I’m going through my back-catalogue of movie clips from previous vacations and trying to make some small movies out of it. The first one is from our awesome helicopter ride in New Zealand around the Franz Josef glacier.
The music is “like it” from sapiens fx.
New Zealand Helicopter Ride! from Jon Rocatis on Vimeo.
Just got back from a nice vacation in Vancouver/British Columbia/Seattle! This was my first vacation since I got CHDK installed on my pocket camera so it was time to experiment with some time lapse photography!
I got quite a lot of footage from various places and since I turned down the jpeg quality to the absolute minimum to get more shots on my 2GB SD card I even had the battery die before the card was full some times. I need to look into making some kind of external battery hack.
Anyway, just finished editing the best sequences in Final Cut Express and uploaded it to Vimeo.
British Columbia 2009 from Jon Rocatis on Vimeo.
The sound is garbled in a couple of places – quite weird. It is not on the source material but it seems that it happens in FCE when it converts from mp3. Must investigate.. Update: I tried converting the mp3 to wav using VLC (QuickTime will do as well) and then using that in FCE. That solved it! Maybe FCE doesn’t like VBR mp3’s or something.
The music is by HiFi Hustlers btw.
A picture is worth a 1000 words – that also goes for CPU instruction descriptions! So I started doing this for the SPUs in the Cell processor. For the most part it makes it easier for me to see what is going on and helps me remember what an instruction does. Not all instructions needs a diagram and some were really not that easy to visualize but I included them all for completeness.
Also I put instruction timings and whether they execute in the odd or even pipe right there with the instructions – all this info is taken from the “SPU Cheat Sheet” document by Insomniac Games. Thanks for those!
I hope you will find it useful. It really was more work than I anticipated and “Pages” which I used for this is not really suited for this kind of work and it slowed to a crawl. Rather painful actually. It handles PDF import very nice though. I used OmniGraffle for the diagrams and I found it pretty much perfect!
Anyway, enjoy!
Download it here
I was beginning to run out of disk space so since I needed to buy some new disks I thought I might as well try to see if using software RAID on the Mac Pro was worth it.
So I bought two 500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 rpm drives and formatted them for RAID usage. I selected 64K block size – I think default was 32K.
Next I copied my boot drive to the RAID setup using Carbon Copy Cloner and made the new RAID my new boot disk. There seems to be some confusion wether or not you can boot from a RAID drive – I do it now so I guess you can.
The old boot drive was a standard drive supplied by Apple – a Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 160GB . I tested it using Xbench 1.3:
Disk Test 48.12 Sequential 86.64 Uncached Write 82.30 50.53 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Write 82.89 46.90 MB/sec [256K blocks] Uncached Read 86.32 25.26 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Read 96.43 48.46 MB/sec [256K blocks] Random 33.31 Uncached Write 11.15 1.18 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Write 91.24 29.21 MB/sec [256K blocks] Uncached Read 90.87 0.64 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Read 119.29 22.13 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Disk Test 120.21 Sequential 182.63 Uncached Write 305.03 187.28 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Write 323.33 182.94 MB/sec [256K blocks] Uncached Read 78.29 22.91 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Read 362.56 182.22 MB/sec [256K blocks] Random 89.59 Uncached Write 31.76 3.36 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Write 353.19 113.07 MB/sec [256K blocks] Uncached Read 170.70 1.21 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Read 223.48 41.47 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Since I finally got my launch movie rotated I thought I would put it on YouTube. It was tough conditions for my small camera but I think it did an okay job on capturing the crackling sound of the Solid Rocket Boosters – especially if you play it on some decent speakers
Only 5 more days until she flies again!
I’ve been looking for a way to rotate movie files taken with my pocket camera for ages and I finally found the tool to do it: mencoder.
For some reason no movie player that I’ve come across will play movies shot in portrait mode rotated properly. Maybe the information is not stored within the movie file – anyway the end result is that you have to tilt your head when watching!
I really wanted a tool that could do loss-less rotating but I’m not sure mencoder does that. Anyway it works fine.
Movie rotate:
mencoder -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mjpeg -vf rotate=2 -oac copy orgmovie.avi -o rotatedmovie.avi
It also does another thing I’ve been wanting to do: Making a movie file out of jpgs. Here is an example of some options that created a file that works in QuickTime:
mencoder mf://*.JPG -mf fps=8:type=jpg -ovc lavc -o rig.avi -vf scale=640:480 -ffourcc DX50
The Mac executable I downloaded from the MPlayer site didn’t include mencoder so I got it using MacPorts instead.
I saw this short in-between-programmes thing on National Geographic channel where they showed that when you read, only the first and last letter in each word is really important – the brain does some crazy pattern matching on the letters in the middle and recognizes the words anyway without too much trouble!
