just for fun, i turned one of the snow fall shot series from this morning into a little video. sorry for the perspective change at the end, this was not intended. i aligned the shots with hugin, scaled them down with imagemagick and converted them to a mp4 video and an ogg video using avconv. (if you’re interested in the commands i used, mention that in the comments, i’ll then post them.)

despite the not so great weather forecast, the sun came out this morning and bathed my surroundings in beautiful sunlight. i grabbed my camera, put on my winter gear, and went on a nice long walk. i essentially walked around the area from the first half of our easter walk, with the difference that this time, everything was covered in snow.

something very beautiful with snow is the effect when snow randomly falls off from trees. the effect is best with sunlight:

some more impressions:

anyway, shortly after arriving back home, the sun was again covered by clouds and the landscape bathed in grey. by now, it’s snowing again.

today, while shoveling snow, the sky suddenly cleared up a bit. i got my camera and took some photos, sometimes with more and sometimes with less shade. here are some of the nicer pictures:

afterwards, when we were in the shades again, i enjoyed playing in the snow a bit, for example by jumping into the snow and by creating a snow angel:

one of the best times of the year seems to have started ;-)

yesterday, we finally had sun together with the first snow. unfortunately, i didn’t have much time before i had to leave to work, but i managed to take some nice shots. i would have loved to walk into the forest and take some pics there. i decided to do that today, but today no sun was around…

well, almost. in fact, it is the second snow. the first snow started on the day we left to monte verità, and when i returned almost a week later, it was gone. today, it started snowing for the second time. everything’s in white, and there’s a lot of snow. i hope this time it’ll stay longer so i can take some photos with sunlight and snow! :)

after the walk on last weekend, we were playing with our and our neighbours’ cats at home:

last weekend, we went on a walk starting at the castle bernegg ruin, walking through forests and a ravine towards hinwil. it was really nice outside, just some clouds and a bit of coldness. here are some impressions:

when arriving back in hinwil, we saw a little park close to our home. a really tiny one, just a few square meters:

it was also not very surprising what it’s name is:

today i discovered why sometimes, some of my latex output contains tildes (~) in the dvi/pdf version. usually, if you use a tilde in a tex file, it is interpreted as a non-breakable space (except in special circumstances, such as verbatim environments or in \url{…}). but thanks to a “bugfix” to texi2dvi/texi2pdf, which is a wonderful tool as it runs (pdf)latex often enough together with bibtex, makeindex etc., tildes appearing in tex files are now shown as tildes in the dvi/pdf output. which is absolutely inacceptable behaviour.
it seems that this already was reported (see here, here, here), but it is still around. i don’t really know what to think of this – is nobody responsible for working on texi2dvi/texi2pdf? or did people stop using it as it is broken?
anyway, i fixed my local installed version (/usr/bin/texi2dvi) by chaning the line catcode_special=true to catcode_special=false. a more sophisticated version would be nice, which only changes catcode_special for tex files (and not for texinfo files), but i don’t have time for that now.

yesterday my cat miukumauku had her first mouse (according to kornel, it’s a wood mouse). well, she didn’t catch it – that was done by the black cat, the only one of our cats who actually hunts –. but then, she somehow took it off the black cat, proceeded to play with it, while running around the appartment with the mouse in her mouth while growling (scaring off the other cats, most of whom didn’t care anyway, and in part maybe because she didn’t really know what to do with the mouse, i think). then, she finally managed to kill the mouse, and after some more playing proceeded to eat it. completely, with bones, skin and tail.

(in fact, this was not miukumauku’s first mouse. she was dragging a mouse around earlier – one also caught by the black cat –, but that mouse managed to escape and hide where the cats couldn’t grab it. unfortunately, we also couldn’t get it out of there, but then it got out overnight and was eaten – at least we think so, since we found leftovers of a mouse next morning…)

update: here’s a photo from the older incident: