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Not just one. Not even two. Three. And a bit. count ‘em! One!.. order of magnitude. Ah-ah. Two!.. orders of magnitude. Ah-ah. Three!.. Three orders of magnitude! Ah-ah!

Orders of what, you ask? Space. Not to move, but maybe to ‘grow’. I’ve been long suffering with disk space issues – Windows telling me that volume D: is low on space, and Volume C: is very low on space – seemingly every few minutes – was starting to get to me. It’s only taken me a week (since I took it down from the cupboard) to get my external drive reconnected. We’ve been ‘apart’ for about 8 months now… the separation anxiety must have passed some time ago. Probably swallowed up by the experience of roaming about in Europe for a few months. Anyhow, my hundred-meg-or-so between two internal drive partitions situation has improved by over a thousand times: the external disk G: has 255 gigabytes free. Even though I know it’s true, it’s hard to really fathom. Two and a half thousand times more space. Wow. Who’da thunk it? It brings into perspective how much we really take technology for granted.

My first hard drive, an A590 side-car unit for my Amiga 500, was 20MB, with an (at the time) impressive 2MB Fast-Ram expansion. Sure, it was a step up from using floppies, but it wasn’t all that massive; only – around 25 discs. These days you can score a Terabyte drive for not much more (actually… maybe less!) than the A590 was back in the day. Of course you need to account for inflation, and back then I didn’t have so much spare cash… but still, a terabyte is over 200 DVDs. Er, let me recalculate that – to be fair I should probably be talking dual layer DVDs, not single layer… Well, you do the math. It’s still an impressive number of whatever units you’re talking about.

I’ve used my ‘little’ USB memory stick these past couple of days (not amazingly effectively, but at least got it out of my bag and plugged it into something!) – even that raises the question of how this $100+ piece of technology from only 2 years ago can now be had for around $10 (for 1GB, and okay, maybe the brand makes a difference, but sill). The mind boggles. In the same timeframe it seems that drink prices have gone up a couple of bucks… who is making the money? (Or, perhaps more worthy of consideration, what are we, generally, wasting out money on?) Something isn’t right.

In all, I wish I was ‘wasting my money’ out at Wiseman’s Ferry this weekend, catching the likes of Kruder & Dorfmeister, Steve Bug, and Tiefschwarz at the Playground Weekender music festival. Had a case of the kinda-sensibles and decided I need to focus a bit on work… what’s happening to me?! For future reference, leaving the office nearly 24 hours after you arrive probably isn’t that sensible. At least not without a proper nap. :o)

I think K&D are doing a 4 hour audiovisual set tonight. Probably right now. Can’t hear it. Can’t see it. Missing out! Actually, I think Tiefschwarz are meant to be playing at the Chinese Laundry tonight… I went down to Laundy a couple of weeks ago to see Gui Boratto – I went to see him at Fabric in London last year, but was disappointed by the situation with the room being too crowded to dance in. And what was it like at Laundy two weeks ago? Bloody awful… stood outside in the queue for an hour, watching dozens of people on the ‘guestlist’ go in before me. Even after 1am. Poor form, Laundry. Poor form. When I asked about the situation at the front desk, I was informed that ‘this is common now in Sydney’. News to me. I can only hope the girl was lying or sadly mistaken. In any case, Gui did good, but the venue failed. I don’t think I’ll be heading back there for any more gigs in the near future. 25 bucks for a 1 hour wait with inconsiderate door staff and/or a really awful door policy (most of the people waiting were pretty pissed off).

Enough of the bad stuff already!… I’ve been rearranging some files on my drives (internal and external) to make better use of the available s.p.a.c.e… and became distracted by some software lying about. A mysterious ISO I had sitting in a temp folder: OpenCD v07.02, file date in March last year. What’s this?.. Ahh.. an Open Source software compilation. :o) The Open CD project is no longer active, but seems to have turned in to Open Disc – High quality open source software for Windows. Worth a look. In any case, as a result ended up downloading a newer version of Inkscape (an Open Source vector graphics editor) and had a squiggle. I should get my Wacom tablet out and start doing some more squiggles… I want some more vector-art-type stuff to use as overlays in my visuals, and would prefer to use my own content if I can, though might have an experiment for a while mixing ‘available’ materials.

-G.

PS: News just in (shortly after posting this item) via text message from a friend:

Hey giorgio! Future music fest 2day-night, chemical bros best fucken visual show i ever saw! U missed a good one.

Double damn!! ;o)

Posted in: Computing, Festivals, Graphics, Science & Technology, Software, Subpixel's Creations, Work by subpixel / Tags: Gui Boratto, Inkscape, Kruder & Dorfmeister, Open Source Software, Playground Weekender, Steve Bug, The Open Disc, Tiefschwarz

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It didn’t escape my attention that the autoinstaller for WordPress supplied by my host, servage.net (nb: link includes my customer code to ‘earn free hosting’…), was out of date at the time I did the installation. When viewing the admin pages it reminded me constantly that an update was available, and that there were urgent security fixes…

Yeah, okay, so maybe someone could hack my shiny new blog. Millions might die! Maybe not, but if for nothing other than to see what it would actually take, I decided to go through the process.

