The last Friday in July (today!) is the 16th annual system administrator appreciation day, an obscure celebration started in 2000 (by a system administrator, of course) as a response to an H-P ad showing users expressing gratitude to their sysadmin for installing the advertiser’s latest printer. To my knowledge, none of us have ever gotten flowers or even donuts on “our” day, but it does remind us in the profession that our job is to keep the users happy, mostly by keeping the machines happy, but also by attending to their needs in a prompt and professional manner.
I was reminded of the event not only by notices in the discussion forums and IT email lists, but by the fact that today, the replacement memory module for our network server came, and I installed it. A simple procedure, but one that takes a fair portion of the sysadmin’s bag of tricks and tools to accomplish. Bigger shops might have a service contract with the hardware vendor, but in many cases, the sysadmin is also the hardware mechanic.
For a few months, the server, a Dell T110, has been crashing every few weeks, fortunately not while we were on our two-month grand tour, but of concern, naturally. especially because it is a virtual machine host, and often has a half-dozen virtual machines running on it, which means, when the server goes down, half of our network goes with it. Virtualization is a great way to run different versions or distributions of operating systems when developing and testing software, so not too many have production roles in the network, but it is still an inconvenience to have to restart all of them in event of a crash.
A red light appeared on the front panel of the server, indicating an internal hardware condition, so it was time to check it out. First, hardware designed for use as servers (the T110 is aimed at small offices like mine) is a lot more robust than the average tower workstation you might have on your desk. Note above the heavy-duty CPU heat sink (air baffles have been removed for access to the memory modules–the four horizontal strips above the CPU fins). In addition, big computers have little computers inside that keep track of the status of the various components, like memory, CPU, fans, and disk drives, and turn on the light on the panel that indicates the machine needs service. Server memory has error-correction circuitry, as do most server-quality disk arrays, but this is limited to one error–the next one will bring the system down.
System administrators depend on these self-correcting circuits and error indications to schedule orderly shutdowns for maintenance, so that the machine doesn’t crash in the middle of the workday. For most offices, this means late evening or weekend work. For 24-hour operations, like web sites, it means shifting the load to one or more redundant systems while the ailing one is repaired, so no data is lost. Companies like Dell supply monitoring software to notify sysadmins of impending problems, which is vital to operations where there is a room full of noisy servers and the admins are in a nice quiet office in the back room. In our case, with just one server, we don’t use the monitoring software regularly, but it is useful for telling us which component the red light is for; then we can look up the location in the service manual and order the right part, and hope the system doesn’t crash before it arrives.
Normally, businesses that are thriving and need to keep competitive in the market replace their machines at least every three years. Others, like ours, that operate on a shoestring and buy whatever resources we need for a project when we need it, tend to run machines five years or more, sometimes until repair parts are no longer available: since we run Linux, we have machines eight years or older that are still useful for running some network services.
Our server is almost five years old, so when I order replacement parts, they don’t always look like the ones we took out, or have the same specifications. For that reason, I usually take replacement as an opportunity to upgrade, replacing all of a group of components with the a new set, which I did when a disk drive failed a couple years ago. However, this time, since I’m semi-retired and don’t have a steady cash flow, I only ordered one memory module, to replace the failing one. Memory comes in pairs, so having slightly different configurations in a pair causes the machine to complain on startup, but it still runs. The “upgrade” alternative would have replaced all four modules, or at least the two paired ones, with the larger size, at a cost of $150 to $300 instead of just replacing a $50 module and putting up with having to manually restart the machine on reboot.
So, the sysadmin not only needs to keep the machines running, but running within budget, and making sure the operating systems and hardware capabiities can support the software users need to do their jobs. If he or she is doing their job right, there won’t be any red lights in the server room, and the sysadmin will look like they aren’t doing anything…
Coming home after a long trip pulls one quickly back into the routine that the trip was designed to break. However, a two-month absence makes reestablishing the routine much more difficult. The inside of the house looks exactly as we left it (in somewhat of a hurry, but prepared–empty refrigerator, empty garbage cans, etc)–almost: a shelf fell off the wall, probably due to being overloaded just before we left, and a bicycle tipped over, probably due to digging out last-minute supplies from behind it. However, the outside is a profusion of blooming things that were just starting to wake when we left, and we missed most of the rhody season–those blooms are long gone. Fortunately we did have a service maintain the grounds while we were gone, so the place didn’t look quite as abandoned as it would have.
