brainwagon

Well, okay, so these bandits were really just stealing Scrappy’s cat food from the patio, but this time I had my new trusty JVC GR-D270 lying around, and decided to try out its night vision mode to try to get them on tape. A few minutes of work with Microsoft’s Movie Maker, and voila!, here they are, ready for an appearance on America’s Most Wanted.

I’ll have to remind everyone not to feed Scrappy outside. These guys are big, and as my wife pointed out, they do carry ticks and the like. Best not to give them a reason to come down the hill to interact with our sometimes feral cat. Still, they are cute on film.

Addendum: Was this valuable to anyone?

Addendum 2: I can’t spell “Raccoon”.

Here is a picture of the crescent moon, captured at 25x zoom on my JVC GR-D270 camcorder. I punched it up just a tiny bit with gimp, but it’s pretty close to what you can expect from this camcorder. Not bad, but not staggeringly exciting either.

I have a lot of fun with digital cameras, just taking pictures of objects in isolation. A bit of work with Gimp, and you have something you can, well, write posts about on your weblog.

Okay, okay, my inspiration was actually here.

I’ve got a lot of toys in my office. My friend Jeff and I used to play Starcraft online quite a bit, back when both of us were single guys living the high life. During that time I had just begun dating my wife, and so I have a number of toys that our son bought for me, including this cool Starcraft infantry guy. The action
figure is very cool and poseable. For whatever bored reason, I snapped a couple of quick shots, dragged them into gimp, removed the background, tweaked the color, improved the sharpness and converted it to an 8-bit png image. I think it looks pretty damned cool for 3 minutes of work.

I wonder if someone could do a complete comic strip using similar techniques. Beats drawing, at least the way I do it.

The incredibly useful dpreview.com has an announcement for a new release of the image noise reduction program Neat Image. If you’ve got photos which are grainy because you are pushing your camera to the limits of its ISO setting, try putting Neat Image to work on it. I’ve blogged about it before, it’s very cool, and worth the money.

After yesterday’s post, I decided that I’d like to try to make some better reflection maps. So I shot this image of my office reflecting in a Christmas tree ball. The image is pretty noisy because my office isn’t brightly lit. (Addendum: I also had the camera set for outdoor white balance, which makes the overall image look pretty crufty. I just shot a different image, and got this better image, which has a magenta hue, but isn’t yellow orange at least.) I then cropped it to a square containing just the ball, and passed it through my unwarping program:

I have a different version of my program that produces a cube map, which is perhaps more intelligible (click on it for a bigger version):

It appears that the quality is pretty much limited by the poor surface of the reflecting ball. You can see a lump in the ball causes the book in the foreground to have a distorted outline.

Still, fun stuff.

Video Thing has a cool experiment in shooting panoramic video using a Christmas tree ball mounted on a boom in front of a DV cam. An After Effects plugin turns the resulting reflection into a cylindrical environment video. Very cool.

I did some experiments a while ago using this setup, only with still images instead of video. My old Kodak 210+ wouldn’t focus close enough to get a good image of the ball, so I turned out this:

The code was pretty simple to write: just convert from reflected rayspace into a cylindrical map. Cool stuff.

Carmen and I spent a short weekend at Reno/Tahoe, and I snapped this picture of her at the shore of Lake Tahoe. A nice trip, alas, all to short. Love you honey! Every moment with you is a vacation all by itself.

Picture seems overblown because I used my cameraphone, and let’s face it, it’s not the greatest camera.

The article on the Dirkon Paper Camera reminded me of the couple of pinhole photographs I made using a simple cylinder of cardboard and some photographic paper.

Well, just got back from a day of watching robot combat at the Robogames competition in at San Francisco State. It continues tomorrow. You can look at my gallery of photos, and maybe even watch a Quicktime of a poor Robosapien competing in an event.

More coverage on Slashdot.

Even more photos, courtesy of Thomas Hawk: here and here.

This is mostly just a test designed to try out Flickr’s Post-To-Blog functionality. Still, it’s a nice picture of my lovely wife munching Dim Sum at the King of Kings in Oakland. I’m not the biggest Dim Sum fan, but this place is among the better I’ve visited.

And of course, my wife is spectacular! Everyone congratulate her on starting her new job today!

I just created a new gallery of Carmen and my Day in Marin in my brainwagon photo gallery. We marched around Muir Beach for a short walk, did a few mile loop at Muir Woods, and ended up searching for (and finding) a geocache on Mt. Tamalpais. Terrific day, but I’m worn out, so podcasting will have to wait for tomorrow morning.

By the way, how beautiful is this view? Or this one?

We also saw six salmon swimming in the stream, the best picture of which is probably this one. I haven’t seen salmon in the wild in a long time. Very cool.

Today I stopped by Cost Plus again, as they had 40% off their Christmas stuff. While wandering the aisles looking for last minute stocking stuffers, I saw the following description above the wine:

Very ripe and round — almost like a Jolly Rancher candy. The plums, cherries and red berries jump out of the glass!

I think this is the first time that I’ve heard a wine described as if tasting like a Jolly Rancher was a good thing. While I have nothing against Jolly Rancher’s as a candy, I sincerely doubt their flavor when fermented.

Of course Cost Plus is the seller of what I consider to be quite possibly the worst wine ever created: their Electric Reindeer White Zinfandel. While all three wines are truly terrible, their White Zin, with its overtones of cough syrup, Kool-Aid and Vicks Vaporub makes you long for the taste of a fresh batch of Pruno.

Well, today marked another nice trip to the Oakland Zoo. As always, I brought my digital camera so I could snap some pictures of the animals, and I managed to catch a nice photo of these two giraffes. It was a good day for photos, I got some more nice photos of the meerkats, and had a nice walk amidst the animals.

Nice way to relax, far away from the hustle and bustle of the malls.

Try this picture of some meerkats, or look at all the photos in this gallery.

As I mentioned in my audio blog today, I was diverted from my mornings appointments by this little guy who appeared on my windshield as I was about to drive off. I just had to fetch my Nikon 4300 and snap some pictures of him. Try clicking on the thumbnail to the right to get a higher resolution of him, or you can look at this Quicktime of him breathing for extra creepiness.