Turns out that, if you haven’t installed a bunch of plugins (and at thos stage I don’t know what they possibly entail), it is pretty easy. One configuration file to keep track of (which you don’t especially need to worry about being overwritten, as the default file has a different name), and the contents of another directory (the uploaded images/whatever content). It does seem a bit silly, though, that this directory is not in the WordPress root – sense would suggest that having any non-WordPress-specific files as separate as possible.

I also backed up the MySQL database beforehand. While reading about that I found my way to an auto backup script, AutoMySQLBackup hosted on SourceForge.net, which I had a browse through and found a bug… so of course now I have a new SourceForge account – yet another thing I don’t need to keep track of, though perhaps it will encourage me to start a project!

At any rate, when all said and done… my blog seems to appear just as before, and this post will (hopefully!) prove to me that it is still kinda working. :o)

-G.

Posted in: Databases, Site Maintenance, Software by subpixel / Tags: MySQL, servage.net, SourceForge, unix script, WordPress

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I’ve had Skype installed on my PC for ages, but never actually used it… nor any other webcam chat software. Previously that was mainly due to not having a webcam (a pretty good reason, I reckon!). I’ve had a crappy little cam for a while, and rarely used it – a couple of tests to see if it works, and using it for a live feed mixed in to the visuals using Neon v2 (okay, yes I mention that software a lot, and that is because it happens to be what I use). I’ve happened upon some rather interesting software which allows you to fubar about with your ‘webcam’ output – you can use still pictures, video clips, and even live capture of your desktop instead of the usual webcam picture. I realise this isn’t completely new, but this is a free program, so I downloaded it to give it a try — Broadcaster StudioPRO. It works fairly well, though it seems now that if I try to use the video capture in Neon without StudioPRO running I no longer get the webcam input.

I was really rather hoping to be able to use the live cam capture as a layer in Neon, then have the output window be my ‘cam’ output streamed to the net so I could mix myself into my visuals (and maybe make myself reasonably interesting to look at – ha!)
but sadly this is not to be. Neon does not allow you to select which camera to use, and it seems the ‘cam’ selected for you is the virtual one. I can still make it give the feed from the camera, but then the live camera goes to everything cam-related (importantly, the stream outbound to the net).

Still, I did manage to have Neon doing some live visuals mixing, and and have that captured by StudioPRO and sent to the net – not just to a webcam user, but broadcast (theoretically… only ever had one person look at it, so not too broad so far) – streamed to a webpage! Viewing the page myself while streaming out, and while my PC is crawling due to an excessive amount of things going on at once (Neon – a problem in itself!, Winamp or a CD playing for some audio, StudioPRO, the ‘Live’ web page/interface to send my stream, and another IE window to view the broadcast), shows a fairly poor framerate. I’m not sure what it’s like for someone at the other end when I’m not trying to stream it back to myself… Feel free to give me a holler and tee up a time to try it out.

Link: Broadcaster.com

Hold on a second… I forgot to mention that I couldn’t get the Broadcast.com LIVE feed thing to work in Firefox, hence the IE windows. Grr-ness.

-G.

Posted in: Internet, Software, Subpixel, Video, VJ / Visuals by subpixel / Tags: broadcast, Neon v2, streaming, webcam

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jhead is a rather nifty looking program… When I was in Europe (er, perhaps I should write some more about that later!) I took some photos – rather a lot, actually – and despite my best intentions, I sometimes forgot to properly set the date and/or time (more likely just the timezone) on my camera. Maybe not the worst thing to happen in the world (I managed to be separated, permanently, from my camera in Vietnam, taking images from Austria with it!), but bloody inconvenient if you ask me – I like to have things somewhat organised – at least to tell me when a photo was taken especially since I wrote bugger all to journal my journey!

The problem then presents itself – how can you edit the datestamp stored in the files? And how about the filesystem datestamps while we’re at it? Okay, it might be possible to edit the date in the file using PhotoShop or something, but that required ‘re-saving’ (and probably image-degrading) the file. Maybe Bridge can edit the metadata… hmmm… Anyhow, I eventually decided, only a few days ago, to do a search for a magic tool to do the job, and jhead might just be it!

I have to admit that I haven’t tried it out yet – ye of little disk space can hardly afford to offer that much faith first up… some sort of precautionary backup is desirable, methinks. Which reminds me, I think I have about a CD worth that isn’t backed up at all yet – that should be first priority!

Anyhow, jhead professes to be able to adjust the Exif datestamp, among other things, and that is what I’m going to try. It has other fancy features such as being able to (re-)generate embedded thumbnail images, but I might leave all tha business alone.

Fingers crossed for the basic task!

-G.

Posted in: Digital Photography, Software by subpixel / Tags: digital photos, EXIF, JPEG

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