Delia is happy to be home, too.
By now, the cat is used to extended stays of a week or two or three at the Just Cats Hotel, but she always clings to us for a few days after we all get home. This time is no exception. We’ve moved downstairs to the guest room to beat the unseasonable heat wave, and the cat has taken that in stride, curling up next to us, though she still thinks we should be upstairs. We’ve been busy finding window screens and hunting down our seldom-used fans to help keep the house cooler: our big oscillating floor fan perished last year and wasn’t replaced: a brief search for a new one, even a table unit, was in vain, as the heat wave caught us in Montana several days before we got home, and local stores quickly sold out of what isn’t usually a big selling item in the usually mild Pacific Northwest.
Entropy continues to eat away at houses whether they are occupied or not: the upstairs bathroom tank-to-bowl gasket dried out from age, heat, and lack of use, so toilet repair was first on the list after unloading the car. Several days have passed: the tank bolts continue to seep, despite new bolts and rubber washers–a careful juggling act between tight enough and too tight, to make a seal without breaking the porcelain. The new bolts were larger in diameter than the old ones, which called for carefully drilling out the holes in the ceramic tank with a masonry bit, not something one expects to have to do… Suitcases were unpacked, laundry done, and finally, camping gear put away, though we intend to do some local overnight trips the rest of the summer. A trip to Costco to replenish supplies was in order, but the bulk items remain stacked in the garage, awaiting time to distribute them into the usual storage places.
We also brought back items from our cabin after staging it for sale as a furnished dwelling, including a small kitchen table and stools we originally had used in our Bremerton town house, four houses back, in the 1990s, intending to replace my parent’s old kitchen table, which has been a bit large for the breakfast nook in our Shelton bungalow. The cabin has a set of folding tray tables that is adequate for meals: the table and stools have always been a bit crowded there. So, the 1930s kitchen table, disassembled, has joined the other items in the sewing/craft space in the basement, awaiting further disposition, perhaps as a craft table instead of the precarious tilting drafting table we use now. The plan for the rest of the summer is to unclutter and simplify our current home, whether or not we choose to downsize to a smaller house in the near future. Unfortunately, part of the clutter is the accumulation of two months worth of mail. Some progress has been made on reducing that, as I have chosen not to renew my professional society memberships as well as let several other paper subscriptions lapse anticipating being truly retired and traveling more.
Of course, retirement is a gradual process for the software entrepreneur and systems manager: maintenance and upkeep goes on for existing clients, and the home network that supports the profession has been largely left running untouched for the past two months, so software patches and upgrades are in order for all the machines as well. Amazingly, the services on which we depend for access to data and security while we were gone performed well for the entire two months, though a few of the non-essential experimental systems, unstable at best, did go off-line. The essential systems still are susceptible to functional degradation after a restart, and could become inaccessible if they have a restart and the cable company changes the router address before we can reset the security tokens. Something to work on–I programmed the devices to require manually starting a password agent after reboot to reset the inter-computer communications between servers and clients both internal and external to the network. There is a way to “permanently” allow encrypted communication between selected computers, but I’ve been reluctant to use that method.
The main issue is that, to save money, we have a regular residential Internet account, where the provider assigns the address more or less randomly, so that our network gateway has to continually monitor its address and then be able to provide changes to the external web server. A regular commercial account can request a permanent internet address and link it to the Intenet name service, but that is expensive. Even though our “stealth” web server and secure gateway is not registered, we still get bombarded with dozens of break-in attempts on a daily basis, as the “bad guys” simply scan the network address space for servers and attack them. In fact, “unlisted” addresses are more likely to be personal computers that are notoriously insecure, rather than servers that have professional management and keep security protocols up to date.
Rain was predicted for Friday, and rain it did. We had planned for an “errand” day. First, a trip to the Group Health Cooperative clinic nearby (GHC of Southern Wisconsin, not part of our GHC HMO in Washington/Oregon/Idaho) for some lab work. Bearing a prescription from home, we had to go through the ordeal of registration and lots of paperwork, so it took much longer than the 10 minutes it takes at home.
