21 Nov 2005
Hi there.
Just writing to let you all know I’m alive, or something. Maybe just to admit I couldn’t stay away from a computer? Whatever! ;-)
I’m on a coin-op terminal in the YHA, coz it’s too miserable to walk to a real net-cafe in town (there are plenty). Which means I’m on a keyboard that looks as though it were designed by someone on heavy, heavy drugs. That is, it’s completely unusable. Actually, come to think of it, maybe they weren’t on drugs and needed to be. Either way, typing is painful.
So this is going to be quick.
Milford walk was good, very relaxing so far as such things go. It was vaguely full of geriatrics (sp? I can’t check, because this bloody terminal can’t even open a new window, let alone tabs), but I hid behind my two cameras the whole time so all was good. 300+ pictures on digital alone, nearly four rolls of 35mm film.
Major problem with the 1GB card. Linux read it fine, the camera read it fine, Windows decides it’s going to… erm… I’ll say “act like usual” to avoid expletives. Basically it didn’t come preformatted, but I didn’t notice because the camera didn’t have a problem and neither, I think, did my desktop (Ubuntu) at home. So as much as I’d love to share a photo or 400, I can’t. Not yet, anyway.
After the walk, we went white-water rafting and I did this Canyon Swing thing… which is like a combination of freefall and an enormous swing. It’s 100 and a bit metres high, about 60 of which is freefall. Good stuff. I have photos to prove it, but seeing as I can’t be bothered walking places (i.e. to a place where I can plug in my camera — ha ha, it’s not working because all these places run Windows — or use a scanner, because I have hard-copy) it’s impossible to share just yet. It’ll happen.
I don’t know when I’m next going to be at a computer because we’re gonna start driving around the country in a day or two, so next post might be sometime in December after I get back!
Oh, yeah, and I might have possibly moderated a comment or two. The spammers have been nice-ish. Time’s up on this piece of junk. The clock is doing some stupid key-trapping animation thing to stop me from actually using it in the last minute. Doh!
12 Nov 2005
That word is impossible to spell! And, yeah, it’s only available as an image coz I scanned it from something dad did and couldn’t be bothered marking it up. Whatever. The only people who care can see/have normal user agents, so accessibility is neatly matched with intended audience here!
And this was really the last post. Bye!
11 Nov 2005
Of course, Paris has seen this sort of thing before, though – think what Robespierre could have done with a Blogger account.
Ah… I’m uncertain whether I’m allowed [by circumstance and social conventions] to find that funny, but it is! :D
11 Nov 2005
That’s the length of audio I can record on my camera with just the new 1GB memory card I got today for it. With the 256MB card recording 4 hours and 18 minutes, I can record the 23 hours and 10 minutes from now until when our flight leaves tomorrow (~1845 GMT+10)! But I’m not going to.
Technology rocks!
10 Nov 2005
Ah, would you look at that date? Yes, indeed, this fabled “Other Side” is indeed real. Or maybe I’m now a figment of my own imagination and I still have exams to go. Whoa, recursive.
Business was good, but for one question, the details of which I don’t exactly recall (23 c), which was so poorly written only BS teachers could manage it. It depresses me to think there are people that can spend that much of their life professionally applying buzzwords and doing absolutely nothing. Your mother was a hampster and your father smelt of elderberries! Now go away, or I shall taunt you a second time!
And they did. The wonders of Monty Python!
So, today, I plan to spend some time doing stuff with Tori because she’s about to fly away for… a long time… and then when I get home/before I go out play with Cinelerra, which, miraculously, I finally have working well. The secret is to ignore the stupid DEB and go straight for the RPMs with alien, which makes the experience remarkably painless. Err… in a totally non-abducted-by-aliens kind of way.
ANYWAY! My biggest qualm with it is its render/batch render thing, not because it’s slow (it is, kind of, but that’s mostly just the way I’ve got this computer setup), but because it seems impossible to export in a format that everything likes (aside from straight raw DV, which I haven’t tried because I need to put another hard disk in this computer. I would have, but I’m out of IDE channels and really need to think about how to store things properly.)
At the minute, I’m generally rendering in MPEG-4 (ffmpeg) and then effectively transcoding back to MPEG-4 using mplayer to make it more player-friendly. I take it the codec is exactly the same, it’s just that Cinelerra seems to have some quirk that means only mplayer can read the rendered file, whilst xine and VLC fall over and promptly die.
Shrug. I’ve just been editing video sequences, though, so at least I haven’t had to deal with audio as well. One would presume that would be rather less painless — it’s not, at least not in terms of setting up Cinelerra for audio playback/NLE stuff. Despite having both ALSA and esound output options, ALSA would just make it crash (this seems widely documented with no fix available), and esound wouldn’t work because… well… I don’t think my local esound server has a port open, and Cinelerra, being some broadcast-quality high-and-mighty piece of crap, decides that talking to a local sound server is beneath it. Ironically, the simplest of the lot, OSS, worked without any difficulties… but that of course means I can only have one sound stream going simultaneously. Which, admittedly, isn’t a huge problem when you’re trying to work in Cinelerra (it’s hardly as though you want other sounds going on whilst you’re trying to edit audio), but disabling the server, etc, can be a little bit of a pain.