Selling Photos on Shutterstock

Lately I started selling my photos at Shutterstock. This was actually one of the first microstock sites I signed up to but I had to wait a long time until my initial reviews got accepted. They have a entry policy that requires you to upload 10 pictures and no less than 7 of them must be accepted.

Now I am a submitting member on that site and downloads are rushing in. In my first week I made more than 10 downloads with only around 30 pictures online already. I'm expecting to see these number increase in the future.

In the meanwhile I'd love to see you browse through or even buy my pictures :)

My latest images for sale at Shutterstock:

Software Update for Nokia 5310 Version 5.81

Today I updated my Nokia 5310 phone to the new 5.81 version. As I have read that there may be some problems with it I thought I'd report about my experience on my blog.

To find out what version is installed on your phone, type in *#0000# using your keypad. I had the 3.6 version installed. So I downloaded the latest version of the Nokia Software Updater. After a reboot it detected my phone connected via the USB cable.
I took the hint to backup the phone settings seriously. You can do that via the phone menu. Go to the Setting->Sync and backup->Create Backup submenu.

Then I started the update which ran automatically without problems. 10 minutes later the phone rebooted and requested the PIN code. Unfortunately all my personal data were deleted. So I had to restore the data I backed up before. That worked quite fine and I didn't loose any contact info or calendar settings.

What's new?
So far I found the following new options and functionalities:

• I can now add Java programs to my favorite's list.


• There is now a quick dial function. Just press one of the keys from 2 to 9 for 2 seconds.

Update: The newest version is V 09.42 which can be installed just as easy. I haven't found any major improvements yet (except for a new status bar when loading things).

Dinner Jazz Excursion Radio

I've been listening to an internet radio station a lot recently it's called Dinner Jazz Excursion. They have good music in great quality, no ads and it's free. Now I've become a real Jazz addict.

Experiments with HDR

While using flickr I stumbled upon a new method to shoot pictures. It's called HDR (high dynamic range) that merges pictures with various exposure settings into one. This way dark and light areas of the picture will be displayed with many more detail.

The picture above is one of my best pictures with HDR so far. I went to a church nearby and took some picture. It is a composition of three pictures to make the walls bright as well as the window visible. A single shot would either be under- or overexposed. You can see more of my HDR pictures on my flickr page.

Countries I have been to

I found a nice site that allows you to create a map of all your visited countries. Check out mine...


create your own visited countries map or vertaling Duits Nederlands

196,324,232

This is the first position where my birthday occurs in consecutive order in the digits of π (according to Pi-Searcher)

Great Midi Site

I stumbled upon a great site offering MIDI downloads and a MIDI to MP3 converter. I was looking for such a feature for a long time as my old SoundBlaster gave up after almost 9 years of working.

Now I have only my internal soundcard with crappy MIDI playback. Now I can make use of the 1000s of MIDIs again that I have somewhere on my computer. I started converting some of the songs I wrote myself some years ago and put them on my iPod.

Fuer Elise Jazzed Up

Today a friend posted me a youtube link about how Fuer Elise can be played - jazz style.

Origami with $$$

I found a nice site that shows how to do origami with dollar bills. Try it out yourself here.

Swim Across The Atlantic Ocean

That's what you would have to do when you ask Google Maps for directions considering the starting point is in the USA and you want to go to an European city, for example.

• Go to the website
• select Get directions
• enter NYC into the Start address
  
• enter London into the End address
• press the Get directions button
  

That will tell you to "Swim across the Atlantic Ocean, 3462mi". I'm going to London, who is coming with me ;-)

[2007/08/06] Unfortunately this "feature" does not work anymore :-(

Globalization vs Localization

Recently I made two purchases on the internet. The first thing that I bought were two books. A typical globalized transaction:

1. I found these books while commenting an article from an Austrian guy
2. I did a search which brought me to an American website: Mind Hacks
3. So I logged in on the Austrian portal of Amazon
4. As you know, this site is only a modified version of the German Amazon
5. I found out that these books were cheaper by an alternative seller in the UK
6. A week later the books arrived and on the envelope it said:
7. Paperbackshop.co.uk from the UK
8. But the address was from Illinois USA
9. Interestingly the stamp said: sent from Niederaula in Germany (written in French)
10. and then i was sent all the way to Austria

On the other hand, last Sunday I bought two packs of chili seeds on eBay. As I found out after the purchase, the seller lives about 10 walking minutes from my home. So today I just walked over there to buy them and save the shipping money.

So one transaction involved 4 countries from half around the globe and 3 languages, while the other was done within less than 2 kilometers from my home. Now that is globalization vs. localization