Then, off to Costco for a few items, including a backup disk for the laptop, since we are on the road for a couple of months and not connected to the network backup system at home. Another stop at Best Buy for a portable scanner in anticipation of having photos to scan during our visits and reunions.
Of course, “some assembly required” prevails when setting up backups on a device meant for Windows and Mac: first, reformat the hard drive to the Linux ext4 file system from ntfs, then install and configure rsnapshot to back up the data directories. The backup on a fresh disk took several hours for over 300GB of data. Setting up the scanner will wait for another day–the xsane Unix utility should detect and manage it…
A late evening out for dinner: Despite temperatures predicted dropping to 12 C overnight, Wisconsinites dine outside in short sleeves and shorts whenever there is no snow on the ground. We Pacific Northwesterners, however, more used to layering, fetched jackets from the car as the sun dropped below the horizon.
One of the many bridges on the Pheasant Branch Trail.
Today promised to be the best weather all week–hot but dry, so we put the “Q” tandem on top of the car and headed to Middleton’s Quisling Park, the western terminus of the Pheasant Branch trail system. The short and fast paved trail meandered along the creek, first through commercial parks on the prairie, then diving and twisting down through a wooded run, ending at a nature conservancy, where the trails were crushed limestone, so we turned around.
The trail continued downhill on gravel, not a good surface for tandems, so we turned around.
The trip back was not as steep as it seemed, so we made good time, and took a couple of side trails a short distance. On the trail paralleling US 12 West, we were overtaken by a legless man in a racing wheelchair, who was continuing north, while we turned around at the Airport Road. Another side trail led to the Costco parking lot, but we didn’t have enough cargo space to do our shopping today, so we returned to the main trail and continued on, making a few parking lot loops at the end of the trail to reach our distance goal for the day, 16 km.
Circling the parking lot to reach the 16km distance bogey for today. We chose not to ride the unpaved trail segments or get too far off the main trail, so came up short. A longer ride would have been nice, but it was getting hot toward noon.
In the afternoon, we drove south to the village of Oregon, to meet our grandson after school. We went for coffee to the Firefly Coffeehouse, one of our favorite anywhere in the country. CJ was anxious to show us his computer work, after introducing us to his YouTube channel, where he posts videos of games he is working on. He’s a beta tester for a 2D game and also works on the Wiki to explain tips and tricks of the evolving game, working closely with the designer/programmer.
Somehow, we let ourselves be talked into entering the XBox360 world of Minecraft. I generally avoid video games altogether, being satisfied with a limited range of what used to be board games–cards, tiles, word and number puzzles, etc. But, it was important to him to share, so we grasped the ears of the very unfamiliar controller and got quickly sucked into the game grid. After a brief, on the move introduction, we deduced that the buttons and toggles on the controller consisted of thumb controls for tilt-and-pan and left-right-forward-back, with some sort of switch action, four mode switches, which controlled vertical jumps, switching between first-person and third-person point of view, and other functions we didn’t get. There are also four finger switches on the top of the controller that performed actions, like striking and picking up and putting down objects, which ended up in various inventory displays at the top or bottom of the screen.
Video game lesson–grandpa is the student here.
Sitting close to his large monitor, first-person POV became immersive, with a feeling of moving clumsily through a strange world with a limited field of view and physics that didn’t work quite right, but could be compensated for fairly quickly. Nevertheless, our first foray into Minecraft consisted primarily of finding shelter and hunkering down, avoiding traps and pitfalls on the way. Not very exciting for a 13-year old, but he was happy that we at least tried and managed to keep our characters alive (but not without help).
We got into a discussion of programming (he does mostly Javascript, probably due to lack of tools for other languages), inevitably leading to the subject of Linux. He asked how I came to Linux, and I had to explain that I worked with similar systems before, had built a Linux computer as soon as it had become somewhat functional, and earned a living managing large Linux systems and installations for nearly 20 years. With the hint that, while Microsoft owns the game world, with Windows and XBox the primary gaming platforms, Linux powers the Internet, we may be able to wean him from the Dark Side yet.
Family resemblance. Granny’s shirt features a bicycle and “I ride to burn off the crazy.” Well, does not apply here–we’re having a good time visiting everyone in one long trip.
Dinner out, a dog walk, and more gaming demos kept us out very late, for a school night, so we left him with a promise of more time over the weekend.
