Linux

No wonder Linux, Ubuntu and its I’ll have never taken off, other than in the embedded world. I’ve got a great microprocessor that it’s a brick at the moment. I’ve taken several days to figure out how to read image the system so I can restart it.

Because I accidentally blew it away.

But alas I am no closer than I was before. The acronyms and the old “go build it yourself” and “oh go find all the tools on your own” always makes a learning curve vertical.

It may be free but it costs so much blasted time when you first start on the stuff that it’s really not that great.

If you’ve got weeks to fool around and do things that all sounds fine but when you really got to get something done, it’s definitely a horrible choice to learn on and start with.

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Merry christmas

On we go!

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Dolly rev 1 performance

The dolly saw its first field action this weekend at the old mission dam in Mission Trails Regional Park.

Being so tied up with filming, we didn’t take any action photos. Oops.

Like most other dolly systems, this configuration only works with the camera upright. That’s great if you want to film everything flat. But as with expeditioning, keeping things level is rarely interesting.

The camera almost ate it once and that’s where I believe I cracked a filter. Better the filter than the lens.

Based on this experience, I’ve got parts on order from Mcmaster Carr. I ended up doing a little engineering analysis AFTER I ordered parts and found what I bought won’t cut it. I will be able to try out the concept, though.

It will be much more versatile than what I and every other Indy film maker has.

That’s a good thing.

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Dolly action

The dolly is ready for action. And I learned to lock focus and exposure on the iPhone.
Excellent!

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Camera dolly construction

The camera dolly to make short trucks and slides is curing and will be ready for its film debut shortly.
This should increase the production value of my training videos as well as the historic video series I shoot for.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86rORz0jkyg&feature=youtube_gdata_player

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Review: Benchmade Stryker Auto

Benchmade Stryker

The Short

Benchmade Stryker Auto 9101

Benchmade Stryker Auto 9101

Benchmade’s Stryker Auto 9101 is a tool that you will keep and use for the rest of your life. It comes out of the box sharp and ready to cut.

You will not be embarrassed to pull this knife out of your pocket.  The handling instills confidence that it will be up to any task you put the knife to.

Continue reading

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First training to

Things haven’t deteriorated so badly that I have to start training all over again. I was able to pick up right where I left off last year. The 4 months of tire towing really paid off in Yellowstone.

27.4 minutes for 1.4 miles. That’s less than a minute off my best time. Excellent!

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Trip journal

I started using Siri to transcribe my journal. I’m finding that’s incredibly fast. Probably about as fast as I can type it. But I’m not sitting there typing.
I can just lounge around wherever I want.
I’ll definitely have this done far faster than any other journal typed up.
I was going to buy Dragon naturally speaking for my computer but Siri seems to do just as well. Plus it’s not another $40 out of my pocket.
Once again iPhone has proved its value immediately.

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Back to running

I am still sore from the first decent run I did last week. Even though I’m still very in shape the specific running was quite the killer. I was very surprised to see that after months of not running going out and doing 3 miles I totally killed my calves.

I took five days off and then started just jogging around the block to recover. It almost felt as though I first started running in the five finger shoes. It’s good to have a calibration point to know how long I can go without doing that before I have to do something about it.

Do I also learned that after about four days of not running actually feel the effects and don’t run as efficiently. It’s a difficult balance to achieve of overtraining but not having your performance deteriorate.

Thus off for a short run this morning I go!

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Getting pics from your iPhone to your XP computer

Check out this handy link:

Transferring from iPhone to XP Computer

It was very helpful to get my pix and video from the trip from my iPhone to my PC (Windows XP).  It took several minutes of searching it out to find it because I was looking in the wrong direction.

For whatever reason, the backup system on my iTunes doesn’t direct to where everyone else says it does.  I don’t really care about that because my iTunes account will recover it.  But the photos and video are a whole other matter.

The essence of the copy is to

  1. Go into Start->Programs->Accessories->Scanner and Camera Wizard
  2. In the Welcome Screen, select “advanced users only”
  3. Select explore like a folder (or something like that)
  4. Windows will pop up a file explorer window allowing access to the iPhone’s camera and video folder.

And there you have it!  Much easier than trying to root around for the iPhone backup that seems non-existent on my PC.

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