At this year’s Santacon, someone Brody dressed up as a grayscale Santa. Here is a picture by NV6V:
Update: more info in the description of this pic:
“Custom gray & white Santa suit, made by me. Wig + contacts + Kryolan body paint”
Unreal…
Filed under: photos, san francisco, santacon, santarchy · 2 Comments
How dogs become their people…, originally uploaded by tiki.robot.
So… Which one of these buttons dispenses the treats??? ;-)
jess
Filed under: photos, zara · 0 Comments
There was a terrible fire down by the RaNCh this weekend. Five neighboring warehouses burned to the ground. Somehow the ranch survived. dreameleven has a writeup of what happened. Craig started a flickr pool of photos of the fire:
Filed under: fire, photos, rAnCH, san francisco, tronix · 0 Comments
OK I’m certainly not all that and a bag of chips, but set to roll out in one week for a 565 mile bike trip to LA (over 7 days — I’m not *that* crazy 8-) I wanted to see if there was a nice/cute way to make me:
the first 3 are easy-peasy. you throw money at the problem and get the ifone with its legendarily crappy cell service and the free facebook app.
for the last point, i searched around wordpress plugins and found “fotobook” plugin (which also comes with two default disabled widgets).
it’s a liddle scary — you login to facebook while it’s “bugging” you, but once you done that (and given it your car keys) it figures out all your photo albums. you can pick which albums you want to show/hide. you can login/auth more accounts/people too (but so far I only love myself). to make my left-hand column “NEW TRACEY PIX” on
show up, I enabled the “photos widget”, set it to “most recent”, and tweaked the underlying PHP code to make a simple link to my facebook “mobile uploads” public page.
I think there’s an “update all albums” button somewhere, but there’s also simple instruction to “cron a get of url [X]” every X period of time so I did that. Next, I tested it and “voila!” 5 minutes later, and then a few hours later when Hunter tagged me in some pictures, the left-hand widget updated as if by magic.
I guess this sort of thing excites me. May be old hat. I know raj got tikirobot auto-posting the twitter feeds so maybe he’s figured something like this out already too.
neat, no?
Filed under: code code, ddAdd new tag, photos, word · 0 Comments
Here are some old pics of Sam and Peliom vj-ing with the open source TikiTV software at the Timothy Leary Archives event at 111 Minna. Way fun!
Filed under: archive, beats, cocoa, code code, opensource, photos, san francisco, tikitv, video · 0 Comments
I love this pic of my mom at Pyramid Lake that my dad sent from his iPhone while they were wandering around Nevada. Next year they’ll probably go to Burning Man without me.
Filed under: photos, playa, PyramidLake · 0 Comments
Since 2001, we’ve spent Halloween morning with a few hundred of our freaky friends. This year we had a spectacular new location and plenty of donuts and bacon. Thanks for another crazy year, Brass Tax crew!
Filed under: beats, BrassTax, halloween, photos, san francisco · 0 Comments
Parking Day was a while ago, but I still haven’t posted pics. Now that I have a worspress client on my iPod, I have no excuse to not post!
Filed under: excursions, ParkingDay, photos, san francisco, tiki lifestyle · 2 Comments
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!
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: chile, excursions, patagonia, photos · 0 Comments
We are back from India! Happy New Year’s to all!
Filed under: excursions, india, photos, TajMahal · 1 Comment
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, InternetArchive, photos, shag, tronix · 0 Comments
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, DaftPunk, Electroma, film, photos, san francisco · 0 Comments
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: Catweasel, DalaiLama, PabaPhree, photos, san francisco, soundart, TheMissingPeace, tronix, videoart, YBCA · 1 Comment
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, lighthouse, photos, PigeonPoint · 2 Comments
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:
jhead -nfpx%Y%m%d-%H%M%S -dt -ft $*
Now you have a nifty sequence of hopefully hi-res images. One of the cool things about timelapse is you can shoot 5 megapixel images and then scale them down to NTSC (720×480) or HD (1920×1024) resolution. In fact if some crazy 5 megapixel video format comes out 10 years from now, you will be able to support that as well! (As an aside, the Digital Cinema releases that are dribbling out to theaters these days are at 2,000 pixels wide. Eventually that will go up to 4,000 pixels wide, but there are not currently projectors that can support that resolution!)
So anyway, megapixels. How do you scale the images without fudging it up? A little known fact is that most video that looks crappy because of “the video compression” actually looks crappy because of the way the video was scaled down to its postage stamp resolution. So here is what you do: Use the fantastic ImageMagick “convert” command to scale your images down at even higher quality than photoshop! for free! and without using a dumb GUI scripting language. You can read about image scaling in laborious detail or you can just use this command line:
convert -filter sinc -resize 720x480 foo.JPG foo_ntsc.JPG
I put the following bash script into a makefile to process my timelapse library:
for i in *; do if [ ! -e "$i/ntsc_jpg/" ]; then mkdir "$i/ntsc_jpg"; for i in orig_jpg/*.JPG; do echo $i; echo convert -filter sinc -resize 720x480 ntsc_jpg/`basename $i`; done fi done
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.
convert -crop 1600x900+0+150 -filter sinc -resize 1024x576 foo.JPG foo_xga.JPG
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.
ffmpeg -i "IMG_%04d.JPG" -b 10000 test.m2v
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:
ffmpeg -i "IMG_%04d.JPG" -vcodec mpeg2video -intra -qscale 4 test.m2v
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: commandline, ffmpeg, ImageMagick, jhead, photos, timelapse, video · 1 Comment
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, public art, san francisco · 2 Comments
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: chicken john, halloween, hsag, photos, san francisco, trick or treat, why are we here?, words words · 0 Comments
We went to the Illuminated Corridor event, Prelinger on Prelinger, at the Prelinger Library last night. Lots of video art! Some pics:
Filed under: archive, books, library, photos, prelinger, videoart · 0 Comments
We went to LoveParade last weekend and had a blast! The Unimog should be at City Hall every weekend!
Filed under: beats, loveparade, photos, san francisco, spacecowboys, unimog · 0 Comments
I found these two awesome posts that my feedreader about a mile long today.. I’m surprised safari didn’t crash:
