felix-arntz.me

Category: Random

  • Walking the San Francisco Crosstown Trail

    Walking the San Francisco Crosstown Trail

    This past weekend, my girlfriend and I walked the 17 mile-long San Francisco Crosstown Trail, which spans from the southeast end to the northwest end of the city. It was an amazing experience and I can totally recommend it to anybody living in or visiting San Francisco. It presented completely new areas of the city to us, and I’m sure that it will even allow long-term San Franciscans that haven’t yet walked it to rediscover their city.

    With all our impressions and photos taken, this made the perfect case for a web story – the open web version of those visual stories we’ve all come to know through platforms like Snapchat or Instagram. If you are interested in creating this kind of immersive content as integrated part of your website as well, try the Web Stories editor plugin for WordPress.

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  • 2017 Focuses

    For this year, I wanted to take some time to write down some notes on things that I would like to prioritize in my life. Just as how WordPress is now putting the main efforts into three major focuses, I wanted to separate mine into three major focuses as well. For 2017, these are going to be health, contributing and relationships. This is the first post I have ever written like this, and for the most part it will be a list of things I want to pursue. I would like to be able to return to this post at any given time to remind myself of these things and also to write a summary by the end of the new year in relation to which of these goals I have accomplished, in which points I have improved and which I should probably put more effort into.

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  • Spotify Top Tracks 2016

    Spotify Top Tracks 2016

    I cannot believe that my most-listened track is actually a German song.

  • Soundtrack of my Life

    Soundtrack of my Life

    Music is a very important part of my life. I’m sure that is the case for many people, yet I wanted to explicitly mention it in this post. I listen to music during almost my entire work day, I have been playing piano since I was 8 years old and I also write songs occasionally and produce a few things using tools like Cubase and such. So yesterday I had the thought of looking back and thinking about the songs that I have listened to over all the years, songs that may even have shaped me in a way. I asked myself whether I could determine a song for every year that I associate the most with that time in my life. Things like that are just something I’m interested in, for example I’ve also been keeping track of my musical listening habits through Last.fm since 2007. It was also very nice to take some time to dive into old memories. So in this post I’m putting the list of songs out there. This is kind of a very personal post in some cases; maybe you’re just interested in such things the same way as I am, or you are curious about music recommendations, or you would like to know me better. For me the reason of writing this is that I simply want to keep track – after all, people used to call blogs weblogs, and that’s what I’m doing here – logging my favorite songs for each year of my life. Well, not my entire life: I will start with the year 2000 (I was 10 years old then), since I can’t quite recall anything before that and it would mostly have been entirely charts music anyway – and you will notice that especially in the first years of the list, my musical taste was still evolving. 🙂 By the way, to start things off, I’m pretty sure that I can say that German band Rammstein has been the only constant for as long as I can remember: Although none of their songs is present in the following list, I have listened to them at the same time I listened to Britney Spears, and I still listen to them now from time to time. But now, here’s the list of my favorite songs for each year as far as I can remember. Some of the years I would say there was more than 1 song I could have put there, but I think what I have there is a pretty good representation of my taste in music and also events in my life. Please note in advance that the songs represent what I’ve listened to for each year – it doesn’t necessarily mean that it was released in that year.

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  • Four new composings of movie score

    Four new composings of movie score

    It has been a while – but now I’ve decided to release some new music I composed over the recent months. As most of the time, these tracks are all written with specific movie scenes (which actually do not exist) in mind – so it’s music which is part of a score that would be played in that specific scenes I had in mind when I composed it. But of course that doesn’t mean it can’t be used somewhere else – this is the cool thing about music, it has different meaning, different interpretations and such. But now, enough said, here there are the four tracks:

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  • How To Stream Spotify from Mac to Playstation 3

    How To Stream Spotify from Mac to Playstation 3

    A while ago I thought about having my Spotify playlists streamed to my Playstation 3. My sound system is connected to that device, placed in my living room, so I needed to find a way to stream the whole sound output (also called “Stereo Mix”) from my Mac to the PS3. In this article I will explain how you can stream any sound from your Mac, for example Spotify, to any local device using WLAN, in this case my Playstation 3.

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  • How To Fix The 6320 WLAN Connection Problems

    How To Fix The 6320 WLAN Connection Problems

    Okay, this short article kind of falls out of the ordinary topics, but I simply think it’s important. In this article you will find out how to solve the WLAN connection problems of the Fritzbox 6320 Cable provided by Unitymedia. Please skip to the last paragraph to see all the necessary steps in a list.

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  • 10 Beautiful Pieces of Movie Score

    10 Beautiful Pieces of Movie Score

    Today I’d like to share my top ten of movie score pieces. Most of them are pretty beautiful, romantic themes, to relax, to think, to dream. At the bottom of this post, you will find a Spotify playlist which contains all the ten tracks included.

    1. Elevator Beat (Nancy Wilson)

    The most wonderful theme for a wonderful movie (“Vanilla Sky”). Elevator Beat contains so much melancholia that it always gives me a feeling where I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. While it is rather sad music, it still emphasizes some hope – beautiful.

    2. La Valse d’Amélie (Yann Tiersen)

    If you haven’t seen the movie “Amélie” yet, do it as soon as you can. To me, there is no other movie as interesting like this, and the music is great aswell. La valse d’Amélie is my favourite piece from the score, and, while there are an orchestral and another third version of this track, I prefer the piano version.

    3. I Love You (Tyler Bates)

    Beautiful music like I Love You isn’t what you would expect from a dark anti-superhero movie like “Watchmen”. Yet, I love this theme for its spirit of optimism.

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  • Working on another music video

    Working on another music video

    I will soon release a new music video, another one for a song by my sister Christina Sophie. It’s called Island and it appears on her new album Secret Sinner to which you can listen below. Be excited as the music video will feature scenes shot in Thailand where we travelled in March this year. You might wanna check out the song first (it’s track 7)!

    Or add it to your playlist on Spotify: Christina Sophie – Island

    I’ll post the video here when it’s out!

  • Fixing errors in Corner Pin to Null by Video Copilot

    Fixing errors in Corner Pin to Null by Video Copilot

    A while ago I saw another very exciting tutorial on VideoCopilot.net where they showed us how to create a great-looking train explosion. As part of this tutorial, they introduced the usage of Mocha for After Effects. In this article I will conclude this for those who are especially interested in this kind of stuff or those who don’t want to watch the whole video (although I encourage you to do so). As an addition to that VideoCopilot tutorial, they offered a new After Effects presets file there which easily allows dynamic tracking in connection with Mocha. However, if you’re using a translated version of After Effects, you might have issues using it – how to fix these will be explained in the last paragraph of this article.

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