Star Fish Movie and Codec Hell

I made a new time lapse movie yesterday. I photographed a star fish as it wandered over the back wall of my tank. You can view it here.  The surprising thing is that it moves fairly quickly, then sits and eats for a while, and then “dashes” away.  Given that the movie took about 4.5 hours to shoot, the darting is actually quite slow.

Sadly, most of you won’t be able to view this movie unless you also download and install KMPlayer.   How is it that I am able to create a movie that no one can view?  The secret lies in the codecs.

The term codec stands for Encoder/Decoder.  A codec is a piece of software that is used to encode and decode something (audio streams, video streams, still photos).  Codecs are used to read and write images (JPG, PNG, etc), audio (MP3), and video (AVI, MPG, MOV, etc).

You would think that the people who created computers would be smart enough to stick to a few standard movie formats, so that everyone has the right codecs, so that everyone can view each other’s movies.  Sadly, this is not true.  Somehow, the freeware software that I use to create these movies manages to create a movie that has a reasonable name, but is indecipherable to most movie playing software.

My latest camera, a Canon PowerShot, only will produce movies in Apple’s MOV (QuickTime) format.  For those of you who use Macintoshes, this is great news; for the rest of us, this is a huge pain in the ass.  Codec hell.

For now, I can’t suggest any easy solution to this problem.  Perhaps someone will post a link to a magical web site that will solve this problem for everyone for all time.

Photos and Movies from the Cape (of Cod)

I just returned from a visit to The Cape, and have created a web page about it. Please click here to go there.

Time Lapse Movies of Corals

Corals move quite slowly in an aquarium, and most casual observers never understand that aspect of their beauty. Some start out quite small in the early morning, but expand during the day under the influence of the sun (lights). I took a series of time lapse movies with my new Canon Power Shot SX10 IS, using the open source CHDK microcode enhancements and an Intervalometer script. Quite neat. I needed a separate DC power supply, as the batteries were not up to taking 900 pictures, one every 6 seconds.

I stitched the JPGs together using a program called MEncoder, which is part of the MPlayer effort. You may not be able to play these movies with the regular movie players: you may have to download KMPlayer in order to watch them. I have no idea why this is.

The first movie was my test run. The others show the corals “waking up” and growing during the morning, or shutting down during the evening. Notice how they each try to shoulder each other out of the way, in order to get all of the light for themselves!

Mini Movie (4 MB)

Time Lapse Movie 1 (11 MB)

Time Lapse Movie 2 (11 MB)

Time Lapse Movie 3 (16 MB)

End Of Oil

There have been many books written over the past forty years about the consequences of over population and the resultant scarcity of resources. The oil scare in the 70s was followed by relatively inexpensive oil in the 80s and 90s, but we are now seeing a return to expensive oil, and the consequences of those price increases. If the authors are correct, many of us will not be retiring in the manner which we have been expecting.

You can read an amazing article about this here if you are willing to pay $12. Clearly, it would be better to just subscribe to the magazine for a year ($28) and get all of the articles for “free” instead.

If you cannot afford to purchase the article, please contact me here.

Understanding the Financial Crisis

There have been a number of great discussions about the origins of the financial crisis on the NPR show “Fresh Air”. The most recent such is by Gillian Tett. This show is well worth listening to

Vote Early and Often

My friend, Rob Nagler, has come up with a creative approach to help kids get regular exercise, by encouraging them, and rewarding them, to bike to school. Check out his concept at freiker.org. And then vote for his product at ChangeMakers.

Amazing 3D Surfaces

If you’re “lucky” enough to be running under Windows, you can download a program that displays Seifert Surfaces. You don’t need to know what they are. Just download the program and run it. Be prepared to be puzzled and to feel your brain grumble a little. Note that the 3D image can be rotated with the mouse.

Click Here for Seifert Surface Viewer!

Summer In Vermont

A few days ago, the peepers were almost uncountable in the pond (see picture).  Over the weekend, Spring seemed to take a stutter-step (see second picture).

Spring Comes Roaring In

I saw a wild turkey within about 10 feet of the house on Wednesday. Thursday morning, the pond was virtually covered with ice.  I went out after lunch to wrestle with some tree limbs that had fallen during the winter, and to convince some diagonal trees that life in the horizontical is much preferred.  It was 60 with nice sun, almost perfect weather.    No bugs yet.  By mid afternoon, I realized that the pond ice was almost gone, so I put the waterfall pump back in the pond, and started it going.  As I went to bed, I heard the first of the spring peepers.  From ice to peepers in 12 hours.  I guess winter’s over here.

Rodney’s Tongue is Rough

So, as soon as the stitches were removed, Rodney made it his principle task to lick the fur off of his belly, and then lick the skin off, too.  I tried two varieties of  “yuck”, evil tasting goops that you lather on around the wounds, to try to keep a cat from licking.  Neither worked.  I tried a salve, hoping that it would reduce the itching, and he would stop licking.  He actually enjoyed eating the salve right out of the container.  I tried a small tee shirt, with leg holes cut in it; that lasted about 12 hours.

Now we’re onto a soft E Collar, which is working (he can no longer lick his belly), but he is fairly annoyed.  And annoying.  He licks and scratches at the collar all of the time, which is loud enough to wake me up at night.  He looks ridiculous, and the other cat, Oni, seems well aware that Rodney is now absurd. The collar makes it difficult for him to walk, because he keeps stepping on the thing.  And it can focus sounds, when it is bent forwards, and this seems to make him freak out a lot when the birds squawk.

So.  Rodney’s better.  But not perfect yet.  Another few weeks.  Sound familiar?