February 2017 – Chris Marquardt's Soapbox

Feb252017 by Chris MarquardtNo Comments

🇬🇧 Peace of Mind: My Travel Tips

Travel

For some people travel causes a lot of anxiety. What if you forget to pack something? What if you miss a flight? Many what-ifs.. even with me. For example I have a habit of double-triple-quadruple checking if I have my passport. Over the years I probably made almost every mistake there is when it comes to travel. But I've come up with a list of things (and stuck to it) that have one goal: peace of mind. Make a travel checklist Biggest one first. Sit down for 20 minutes and in your mind, go through different situations on your journey and think of what you will definitely need. And what you can do without. Use any simple tool at your disposal to capture these points. I use the reminders app on the Mac and iOS because they sync nicely. My list contains things like: toiletries, ea...

Feb252017 by Chris MarquardtNo Comments

🇬🇧 Siberia ahoi

Photography, Travel

I took this shot of ice bubbles on Lake Baikal in Siberia last year when we did a photo tour there with a group of great people. Tomorrow I will take off for yet another photo tour to Siberia and during my preparations that feeling of standing on top of the lake for the first time came back to me. Lake Baikal is the oldest, clearest, deepest and biggest body of liquid fresh water in the world. In fact it holds 20% of the world's liquid fresh water. TWENTY. EFFIN'. PERCENT. It's 395 miles long, 49 miles wide and at its deepest point it is 5,387 feet deep. That is over one mile of water. And I've been told that it's so clear, that in summer, if you drop a coin from a boat, you can watch it sink for a whole minute. That's insane. Insane and very exciting when walking on top of it...

Feb212017 by Chris MarquardtNo Comments

3D sensing is coming

VR/AR/MR

Google's Project Tango was the first to market and others will follow in the consumer space very soon. 3D sensing is a critical component of the future of computing. It will not only allow facial recognition on a completely new level (e.g. you won't need finger print readers anymore), the spacial awareness of the devices will change pretty much anything. Think interaction. Think entertainment. Think mixed reality. Image recognition won't have to rely on a 2-dimensional photo, but can use actual depth, which will in turn make recognition reliability almost perfect. Gesture recognition is another piece of the puzzle. The moment your device can tell what your hands are doing, you'll have a new user interface. Touch that virtual computer screen that's hovering in front of your face ...

Feb172017 by Chris MarquardtNo Comments

Art. Yes, it’s Art.

Personal

When years ago I found the first episode of Cowboy Bebop, I had to watch them all. In Japanese, with English subtitles. I had tried an English dub, but it lost so much authenticity in the voice acting, the original was better. Cowboy Bebop left a profound impression on me. The episodes, the stories, the music, the depth. Here's a video about Cowboy Bebop that was just released by Channel Criswell. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkXFBPGZpTM Here's a take by someone else who has also been deeply touched by it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip5CpjXR4CI Here's another take on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3Z8cDkP86g Watch the series if you can.

Feb172017 by Chris MarquardtNo Comments

Rejiggle all the things

Tech

Update: making progress, the list now includes tipsfromthetopfloor.com (took a bit longer because I had to make sure there was no interruption or side-effects on the podcast delivery). Once I'm back from Russia, I will get to work on the rest of the sites. It's about time to revamp my web hosting. So far, it's all on one dedicated server (as in a hardware box with spinning disks, mirrored albeit) and the system has served me well in the past. It's getting a bit long in the tooth though and the cloud offers everywhere are quite intriguing. Especially as many of them run on really fast hardware, SSDs, quick networking and the flexibility is beyond anything I've ever had. Fire up an instance with the click of a mouse. Add a temporary server for a special purpose, delete it later and pay by...