08 Jul 2006
Got back from Orient Point last night at about 10.30 or some equally respectable time (felt like a really short trip despite near-disasters with lack-of-petrol, etc., made much less stressful/long thanks to an iPod shuffle clearly powered by the Energi[s/z]er bunny, good conversation, and shared driving load). Was awesome, featuring lots of console action, a bit of mud, a lot of water earlier in the week, a lot of water in a boat after certain people (see photos referred to later in post) capsized a canoe, Kahlua (straight, with ice-cream, with vodka, milk, and I’m sure there were other variants), moderate quantities of Taboo, a few hours of DVDs, sunset on the headland looking over water (yes, even on Australia’s east coast. I love rivers.), alternately good and okay food (few disasters, I’m pleased to report!), and a not-quite complete absence of Internet (only by GPRS when we were trying to get something working earlier in the week).
Am now sick. (Not very sick, just annoying-cold-sick). Sickness was probably brought on by late nights etc., but it’s not like sleep wasn’t had… plenty of sleep was had, just at slightly, errr… skewed hours. Plus other people made me sick but I timed it well so I wasn’t sick whilst away. *nods* Too many diseased clouds (aside: that so easily becomes diseased clowns, which is all fun and games until you go a step further: deceased clouds (rain) or deceased clowns (black comedy). Words are fun. (Apologies if I used them to annoy anyone too much during the week (seriously (I like brackets))).
Last night was going to be early (after an expedient trip home) then became late as some wedding party rehearsal (the wedding was this morning) locked themselves out and I went to let them back in (should have been a quick trip but I stayed to setup various stuff for a bit). Meh! Then I didn’t get to sleep for ages because of not-being-able-to-breathe badness. I kept waking up and finally gave up and ended up getting out of bed at about 6.30 this morning… yeeeuuuccchhh. Yeah, whatever, I don’t care if you normally wake up at that time. It’s that versus 9.00-ish to 11.00-ish every morning for the preceding week, so twas e’er so slightly painful. And now I’m exhausted (predictably), and plan on sleeping in until about 11am tomorrow morning.
Whilst that’s happening, hopefully 750-odd MB will be trickling up onto Flickr. Since I started writing this (probably twenty minutes to half an hour) I’ve done 8 photos (~2.55MB each)… poor computer :( Gonna be a long night for it! Ah well… Telstra is being retarded this month (still capped speeds despite not officially being capped according to its site, etc. Must call up and whine extensively.) so I’m gonna use it anyway, because uploads aren’t capped (speed-wise, even if they retardedly-count-towards-quota). I could alternatively upload at work (== iiNet ADSL2+ == no upload quota == fast) on Monday but I’m afraid I’m too impatient for that. Plus I *heart* kflickr and abhor their (Flickr’s) Windows uploader tool (fuploader it should be called, which makes a sound suspiciously like a belly-flop does (“fup”/”thwup”/”thwack”/*blood splatter*). F stands for FAILURE.)
Speaking of quotas and the like, how much mucus (I could swear that is spelt incorrectly) do you think it’s possible for a person to produce per day? I’m so sure I’m over quota right about now. Hopefully this means I’ll run really quickly through this cold and be capped by tomorrow! Hehehehe. Insert elaborate metaphor about running noses and de… what’s the word? Some drug. Does stuff with colds. Whatever… point is I dislike cold + flu drugs. They make me drowsy and I forget to take them and you’re not meant to mix them with alcohol… err hi. I mean… Operate heavy machinery. Yes, that.
Good week. Photos coming soon.
03 Jul 2006
Oh my goodness I can feel myself turning into an aspiring engineer. WHY ARE MY INTERESTS SO COMPLETELY SCHIZOPHRENIC? And no, I have no interest in being a highly literate, well-read engineer that is capable of communicating well, so don’t even suggest it. Mostly because I do an Arts degree and am not terribly good at communicating to start with (I make simple concepts take hours to explain, but if given those hours things should hopefully be abundantly clear and open for independent exploration + thought… so I don’t really know how the teaching thing would/will go. Fact is I suck at talking to people in normal contexts without a massive focus on particulars).
