A few weeks ago on my Minecraft server of choice, I made a thing:

It's about 50 by 50 blocks. How did I make this, you ask? I took the actual Firefox logo, resized it to 50x50 pixels in Gimp, and reduced the colors pretty drastically. Then it just boils down to putting a grid over the image and turning the pixels into blocks. (Luckily, the Minecraft server is in Creative Mode, so I could freely pick blocks according to their colors, even though some of them are really rare when mined.)

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Oh noes! Yesterday I learned that I never posted the followup photos to my Limoncello experiment a few months ago! Sorry about that. Here it goes!

A few weeks after preparing the lemon zest and Everclear concoction for the steeping, I got it back out of the basement: Limoncello

Meanwhile, I had obtained and cleaned some small, reclosable lemonade bottles (after drinking their content, of course): <!--more--> Limoncello

Straining the zest from the concentrated lemon extract reveals that it has transferred virtually all its color into the liquid and is now almost white. Fun! Limoncello Limoncello

Prepared some simple syrup (same amount as the lemon extract, i.e., about half a liter) in a pot and stirred it in. As you may have noticed, this changed the tint of the liquid a little: I used raw cane sugar, which unlike refined white sugar has a little bit of a color of its own. But hey! Trading color for flavor is fine by me. Limoncello

Stirred it good, funneled into the bottles! Limoncello

Finally, off into the freezer, and after a few hours... Prost! http://www.flickr.com/photos/freeed/6847676614/in/set-72157629612992683/

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As you may have noticed, I was taking some "time off" from the daily photo-taking-and-uploading after 365 consecutive days of that exercise in 2011. But of course, the photos I take can't just go unpublished, so I discussed it with my fellow photography nerd morgamic, and we decided to start a photo blog together! It's called Overexpose Me and lives under the catchy domain name overexpose.me.

I am planning on posting a new picture or two per week, depending on what photo opportunities I come across. I also installed a widget into the sidebar of this blog, showing you the latest and greatest additions to the photo blog.

We hope you'll enjoy looking at the pictures as much as we liked taking them! Let us know what you think!

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Grandma's Potato Dumplings, Part 2

Not a "photo of the day", but the second part to grandma's potato dumplings: The actual dumplings!

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On the Library of Congress' flickr feed, I just stumbles across the following, fabulous portrait of Coleman Hawkins. In the background: Miles Davis. So cool.

[Portrait of Coleman Hawkins and Miles Davis, Three Deuces, New York, N.Y., ca. July 1947] (LOC)

Portrait of Coleman Hawkins and Miles Davis, Three Deuces, New York, N.Y., ca. July 1947

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Time flies! Believe it or not, yesterday ended our Munich "era". We moved out of our apartment and are getting ready to move to the San Francisco Bay Area in just a few days.

Thank you, Munich, for having us. It's been a blast.

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A week ago, Tara and I took a trip to Lyon, France, and spent a few days basically eating the most delicious food in the universe all day (did I mention the Lyonnaise are the undisputed masters of cooking with shameless amounts of bacon?).

While we were there, I also took a bunch of pictures, such as this HDR image of the Basilica of Fourvière:

(larger size)

Another experiment I made is this wide-screen panorama of the city of Lyon that I later stitched together with Hugin.

(you must see this one in the original size.)

Also, this one is really funny:

If you want, check out the whole photo set. Hope you like it!

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Coincidence? I let you be the judge ;)

From Leech, John (1817-1864), Drawings. In the Public Domain. Via: The Internet Archive.

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I am two days late for this year's anniversary, but this is just too impressive: Omaha Beach, June 6, 1944.

Make sure to click on the picture to see bigger versions.

(via Justin, thanks! Source: US or Canadian National Archives, via Wikipedia. Public Domain.)

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On occasion, people claim I blog about too much geekery, so here you go with some dog content:

Yup, that's Lizzy, playing with her brand-new rubber chicken. She picked it herself at the store and oh-so-appropriately, it is a Bavarian chicken sporting Lederhosen.

Given her usual aversion to having photos taken of her, I was impressed that I got a set of four pictures before she bailed.

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