Browsing the archives for the english category

How to make time-lapse videos on a motorcycle…

Hardware Gadgets, Motoriges, english

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:

Post to Twitter Post to Yahoo Buzz Post to Delicious Post to Digg Post to Ping.fm Post to Reddit Post to StumbleUpon

4 Comments

snow leopard – leopard with brain freeze…

Software, apple, english

yesterday i installed snow leopard (10.6.1). BIG mistake; at least with a minor version number of “1″. Snow Leopard

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:

  • a Linux Server with samba shares
  • user password needed for personal shares
  • some shares read only for guests as well.

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…

Post to Twitter Post to Yahoo Buzz Post to Delicious Post to Digg Post to Ping.fm Post to Reddit Post to StumbleUpon

No Comments

Apple Remote Mod…

Hardware Gadgets, apple, english

my apple remote seemed a little flavorless and i kept confusing it with the one of my girlfriend or my sister’s. so i decided to paint it a little. (yes i know a sticker would have done the trick too)

here is the result:

Continue Reading »

Post to Twitter Post to Yahoo Buzz Post to Delicious Post to Digg Post to Ping.fm Post to Reddit Post to StumbleUpon

1 Comment

loops and stretching with urlshorteners…

OnlineLife Net Webapps, english

there has been some discussion (via @mstrohm) on the security of urlshorteners and i have been thinking about this the past days.

putting the problem of the bottle neck aside it leaves us with the possibility of spamming and/or loops and missing transparency when looking at urlshortening services. let’s say the advantage of shortening urls has to compensate one of the disadvantages; let’s take the bottle neck. it’s clear that one cannot shorten a url and expect the link to be independent or maybe distributed like DNS at the same time.

still there are 3 problems which have to be solved:

spamming: there are concepts which we know from mail services that can narrow this issue down. is.gd uses the surbl blacklisting service to check for spams. with a little fine tuning this is manageable.

loops: similar to the spamming problem, there must be a blocklist of sites that are not accepted for shortening. qr.cx already implements a list of about 200 services that are blocked from shortening. is.gd is saying so too, although they accepted qr.cx links and others at the time of writing. this is really easy to implement and should be done by every shortening service.

transparency: the problem here is that users cannot see where they are going when clicking a shortlink. the solution is again very easy to implement. tinyurl implements it by putting ‘preview’ as subdomain http://preview.tinyurl.com/m5l96j and qr.cx by putting ‘/get’ behind the shortlink: http://qr.cx/1r8/get.

curious as i am i decided

Continue Reading »

Post to Twitter Post to Yahoo Buzz Post to Delicious Post to Digg Post to Ping.fm Post to Reddit Post to StumbleUpon

2 Comments