Tag Archives: mac

A New Toy @wnka

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I have a new toy, thanks in part to Wnka, creator of Gawker.

Over the weekend it snowed and I had the idea of taking a video of the event and then compressing it down by speeding it up 50,000 times. Fortunately other ideas happened too, in the form of Gawker.

Gawker is an app for Mac OS X (with no evidence of any form of Windows or Linux compatibility) which uses compatible webcams and creates time lapse videos in what seems to be Quicktime format.

Now I am stuck with a few problems. The first is that the videos being put out are seemingly incompatible with Quicktime on Windows, as well as with iMovie ’08 and iMovie HD (’06). Quicktime on Windows gave no video output (useless since there is no audio), iMovie 08 is taking the files and not importing them, and iMovie HD is complaining that they are invalid. I also have the problem that I’d like to view the stream (if I share it) from a non-mac, since I only own the macbook and it is often sitting in a window where I don’t want to move it. That leaves accessing via VNC, not the ideal option. I’d also like to be able to share into Gawker from a Windows PC, but that isn’t quite so important. It’d be cool if there was a configurable web-client (Java, Flash?) that could view the feed – I could put up a page on my site that shows what the feed is showing.

The other problem I have is that now I want to make a whole bunch of time lapsed movies, but I have nothing to make them with – I need ideas!

In summary, it seems that perhaps what I have learned this weekend is that time lapse is fun and interesting, but maybe I need to find a different way of doing it for my windows-attached cameras, and some way of editing the videos that Gawker makes on the mac.

This is one of the videos I caught over the weekend, mostly of snow cleanup.

Triumph!

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Yesterday I wrote in fear regarding my macbook, one of the most important physical possessions I have (the macbook, my camera, my passport, etc..) – holding alot of non-backed-up data (I need to buy another external hard disk at some point…) had water spilled on it and wouldn’t turn on. It’s sat in front of the floor-heater in the computer/art room for around 48-72 hours, the room heated to 60 F constantly, and I’ve been sitting in the desk chair across the room from it watching it nervously from the corner of my eye.

I was going to wait until the weekend to turn it on and see what the damage was, but I realised that having been sitting there this long that it was as dry as it was going to get. So I bit my lip a little and reached down and picked it up from under the table, picked up the battery from on top of the desktop, put the two together, turned the lock thing to secure the battery in place, and pressed the power button. And the screen flickered. Fans spun up. The screen turned white, the speakers made that “Ahhhhh!” noise, the apple logo appeared, it was starting up!

That was nearly 3 hours ago, and I’m blogging this from the macbook.

So thanks be to God who knew we couldn’t handle the mac being down, to Kelly who kept me calm and assured me there was still hope, and to Apple for making a product that can survive water spills.