Posts from Chris82

[EN] My personal power challenge goes on!

nobody@ipernity.com (Chris82) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 19:17:46 +0000

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Facts Year 1:

TV/Modem/Router/HiFi/Phone = 0,868 kWh / Day

Computer/Peripherials = 1,805 kWh / Day

Fridge = 0,545 kWh / Day

Cooking/Washing/Light/Others = 0,907 kWh / Day

Overall: 1505,625 kWh

Facts Year 2:

TV/Modem/Router/HiFi/Phone = 1,050 kWh / Day --- (Bad! I watched too much TV!)

Computer/Peripherials = 1,729 kWh / Day --- (Good! More sports, No quadratic eyes!)

Fridge = 0,444 kWh / Day --- (Perfect! Better use of the fridge lowers consumption!)

Cooking/Washing/Light/Others = 1,074 kWh / Day (Bad! Too much sports produces more sweaty clothes *gg*)

Overall: 1568,405 kWh (Ok, you can say overall I kept the level, but that's not the target!)

Planned for Year 3:

1. Stop watching TV! (Actually, I did so for the last 2 or 3 months already)

2. Stop using the PC when it isn't necessary. My notebook consumes a lot less energy!

3. Turn off Modem and Router at night and when PC is not in use, this alone will save around 117,53 kWh!

4. Make better use of lights to reduce light power consumption by at least 50 kWh (this will be tough though).

In year 3 I will reach a power consumption of <1200 kWh (planned) and in year 4 I will reach the target to reduce my yearly power consumption to 999 kWh or less!

How much energy do you use in your home per person every year? Let me know, I am interested!

[DE] Ich suche eine ganz bestimmte Foto Location rund um Berlin...

nobody@ipernity.com (Chris82) — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 20:31:57 +0000

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Also der Titel verrät ja schon viel... ich suche für eine ganz bestimmte Idee eine Foto Location die von Berlin aus per ÖPNV oder Fahrrad (max. 80 km Umland) gut zu erreichen ist. Also folgendes sollte auf die Location zutreffen.

Bachbett oder Fläche
Viele kleine Steine auf dem Boden (man muss sie hochheben können)
Optimal wäre links und rechts grün, ggf. Bäume
Perfekt wäre wenn man Richtung Westen freies Blickfeld hat

Danke im Vorraus für etwaige Tipps

[EN] Bored by Google Earth? Try WorldWide Telescope!

nobody@ipernity.com (Chris82) — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 18:53:12 +0000

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Just seen this great website in a demo about Microsoft Research and it looks really awesome. Instead of zooming in to planet Earth you can zoom in to infinity of space! You can even zoom in to Pluto and follow its movement live. No joke, you really see the planets moving. It's not really a live image of course because the data would be too huge but the photo is real and the movement is calculated. Try zooming in to the moon, the resolution is just... WOOOOOW!

Find it at http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/Home.aspx

[EN] What are you watching tonight?

nobody@ipernity.com (Chris82) — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 00:42:20 +0000

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Are you politically interested and watch the presidental election? Or another reason would be that you can't sleep and you need some boring numbers *g* Well, I know in Germany it's in the middle of the night, but I am just too curious what the outcome will be that I have CNN turned on (I think the only US channel you can trust) to see the results. I hope Obama wins Vote now it's not too late!! =)

Also checkout: edition.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/results/president

[DE] Musik zu humanen Preisen - aber wo?

nobody@ipernity.com (Chris82) — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 12:52:37 +0000

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Wollte mir mal wieder neue Musik zulegen (aber legal). Jetzt hab ich mal zu Music Load geschaut und mit erschrecken festgestellt, dass die 1,29 EUR für ein Lied haben wollen. Das ist doch krank! Da ist es ja billiger zu Mediamarkt um die Ecke zu gehen und da bekomme ich eine CD die ich beliebig oft, auf beliebig viele Medien kopieren kann, eine schöne Hülle mit Cover und hab gleich ein Offline Backup Medium. Wer kauft denn bitte ein 3-minütiges Musikstück für 1,29 EUR??? Oder besser grafragt wie soll man sich das leisten? Da zahle ich für eine halbe Stunde Musik schon weit über 10 EUR!!! Kennt zufällig jemand günstigere Musik Shops? Wollte mir z.B. das neue Album Masterplan von Stefanie Heinzmann kaufen... tolle Musik :-) (www.deezer.com/#music/album/109160).

