an 8MP digital still camera and aiming to replace digital compact cameras in many peoples' pockets. Read the story here.

Seemingly unrelated, The Register has an article about a provider in the United Arab Emirates pushing a trojan horse program as a software update to their customers Blackberry smart phones. The sting was only accidentally discovered and if anything can be learned from that, it is that stuff like that is not just overheated imagination of a few conspiracy theorists but happening right now under our very eyes.

This got me thinking. Do I really want all those features crammed into a connected device I have no control over? Each and every feature requires me to provide more, sensitive information. Phone books are no longer just phone books but store email and postal addresses of my contacts. browsers store web site credentials, Ebay, not to mention PayPal accounts. All my data under the reign of a software that can be changed at any time, without me even noticing.

I may want my camera be a camera, and my mobile phone be just that and nothing else.

Published on Leave a comment on Canon vs Tokina 135mm lens shoot out

A couple of days ago I acquired an old Canon A1 SLR camera. Someone was selling off old photo equipment on Ebay and so with the camera came a small collection of four lenses. One of them is a Tokina 135mm f2.8 telephoto. It's quite an impressive item, looking much sturdier mechanically than its Canon FD counterpart. It's made of all aluminium, even the aperture ring is made of metal. It feels quite heavy in your hand and appears to have been well treated since there is no apparent sign of wear. Since I also own the Canon lens, I started wondering which of the two to sell. Casual shooting with both lenses on the G1 didn't reveal major differences in image quality so I did a series of shots under more challenging conditions.

The following photos show performance of both lenses while taking images of a church in my home town against the bright sky before sunset. The sun is hidden behind a cloud layer just outside to the right of the frame on the G1, on a 35mm film camera it would still be inside the frame.

The photos taken with the Tokina are always on the left side. They start at f8 and go up to f2.8, the maximum aperture for both. The lenses feature a built-in hood, it was used while taking the photos but of course for a factor-two crop sensor it's not deep enough. The images were taken as RAW files and then developed without any sharpening or other corrections applied. They were downscaled for presentation and 100% crops of two interesting areas patched on.

Tokina f8 Canon f8

As you can see, at f8 there is not much difference between both lenses. If you look at the 100% crops, there is a slight advantage for the Canon, but it's not obvious. There is a difference in color tone, but I cannot say if its a difference of the lens or just subtle changes in the lighting conditions.

Tokina f5.6 Canon f5.6

At f5.6 the difference is more noticeable. While the Canon lens shows almost no degradation in sharpness and contrast, the photo taken with the Tokina is becoming a little soft with a very slight amount of CA, but it's still pretty good.

Tokina f4 Canon f4

The trend continues at f4, the gap between Tokina and Canon is getting wider. The Canon now starts to show a little softness and a bit of CA, but its overall still pretty good.

Tokina f2.8 Canon f2.8

At f2.8, the Tokina shows a significant loss of contrast and increased softness. Color seams appear around back-lit areas. The Canon has also lost some of the sharpness and contrast it displays at smaller apertures, but its a lot better than its Tokina counterpart.

Summing up, I found the Tokina lens to be performing quite well under most conditions. A challenging environment like strong light sources just outside of the frame requires stopping down to f4 or f5.6 for good image quality. The Canon 135mm however proves to be an excellent lens with good results even wide open.