Browsing the archives for the english category
i did a little tilt shift miniature time lapse, just to see how it is done and estimate the complexity.
here it is (best seen in HD and full screen):
Time Lapse Miniature from flowolf on Vimeo. also on youtube.com
music by bob wizman – “on your 45″, licensed under cc-by-sa
the howto can be found here.
No Comments i recently came across some videos that took my breath. tilt shift time lapse videos. they produce kind of a miniature look combined with a stop motion and time lapse feature that was just nice.
of course i wanted to make one 
here is how:
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the original apple ear buds are not known for their comfort. so they are a good piece of old hardware to hack
i adapted them to have a shackle. this adds a lot of wearing pleasure and stability.
i took a wire to do the framing and some tape to fix the cable to it. then i coated the whole thing with sugru, apparently my new favorite working material.
as i blogged a few days ago, i got a nook (german). as this device only sells in the US it comes with a US power supply. lucky me that the supply supports 100-240 Volts out of the box. so the hack to adapt it to european power outlets was rather simple.
i found myself an old device which didn’t need the jack anymore
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i love firefox addons for certain quick tasks. they get things done so much faster and there are some really nice ones that i use regularly.
one of them was Exif Viewer, until it stopped working with version 3.6.* of firefox. 
since there was no update since July 2009 i didn’t expect a quick fix. so i did it myself.
here is what you do to make the addon work again (i already had it installed when i upgraded firefox to 3.6).
go to (the SOME_HEX_ID part is usually different for everone)
~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/[SOME_HEX_ID].default/extensions/exif_viewer@mozilla.doslash.org/
and edit the file install.rdf in that directory.
change:
[...]
em:minVersion="1.5"
em:maxVersion="3.5.*" /> <!-- Firefox -->
[...]
to
[...]
em:minVersion="1.5"
em:maxVersion="3.9.*" /> <!-- Firefox -->
[...]
or a version number that suits you. after a firefox restart the exif viewer addon should work again.
i give no guarantee this will work on any version of firefox. after all there is a reason they put a version number in there 
a few weeks ago i got my hands on a motorcylce camera stand (thx Patrick). one that was actually made for a motorbike and not a modified tankbag with rubber wraps. please don’t ever use those and please do never put a camera into your helmet as some youtube idiots present.
the camera i used is my canon ixus 750. since the lense on this camera is rather low i had to improve the camera stand. i added some aluminum ducts to make it higher and to make the camera see the street. about 7 centimeters were enough.
since i was not able to get the CHDK timelapse to work i shot video. to generate a timelapse i used ffmpeg to extract images out of the video and to unite them to a timelapse video.
using this tutorial and the man pages i was able to come up with this:
#!/bin/bash
# sample usage: ./timelapsify.sh input.avi output.mp4
mkdir ffmpeg_temp
ffmpeg -i $1 -r 1.4 -f image2 ffmpeg_temp/%05d.png
ffmpeg -i ffmpeg_temp/%05d.png -sameq $2
rm -rf ./ffmpeg_temp
note that it is important for ffmpeg to have the images you use to generate the timelapse video in order and sequenced. if you decide to delete some images you have to rename them and must not leave gaps.
also you may have to vary the rate (i used: 1.4) acording to the speed of your input video and the speed of the output video you want to have.
one step i did between extracting and generating the timelapse was sending it through imagemagick to blend the speedometer. using info from this mailing list:
#!/bin/bash
#usage: pixelate_circle.sh IN.file OUT.file center_x_coord center_y_coord border_x_coord border_y_coord
convert $1 \( -clone 0 -scale 10% -scale 1000% \) \
\( -clone 0 -gamma 0 -fill white \
-draw "circle ${3},${4},${5},${6}"\
\) -composite $2
of course this has to be done for every image
and here is the resulting video:
yesterday i installed snow leopard (10.6.1). BIG mistake; at least with a minor version 
i immediately ran into 4 problems. one of them that big that i decide to write these few lines to warn you about it (since they are essential to me).
the all so new finder is not really well implemented as it seems. finder has problems connecting to samba shares. a working setup under 10.5 (Leopard) was:
one of the shares that is accessible through a password is my time-machine share. on this net share i run backups from my mbp. see how to do that in this blog post. time machine connected to it automatically.
for leopard i had to add this to the smb.conf to fix issues:
# fixes weird leopard behavior
unix extensions = no
but for snow leopard i had to add this:
encrypt passwords = Yes
because the finder will not connect to servers without password encryption.
this allone did not fix the problem that i could not login. connection to shares that are open for guest users did show, shares that needed login did not.
as it turns out the finder has a little hidden feature called “Numeric passwords ONLY”. this means that you have to have a user account that authenticates with a password that only consists of numbers! as soon as i changed that i was able to mount my beloved shares again and time machine seems to work as well.
some users report that finder is quite picky about dns resolution as well… see the forms i linked about that.
the second little issue i had affects boxee. the apple remote seems to handle locks diffently or not at all. whenever is started boxee under 10.5 the apple remote was talking to boxee only. under 10.6 it also controlls itunes and front row whilst i run boxee in the foreground. not so cool!
a third little thing that did not work in leopard either is tether a mac with the htc hero. this apparently works out of the box for linux users but not for mac. what’s so hard about that?
a fourth little thing that annoys me is that the new quicktime has no more option to stay in full screen when the focus comes off. this is especially disruptive on dual head setups.
i really really hope that apple will soon release 10.6.2 and fix these problems. i don’t get how they could have overlooked these…
Aug 14, 2010 