Anyway. I’m kinda pissed off with myself for wanting to take the thing down anyway and try fixing it because that is SO GEEKY and anti-social, etc. Like, I’m sure there’ll be a quiet hour or three in which I can do that without appearing such, but… bleh. Disliking… various things. Oh yeah I’m talking about a projector with RETARDED MGA (26-pin, 3-row. Used as AV feature connectors on mid-90′s Matrox cards and possibly later, D-SUB part impossible to source with a day’s notice.) CONNECTORS that SO NEARLY match up to VGA VESA spec as to be indistinguishable. The only difference is two pins for some kind of digital IO… even device ID pins (introduced in DDC spec for supplementing proprietary ID bits manufacturers were starting to use anyway, apparently) are the same. The digital IO pins seriously should have been saved for some other socket, because this causes so much unneccessary pain. Grrr.
I’ll source real parts upon return to Sydney if I haven’t ‘accidentally’ dropped it from the back of a rapidly-moving vehicle before then. I am sufficiently pissed off at the eBayer who neglected to say that absence of cables meant impossible connection. Despite listing PC and video input in item specs. Bastard. Grr grr grrr. Okay I’m done being angry at the world now. Time to go finish packing then throw crap in car then sleep for… six hours, then get pink slip for car because it goes out of rego in the middle of the week away (!) and THEN drive with people southwards to Orient Point. And in that week I’m hoping to do stuff with people/read books WAY more than geeking. Will see how this goes. :-/
01 Jul 2006
Spent re-wiring Tim’s car after sound install people broke + stole end of fridge power lead, trying to get a clearer idea of what’s happening logistically next week (less complicated than I thought it’d be), discovering we’ve parked Tim’s car in the garage and can’t get it out because of a car we don’t have keys to, eating pizza in an ice-cream shop, stumbling upon (well, we knew them) a buck’s night involving a cross-dressing violin-busker and an unfortunate encounter with one member of the party’s ex-students, a fight with cleaning implements in aforementioned ice-cream shop, culminating in the discovery that, in fact, there is very little to be gained by turning off the lights and running in such a situation due to the copious light pollution afforded by display lights from fridges, etc.
Well fine it wasn’t that crazy, but… sufficiently exciting. Tomorrow I’m waking up at 6.30 (!!) to go get a projector for next week away (!!!). That said, this could well be the last post before leaving… but that’s probably rather unlikely. Now gonna go catch a quite-reasonable six and a half hours of sleep.
30 Jun 2006
Went pretty well I’d say. Not that it’s really my call to make :) Seemed rather short despite my lack of foresight resulting in me standing for the duration (I forgot to get a chair and then there were people in the room and chairs were too far away. Ones with armrests weren’t an option because they’re inconvenient). Standing was, however, a necessity. Video was composed largely from analogue loops, with everything ultimately running through effecTV. It did work amazingly well (IMO) but it was a bit of a pain not to be able to use composite capture, which would have meant a bigger camera not so constrained by a USB lead. Just quietly, my webcam kicks arse. Like, with plastic explosives or something. It’s great even in low light! Obviously it drops off into the nether-regions, but still… all-round goodness.
The grain wasn’t really a problem anyway, because most of the vision was intentionally grungy/the input was only a seed for further digital genesis, so that was cool. I’ve got to get the composite input for this computer working before I do another one of these things or get a real capture card, though, because it’s a pain having only one camera. Usually I’d flick it around to a light source bright enough that everything would flare out and then repo, or switch to a heavily distorted effect, or slide my finger over it (it’s a webcam, okay?) to black. The vision mixer didn’t get a workout because I couldn’t get TV-out working properly in time (mostly because effecTV’s fullscreen mode did weird things to sync on composite outputs, but hey, VGA worked).
