Je mehr desto besser?

Der Hype um immer hochauflösendere Fotos und Videos nimmt auch heutzutage noch nicht ab. Kameras verkaufen sich nur, wenn sie möglichst viele Megapixel aufwarten. Genauso verhält es sich mit den Videoaufahmegeräten. HD und Full-HD sind dabei die Zauberwörter.

Je mehr desto besser – das ist aber nur zum Teil richtig, denn eine hohe Auflösung hilft auch nicht weiter, wenn die dahintersteckende Optik minderwertig ist.

Wohin mit den Daten?

Schon lange lohnt es sich gar nicht mehr seine Dateien auf CDs oder DVDs zu brennen, denn da passt einfach viel zu wenig drauf. Durchschnittliche Digitalbilder sind ca. 1,5 MB groß. Auf eine CD passen etwa 700 MB, also ist Platz für knapp 450 Bilder. Eine Standard-DVD fasst ca. 7 mal so viel wie eine CD.

Eigentlich eine ganz tolle Sache, denn da passt der ganze Urlaub schön sortiert auf eine Scheibe.

Warum nicht brennen?

Das Problem mit diesen brennbaren Datenträgern ist allerdings, dass die Datenbeständigkeit unterirdisch ist. Die Hersteller versprechen Haltbarkeiten von vielen Jahren.

Meine Erfahrung – und ja, auch mit Markenrohlingen – zeigen das genaue Gegenteil. Nach etwa 1-5 Jahren war von meinen gesicherten Bits und Bytes nicht mehr viel übrig. Von anderen habe ich ähnliche Schaudergeschichten gehört.

Wohin dann?

Externe Festplatten sind bestens geeignet, um große Datenmengen auch dauerhaft zu sichern. Sie brauchen wenig Stauraum, lassen sich bequem am Computer via USB oder Firewire anstöpseln, sind als Datenträger verfügbar und das Kopieren geht rasend schnell.

Außerdem kann man auf Festplatten nicht mehr benötigte Daten einfach löschen – versuch das mal bei einer DVD.

Eine externe Platte mit einem Terabyte erhält man deutlich unter 100 Euro und darauf passen dann ganz grob überschlagen 700.000 Bilder.

Bildgrößen

Die Größeneinheit für Bilder ist in der digitalen Welt in Pixeln angegeben. Ein Pixel entspricht einem Bildpunkt den, man auf dem Bildschirm sehen kann. Damit wäre das Bild aber nur schwarz-weiß, daher gibt es noch eine Farbtiefe, die dann angibt wieviel Bits ein Pixel enthält um einen farbigen Punkt darzustellen.

Gängige Farbtiefen, sicherlich auch bekannt aus der Bildschirmauflösung des Computerbildschirms sind

• 8 Bit mit 256 Farben
• 16 Bit mit 65536 Farben
• 24 Bit mit 16,7 Millionen Farben
• 32 bit mit gerundet 430 Millionen Farben.

Rechenbeispiele

Bei einer Bildschirmauflösung von 1900 x 1200 Pixeln und einer Farbtiefe von 24 bit haben wir dann 5,4720,000 Bits. Ein Byte umfasst acht Bits, also haben wir dann 6,52 MB nur an Rohdaten für die Grafikkarte!

Rechnen wir das noch einmal für eine Digicam mit 12 Megapixeln, dann haben wir (4048 x 3040 x 24) / 8 = 35 MB Rohdaten pro Bild.

Daraus lernen wir, dass Fotos für den Bildschirm so eine Auflösung gar nicht benötigen, da reichen Bilder mit 5 Megapixeln bei 2595 x 1944 mehr als aus.

Rohformat?

Spiegelreflex-Profikameras allerdings können die Bilder tatsächlich im Rohformat ablegen und dann sind die Dateien dann auch so riesig! Profi-Fotographen wollen und brauchen die bestmögliche Qualität für Ihre Arbeit.

Warum sind meine Bilddateien kleiner?

Digitalfotos mit 35 MB findet man so allerdings bei einer einfachen und herkömmlichen Digicam nicht auf seiner Speicherkarte, weil die Bilder durch spezielle Algorythmen komprimiert sind.

Dabei gibt es zwei wesentliche Methoden der Bilddatenkompression, nämlich mit oder ohne Qualitätsverlust.

Eine Datenkompression funktioniert in der Regel so, dass nach wiederkehrenden Mustern gesucht und diese dann zusammengefasst werden. Somit benötigt man weniger Platz.

Methode 1: Verlustfrei

Gängige verlustfreie Formate sind RAW, BMP, TIFF, PNG, JP2, das heißt, alle Bilder, die in diesen Formaten gespeichert werden, behalten ihre volle Qualität. Die allerbeste Kompression hat allerdings JP2, danach folgt PNG und TIFF. RAW und BMP komprimieren gar nicht.