[EN] Don't vote ;-)

nobody@ipernity.com (Chris82) — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 11:05:40 +0000

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Check out this great sarcastic video by some of the most famous Hollywood actresses and actors which should obvisouly encourage you to vote... it's funny to watch

www.youtube.com/5friendsvote

By the way if you don't know where to vote, go to www.maps.google.com/vote

I know this is "only" the US presidental election and the many Europeans here can't really influence that election, nevertheless it has a quite tremendous influence on us, so I hope the right decision is made this time. I'd personally vote for Obama, but not because I think he's the perfect president, it's because I think he's the better choice. I don't want another 4 years of McBush

[EN] No Ice At The North Pole This Summer

nobody@ipernity.com (Chris82) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 07:07:15 +0000

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Were you also thinking about where to sail with your boat this summer? Well, the north pole will be, for the first time in human history, the newest area of open water this summer. So pack your things

I hope no one needs an explanation why this is worrying and dramatic at once!

And yes I know that this has happened before human history, but then you should also know that before human history the earth' atmosphere and climate wouldn't even have allowed humans to have a history.

10,000 Visitors - Thank You!

nobody@ipernity.com (Chris82) — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 10:49:59 +0000

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I've seen quite a few of the "famous" 10,000 visitors posts and now I am glad to post my own. Thank you very much for all your comments, fav votes and kind words it really inspires me to take new photos and try out new photo styles :-) Also I am fascinated by the short time frame where I got so many visits, I am just a member for 4 months. Not even my Sandra Bullock fan website which is #2 at google.de has so many visits *ggg*

Thanks a lot and looking forward to the next 10k :-)

[EN/DE] New sharpening algorithm a little soft? Neuer Schärfungsalgorithmus ein bißchen weich?

nobody@ipernity.com (Chris82) — Thu, 22 May 2008 05:57:47 +0000

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Hi everyone! I have the feeling with some of my latest photos that the thumbnails look really soft due to the new sharpening algorithm. I am a fan of crisp and sharp shots and I don't really know yet wether I like it or not. What do you think? Did you notice this too?

Hallo! Ich hab das Gefühl, dass einige meiner neuesten Foto thumbnails ziemlich weich aussehen wegen des neuen Schärfungsalgorithmus. Ich bin ein Fan von sauberen und scharfen Fotos und bin mir noch nicht sicher ob ich die Neuerung mag oder nicht. Was denkt ihr? Habt ihr das auch schon bemerkt?

[EN] Save energy (and money) to buy a better lens ;-)

nobody@ipernity.com (Chris82) — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 19:05:06 +0000

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Since I am very interested in global warming and climate change discussions and in this area very green politically, I want to write down a few ways how to save a lot of energy and as a result also save quite a lot of money. In the examples I will use my personal price per kWh which is 19,8 Euro Cent for green energy by Greenpeace Energy e.V. :-) Naturstrom AG energy is a little cheaper but I prefer giving my money to Greenpeace because they reinvest all money into new environment friendly plants.

1) Stop buying 60W lamps or 30W halogen lamps and get a decent 10W energy saving lamp. I know they need a few minutes to reach their maximum brightness but you get used to that and with some age they reach their brightness almost instantly.

Example calculation: You use a light 4 hours a day and 340 days of the year. With a 60W lamp this is a total power consumption (TPC) of 81,6 kWh / year. With a 30W lamp your TCP is still 40,8 kWh / year. With the energy saving lamp you just need 13,6 kWh / year. Now when you look at the cost you don't pay 15,99 EUR or 8 EUR but only 2,67 EUR / year. This also clearly shows that the 4 EUR you pay for a energy saving lamp is totally worth it compared to the 1 EUR standard lamp.

