Filed under: photos | 0 Comments
Tagged: exploratorium , toilet

Ulrich Schnauss at the Fox Theatre in Boulder, Colorado on July 8, 2008, with A Shoreline Dream, Cacheflowe, and Ian Cooke.  A remarkable show, one of the best.  Music was great, crowd was appreciative, and the musicians had much love for each other. Multiple encores.

Audio sample one; audio sample two.

If anyone happened to record this show, please post a comment below, I’d love to get a copy. Same lineup is playing July 9 evening in Denver at the Falcon.

Filed under: beats, inspiration, photos, via phone | 0 Comments

Seen outside archive HQ:

Today, while trying to burn a Knoppix DVD, I had four senior programmers standing around me, helping with cdrecord command line options.

me: I can’t believe I’m wasting four other developer’s time trying to burn a dvd…
sam: That’s the difference between Linux and Windows.

Photo credit: Paul!

Filed under: archive, photos | 1 Comment
Tagged: coredump

Here are some pics from my recent trip! I did an 8 day trek in Torres del Paine called the Paine Circuit which is in southern Chile. It was beautiful! It was also really really hard. I can’t lie…there were many times I wished I were lying on a warm beach in Bali that week…especially when I was kind of lost, at the edge of a precipice, and the wind was so fierce, I had to grab hold of a tree or my makeshift trekking poles that I dug into the ground to keep myself from being blown off the mountain. The wind was UNREAL. I had to stop whenever I heard it coming behind me, hunch down close to the ground, and prepare myself to get hit. it came in phases like mini-tornadoes.

The weight of my pack also made it difficult for me to put one foot in front of the other sometimes. I’d never gone on such a long backpacking trip before and at the end of the first day, my back hurt so much, I gave my SLR to a chilean woman at the refugio by our first camp. Luckily I still had a small pocket cam which I used for the pics above (hooray for small pocket cams!)

The crazy wind and weight of my pack aside, the trip was great! I met lots of nice people, and learned a lot. It was one of the most beautiful places I’ve been to and I’m glad I went when I still had knees. I’m fairly certain they’re done for now. They’ve just told me that they will no longer be in on anything I decide to do this year. They are going on stike!

Here’s a map of the trek.

The penguins were at a penguin colony on Seno Otway, about an hour from Punta Arenas. To get to Torres del Paine, you have to fly to Punta Arenas (about 4-5 hrs from Santiago, Chile), take a bus to Puerto Natales (about 3-4 hours) and then another bus to the park (about 2-3 hours). It takes a while!

Filed under: excursions, photos | 0 Comments
Tagged: chile , patagonia

We are back from India! Happy New Year’s to all!

Filed under: excursions, photos | 1 Comment
Tagged: india , TajMahal

When you are building a digital library to provide Universal Access to Human Knowledge, how to you hold all the data?

You start with a few racks of machines to hold the data using redundant storage:

The red boxes are built by Capricorn. Each one is a 1U half-depth low-power server that can hold four 1TB hard drives:

Add a bunch of homemade routers:

And some BigIron: (this thing pushed 6Gb/s today!)

Now you need to power it up:

And cool it down:

And fill it with books:

For some reason, you need a 1980’s-era Connection Machine:

Finally, no Archive is complete without a world-class Linux kernel hacker:

Filed under: archive, photos, tronix | 0 Comments
Tagged: InternetArchive , shag

After we went to The Missing Peace opening party, we went to see Daft Punk’s Electroma at the Clay Theater. Nate, Mario, Shag, Richard, Sonya met us there, but somehow we missed Aryana.

The DJ set before the movie was awesome. All movies need DJs, robots, and lasers.

Filed under: beats, photos, san francisco | 0 Comments
Tagged: DaftPunk , Electroma , film

May, Peliom, Barbara, Sasha, Mang, Greta, Furry, Lisa, Mr. Foo, Dodger, Herve, Jess, and I went to opening party for The Missing Peace: Artists Consider the Dalai Lama at YBCA. Paba Phree and Catweasel worked on this 32-channel sound/video installation:

The installation was wonderful, but it was too loud to fully hear the soundscape. We’ll have to go back when it’s less crowded. The other pieces were great as well!

Here are a few more pics I took before a security guard came and told me there was absolutely no photography allowed at YBCA.

Filed under: photos, san francisco, tronix | 1 Comment
Tagged: Catweasel , DalaiLama , PabaPhree , soundart , TheMissingPeace , videoart , YBCA

Once per year at the Pigeon Point Lighthouse they shut down the weak insipid modern (presumably electric) light and switch over the the 5 kerosene lamps and fresnel lens of the original, as it was 135 years ago.

