alex.polvi.net

Check it out! Pat’s book was on the front page of the dining section in the New York Times today! I went down to Borders to get a copy, and while I was there did a little clean up of the “Reference” section…

Before:

After:

This is a hack I’m working on … trying to grab the daily news from the web and make an episode.

Just a quick note to point out my, now open sourced, videostrip generator.

My dream goal would be able to generate these using a webapp and then let the site grow. I originally implemented a flash recorder, but now my flash trial has expired and I am unable to continue messing with it. Guess that means it is time to start hacking on a firefox-addon/ogv/icecast stack to replace the existing flash-plugin/flv/flash-server stack! It’s 2008, why is flash still the only solution for streaming video out to the web??

Last weekend I went to Austin, TX, for the Makers Faire. There, Pat, David, and I make a crap load of custom ice cream scoops. The process involved filling a dixie cup with whatever ingredients you wanted, including fun stuff like chayanne pepper and BBQ sauce (some people made normal ice cream, too), and then instantly freezing it with liquid nitrogen. The kids loved it!

Just as a note, this was a promotion for Pat’s just published book, the Hungry Scientist Handbook. The book is meant for foodie/geeky types — I’d definitely check it out if you self identify with either of those groups.

Anyway, I made a timelapse of the setup. Here, you can see us getting ready and serving for about half a day (then my battery died).

After discovering CHDK, I’ve started messing with timelapses. Here is how I created the above timelapse:

• Installed CHDK on my Camera
• Added this script to my CHDK/SCRIPTS directory
• Set it to take a picture every 15 seconds, and run it until the battery runs out
• Copied all the resulting photos off my SD card into a folder on my computer
• Ran the following command (requires mplayer): mencoder "mf://*.JPG" -vf scale=640:480 -o timelapse.avi -of lavf -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mjpeg -lavfopts format=avi

And tada! You now have timelapse.avi.

I’ve been casually hacking on a videobooth project that will generate videostrips (analogous to photobooth and printing photo strips). Here are the full results of the free culture conference, where I got to test the system out last weekend. Check it out at, videobooth.me/fc2008/.