Saving Potential: 83%.

2) Buy at least energy and efficiency class A products for your kitchen. A+ and A++ products are usually too expensive compared to the little energy you save. If you have well working B products which are not older than 10 years buying a new stove, dishwasher, freezer etc. will not be immediately worth the money but after a few years you will start saving money. If you have a class C or worse product it's probably time to change or return it if you just bought it. Since especially fridges may contain hazardous material don't just through them away, they require special garbage treatment.

3) Buy energy effienct PSUs if you use a Personal Computer. An average low cost OEM power supply for a Personal Computer like it is in many premade PCs has a power efficiency of around 75% (assumption). This means you put in 100% while your PC only uses 75% of that energy, wasting a quarter of the energy you use up! An energy efficient high quality PSU like the Corsair HSX has an efficiency of around 88% with an average PC.

Example calculation: Your PC requires 100 watts in idle and 160 watts under full load (you have that with a mid-range Core 2 Duo and a mid-range graphics card with intelligent power management) so with the inefficient PSU you actually use 133,5 watts in idle and 214 watts under full load while the high quality PSU only requires 114 watts in idle and 182 watts under full load resulting in savings of 19,5 to 32 watts. Assuming your PC is turned on 6 hours on 300 days of the year and runs 90% in idle and 10% under full load (a normal system is in idle mode most of the time) your bill with the bad PSU would be: 50,45 EUR for 254,79 kWh while with the good PSU you'd only pay: 43 EUR for 217,44 kWh. The "little" savings here show you that replacing a PSU is not necessarily a good thing, you should rather buy the components on your own and put the computer together yourself, you save money this way and only get the components you want and no 50 in 1 card reader nonsense that just crashes your system ;-).

Savings Potential: 14,8%.

4) Even better don't use a personal computer but use a notebook. They are so cheap already that they can easily compete with PCs and they require only 60-80 watts under load even for highend models. In idle they are even more efficient because the mobile CPUs and GPUs have better power management.

5) Turn off your TV damn it! I really mean it, you might think it is turned off but I bet that 98% of you just switch it off using the remote control instead of the TV power switch. This wastes a good 10 watts for your "turned off" TV resulting in costs of 16,48 EUR when your TV is turned off 95% of the time besides that you waste 82,22 kWh which is around 7,5% of the power consumption of a single household in an appartment. By the way, did you know that if all people in Germany would do this we could immediately shut down a complete nuclear plant wasting our environment for thousands of years?

6) Don't be an internet junkie. There are modems, routers, switches, cables, servers all around the world and all of that requires more or less energy to work. It's not easy to calculate how much energy is consumed by a website visit but it's more than you think. Especially things like Google Searches are a power hog as Google uses thousands of servers to achieve such fast search results. So what do we learn from that, use small topic based search engines and don't hit refresh 20 times on your ipernity frontpage to see what's new within 5 minutes ;-). I know this isn't your energy you waste there but you do good to our environment by saving some more and the title to save the energy just to buy a new lens isn't that serious anyway!

7) Use public transport or a bike if possible. I know some people need a car because they live far away from the next train station or city, so they have an excuse. But what about someone living in Berlin who drives 10 minutes to work every day by car? It's a waste of fuel which is very expensive, you have to pay taxes for your car, and it also has to be checked by the vendor every year or so which isn't free either. Since I sold my car I didn't only save 300 EUR of fuel costs I had every year but also around 1500 EUR the checks and repairs had cost every year. You can never ever pay so much for public transport in any city unless you do it on purpose :p. In Berlin there are few places where you can travel a lot faster by car than you can by train, bus, subway or bike.