The old saw, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” Answer: “Practice, practice, practice,” is so true. All of us are impatient: we just want to “do artistic stuff” and have it turn out like the examples that inspired us in the first place. However, no matter how refined our tastes, our talents take time to develop. How long depends on how much help or critique we get along the way, plus a lot of hard work. What follows is a narrative example of and informal tutorial on making videos on a budget, with inexpensive equipment and open source software.
I’ve always wanted to learn to make video presentations. I imagined I might want to record test flights in the homebuilt airplane project that has languished, unfinished, in my cluttered and sometimes soggy workshop. Another project is documenting our bicycle travels. One obstacle was gear: quality video equipment is expensive. However, all modern digital cameras have a video mode. I started practicing several years ago, strapping my Fuji pocket camera and small tripod to the handlebars of our tandem bicycle, to document rides on the bike trails. It was pretty terrible, amplifying the bumps and roots on the trail and the clicking of the gear shift, as well as not being very well attached, with the camera flopping around from time to time.
The next year, I got a GoPro Hero 3 (Silver–the mid-range model) point-of-view sports camera, and a handlebar mount made for it, a modest investment. The GoPro web site has daily videos sent in by users, showing off amazing feats of surfing, bicycling, motorcycling, scuba diving, parachuting, wing suit plunges, and all manner of dangerous sport, seen from a camera strapped to the forehead, chest, or wrist of the participant. Some were exciting, some just plain scary, but all very professional-looking.
The Mean Green Machine on tour in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, with the GoPro mounted above the handlebars (and the headlight) in its waterproof case. While at an ideal Point of View height, the mount tends to vibrate a lot. I have a helmet mount, but my riding style involves a lot of head movement, which is distracting as well.
At first, I strapped the new camera on the handle bars of our Bike Friday Tandem Traveler “Q,” turned it on, and set off on a 35-km ride. The result was better than the first attempt with the Fuji, but still shaky, vibrating, and endless. OK, a bit of editing to show some particularly interesting parts, or at least cut out the really boring and really shaky parts. But, a lot of time sifting through gigabytes of footage. I eventually pared the hour and a half of “film” (I only recorded one way of the out-and back ride) down to 11 minutes of not-very-exciting or informative view of lake and woods drifting by at 15km/hr bicycle speed, plus a few moments of 30km/hr downhill bouncing and shaking. The sound track was a muffled one-side conversation between me and my stoker, Judy, on the tandem, plus a lot of road noise transmitted through the frame, and the frequent clicking of the shifters and hissing of the brake shoes on muddy metal rims. A really round-about way of saying “We went for a really satisfying bike ride up the south shore of the lake, and came to nice waterfalls about once an hour. Wait for it.” Fast forward two years of trial and error…
After watching a lot of other people’s videos, and the progression in skill over the years of some of my favorites, like Dutch cycle tourists and videographers Blanche and Douwe, I have possibly picked up some hints of what makes a good video presentation. I mostly publish on Vimeo.com, which offers a set of short tutorials on making videos., but I also recently viewed some good tips by Derek Muller, a science educator who makes a living filming short YouTube videos on various topics in science (Veritasium.com), and Ira Glass, host of National Public Radio’s “This American Life,” who published a series of four short talks on storytelling on YouTube. Both agree that getting good takes practice. Lots of practice. Probably not as much as Malcom Gladwell’s tale of 10,000 hours of solid practice (in “Outliers“). but a lot nevertheless.
The main point of Derek and Ira’s stories is: video is storytelling. As we found, it is not enough to simply record the world as it goes by on your adventure. The result has to tell a story: why you did it, where you went, what it was like, and what you learned, in a concise way that holds the interest of the viewer. I know that most of my efforts failed, because of my viewer numbers on Vimeo. Sometimes both of my loyal viewers watch a particular video, sometimes neither of them do. Obviously something needs work. Submissions to video contests garner a couple hundred views (compared with thousands for the winning entries, and millions for the viral baby, cat, and stupid human tricks videos on YouTube and Facebook), with no idea how many viewers actually watched all the way through. So, we evolved over time, failure after failure.
