Today I've got nothing. At my desk there are a load of started and unfinished projects, parts for other things, kits from boldport club to be made. Nothing that is interesting even in its started state, components to make cools things, coolness sold separately.

At the hackerspace tonight I will try to finish my sat tracker , but even that is a fallback project. The projects I want to have completed have such a high bar to entry.

I wonder if my brain empties out in cycles.

Reading: Reamde

My Idea to use the hugin stitching software to make a panorama from some images I found on my camera seems to have hit a snag. I am convinced I didn't have a tripod with me and took the panorama in a haphazard fashion, I remember the area by the glacier being much much colder than the campsite we were staying in and I was pushed to leave.

I opened up the 8 images I had to try and stitch together and while they sort of fall out in a reasonable orde I think it is going to take some time with the software to get them together. Unless I find the more magic button .

Reading: Reamde

I tried to use hugin to stitch together a panorama I took of a glacier, but the binaries they offer will only run on the next version on MacOS. Really annoying. I will give it a try tomorrow on FreeBSD, if not I will have to try some of the gimp plugins.

Facing a gimp plugin makes me think of this xkcd .

It is Sunday, so that makes seven days of writing .

Reading: Abaddon's' Gate, Reamde

ffmpeg by default aims for the lowest bitrate it can manage for a video when encoding webm. I have been happy with this so far, but the video I grabbed of a waterfall today does not look good in this mode. I tried changing the bitrate options as discussed on the ffmpeg wiki , I thought I would show what you can expect with a couple of differnet rates.

The original mov file generated from my camera was 21MB.

$ ffmpeg -i INPUT.mov -an output-default.webm

The original ultra low, 443kb/s that ffmpeg generates, file is 369KB.

$ ffmpeg -i DSC_3536.MOV -an -c:v libvpx -b:v 1M  output-1M.webm

Doubling the rate, file is 976KB. Still a lot of artifacts in the video.

$ ffmpeg -i DSC_3536.MOV -an -c:v libvpx -b:v 10M  output-10M.webm

This passed the smell test for me, I think it looks good enough for its size, this file is 5.6MB roughly the size of a jpeg of the same scene.

I had a look through some of the pictures I have from my Iceland trip in August, but it was really painful. My network drive seems to be struggling delivering large files over sshfs, it probably doesn't help that they are 25MB raws.

I used darktable to crop the image, everythin else I had on my machine chocked on the CR2 raw files.

Reading: Abaddon's Gate, Reamde