8) Hmmm what else, well make your suggestions and post your thoughts about this topic. Feel free to tell me why saving energy is complete nonsense as well if you think so :-). I showed some rather special and some more or less general ways to save energy here so let's see what you can come up with :-)

[EN] Post Processing - Yes or No?

nobody@ipernity.com (Chris82) — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 15:43:16 +0000

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I heard from a few people already the question: Why are you post processing your photos so much? Well, the reason for me is pretty simple. If you want to see the real thing you have to be there. No matter how good of a photographer you are or how good your equipment is, a photo will never show you the smell or the temperature around a place, or a nice breeze blowing in your face when you stand on a high building, or the sun shining on your back when you watch a sculpture lit in the evening sun. That's all not possible, but what is possible in digital photography is to dive into a world beyond the real world. For example with high dynamic range (HDR) photography you can show a wide range of details you won't see with your eyes. Also long exposure night shots or simple black & white photography is something your eye doesn't offer. So in my opinion post processing is nothing bad, it just gives you a different view of the things you can't have when standing their for real :-)

P.S. I don't want to say that you have to post-process every photo, I don't do that either, I just wanted to answer that question I was asked so often lately :-)

[EN/DE] How to sharpen your photos the high pass style!

nobody@ipernity.com (Chris82) — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 09:25:58 +0000

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A little front- or backfocus or too low light for a good focus, we all know that. When we see a photo on our computer then we often think that it could be a little sharper. Simply using Photoshop filters like "Smart Sharpen" doesn't really do any good to your photos though.

This is a little guide of a better way to sharpen your photos (using Photoshop):

1) Open the photo you want to sharpen.

2) Copy the complete photo to a new temp file (no new layer here please and no need to save it).

3) Click Image > Mode > Lab Colour on the menu.

4) Click Filters > Other > High Pass. You will see a pretty grey photo now but don't worry that's normal. I usually chose values between 2 and 5 (higher value sharpens more, but don't exaggerate here) depending on the photo I edit. The more details there are the lower value I choose usually to avoid sharpening artifacts. I don't recommend a value above 10 but you can play with the slider yourself and check out the results.

5) Click Image > Mode > Greyscale and say yes to discarding colour informaion. This eliminates colour noise in your photo.

6) Click Image > Mode > RGB (Skip this step if your original photo is Greyscale).

7) Copy the temporary photo you applied the high pass filter to back to your original photo as the top layer.

8) In the layer properties either choose "Soft Light" or "Hard Light" which is about equal to "Sharpen" and "Sharpen More".

Alternatively you can do these steps only with a small area of the photo instead of the complete photo to sharpen only parts of it, e.g. the eye of a person.

In my opinion this little more complicated way than simply using the Sharpen Filter gives you way better results for a small effort!

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Die Wichtigen Schritte auf Deutsch:

Dies ist eine kurze Anleitung wie du deine Fotos schärfer machen kannst (mit Photoshop):

1) Öffne das Foto, das du schärfen möchtest.

2) Kopier das komplette Foto in eine neue temporäre Datei (eine neue Ebene genügt hier nicht, du musst das neue Bild aber auch nicht speichern)

3) Klicke im Menü auf Bild > Modus > Labor Farbe

4) Klicke auf Filter > Sonstige Filer > Hochpass. Du siehst jetzt ein ziemlich graues Foto, aber nicht wundern das ist normal. Ich wähle für gewöhnlich Werte zwischen 2 und 5 (größere Werte schärfen mehr, aber man sollte es nicht übertreiben) je nach Foto das ich editiere. Je mehr Details im Foto vorhanden sind, je geringer wähle ich die Werte im Artefakte durch das Schärfen zu vermeiden. Ich empfehle keine Werte über 10 zu verwenden, aber jeder sollte selbst einmal mit dem Regler spielen um das Ergebnis zu sehen.

5) Klicke auf Bild > Modus > Graustufen und bestätige das verwerfen der Farbinformationen. Das eliminiert das Farbrauschen im Foto.

