NaNoWriMo 2011 Novel – and Audiobook
I have finally bitten the bullet and decided to enter NaNoWriMo this year, 2011. You can follow my progress (or more likely, lack of progress!) here. The purpose of NaNoWriMo (for me) is to finish a first draft novel (50,000 words) in 30 days. No polishing. Almost no planning. Just write the thing.
I’m also attempting to read the chapters and post them as mp3s here. Not sure how long I’ll keep that up – we’ll see.
Chapter 1:
NaNoWriMo 2011 Chapter01 v01
Chapter 2:
NaNoWriMo 2011 Chapter02 v01
Chapter 3:
NaNoWriMo 2011 Chapter03 v01
I’ve Been Remixed!
Old friend Anthony Brand has taken one of my AudioBoos and remixed it into this. Groovy! Has a sort of Word Jazz vibe to it. I might add to it myself one day…
Kinect for Filmmakers
I was hoping that people would take the Kinect, Microsoft’s new controller-less gaming add-on for their XBox360 games console, and somehow hack it into an affordable motion capture system for low budget filmmakers. But I didn’t expect the progress to be so rapid. Already cropping up on YouTube are videos of people using it to control virtual puppets, and using two of them at once as a real time 3D scanner. The future looks bright not just for controller-less gaming, but for low budget filmmakers. To complete the circle, here’s an actual real puppet reviewing the Kinect - a device which might not only cause the demise of his own felty kind, but by the end of the video seems to cause his.
I blather about Kinect for filmmakers for five minutes on AudioBoo here.
Quantum Jumping
Nokia n97 v2 Firmware and Optus
Omegle
I just tried Omegle (chatting with strangers) for the first time. I don’t think I’m the target audience. This is the transcript of my first (and probably last) conversation on Omegle:
ZoomIt
ZoomIt
ZoomIt is the best PC-desktop-screen-zoomer-inner-thingy I’ve ever seen – and it’s free! Great for zooming in on presentations or during software demos – both of which I do at home and at the QSFT. I wish I had found it earlier. Here’s a quick video of me using it (be sure to select HD mode when viewing it).
I’ve been looking for a smooth screen-zooming tool ever since I saw uber geek Chris Prillo use one on his desktop when demonstrating software and websites during his YouTube videos. His PC is probably more powerful than mine, but I could see he wan’t using the standard Windows magnifier, which magnifies a screen area into a separate window – his zoomer was zooming the whole screen into itself. ZoomIt seems to offer the same effect, and as well as being free, it’s also tiny – less than 300KB, allows you to draw and write on the zoomed in desktop, and on Vista the magnified desktop is “live”, rather than a freeze-frame.
And yes, Mac lovers, this desktop zoom effect is standard on recent Macs – I know, I know.
Star Wars Meets Dallas – “Dallas Wars”? “Stallas”?
It probably only works for people my age or older, but this YouTube video of the opening credits for Star Wars done in the style of the TV series Dallas made me smile. I particularly like the way the creator used a shot of Tarkin turning around for his credit – Old School! The whole thing was inspired by this Star Trek one.
Building an IKEA Studio
I’m currently building a small recording booth in my study using mostly IKEA furniture, so this article on MusicRadar How to Build Your Own Studio in 11 Easy Steps was a well-timed read for me (even if not all of their eleven steps seem that easy to me!). I like their idea of plonking a whole new pre-built building down and fitting it out from scratch, but that’s not an option for me right now, so I’m using one side of my study/granny flat, some large IKEA cupboards, and some padding from IKEA and Clarke Rubber. I’ll post photos of my progress as I go.
It’s not designed for music production, with sound proofing strong enough to acoustically isolate a drum kit. I just need the ability to record voice and Foley performances without the sound of my PC fan and hard drives chattering coming through onto the recordings.
It’s coming along, but it’s taking longer than I expected (of course) and the booth door is still going to be a challenge.
Squashed Head
Proposed Sculpture
Scaled Sculpture
Thanks to twitterer JamezRC, I saw this article about an oddly elongated, and slightly controversial, sculpture being built in the UK, and as soon as I saw the picture of the proposed design (on left) I, it struck me that it was just a normal head that had been stretched in software before being created.
So by squashing the image by about 66%, I ended up with a normal looking head (on right) – I wonder if the face belongs to a real person?
The Wilhelm Scream
The Scream
Even as a kid, I knew there were sound effects out there that were being used over and over again in films. Certain rock-falling sounds, certain gunshot sounds, certain horror sound effects. Before I started to take a strong interest in post production I could tell that there were sound effects that “did the rounds” amongst sound mixers.
Tonight a student asked me about one of them and he reminded me that this one had a name – The Wilhelm Scream. For a history of the scream (“screams plural actually) read this brief history from HollywoodLostAndFound.net, where you’ll also find a list of films that it has appeared in. To hear a few different takes of the scream in medium quality, check out this freesound page. Anyone my age or younger who has watched (and rewatched) films edited and/or mixed by Ben Burtt will instantly recognise the scream(s), but I didn’t realise until tonight how far back its history went – all the way to 1951.
Now if I can just figure out a way to incorporate it into a future project, I’ll be happy.
I’m Not Dead Yet!
Despite appearances, this website is not dead. Behind the scenes I use my web server all the time for sending files to fellow filmmakers and clients, but I haven’t updated the actual pages for years (only two updates in almost three years). So today I loaded up a new theme (Atahualpa Theme by BytesForAll), tweaked it a bit with my own images, and added a Twitter widget to the side panels.
Time will tell if I update it regularly.
