How I wrote renaissance fair man.
I need a kite icon.
I very much like feeling of being both tired and slightly toasted after having been out in the sun.
Back before the fall of the Berlin Wall, I'd got quite good at analogue circuitry. Mostly due to being taught by a chap who'd scribble a circuit on the board, stare at it with his head on one side while he worked out likely values for the passives, then fill them in and tell us YTS-types to get on with it. (He'd also tell us that repairing foreign hi-fi kit was never worth the bother and not to worry about remembering equations. That's what textbooks were for.) Of course, once I'd got into coding and then Unix admin, it all fell out of my head.
Earlier in the week, jarkman dragged me along to the Bristol Dorkbot, which was a jolly interesting evening. For a variety of reasons I was inspired to build a Theremin. Thus I did some poking on the internet and found one that didn't work by wireless. A simple circuit; how hard could it be to remember skills from twenty years ago?
Not that hard, as it turned out. It makes a splendidly horrible racket.
Somewhat pleased with that success, we decided to try something I've been meaning to do for almost as long. This was the 'fix a camera to a Flexifoil and try not to wallop it into the ground at 50mph' plan. No-one was entirely sure that it would fly right with a camera hanging off one end, but there's only one way to find out.
Ladies and gentlemen, we rock very much indeed.
Then we tried Richard's idea of towing the camera on a bridle, which wants doing properly, rather than with gaffer and an Amazon box. In truth, there's a lot more work to be done on this. You'll have noticed that the Youtube output is a bit shoddy. The original footage has an air of Super-8 about it, probably due to lens flare, vignetting and shooting into the sun by accident. It reminds me of bits of 'Big Wednesday' and 'Dogtown and Z boys' because there's some washed-out Lomo-ness there too. So I think what I need to do next is create a proper cradle for perhaps a different camera. One with a faster framerate that'll run for longer than a minute at a time. Although also one that I won't mind destroying by accident.
(If you look at the last few frames of the third film, you'll notice I missed a brick and a section of wavy tin by about a foot.)
There are also no pictures of the mk1 camera-cradle because I stuffed the kite into the ground before I thought to wave a different camera at the thing. Mind you, in stuffing the kite, I bashed the camera hard enough to bend the lens zoom/retract mechanism and stop it working. Out of desperation, I heaved on the thing... And it clicked back into place. This is also the camera that spent a month or so taking pictures that were mostly purple. (See icon. That came right out the back of the camera. No Potatoshop other than crop-and-shrink)
This is what I want from a digicam. Non-linear behaviour and the ability not to mind over much if thrown into boggy ground at 40mph.
I very much like feeling of being both tired and slightly toasted after having been out in the sun.
Back before the fall of the Berlin Wall, I'd got quite good at analogue circuitry. Mostly due to being taught by a chap who'd scribble a circuit on the board, stare at it with his head on one side while he worked out likely values for the passives, then fill them in and tell us YTS-types to get on with it. (He'd also tell us that repairing foreign hi-fi kit was never worth the bother and not to worry about remembering equations. That's what textbooks were for.) Of course, once I'd got into coding and then Unix admin, it all fell out of my head.
Earlier in the week, jarkman dragged me along to the Bristol Dorkbot, which was a jolly interesting evening. For a variety of reasons I was inspired to build a Theremin. Thus I did some poking on the internet and found one that didn't work by wireless. A simple circuit; how hard could it be to remember skills from twenty years ago?
Not that hard, as it turned out. It makes a splendidly horrible racket.
Somewhat pleased with that success, we decided to try something I've been meaning to do for almost as long. This was the 'fix a camera to a Flexifoil and try not to wallop it into the ground at 50mph' plan. No-one was entirely sure that it would fly right with a camera hanging off one end, but there's only one way to find out.
Ladies and gentlemen, we rock very much indeed.
Then we tried Richard's idea of towing the camera on a bridle, which wants doing properly, rather than with gaffer and an Amazon box. In truth, there's a lot more work to be done on this. You'll have noticed that the Youtube output is a bit shoddy. The original footage has an air of Super-8 about it, probably due to lens flare, vignetting and shooting into the sun by accident. It reminds me of bits of 'Big Wednesday' and 'Dogtown and Z boys' because there's some washed-out Lomo-ness there too. So I think what I need to do next is create a proper cradle for perhaps a different camera. One with a faster framerate that'll run for longer than a minute at a time. Although also one that I won't mind destroying by accident.
(If you look at the last few frames of the third film, you'll notice I missed a brick and a section of wavy tin by about a foot.)
There are also no pictures of the mk1 camera-cradle because I stuffed the kite into the ground before I thought to wave a different camera at the thing. Mind you, in stuffing the kite, I bashed the camera hard enough to bend the lens zoom/retract mechanism and stop it working. Out of desperation, I heaved on the thing... And it clicked back into place. This is also the camera that spent a month or so taking pictures that were mostly purple. (See icon. That came right out the back of the camera. No Potatoshop other than crop-and-shrink)
This is what I want from a digicam. Non-linear behaviour and the ability not to mind over much if thrown into boggy ground at 40mph.