6) Klicke auf Bild > Modus > RGB (Diesen Schritt kann man überspringen wenn das ursprüngliche Bild sowieso schon in Graustufen ist)

7) Kopiere das temporäre Bild zurück in das Original Bild und füge es dort als oberste Ebene ein.

8) In den Ebeneneinstellungen wähle jetzt entweder "Weiches Licht" oder "Hartes Licht" was in etwa "Scharfzeichnen" und "Stark Scharfzeichnen" entspricht".

[DE] Neue Gruppe für Graz Besucher :-)

nobody@ipernity.com (Chris82) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 21:32:55 +0000

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Da es hier zu allen möglichen Städten schon Gruppen gibt, mein Geburtsort Graz aber noch fehlt, habe ich jetzt mal eine Gruppe erstellt. Man findet sie unter der leicht zu merkenden URL http://graz.group.ipernity.com/

Wenn ihr also schon mal in Graz wart, könnt ihr dort eure Bilder hinzufügen :-) würde mich sehr freuen. Solltet ihr noch nicht in Graz gewesen sein, na dann auf geht's einen schönen Überblick über die Stadt und die Umgebung gibt http://www.graztourismus.at

[DE] Warum feiern wir Ostern eigentlich schon so früh?

nobody@ipernity.com (Chris82) — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 00:41:41 +0000

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Die Frage habe ich mir bisher ja nicht gestellt, aber die Sendung die das heute im Radio erklärt hat, hat daraus eine interessante Geschichte gemacht. Also... es war einmal der liebe Herr Gauss (der allen Mathematikern bekannt ist oder sein sollte ), der seine Mutter fragte: "Du Mama, wann bin ich eigentlich geboren?". Und diese antwortete ihm nur "Im April 1777". Da ihm das aber nicht genau genug war, er aber wusste 1 Woche nach Ostern geboren zu sein, wollte er sich nun den Tag überlegen an dem er geboren war. Da Ostern aber immer an einem anderen Tag ist, war dass gar nicht so einfach und konnte ein einfaches Gemüt bei der Berechnung schon zumbringen *g*

Nach einer ganzen Weile hat er also diese Formel errechnet:

a = X mod 19

b = X mod 4

c = X mod 7

k = X div 100

p = (8*k + 13) div 25

q = k div 4

M = (15 + k - p - q) mod 30

N = (4 + k - q) mod 7

d = (19*a + M) mod 30

e = (2*b + 4*c + 6*d + N) mod 7

ostern = 22 + d + e

Ausnahmen:

I. Falls d + e = 35, dann ostern = 50.

II. Falls d = 28 und e = 6 und (11*M + 11) mod 30 < 19, dann ostern = 49.

Und weil diese Formel (eigentlich ein Algorithmus) so genial war gilt sie heute noch. Nun sollten wir noch festhalten, das Ostern dieses Jahr bereits am 23. März ist (22. März ist das frühest mögliche Datum) und das nur sehr selten vorkommt. Das nächste mal erst im Jahre 2160. Also schön feiern, denn so ein frühes Ostern erleben wir wahrscheinlich nicht wieder.

Hiermiet allen Ipernianern und auch sonst allen Frohe Ostern!! :-)

[EN] New URI for my Ipernity page!

nobody@ipernity.com (Chris82) — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 13:29:09 +0000

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I was lucky and got http://chris82.ipernity.com as a shortcut to my profile so it's easier to remember my page

[EN] Hello Ipernity

nobody@ipernity.com (Chris82) — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 10:39:39 +0000

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Photography is one of my hobbies for many years but I never joined any of those photo communities. Actually there's no good reason for it. Last christmas I got a Canon 400D which is a nice lightweight SLR and this weekend was the time for the first real photo tour I went on. There was an Ipernity Meeting in Berlin which Stargazer told me about and I have to say it was real fun to walk around the city. I live in Berlin for a few years already but I've never been to the East Side Gallery for example where we went to on Sunday . So hope to meet some people again who can show me the best places for nice pictures!

See you guys...