First, I got rid of the “native sound,” because what the camera mic picks up isn’t what I focus on or even consciously hear while riding. Instead, I find a piece of music that I think reflects the sense of motion and emotion in the ride, or one that at least fits the length of the film, or that I can cut the film to fit without making the visual too short or too long. A fast ride needs a beat reflective of the cadence; beautiful scenery or glorious weather deserves a stirring orchestration or piano number, a matter of taste. The next step is to trim the video clips to match the phrasing of the music, if possible.
I realized that, though I find looking forward to what is around the next bend exciting while on the bike, watching endless scenery flow by on the small screen isn’t particularly engaging. Most of other people’s videos I enjoy have clips (scenes) of 7-10 seconds each. Mine ran generally 20 seconds to several minutes. Boring. Furthermore, long takes don’t necessarily advance the story line, just as important to film as to the page, unless there is some interesting progression unfolding in the clip, much as a detailed sex scene in a novel is only necessary to define a key point in the development of the relationship between the characters: mostly, it is sufficient for the characters to retreat to the privacy of the bedroom behind a line of asterisks, as a transition between scenes. A video fade on a long stretch of empty road to the next bend suffices just as well. We’re not promoting “bike porn” here: no matter how much we personally enjoyed the ride. I’m beginning to appreciate the need for story-telling that doesn’t fall into the “shaggy dog” genre, i.e., drawn-out and pointless–suspense to boredom without a satisfying punch line.
Picking music is another issue. At first, I shuffled through my library of ripped CDs (no piracy here, just a convenient way to carry your music library with you, on the hard drive of your computer instead of a case full of plastic in a hot car). However, even if the audience is small (i.e., myself and others in the same room), such usage violates the copyright on commercial recordings, especially on a public post on the ‘Net. I’ve recently started re-editing some of the early videos I made this way, substituting from my new library of royalty-free music published under a creative commons license, and downloadable from several sites on the Internet, notably www.freemusicarchive.org, where musicians leave selections of their work as a calling card or audio resume, hoping for commission work or performance gigs, or to sell physical CDs in uncompressed, high-fidelity audio instead of downloading the lower-quality MP3 lossy compression version.
This is the wave of the future in a world where digital copies are easy: whether you buy a copy or get one free, play it, listen to it, use it to enhance your art, just don’t resell it whole. That’s the idea behind creative commons. Unfortunately, much of music publishing is still in the “for personal use” only, and if the pressed recording gets scratchy, buy another one, no “backup” copies allowed, and no sharing with friends: if you want them to hear a song, invite them to your house or take your iPod over to theirs: you can’t stream it or email it or share a copy on the cloud. ASCAP blanket licensing for broadcast or use in video is still on a corporate price scale, intended for production studios and well beyond the reach of a PC user who just wants to add her favorite pop tune to a video of her and her friends having fun. So it is that Kirby Erickson’s ballad of driving up US93 through the Bitterroot as background to a bike ride up US93 through the Bitterroot is gone, so viewers who aren’t familiar with his work won’t be tempted to buy the album the song came from, because they won’t ever hear of it. Restrictive licensing actually potentially reduces sales in the Internet age. By now, you can’t even upload videos if they have copyrighted music audible in them–Facebook, for one, matches audio signatures from video against a sound library and blocks them.
Although I see some improvement in quality in my amateur videos, I still have a long way to go. For one, the handlebar mount for the GoPro camera introduces too much vibration, so the picture is hard to watch, and doesn’t reflect the experience of riding. Some damping is needed. We did get some better results with the camera mounted on our trailer, but we only use that when touring. Some sort of counterweight to produce a “steady-cam” effect might work here, as the “real thing” is expensive and a bit bulky.
The story is more interesting when it shows the participants, which, for us, means using the trailer mount or some sort of “selfie stick” to put the camera to the side or front, or, as I did in one clip, turn the camera around briefly. During my convalescence from heart surgery last summer, we did a lot of hiking, where I devised a selfie-stick approach to give the impression of the viewer being with us instead of sharing our point of view. I’m a bit happier with some of those, particularly the ones where the camera boom isn’t in the view. More practice, and experimentation. I’ve been more satisfied with ones where we’re in the shot only when necessary to tell the story (an essential point, when the story was that I was OK, and getting better), and the scenery out in front when it was the story.
Now, the issue is to trim the scenes to the essential elements (who, what, where, when, why, and how). To that effect, part of the re-editing process to replace the audio tracks involves cutting the video to synchronize with the sound track phrasing, as well as reducing the length to the minimum necessary. To paraphrase E.B. White’s dictum on writing, “Omit needless frames.”