So I wrote this little Ruby script to check it out myself.
I msut say taht it is rllaey ture waht tehy say. the biran is pertty aminazg
hree is the spcrit if you wnat to try it out yurseolf
# word scrambler
str = ARGV[0]
srand(Time.now.usec)
strs = str.split(' ')
res = ''
strs.each {|curword|
scramble = String.new(curword)
len = curword.length
if (len > 3)
begin
sel = curword[1..len-2].split('')
(1..len-2).each {|c|
idx = rand(sel.size)
scramble[c] = sel[idx]
sel.delete_at(idx)
}
end while (curword == scramble)
end
res += scramble + ' '
}
puts res
Some time ago when browsing the web I came across some news about the Space Shuttle. NASA had decided to retire it at around the year 2010! This was a bit of a shock to me and I began thinking about experiencing a launch live. I mentioned this to some of my colleagues and to my surprise they were all ready to go! In the end only Martin and Andreas were able to go – but that made planning a little easier too…
Getting the launch tickets was pretty intense as they sell out quickly. So the first countdown we experienced was the countdown for opening of the ticket sales! I was refreshing the ticket site URL pretty often until they finally started the sale. Then it was a race to enter the required information.. typing away like crazy.. done.. clicking “next”.. Arg! Forgot to click “I have read and understand bla. bla.”. Back.. clicking the checkbox.. “next”.. Arg! My credit card had changed from Visa to a Discover card! Back.. changing credit card type… “next”. Finally! The order went through and the confirmation mail appeared in my inbox! Phew!
We visited the Kenendy Space Center 2 days before launch to check things out. They had a “Up Close”-tour which we wanted to go to but they apparently sell out quickly so we had to get tickets for the next day. And the next day again was launch day so we ended up going to KSC 3 days in a row.
But it was all worth it. Seeing the Shuttle up close on the launch pad was really cool and it was a nice thing to do before seeing it launch.
At launch day we arrived at KSC pretty early as we didn’t want to take any chances with heavy traffic or things like that. The amount of people there surprised me! There were more people that evening than we had seen the previous days – and that was during the weekend! We killed some time taking pictures in the Rocket Garden where they illuminate the rockets at night.
I think we started to get in line for the busses that would take us to the launch viewing site around 23:00 or something. There were really long lines there, but we finally entered a bus and arrived at the NASA causeway around 01:15 – about an hour before liftoff. Then it was camera gear setup time! I brought my trusty old 300D for one purpose only: doing a long exposure of the launch. Setting it up using a gorillapod was pretty difficult – the camera was sitting all the way down on the ground and with everything around the being black it was really hard getting reference points.
With all camera setup done I could finally just relax and enjoy the countdown..
Unfortunately clouds had moved in over the area during the night – and they were thick clouds as well. So the Shuttle vanished out of sight fairly quickly after launch. That was pretty disappointing of course but at around the same time I realised that we weren’t going to see it again the sound reached us. Then the disappointment immediately went away! First you hear the rumble of the main engines followed by the awesome crackling sound of the twin solid rocket boosters. That is impressive to say the least. Even though we were around 9.5 kilometers away you can still feel the sound!
“Roger roll, Endeavour…”
Above is my long exposure attempt. The horizon is a little crooked and I should have had a little more ground in the picture. But I was afraid that I couldn’t fit the entire arc in the frame – that turned out to be a non-issue..
Even with the disappointing clouds it was still an awesome experience and something that I will never forget.
The cool thing about rocket launches is that they aren’t designed to be bright like the sun or to make as much noise as possible – that is simply a by-product of what it takes to go into space! That is all kinds of awesome! To quote one of Andreas’ T-shirts: “Science works, bitches!”
See more launch pictures here!
The server that is hosting this blog have had some rough times lately – and it all ended with the postal service destroying it! But luckily it lives on with new hardware in a brand new location!
Hopefully it will stay safe and sound for a long time…
The GDROM drive in the Dreamcast in my arcade cabinet is sometimes making unhealthy squeaking noises. That made me think about that when the GDROM eventually dies the Dreamcast is pretty much useless – and getting spare parts will continue getting harder.
Recently I got a new found interest in electronics after realizing what you can do nowadays with FPGAs and microcontrollers. I think it all started when I read about the Minimig – awesome project!
So I started toying around with the idea of replacing the GDROM drive with something else – a hard drive, connection to a PC or maybe a flash card. I did some googling and realized I wasn’t alone with that idea. A good thing is that the gdrom electronics are on a separate board which connects to the Dreamcast motherboard. Therefore it should be easy to replace at least physically.