CC-licensed (by-nc-nd) photo by MumbleyJoe:

via

Filed under: bay area, photos | 2 Comments
Tagged: lighthouse , PigeonPoint

I thought I would share a couple of helpful GPL command lines that really get the job done if you want to animate a sequence of images.

First (via Mike) is news of the jhead project. Unbelievably the ImageCapture.app application that ships with Mac OS X cannot handle more than several thousand images. ImageCapture.app will copy all of the image files, but the number sequence wraps around and it overwrites thousands of the earlier images in the sequence!! jhead fixes all that by renaming all of the image files based on the EXIF timestamp in the JPG file. brilliant! Here is the commandline he recommends:

Now you have a nifty sequence of hopefully hi-res images. One of the cool things about timelapse is you can shoot 5 megapixel images and then scale them down to NTSC (720×480) or HD (1920×1024) resolution. In fact if some crazy 5 megapixel video format comes out 10 years from now, you will be able to support that as well! (As an aside, the Digital Cinema releases that are dribbling out to theaters these days are at 2,000 pixels wide. Eventually that will go up to 4,000 pixels wide, but there are not currently projectors that can support that resolution!)

So anyway, megapixels. How do you scale the images without fudging it up? A little known fact is that most video that looks crappy because of “the video compression” actually looks crappy because of the way the video was scaled down to its postage stamp resolution. So here is what you do: Use the fantastic ImageMagick “convert” command to scale your images down at even higher quality than photoshop! for free! and without using a dumb GUI scripting language. You can read about image scaling in laborious detail or you can just use this command line:

I put the following bash script into a makefile to process my timelapse library:

And finally I would like to share the “ghetto HD” format that VJ Science came up with for doing 16:9 format on an XGA projector. This command includes cropping to get my 1600×1200 images into 16:9 aspect ratio … if you have a different source resolution, I’m going to leave it to you multiply your image width by 9 and divide by 16 to figure out the how many pixels to crop on top and bottom. The idea is to crop first and then scale down. Although I guess in terms of quality it doesn’t matter the order.

Now you’ve got a nifty sequence of beautifully scaled images. Time to make video! Which of the 7 bajillion video codecs are you going to use? My recommendation is to use ffmpeg to make an mpeg-2 “master” that you can distribute by uploading to youtube, archive.org, and so on. ffmpeg understands image sequences! So here is a quick way to get your mpeg-2 video (no audio). This command assumes your images are named like “IMG_0001.JPG” and so on … I know that doesn’t jive with the jhead naming I’ve outlined above, but you are a big unix haxor and can figure that out.

For my purpose I am building up a video library for doing VJ/video mixing stuff. In this use case video quality and decode speed is much more important than bitrate. Since decoding mpeg-2 “I” frames is about 3x faster than decoding “P” or “B” (difference) frames I use this command to get a high quality I-frame only mpeg-2 stream:

You can get higher quality by dropping qscale down even lower, but I think if you do qscale=1 your video basically won’t be compressed at all :-) rajbot?

So there you have it! The basics of an Open Source timelapse production pipeline. I use these tools on Mac OS X. Of course they are available on GNU/Linux. And you can also get them working under windows using Cygwin … We need more timelapse!

Link to jhead project
Link to ImageMagick project
Link to FFmpeg project

Filed under: photos, video | 1 Comment
Tagged: commandline , ffmpeg , ImageMagick , jhead , timelapse

sometime last week this amazing bronze spider [Crouching Spider (2003), Louise Bourgeois (b. 1911)] crawled onto the Embarcadero near Pier 14 in San Francisco. it’s just sitting there, waiting. like a scene from The Host: it appeared, people gathered, and some didn’t make it back - particularly the small ones. i was lucky … more photos. 

Filed under: photos, san francisco | 2 Comments
Tagged: public art

and on this night
did “PJ” and I go forth:
enrobed, and buzzing:
what would we find?

this cancelled holiday,
some bloody recent past:
this new top-down sanitation:
would it fly?
or, might
a hundred thousand frustrated planners
bust forth,
strutting where they could not ride?

we learned. the streets:
tranquil.
a few of us presented
different faces to the night,
but, mostly,
empty spaces where we once were,
some tourists,
some journalists,
a few mobile “Chicken John Johns”,
lots of cops.

some tentative reaching out -
as if
anything at all could happen,
focused violence or
friendly greetings:
friend or foe, both hidden,
no one could see, fearful,
but, some defied this
creeping numbness:
and happily swept the shrine
for our most honored holiday.
Trick or Treat.