I’ve really got to learn how to use PureData before next time, too. It looks so incredibly powerful, wow. I don’t understand where it outputs sources/runs, though. Looks great for routing and filtering stuff to the hilt, but where that all ends up is beyond me! Again, hopefully before next time.
It just occurred to me that pretty much every camera with IEEE1394 on the planet can be used as a V4L source. D’oh. Maybe I should finally buy a real camera instead of some boring capture hardware. Capture hardware doesn’t NEED to be boring, if you’re in a Windows environment and need a device that does real-time effects… but I’m not $2500 enthusiastic about all this just yet. And probably won’t be until it starts to have some abstract kind of earning potential… which I’m pretty okay without, but nevertheless, it’s difficult to justify that going into a hole of depreciation.
So… for next time, more cameras mixed (with vision mixer) into capture device, more cameras using FireWire, more effects custom-designed using PureData, and digital vision mixing with FreeJ. I’m happy with VGA output because you’re pushing native resolution to the projector that way. I’m also not too concerned about PC resources/performance. Tonight I’d say it was online for 3.5 hours without a glitch (with the exception of a kick-out 10 minutes in, and I was still partially setting up and wasn’t particularly in the middle of anything), running from a USB source. There used to be a time when that would just not have been possible with consumer gear (the camera cost about $90-110, which means it’s a rather-decent webcam. Probably, at this stage, one of the more expensive components of my setup!)
Oh, and I didn’t get to record any of the performance, sorry. Gem recorded another person’s performance for me earlier in the evening, but I’m too tired to share that right now… probably tomorrow, before Selo comes to my house and kicks my dog… err I mean camera’s SD card memory. I gotta do it before this month ends, because I’m now hilariously over quota. It’s got to be all because uploads count, seriously! I’ve been doing nearly 1GB a month to Flickr alone. Anyway. Stopping rambling and starting sleeping.
28 Jun 2006
If you’ve got stock video (random karaoke crap useless for anything else but mixed ambient visuals — OR — people footage from videoclips that are missing plots. Which basically means rap videos I’d say.) and wouldn’t mind lending me the CDs/DVDs for a day (preferably in Quicktime/MOV format, compressed as little as possible, no crazy codec variants) AND would be free for me to grab them tomorrow afternoon, send me an SMS/get in touch leaving a comment/whatever.
I can have plenty of fun with realtime vis from video inputs, but depending on how much light there is in the room it’d be nice to have stock to fall back on.
The occasion is nothing too serious… it’s an end-of-studycamp party for a Crusaders camp, so my ambitions are entirely my own and hardly out of any great need to impress… toy lights do a good enough job of that without video’s help. Just pushing myself a bit for kicks. I picked up a vision mixer a few weeks back for cheap that doesn’t have inbuilt TBC but can fade one source and has a positioner on black (well, positioner on another layer if you’ve got genlocked sources) which will hopefully perform okay. Despite it not having TBC it will say when sources are in sync, which is kinda nifty. I’ll eventually invest in a decent vision mixer but at the minute they’re still a little out of my range. If it’s not a horrendous failure, I’ll report how it works out :-)
Lighting will be lame party gear that I’ll hopefully mount significantly off the ground (there are four places in the room I can use) at least in part and then probably have one or two larger fixtures in corners/on a T-stand. Lighting, as always, will be largely forgiven by copious quantities of fog. Projection should improve matters in the room somewhat (in terms of visual quality) BUT will probably be rendered ineffective by the fog. If it’s too bad then I’ll just switch to visualisations, which is totally not a big deal at all… I just don’t get to be quite as creative *dreams of a plasma in every corner instead of a sole projector*.
So yeah, I am mildly excited. Will be staying up there overnight unless I’m feeling particularly energetic and in a driving-mood late that evening… the camp is at Galston which is slightly north of Hornsby. Doesn’t have to be a particularly long drive, and it’d undoubtedly be less susceptible to peak-hour traffic if I went back that night instead of Friday morning, but still… it’d be late. We’ll see.