Hey everyone! I am sure you all realized that I have not been working on the server lately. The main reason is that I am very busy at work together with the fact that I decided more than half a year ago that I wanted to change how I work on my other hobby, photography.

The issue with my photography was that I used to do all kinds of photography, but in the last 2 years I start focusing more and more on live music and dive photography. I also got some new equipment (= strobes / flash setup) end of last year for underwater photos which dramatically increased the amount of decent shots that I could take during a dive. From maybe one nice photo per dive to a dozen or more. It’s darker than one thinks down there and strobes make a huge difference. I also took a class in post-production. So I had a lot of photos that I wanted to publish but no platform to properly do so. My old “portfolio” website where I used to post the best 30-40 pictures I had ever taken was not really made for this kind of stuff, and uploading every photo individually was just not feasible. So I had to look for a new system and eventually decided that I needed to write it myself.

So I have been working for the last 6 months on that new system, on and off. There were some technical difficulties that I ran into, which took me several months to resolve, but once I finally got over those, I could make some faster progress. So the news is that I finished the software finally. It consists out of 2 parts:

One part that allows me to upload a lot of images in one batch and the system automatically sorts them by date, creates previews and then lets me include them into a blog post by simply defining the times pan of the photos I want to see. That’s ideal for live music since a band plays for a certain time as well as for diving, since a dive takes a certain time, and I want to see all photos during that time span.

The second part allows me to download data from my dive computer (depth, time & temperature) and plot it as a graph. It also reads the photo information of the above system and shows them on the graph. This gives a very nice picture of a dive that is otherwise not possible. All I need to do is define which dive I want to see and if the dive computer and the camera time did not match 100%, I just say by how much.

So I can just make a dive, upload the photos and one file from my computer, enter 2 lines of text into my blog and all is done. Hardly any work and it looks good.

So today, I finally finished working uploading recent live music photography and my recent dives and published the websites. If you want to see them, they are reachable at

http://hongkong-rocks.com and https://uncovery.net (you can guess which is which?)

What’s left to do now is to publish the first system and to clean up the second one, then potentially publish that as well. They are both 100% open-source projects. Once that is done, I can focus on working on the minecraft server again.