JP2 alias JPEG2000 wird von Windows 7 direkt leider gar nicht unterstützt. Mit dem kostenlosen Apple Quicktime Picture Viewer oder XNView lassen sich diese allerdings anzeigen. Sicherlich kann es auch die eine oder andere Bildbearbeitung. Auf dem Mac ist das gar kein Problem, es ist keine Zusatzsoftware nötig.

Alphakanäle werden von TIFF, PNG und JP2 unterstützt.

Beispiel Desktop-Wallpaper:

• BMP = 6,9 MB
• TIFF = 2,4 MB ^ Ersparnis 35%
• PNG = 1,8 MB ^ Ersparnis 73%
• JP2 = 0,3 MB ^ Ersparnis 95% (6 x kleiner als PNG)

Methode 2: Verlustbehaftet

Beim Musikformat MP3 wird eine Psychoakkustikanalyse vorgenommen und somit werden nicht oder nur schwer hörbare Töne schlichtweg weggelassen. Deshalb bleibt weniger Material übrig das komprimiert werden muss und die Dateien werden letztendlich kleiner.

Bei Bildern funktioniert das recht ähnlich, denn oftmals liegen sehr ähnliche Farben nebeneinander und werden dann einfach zusammengefasst und später durch berechnete Annäherungen (Interpolation) wieder auf dem Bildschirm dargestellt.

Das dort bekannteste Format ist JPG. Man kann sogar die Höhe des Qualitätsverlusts mit den meisten Bildbearbeitungsprogrammen festlegen und dann selbst bestimmen wieviel Verlust man in Kauf nehmen will.

Der Vorteil ist klar: die Datei wird kleiner.

JP2 kann übrigens bei Bedarf genau wie JPG auch verlustbehaftet speichern.

Der beste Lohn für einen guten Artikel sind jedoch immer noch Kommentare, Verweise und Zitate. Von alldem habe ich hier für meine Erwartungen viel zu wenig geerntet. Da mein Blog sich überwiegend mit technischen Dingen beschäftigt, hatte ich einen Grund mehr auf Englisch zu schreiben. Nerds, Geeks, Fanboys gibt es auch jede Menge in Deutschland, von daher schreibe ich nun auf Deutsch, da es mir auch wesentlich leichter fällt und weniger Zeit kostet.

Die Übersetzungshilfe bleibt euch erhalten und hoffentlich leistet Google auch bei der Übersetzung von Deutsch in alle anderen Sprachen gute Arbeit.

Screencasts, Videos, et cetera werde ich künftig auch auf Deutsch aufnehmen und mit englischen Untertiteln an den wichtigsten Stellen versehen – genauso wie in meinem letzten Artikel.

In a former article I wrote some words about Google Wave, a service to do live and interactive co-laboration. It was highly coveted at the beginning, because people could only get in with a private invitation. Those invites were quite rare and everyone wanted to be in.

After about two or three months, Google allowed lots of invitations and then it began to get very slow and went to a very very very very …. slow performance and people lost interest.

At the end there is an end

Google said, it is going to die, because not enough people are interested in, but I don’t think it is the missing interest. My opinion is, that lots of people tried that in an early beta status where the performance was terribly bad and of course a lot of unacceptable bugs, with that you can not live – especially the malfunctioning gallery for my meaning.

That bad experience leads people to say no, that sucks and never try again, even if it is free. Also I think, that many people can not deal with that huge power of functionality.

I am really sad to see that great product dying, but I am happy about being a part of that, collecting good experiences, made some new friends and that Google will continue to use that technology in further projects.

Bye, bye, good old Wave!

Last chance

As long as it is still online, you could check out, what you would be missing. If you have no invite, I have got still some left. Leave a comment if you want to get invited.

In the recent past days I got written down by some companies to test products and were asked where I am having a place for ads. First of all, they bootlicked my blog by praising my design or importance of my content for their business.

No ads?

I will not place any advertisements. If you really like my work, then spread the word or donate, flattr, or ask for my banking account.

Testing “free” gifts?

Also I am not interested to “test” any products to give a credit for a pseudo-advertisement. If you want to gift me something, just do it, but don’t ask me to write an article about that. If you require an article for testing something, then it is the same like an advertisement and fooling people – even if it is a good product. If you want something, it is not free!

Why not?

Right, this is MY private blog, and MY place to write what I think and what I like. It is MY intention to give some noticeable articles, to just say my opinion or help people out having the same problem or questions. This is MY view of the meaning of blogging and honest neutral unpaid journalism. When I like a product and want to recommend it, then I will do so – maybe.

You certainly know Paypal for this kind of gifting or any other payment, but then you have to take the decision to specify the amount of what you are willing to spend each time. Flattr makes it a little easier.

