Quoting wikipedia:

Metelkova is an autonomous social centre in the centre of Ljubljana, Slovenia. It is located on the site of former military barracks (the Slovenian headquarters of the Yugoslav National Army) and was squatted September 1993. The site consists of seven buildings and was 12,500 m². [1] The name of the squat comes from the surname of the 19th century Slovenian Roman Catholic priest, philologist and unsuccessful language reformer Fran Metelko, after whom the nearby street is named.

Nowadays, Metelkova is a place where young people gather for various reasons, namely concerts, workshops, pint(s) of beer, or just to hang out. I’ve always liked this place for it’s artistic looks.

See for yourself …

It was a lovely Saturday afternoon and I took most I could out of it - I went to the bathroom. I took some equipment with me. I had a camera, some lens, flash, a tripod and a remote shutter release. Plus a black shirt. I opened the water pipe and started playing. Here are the results:

As part of my last year’s photography class, I had to make a photo album with some of my work. Rules of the game were:

• Needs to include 95 photos - 40 coloured, 40 black&white, 15 photoshopped.
• Format has to be at least A4.
• Each photo needs a photographic assignment and some notes on things you have learnt from it.
• Each photo must also be accompanied by information about camera model, aperture, ISO, etc.
• No photos of “cute pets” and “gorgeous sunsets”.

After postponing it for months, I’ve finally decided to finish the album last month. I did the layout and sent the pdf for printing to DigiFot. They did a great job printing it, and here are the results:

You can also view the PDF version of the album:
Photography - Dušan Smolnikar

Photos have been compressed, so may not look their best on screen. Colors also seem to show up more correctly in Adobe Reader than they do in Apple’s Preview. To view better versions of most photos, plus some of the newer ones, I’ve put up a gallery on flickr. It shall be regularly updated.

Best of
The photos I consider to be my favorite.

As some of you know, I was part of Zero.99 seminar in Zagreb, talking about web accessibility with Jasna Medar.

All in all, we had a nice trip. The seminar was quite interesting, some reports very informative and we got to see some funny videos as well. Professors were all very impressed with us (ego boosting effect). We got to see Zagreb afterwards as well. It’s a nice city. Looks good trough the wide angle lens, plus a local girl took us to a pub with home brewed beer. Tasty.

There are a couple of ways how you can experience what was going on. Non-slovene speaking readers may have a few problems with these. Just skip to the photos.

Videos
Open these with VLC. It’s best if you just copy the url and paste it into the url field of VLC’s “File -> Open network”

• http://x3.ntf.uni-lj.si/~ucakar/zagreb01.ts
• http://x3.ntf.uni-lj.si/~ucakar/zagreb02.ts
• http://x3.ntf.uni-lj.si/~ucakar/zagreb03.ts

I’m not telling when I am on, but Jasna may be the first in video #3 ;)

Slides
You can scroll trough the slides we used for our presentation.

Photos
As always, I have a few …

If you’ve just tuned in, and want to know more about web accessibility, head over to Slo-Tech version of our paper - part 1 and part 2. If you either want to know even more, or don’t understand a word of this funny language, try the Web Accessibility Initiative.

Is it time to update the blog yet? Might be …

I’ve spoke about accessibility before. To be exact, Jasna, a classmate of mine, and me did a paper on it last semester. The professor liked it. So we decided to publish our paper online (part I, part II). We’ve got some positive feedback on it.

A few weeks ago, the professor offered us to present the paper on a student seminar in Zagreb, Croatia. Naturally, we said yes and are quite excited about it. It’s taking place on October 10th, 10.00. There are going to be a few Croatian and a few Slovenian students speaking on various topics relating to print and interactive media.

Our speech will be in Slovene, but we were told to prepare the slideshow in English. It’s still in its beta stages, but I’ll publish it here when it’s done. For you to know and learn :)

Back home from the north! :)

I’ve visited Tallinn, ate some great pancakes and had a big laugh at the hostel. Totally euphoric.
We continued the trip to Helsinki, where I stayed for 2 weeks, learned a few things about product development, visited Nokia, Tekla and Fortum and spent a really great time with great people.
Then we took the ferry to Stockholm, where we finally got to see the reindeers.

Well, they say a picture is worth a 1000 words, so see the photo gallery for a better description on what was going on.