Istanbul

As I may have mentioned previously, here is a special presentation of some photos from Istanbul, with some appropriate background music.

Don't be this Lady

Just don't, OK.

End Post
Writing time: 1 minute
Time since last post: too long
Current media: None, although I did watch five episodes of No Heroics last night, which was good enough to deserve a mention

If Only It Were This Easy

The Governator delivers a classic line. It's a little old, but it really suits the current times.



End Post
Writing time: 1 minute
Time since last post: a few days
Current media: None

More stop motion

On another boring weekend, I decided to try some more stop motion stuff. This time the plan was some juggling balls. Before starting though, my perfectionist (perhaps obsessive) side shone through and I decided to plot out a proper set of parabolas for the balls to follow and a timing chart. This meant I had to do a bunch of playing around in Octave (Matlab for those not at a university or unwilling (actually unable (bloody mac)) to pirate). This in turn led me to try and sort out the problems I'd been having with making plots with Octave. After reinstalling Octave and Gnuplot, it turns out the answer involved change an environment variable in the .profile file. But that isn't really important for you guys to know. The end result was that I got it all working and wrote a script that would tell me where the balls should be positioned at each frame.

Next came preparing the scene. I decided my floor would be the best place to actually place the balls, since any other surface would involve certain difficulties regarding a force known to some as gravity. I checked that pencil marks could be easily removed from the floor, and then proceeded to mark out the spots that balls would be placed during the video. The last step was to set up the good old tripod and then take 70 odd photos, moving one or two balls in between each photo.

Onto post-production. Importing all the photos onto the computer and then into iPhoto was easy, but then it turns out that iPhoto doesn't have a batch rotate command built in. So I went and found a command line tool that did the job. After the little jaunt on the command line, it was onto iMovie to put it all together, which like this post, was a little tedious.

Now for the end result.


I think for my next stop motion project, I think I'll try for a few more complicated moves and put some gloves in the scene to represent the hands (I just had the idea for the gloves and am quite happy with myself). I might try this on the weekend if I don't go anywhere. (It's a long weekend and I'm not sure if I get paid tomorrow, Monday or Tuesday since payday is Saturday and Monday may or may not be a public holiday. If I have money tomorrow, I may go to Busan for the weekend.)

End Post
Writing time: 21 minutes
Time since last post: less than an hour
Current media: Daria 1x01 Esteemers

Watch This

This is an amazingly cool video to watch. It's a simulation of all the flights over the United States covering a period of a 29 hours (Mar 19 21:58 to Mar 21 2:01 GST). It's really impressive to watch. You can actually kind of make out the shape of the country just from watching where the planes go. Hawaii is kind of obvious sticking out in the middle of nowhere, and you can tell a lot of large cities by the amount of flights going in and out. Watch it and be amazed.

End Post
Writing time: 6 minutes
Time since last post: An hour or so
Current media: None

Proof of Concept

As has been mentioned, I recently got a new camera. Among the bonus stuff they through in with the camera was a tripod. Until today the tripod had been going to waste, just sitting in it's bag doing nothing.

Also, as my birthday occurred recently, I splurged and bought some bionicles (my uncle started giving them to me for birthdays and christmas, so when I was wondering the store I saw them and decided to get some for myself this time). This too has just been sitting unused, although it did make it out of the packet and was constructed.

Today I got an idea that would put both of these to work. Stop motion video production. So I got out the tripod, the bionicle and the camera and took a bunch of pictures. I couldn't do everything I wanted because the bionicle is rather hard to balance, and I couldn't really make it float in the air (I'm thinking about ways to do so).

Anyway, I present to you 4 seconds of video, vaguely inspired by the matrix.

End Post
Writing time: 5 minutes
Time since last post: about two hours
Current media: this post

Awesome + Awesome = Awesome

Scrubs meets The Muppets. Enjoy.
End Post
Writing time: 2 minutes
Time since last post: 1 day
Current media: This post

I'm on the YouTubes

Yesterday I was looking through a hundred yen shop near work looking for some feltpens, and while not finding any at that price point, I found some moderately bouncy balls with lights in them. Since the price seemed reasonable (105 yen each) I bought five of them, as I'm trying to learn to juggle five balls.

Today I was practicing and thought how about trying this in the dark to see what it would be like. Later on I thought it might make a cool video. A bit after that, I remembered my computer had a built in camera, and wondered if I had the software to record video. After finding out yes I do, I decided to give it a try. The result is not too bad. Not great, but not bad.

Here is the video.



There a few technical points. The lights are activated by bouncing, and the usual catching motion is not strong enough to activate them so I have to force the catches to turn the lights back on, and usually revert to a 3-ball cascade as catching dark balls in the dark is not easy.

I'm going to practice some more (I want to get turning the lights back on to the point where I can do it reliably on the first attempt), and may record a few more.

End Post
Writing time: 18 minutes
Time since last post: 2 days
Current media: The Daily Show

Cool video

Here is a video of several sand castles being blown up. For extra fun the film has been played backwards. It's pretty cool.

End Post
Writing time: 1 minute
Time since last post: 5 minutes
Current media: None