You just load an amount to your account and specify a monthly total donation amount. All your honor clicks of that month are shared among all the respective websites you have flattred. So if you have 2,00 € and hit 10 Flattr buttons, then each URL author will get 0,20 €.

It’s that easy and if you like my work here, please consider to flattr each article you like!

If you need a beta invite code, just leave a comment. There are still three left.

If I see an update of an application, I want to have the latest and hottest stuff, of course. But first of all I read the changelog to know what is new or changed, and then I do run the update.

Unwanted changes

Sometimes, the developers change the behavior of a certain feature or in worst case it is even removed. If I really need this functionality exactly as it was before, it would make sense to downgrade the fresh installed update back to the old version.

New software is not always an improvement. A good bad example is Aptana Studio having removed the FTP-Sync functionality from version 1.5 to 2.0. It was so heavenly useful and now it is gone. The developers stated to eventually bringing it back in a future version.

Back to the past

If that worst case scenario became true, it is often impossible to get the old version back, because the vendor often just serves the latest version for downloading. But, what if there is no archive existing? Where do you get it?

For the Mac user

On a Mac you can use Time Machine and grab your old copy back from the Applications backup folder. But what, if no Time Machine backup was created?

Then go to http://mac.oldversion.com/ and download what you need. They have a large archive and host really many old versions of favourite applications.

For the Windows user

Go to http://www.oldversion.com/ and download your older piece of software.

While living in the virtual reality I help my environment to save valuable resources. One of them is avoiding the use of paper whenever possible. But, unfortunately there are some rare situations where somethings needs to get printed out and signed – contracts for example.

And the winner is

Some years ago, I decided to afford me a printer to exactly match such requirements. A good device with a reasonable price and performance ratio for my needs is the Brother HL-2040 series. It is a black and white laser printer with economic power and toner saving working on Windows and Mac.

When something is really needed

As Murhphy’s law confirms, the printer will stop it’s work when really needed. And exactly that happened. I did not use it for about two months and the first print job ended with paper jam, so the second did, too. After that all four LEDs started flashing and no printing was possible.

If you have a similar problem, then these two tips may help you out, because this is not mentioned in the FAQ and the official technical support did not know!

Solution

Tip 1:

Remove paper jams with the device still powered on. DO NOT POWER OFF! Open all paper trays and toner lid, then close. The motors will begin turning and the printer will be ready, again. Maybe it is required to press the GO button.

Tip 2:

This printer does not have a text display, just LEDs. Turn the power off, hold the GO button, power on, still hold GO for eight seconds. Release and press again. If the ready indicator is green, try a print. If the LEDs are all flashing again, do this Tip 2 instruction again and power off the device instead of printing. IMPORTANT: Let the power off for some hours, not only seconds or minutes! Turn on the next day, and voila.

Previously, when a user clicked a link leading to a podcast, it brought you to an empty white web page. Then, iTunes was opened – and if not installed you got a offer to download the free ware. The user did not know what is to be expected.

The new change is, that you will now see a tiny preview with the same information that is presented only in iTunes, before. The behavior of starting iTunes or the download offer is still there. Click the picture on the right to see an example with my podcast.

You also can view video and pre-listen audio!

Apple of course does not want this and sued several times against Psystar, because it is permitted and listed in the software agreement to run OS X on non-Apple-hardware.

A very required assumption for Rebel EFI enabling running OS X, seems to have a Intel processor, because since the release of Snow Leopard only Intel CPUs are supported.

On a Mac, hardware and software are the best friends and everything runs smooth. That is a proof and you can check this out by yourself in any store selling Apple products if you do not own one.

I am really afraid, that OS X may get a bad reputation from all those jealous PC users thinking their Windows OS and hardware is much better. They will run that on cheapest hardware and the smoothness of the OS X workflow is gone. Of course this is the wrong way and I am sure they will blame Apple of bad codings.

Sometimes, when a friend needs technical help or a good tip and I wrote about it, then I advise them to read the appropriate article. But the answer often is:

Hey, your blog is English and I do not understand any word.

It also happens more often, that an article got commented in a language that I do not understand and even can not read because of non-latin letters.

I really tried some WordPress-plugins to make by blog multilingual, but that all did not satisfy me. First of all, I could only provide German and English texts. Secondly it takes so much time, to write everything twice.

Today I found the Google AJAX Translation plugin which is now implemented here with some modifications. As you can see, every article, page and even the comments have now a “Translate” button. Click it, select the language and the content will be replaced instantly with a translation and without reloading the whole page.

Hopefully you like it and the communication barrier is gone!

The bird got a tiny 4 GB memory card and transported it over a distance of about 85 kilometres. It took just one hour and eight minutes at non-optimal weather conditions.

Downloading the same data over the same distance with a high speed ADSL connection amount took more than two times longer the bird winged.

