During the last year, the chinese company SIRUI released three anamorphic lenses for various camera mounts. Anamorphic lenses are commonly used in movie production. Instead of rendering a proportional representation of a subject on the camera sensor, these lenses squeeze the image to give a wider horizontal field of view. This results in a cinema style widescreen picture and the typical “movie”‐look. Normally, such lenses are rare, heavy and expensive.

But not only are the SIRUI lenses smaller and lighter than previous anamorphic lenses, they are also way more affordable.
So, a dream come true for amateur cinematographers and also weirdos like me that always wanted a digital version of the film era Hasselblad X Pan. The X Pan has also been able to capture a widescreen image by just using more of a standard 35mm film strip. Unfortunately, camera sensors do have a fixed size. So unless a manufacturer produces a camera with an extra wide sensor, we are limited to standard aspect ratios.

Except, of course, you squeeze the image onto the sensor. Like with an anamorphic lens.

I have been shooting for while now with their 50mm and lately their 24mm lens. Unfortunately, the resulting images are in the normal 3:2 format, as my Fuji X-T10 does not know about anamorphic nature of the attached lens. Which means that I have to convert all these images to the correct aspect ratio by hand.

While doing this, I got bored…

When your OpenSSH server refuses to start with an invalid format error message when loading the host key, this weird reason might be the cause.

Update 2022-10-10: I published the code and added more container versions on dockerhub. Check the AnsibleDS post update.

Recently, I was massively bored over the weekend. So I started to redo my personal server setup.

I wanted to use an LDAP server for user management and got instantly confused over which one to choose. OpenLDAP is said to be fast and reliable, but the documentation is all over the place and usability is limited at best. 389 Directory Server has a better documentation but you need an extra management server and a console server. That was just too much hassle for me.

Luckily, there is ApacheDS. Sure, its written in Java but you only need to run one process and it comes with a fully fledged IDE.

Then again, there is no official docker container. So I made my own, together with a set of ansible scripts to deploy the container to my server. Enjoy!

Once, during a pandemic, I was bored. So I started playing around with some
stuff. This blog basically is a documentation of my learnings.

Have fun…