DataMike

This panorama was stitched from 9 photos of about 180 degrees.  You can take an aerial tram from a parking lot to the peak for $7 and hike back down (or up if you’re nuts) in about 2 hours.  It’s not the longest tram (that’s actually in Albuquerque), but it is a pleasant view.  Off in the far distance is Juarez, Mexico.

A view from Ranger Peak in El Paso, Texas

Blender is a free open-source 3d modeling program available from blender.org.

There’s no shortage of tutorials regarding modeling, texturing, animation and other subjects for blender, but basic info on the user interface is tough to come by. Surprising, considering that 90 percent of understanding blender comes from wrapping your head around the interface. Once you get past that, it’s a whole new world and a what was once a dense program suddenly makes a lot of sense.  Some fine tutorials can be found by searching youtube; some more cool tutorials can be found at gryllus.net

The cool thing about the UI is I started to wonder about it being applied to other programs like a word processor. What if you could just slide open a new window in Word, and then make that window another view port in a long document for easy cut and pasting, then make that window into some type of sub-menu system, drawing area, wysiwyg output. or html preview, withouth having to hunt for them in menus. Really cool stuff.

In these four videos, I show how I use my Garmin Etrex handheld GPS  with Google Earth and Google Maps, transferring data to and from.

Obviously, I not going to tell you to pirate DVD’s that you didn’t buy, but I have no problem telling you how to copy your own DVD’s either for backup or to convert to your portable device.  In these two videos I show you how I use Slysoft’s AnyDVD to rip DVD’s and the open source Handbrake to convert the resulting files to different formats.  Along the way, I talk about some other tools I use in the process.

I had to make a new cat 5 cable today, so why not do a test video with my Logitech Quickcam 9000.

The webcam is actually mounted on a mini-tripod by using a spring clip from Home Depot that was drilled and tapped for a 1/4 inch hole.

My "video rig" a Logitech Quickcam 9000

I talk about IP updating services to will keep tracking of your changing dynamic IP address on the internet, so you can alway point to your web server or DVR camera on the internet

I had an interesting weekend.  I keep a couple of search columns on Tweetdeck open for “ustream” and “stickam” looking for interesting feeds(hey, I spent a week watching the Burning Man festival feed).  Suddenly there was a lot of activity under “ustream” about “the fight”.  It was the Mayweather-Marquez fight that was on pay per view.  Sure enough somebody had routed the video into a ustream feed.

pay per view fight on ustream

A quick note: more than 5700 viewers, wow.  (I guess if your viewer count is lower than you’d like, start pointing your webcam at HBO)

Not to surprisingly about 25 minutes later:

banned

But there were a couple more feeds using the old fashioned “shoot the camera at the screen” method.

camera screen shot

This guy’s view counter went up to 2662 after the other channel was banned.  In-between rounds the camera would swing around and the hosts would responds to the chat room.  An interesting way to go.

Here was another camera shot feed, less framed up.

another camera screen shot

We live in interesting times.  And suspect there’s an interesting meeting going on at Ustream headquarters today with interesting phone calls being made.  And that leads to interesting questions about ways to prevent this, can you prevent this, should you even try.  I’ve seen plenty of ustream feeds showing old public domain movies, but this is the first time for this (for all I know, this goes on all the time).  But it brings up the you argument of how responsible is the website(publisher) for the activities of it subscribers.  Me, I’ll just watch.

About 6 months ago, I did a series on tutorials on the free VMWare VMServer product that ran and administered virtual machines through a web interface.  I got a letter from a gentleman asking how to move his laptop windows XP image to a virtual environment.  He was making a Driveimage XML(as a BartPE plug-in) backup and was trying to restore it in a XP virtual machine.  This runs into a s-load of  abstraction layer problems, that I don’t think it could ever work that way.  Here’s a section of my reply to him:

>But that’s all academic, because the real problem
> is that the restored image probably won’t run because the
> “hardware” that windows sees has changed.  Just like
> pulling a physical hard drive from one machine and putting
> it in another, Windows won’t probably boot fully, because
> it’s seeing different hardware.  Acronis advertises
> that their workstation software can create VM images during
> backup, that would be one way to go.  I just saw the
> VMWare has a free converter program http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/
> for creating VM’s, but I only just saw it now while
> researching for your letter,  I’ll certainly check that
> out.

I did indeed check it out, and it does work as advertised.  It took roughly 20 minutes to produce a VM image folder of my bench XP that I was able to take to my main computer and run under VMserver.  Under the first “power on” of the XP image it went through a series of finding and installing drivers then asked for a reboot.  After the reboot of the XP image, the environment was fully there as was the installed software from the bench computer; nifty.

Of course, since the hardware has changed, and we all know Microsoft’s douchiness on this subject, the image is giving me 3 days for activation(compared to 30 days for an initial XP install, interesting).  I’m not going to bother, since this is a test image I’m going to dump anyway, but I suspect when you go to activate, it’s going to give that magic phone number to call and you get to tell the rep that you’re upgrading the motherboard.

Either way,  the converter is the equivalent of magic to me, and I’ll definitely have a video coming up.

I’ve owned  a Zoom H4n recorder for about a month now and have to say I’m still pleased with it.  I use it for nature sounds and eventually want to start doing interviews with out.  You can buy it now for roughly $300 (lucky you, when I bought it, it was $350) at Amazon, but there are plenty of bundles on Ebay (where I bought it) the will include extras like a corded remote , extra memory card, and a mini-tripod for the same price.  The only disadvantage is you have to wait a week instead of the 2-day amazon delivery.  The Video I put on youtube shows the menu structure and gives a general overview.

At the risk of sounding old, I get excited with objects like these:  for $300 you’re getting the equivilent of technology that would’ve cost $1000 to $5000(and this is being conservative) 20 years ago at the dawn of digital recordings (you know, the audio CD area).  Technology has removed another barrier to getting your voice out there, an idea which is worthy of a whole separate post.

Here are some recoded clips made with the onboard mic’s:

rainwater

crickets

Rio Grande bosque area