Sources: Article, Image

Unfortunately not everybody owns a big enough USB stick, yet – although they went quite expensive. I got mine 16 GB USB stick for less than 20 Euro!

Burning takes too much time in my humble opinion nowadays and especially with rewriteable media.

Depending on the amount of the megabyte or even the gigabyte you want to burn you have to decide what media you should take.

On videohelp.com is a very nice summary of the media types and their appropriate writing and reading speeds. Take a look at that save as much time and media as you can.

Credits: Icon by webdesign-guru.co.uk

I have heard from the Twitter service some months ago and I decided to register there. At the beginning I did not see any sense in that service, but then I started to find some interesting people and followed them.

Afterwards I saw the advantages of seeing news and rumors much more quicker than professional newspapers and magazines provided me before. Among them are Heise or even MacWorld. To placate you, I still read you.

Okay, it takes a much time reading all interesting content and filtering the absolutely uninteresting things, but I met some people in real life and gained lots of new knowledge.

Also it makes fun to help people, get help by myself, sharing fun stuff and more. This can not be explained by only using words, you should collect your own experience. For me, twitter went to a part of my daily life.

Maybe you already have noticed, that I wrote some articles like this about Twitter and other sites or tools making it more powerful. Due to that I have created a very own category and sorted the articles into it. Of course, you can click the twitter-tag in the right hand side tag-cloud.

Vote here your opinion or leave a comment.

Due to that I had implemented a plugin called DiggBadger which really fits nice into my wordpress template. But it uses CrossScripting to get the DiggContent and functionality and this takes too much performance in my eyes to load my site. The content will not be displayed until digg.com has answered.

To give my readers the best speed and comfort, I decided to remove it, again. By the way, the amout of diggs I received was too low.

If you want to support my articles on digg, then just add me as your friend.

Today are still some guys at the demoscene active and coding really amazing and stunning stuff we absolutely could image that it would ever be possible.

With modern tools and utilities are very cute home made things possible. Have a look what Benjamin Heckendorn has produced:

C64 Laptop by Benjamin Heckendorn

A laptop designed Commodore 64. Nostalgy for the “pocket”. Please visit his Blog to see more details.

Illegal advertising

I love when people are creative and do some really unusal stuff. Most advertising broadcasted on standard TV – at least in Germany – is so boring and somewhat lame it makes no fun watching it. Especially those mobile services for ringtones are really bad and annoying. That should really be forbidden, because the absolute worst is to see one and the same ad in one block more than once!

There are some shows demonstrating adverts from other countries. And there are really some cool ones among them, because outside from Germany are countries who do not shame to provoke on the pain threshold. All in all, real good spots are nevertheless rarely.

The illegal advertising website really made it to match 100% of my humor style and I can truly laugh at every spot they are presenting. Their feed is stored in my feedready to have at least one laugh a day.

The most quoted sentences of it’s protagonist Dr. House is “People lie. All”. And unfortunately he is right, isn’t he?

Vlatko’s blog about lies shows you details, reasons, statics and more.

Find out the truth by yourself.

And guess, what they sanctimoniously promise you: Those bunnies are just waiting only for you! So register with your credit card and go to meet her.

Below the persuasive photo you see her age, just over 18 and still below 30. That’s a match and the username is below, so there is no reason not to contact her directly.

Did you really find any of those shills?

Reload. Reload. Reload. Reload. Reload.

Meet these girls from your area

What?!

They got you fooled, because of course these girls are fakes. Reload the ad containing site several times, until your browser releases cache or something else, and then have a look at the details.

The pictures are the same, the girls are same. Really? Not really! The blonde 24 year old Bleustar77 renamed to Gemini0669 and is now 20 years old. My brain says: Stop, she is now 4 years younger. Damn! How is she doing that?!

But next, lets have a look at the usernames and the pictures, again. We have already noticed, they have changed. Clever, so far.

Anne14388 is one advert two times! Two different looking girls and two different ages, but both do have the same username?

Please, dear Adultfriendfinder network, stop fooling us with bad coded random generators and sniffing our geo locations by IP-Adresses!

Bits in 60 seconds

If you are programming you will get in contact with binary digits sooner or later, well known abbreviated as bits. Then it is good to know what is, how it works, and to be able to calculate them without using a calculator. At the latest when doing a website with HTML or CSS you will have do deal with hexadecimal codes.

In the Nirwana Software blog I have found a very smart and quick explaination done with a flipchart and an easy example. In 60 seconds you will know, and if you are still at school, tell your informatics teacher, because most of them can not explain that clear and that short, I swear!

6 candles to boil

Every man has a Firestarter built inside by nature. So I have started a little kitchen and fire experiment:

How many candles do I need to get one litre of water boiling in a glas teapot?

Of course the devil knows and says:

6 little tea candle lights are making it boiling hot like lava mass.

Exeptionally it is not my favourite tea (Earl Gray).