Snake Season
Maisy
We’ve seen a couple of snakes on the property in the last few weeks, but today I heard the dogs (Jed and Maisy) barking and went out to discover their latest kill – a green snake. Combined with the large brown snake Kareena saw yesterday, and it’s definitely snake season here…
Back To Writing
I have not updated this website for over a year now, partly because I spend less time online than I used to, and partly because I’m writing a lot less than I used to. Despite no updates in over a year (and the website being offline for abour six months), my website still gets a healthy number of hits – proof of the power of Google.
But my very late (or very early) New Year’s resolution is to write every single day, even if it’s only a “blog post”. I have never considered myself a “blogger”, even though I’ve used blogging sytems to run the MavArt site for I think over six years (first Greymatter, then MovableType, now WordPress). I use these blogging systems because they allow me to change the look of the site without changing its content, and visaversa. But being a “blogger” implies a certain dedication to regular updates and posts – a dedication I’ve never had.
But, my New Year’s resolution is to write every day, so I’m going to write every day, even if it’s just a little blog post or review on my website – like this one.
This post, as well as qualifying as my writing for today, is also a test of the idea of using my Palm Treo 650 phone to type and upload blog posts. I’ve owned several Palm handheld computers and loved all of them, even the crappy plastic one that fell apart, but when I first got the Palm Treo I disliked the weeny little keyboard it had. I ‘d gotten quite good at the stylus-based Graffiti system for entering text on my other Palms, and clicking on the tiny little qwerty keyboard on the Treo seemed a lot slower.
But I recently discovered that I’d been pressing the keys the wrong way – using the tips of my index fingers, fingernails, or even the stylus pen in an effort to only press one key at a time. Now I realise that by pressing the keys with the end of my whole finger/thumbs, it may press more than one key, sometimes as many as four, but the PalmOS almost always guesses correctly which key I meant.
And if you’re reading this then I guess I figured out a way to upload it…
Spam Names
I get a lot of spam emails. A lot. Most of them I never see due to my spam filter, but recent email problems meant I had to sort through them by hand. During this dull process I noticed that, as always, spammers disguise their real names with phony ones. But I also noticed that some spammers are getting a bit more creative and apparently using some sort of random access to a database of names/words to make up an endless variety of fake names.
Some of the results are quite goofy and Goonish/Pythonesque. Some recent ones were:
- Eight R. Straggles
- Stratagem B. Shipyard
- Fatalist H. Faraway
- Grunt P. Foreclose
- Beards T. Lively
- Gamma F. Transfusion
- Constance V. Barrage
- Swooned H. Stimson
- Resettle D. Outrigger
- Dogcatchers G. Abbess
- Checker G. Canards
- Balminess Q. Crawl
- Threatenings L. Chortle
- Sandy L. Gasping
- Flap C. Kerouac
- Nonfiction H. Miraculously
- Shrieking P. Delano
- Superficial I. Incumbent
- Dillydallied H. Yevtushenko
- Heliport S. Persecuting
- Handgun H. Deficient
- Churlishness H. Folk
- Striker M. Vistas
- Denver G. Commonwealth
- Discotheque H. Artificer
- Appeasement E. Percolated
- Injection V. Brenda
- Projectile S. Scuzzier
- Feting U. Deleterious
- Stereo Q. Sectarianism
- Infringement R. Swampiest
- Hesiod A. Probationer
The ones in bold are the ones I like so much I’m going to try and use them in a script or even in conversation. Such as “Wasn’t that written by the poet Grunt P. Foreclose?”, or “Wasn’t he killed by the gangster Shrieking P. Delano?”.
Multi-Touch Interaction Research
When two friends on opposites sides of the country independently emailed me links on the same day to the same cool video clip, I knew it must be worth checking out. And it is – it’s a demonstration of “Multi-Touch Interaction Research – a touch-screen technology based on a “frustrated total internal reflection sensing technique” (no, I don’t know what that means either). But check out the video demo at either of these two links (same demo, just different pages).
Multi-Touch Interaction Research at their NYU home page (its downloadable there), or:
The future of computing? Maybe – It would breathe new life into the tablet PC market I bet. Especially if they can get the system to be able to determine which finger you are using at any time, so that commands/modes can be mapped to certain fingers. I can see this one day making the computer mouse look as cumbersome as punched paper cards.
UPDATE: But not everyone agrees that it is a useful technology – see the discussion on the demo here. Personally, as a Wacom tablet user/lover, the uses for this are quite obvious to me,and there will doubtless be less obvious uses and improvements over time (the computer mouse did not always have a scroll wheel).
Squeezing Out Hawaii Five-O
If this is real, I for one think it’s extremely impressive. It’s the Hawaii Five-O Theme, played on the hands (manualism) via Google Video. He squeezes his hands to gether to make… um… farty sounds that form recognizable tunes. It looks like the most fun that can be had with your hands without sending you blind…
TACMAV
Oh. My. The TACMAV. Oh. Yeah.
A foldable, electric model aeroplane that can both fly around under direct remote control or fly itself guided by it’s own GPS, while filming its surroundings using two colour video cameras, all fed back to a toughened tablet-based computer.
Note, the first image on the page, despite its size on the page, is actually a very large image and will take time to download on some connections.
Google Maps
Thanks to slashdot I’ve just discovered Google Maps. An amazing repository of digital satellite images that cover the whole globe (not all of it in great detail). You can zoom in, drag the map around with your mouse, and it all seems to load pretty fast.
Searching for Australian cities and areas seems broken, but manually dragging the map around can find some interesting (to me) locations. Such as my old school, where I live now, where I teach, my favourite Brisbane park, and, just for kicks, some pyramids. If this sort of information is available for free to the general public, what must the military and secret services have access to?