australia flashback: a kangaroo, a beach, and a distinct absence of pebbles

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situated right within murramang national park, pebbly beach is one of many stunningly beautiful beaches in new south wales’ south coast. just after tasting the most wonderful meat pies ever (they were “award-winning”, after all), we took a short detour from the main route for some beach time, and found ourselves on pebbly beach which, most notably, featured a distinct absence of pebbles.

a bit surreal: a kangaroo is hopping around at pebbly beach (murramarang national park, NSW), which isn't very pebbly.

it’s a beautiful beach, complete with natural dune vegetation and miniature rock pools at both ends. well worth spending a few hours! it’s also where we had our first encounter with kangaroos right on the beach, hopping around, grazing, and apparently just having a good time.

[categories: random photos, travel] [tags: , ]

the beauty of wood anatomy

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wood is one of the most important substances in the human world: it’s essential for areas as diverse as music (instruments), construction, living (furniture, heating), art (sculptures) and has a broad spectrum of other uses.
its beauty can be found anywhere along the way, from a living tree to a carefully carved toothpick. going a bit deeper, it seems to just get more and more beautiful.

sweet chestnut (castanea sativa) - year rings and wood anatomy

in this post, i’d like to show you the beauy of wood anatomy at a magnification that shows individual water transport vessels. [more...]

[categories: nature, photo] [tags: , , ]

how to use google authenticator for facebook’s two-step authentication

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Google Authenticator 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...]

[categories: android, computers & technology] [tags: ]

hdr panorama: fimbatal, austria

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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.

[category: random photos] [tags: , , , ]

the things we do to our feet [lytro]

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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.


(view living picture on lytro.com)

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[category: living pictures] [tags: , , ]

australia flashback: blue water hole, cape tribulation

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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.

blue water hole, cape tribulation

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

[category: random photos] [tags: , , ]

captivate: custom picasa button to fix image captions for facebook, wordpress and others

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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

[more...]

[category: computers & technology] [tags: , ]
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