My wife is so wonderfu!

It’s my birthday today, and my awesome wife Diana bought me some awesome presents.

First off was the Cigweld Weldskill 170. That’s the one I knew about. It was already awesome!

What I wasn’t expecting is the iPod
Touch I was presented with when I woke up this morning! OMFGZ I wasn’t expecting that!

So here I am, writing a blog post on the touch, just to test it out!

Yeah!

I love you sweetie! You blow my mind every birthday!
Xoxox

In-phone video production on a Nokia 5800

A couple of months ago now, I finally ditched prepaid phones again, and got myself a plan, and along with the plan came a new phone.

The phone is Nokia 5800 XpressMusic.

I discovered that with the phone, it is possible to film, perform basic editing, add titles, and background music, and then upload it to YouTube, all from the phone itself

The above video, staring my lovely fiancée Diana, was created from start to finish in camera

Camcorder Microphone Adapter

This is my latest project. It is a converter box that converts the 3.5mm stereo microphone input on my camcorder, into some common interfaces, Such as XLR, RCA, and dual 3.5 mono plugs.

Specifically, the driving idea was driven by the XLR inputs, and I was contemplating making a simple cable with 2 XLRs, but I decided to go with the jiffy box and extra inputs for flexiblilty

Scientists Colour by Number

Crayon rendition of the Mars Landscape

While sifting thru the 200 or so blog posts in my rss reader, I came across this interesting little article on Gismodo about the first pictures from the surface of Mars in 1965

“people at the JPL were so excited to receive the images that they couldn’t wait for them to be processed by the lab’s imager. As the first picture was beamed down as a stream of 8-bit numbers—each point indicating a brightness point—they thought of a quick way to get an image straight away: Print the numbers indicating brightness in paper strips, put them together, and colour them with pastel crayons.”

Its a amazing that crayons needed to be used to get a “fast” graphical representation, contrasted by today’s real time processing. We are however, talking about a time when computers where huge room filling machines, with processing speeds a fraction of what can be found in most peoples pockets these days.

Now, I keep coming back to data visualisation, but that is mostly due to visualisation being the topic of choice for the assignment. I have the assignment partially underway at the time being, with my idea fairly solid in my head, and starting to form in real life

All this talk of crayons got my want to do my assignment in old school kindergarten style, and so this is my assignment:

My bank balance over 2 weeks

LOL, just kidding. it is a rough approximation of my bank account over the last 2 weeks. really, it should be shown with my other bank accounts for an accurate picture, as the spikes in the middle are due to me transferring money from them to this one, not some extra covert payments or anything.

Am I crazy for going to the shops and spending $3.60 for a pack of pencils to do this? quite possibly, yes. for some reason I envisioned something more impressive, but alas, here we are.

Right now, I’m looking for a convenient way of converting images to a numbered grid to make my own mars style crayon pictures. I’m also interested in checking out a few different things, like rendering items in Lego bricks and the likes.

Anyway, that’s enough crazy for the time being, to I’ll leave you to it.

Matt

Photographers Rights

Many of you who read this blog, like to take the odd photo, or maybe a lot of photos. Some do it for for pleasure, some for art, Some for for work.Whatever the reason, you are likely to take at least the odd photo with people you do not know in it. The more photos you take, the more likely you’ll eventually encounter someone who isn’t happy with you takeing photos, be it of them, or something they own or are in charge of.

On Camera Light mod – Part 2

The completed package, off the camera

In this part, we finish off the camcorder light. When I left you, i had just finished the top part of the light.

Now we need to wire up the battery pack and everything, then we are done.

On Camera Light mod – Part 1

The Light in its unmodified state

I have had a light from an old panasonic video camera kicking around here for a while. Originally,  my plan was to swap the 12v bulb in it for a 6v one, and connect it to a 6v SLA battery i have, which originally came out of a cheap rechargable spotlight.

Then i had the idea of combining a cheap LED torch i had  around, and the camera light. that would allow me to use much smaller batterys, and possibly even make the battery pack camera mountable