in a world where more and more of our personal life is taking place on the web, a strong password is the very least you can do to keep your stuff safe from others.
about a year after an online journalist had his entire digital life deleted by hackers, many online services including google, facebook, dropbox, and lately even apple, microsoft and twitter, have implemented two-step authentication (or two-factor verification). this means that there’s an optional, extra step that you can activate to verify your identity during login – using a special, variable code that’s e.g. time-coded or individually texted to you.

if you don’t have two-step authentication activated for your email, online banking, google account, apple ID, and even your social media accounts, you should do so right now. [more...]

another picture from the piz val gronda excursion in 2011:

the hdr panorama shows part of the fimba valley (fimbatal) at the swiss-austrian border.
the rugged landscape on the right is the result of tectonic windows, where marble columns “poke through” the eroding slate.

what fascinates me most about rock climbing, is that i learned to use parts of my body for the activities they weren’t originally made for (or were made for, depending on how far you look back). for example, squeeze two neighbouring fingers into a small crack in the middle of a rock face, twist your hand slightly, and see how these two fingers can support your entire body’s weight without problems! (disclaimer: try at your own risk!)

here are some lytro living pictures from a recent visit to tivoli kletterzentrum, innsbruck.
as always, click to refocus, click&drag to shift perspective.

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working in the tropical rainforest of far north queensland doesn’t just mean you have an insane variety of tropical fruit available at your fingertips. it also means you can pop out for a swim in one of countless water holes, every now and then.

pictured: the aptly named “blue water hole”, surrounded by lush rainforest, and almost always crocodile-free.

if you’re using picasa to organize your photos, and upload them to your wordpress blog, facebook and/or google+, you’ve probably noticed that sometimes the picasa caption doesn’t show up on the web.
the reason for this is apparently a number of metadata fields (e.g. caption, description, and title fields in either EXIF, IPTC or XMP metadata) that are used differently depending on the software you use.

to solve this problem, i’ve created a custom picasa button that will copy your picasa caption (caption-abstract) to the relevant XMPC:title field that is used (amongst others) in wordpress as the attachment title. the most important line of code is the following exiftool command:

exiftool.exe -overwrite_original -"xmp:description>xmp:title" *.jpg

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since google now allows embedding of photospheres, i thought i’d share three more that i posted on g+ while in australia:

tropical rainforest at mossman gorge, far north queensland:

if you’ve been following the feature additions to android over the past few months, you’ve probably heard of photospheres: they’re google streetview-like interactive 360 degree panoramas that you can easily record with your smartphone running android jellybean 4.2+.
now, google has finally provided us with a way to embed photo spheres from google+ on other websites, including your self-hosted wordpress blog!

here’s a little function for your wordpress theme’s functions.php, which will enable the shortcodes [photosphere URL] and [ps URL]: [more...]