Filed under: photos, san francisco, why are we here? | 0 Comments
Tagged: chicken john , halloween , hsag , trick or treat , words words

We went to the Illuminated Corridor event, Prelinger on Prelinger, at the Prelinger Library last night. Lots of video art! Some pics:

linky to pics on flickr

Filed under: archive, books, photos | 0 Comments
Tagged: library , prelinger , videoart

We went to LoveParade last weekend and had a blast! The Unimog should be at City Hall every weekend!

Linky to photoset

Filed under: beats, photos, san francisco | 0 Comments
Tagged: loveparade , spacecowboys , unimog

I found these two awesome posts that my feedreader about a mile long today.. I’m surprised safari didn’t crash:

• Dorothy of Cat and Girl posts images of every photoshop filter successively applied to a photo.
• Joey aka Accordian Guy posts 72 scenes from the Simpsons, and their corresponding movie scene screengrabs.

Filed under: photos | 1 Comment

Jess and I went to the Samavor Tea Lounge at Yerba Buena Gardens a few weeks ago.. Here are some pictures!

Filed under: food, photos, san francisco | 1 Comment
Tagged: brunch , samovar , yerba buena

Pics from the slide.com party at Medjool… The Slide peeps throw the best parties, so of course we had to show up! It must be a blast to work with the Slide crew :)

The pics are also on flickr.

Filed under: photos, slide | 2 Comments

For Mike’s b-day we went to Little Baobab for dinner and then Bissap Baobab for drinks. I know, we got it backwards, but it was great! Here are some pics:

There were some awesome musicians at Little Baobab who were playing a cajón, a Peruvian drum that looks like a box. Somehow I’d never seen or heard one before!

Filed under: photos | 1 Comment
Tagged: mike

Bob was in town for my B-day, and Tyrone’s band SABRETEETH happened to be playing at El Rincon, so we went out for birthday drinkies.. May and Peliom surprised me with CUPKAKES!!!, which we ate in the back of the truck, due to an extremely loud opening band.. photo linky!

Created with Paul’s flickrSLiDR.

Filed under: beats, food, old timers, photos | 0 Comments

Having two monitors really does make you more productive! Without the second one, I couldn’t get any work done, because Flickervision is fullscreen on the first one :)

Filed under: photos | 1 Comment
Tagged: neat

The TikiRobot crew went to the Creative Commons Salon last month at Shine SF. Shine has an internet-enabled photobooth that uploads the pics it takes to Flickr. I checked it today and found this pic of us, which is very tame compared to most the Shine photobooth pics.

A Flickr photobooth.. I’m pretty sure we’re living in the future or something.

Filed under: photos | 5 Comments

I love Wild Side West. It’s my favorite bar in Bernal, and maybe my favorite bar in the world. When San Francisco gets cold and misty, I love their fireplace. When it’s hot and sunny I love the fabulous garden in the back. Whenever the evening plan seems a little lackluster (like on Friday), re-routing to the Wild Side is a good way to ensure a fun night!

Filed under: photos, san francisco | 0 Comments
Tagged: bernal

I gave a short and silly opendork presentation at about TikiGraffiti last night. Here is a photo that Scott Beale of Laughing Squid took of me in front of Jonathan Moore’s and David Fine’s External Combustion Engine, an awesome machine made for monochrom’s Roböxotica festival.

Last night was awesome.. Dorkbot, monocrom, SRL, Electrum, Tamale Lady, Mooninites, Laughing Squid, robots that make music and robots that make tiki drinks…. Sometimes I love San Francisco!

Karen has a bunch of pictures, including a bunch from my opendork. Thanks to Karen Marcelo and Michael Shiloh for organizing, and thanks to all the awesome presenters :)

Filed under: all talk, no code, photos, san francisco, tikibar | 3 Comments

I got sick of our SecureImage captcha. I couldn’t type in the correct code a third of the time, and it looked ugly. So I wrote a new hacked up our existing captcha plugin to show pictures of graffiti and street art instead of computer-generated text!

Please help me test it out by leaving a comment with a link to a picture of street art. I found some great ones in this Flickr set by Trois Tetes. You can also use Flickr Creative Commons search to “find content to modify, adapt, or build upon”. Please make sure that the image has a CC license!

I’ll add attribution for the images and then post the code if no one finds a bug!

Update: Get it here!

Filed under: all talk, doodles, no code, photos, typography | 10 Comments

On our way to India we had a layover in London and decided to go out and explore the city. We had lunch near Paddington Station and our bartender poured pints of Guinness with clover leafs drawn in the bubbles!

The 2:1 exchange rate made our short adventure pretty expensive (2 fish & chips and 2 pints of Guinness were 25 pounds.. 50 bucks!). I think we managed to spend as much in London in 10 hours as we did in Delhi in 10 days! On the way back, we decided to not leave the airport.

Filed under: excursions, photos, tikibar | 2 Comments