This still frame says it all: who is reflected in the window, how is the bicycle, where is “Firefly Coffeehouse” in Oregon, Wisconsin. what is “bike tour,” and why is, well, we’re having a good time.
One of the issues with being the director, cameraman, and actor all at once is to keep the bicycle safe while planning the shot and operating the camera, as well as keeping the mission (travel) moving along. We miss some good shots that way, but it is inevitable. One popular technique is to set up the camera along the route and show the bicycle or hikers approaching or receding across or into the frame, which involves stopping and staging the shoot. This is less intrusive where there are two or more cyclists, so it is a matter of setting up the shot ahead of or behind the other rider(s), but that isn’t an option with the tandem, and we’ve used it in limited fashion by propping up the monopod/selfie-stick along the trail. We do have several sizes of tripods, but they aren’t convenient to carry when the photography is incidental to the main purpose of travel. I’ve long since taken to filming short takes “on the fly” rather than just leaving the camera on to pick up everything, which involves anticipating some scenery reveals or events, and, of course, missing some. But, editing “on the fly” to limit scenes does shorten the editing process and save battery life on the camera. We work with what we have.
Recently, we entered a video contest for a short travel documentary on the Newberry National Volcanic Monument, in central Oregon, which seemed to demand some dialogue in addition to the usual soundtrack and titles, so we experimented with voice-over to add a short narration where appropriate. This also wasn’t the best, since our microphone is the headset-attached variety, suitable for making Skype phone calls and video chats, but little else. Good quality condenser microphones for the computer and lapel microphones compatible with the GoPro are simply not in the budget, along with professional video cameras with microphone jacks or built-in directional microphones. Drones are all the rage, now, but one suitable for carrying a GoPro as a payload is stretching the budget, also, and presents safety and control issues for use in our primary video subject, i.e., bicycle touring and trail riding.
Besides finding a story in a video clip sequence, getting the story to flow smoothly, and finding an appropriate sound track to evoke the mood of the piece, the skill set also involves learning to use video editing software. Microsoft Windows comes with a decent simple video editor, but we don’t use Windows. We do have iPads, which have apps for making videos, but haven’t spent a lot of time on those, which also limit one’s ability to import material from multiple sources (the apps work best with the on-board iPad camera). There are a number of contenders in the Linux Open Source tool bag, some good, some complex. We chose Open Shot, a fairly simple but feature-full non-linear video editor, which gives us the ability to load a bunch of clips, select the parts we want, and set up multiple tracks for fades and transitions and overlays of sound and titles. We also found that the Audacity audio recording and mixing software can help clean up the sound from less-than-adequate equipment. ImageMagick and the GIMP are still our go-to tools for preparing still photos to add to the video. Open Shot uses Inkscape to edit titles and Blender for animated titles.
Video is memory and CPU-intensive, so it helps to have a fair amount of RAM and a fast multi-core CPU (or several). Our main working machine, a Zareason custom Linux laptop, has 8GB of RAM, an Nvidia GeForce Graphics Processor Unit, and a quad-core dual-thread CPU, which looks like an 8-processor array to Linux. This is barely adequate, and often slows down glacially unless I exit from a lot of other processes. The more clips and the longer the clips, the more RAM the process uses; often the total exceeds the physical memory, so swap space comes into play. I’m usually running the Google Chrome browser, too, with 40-50 tabs open, which tends to overload the machine all by itself.
This isn’t something you could do at all on a typical low-end Walmart Windows machine meant for browsing the ‘Net and watching cat videos on Facebook and YouTube, so investing in a professional-quality workstation is a must. Since we travel a lot and I like to keep our activity reporting current, that means a powerful laptop machine, running Unix, OS/X, or Linux. Fortunately, our laptop “strata” is in that class, though only in the mid-range, a concession to the budget as well as portability. We purchased the machine when we were developing software to run on the National Institutes of Health high-performance computing clusters, and is roughly comparable to a single node in one of the handful of refrigerator-sized supercomputers in the laboratories that have several hundred CPU cores and several dedicated GPU chassis each.
In addition to Open Shot, we also sometimes use avidemux, a package that allows us to crop and resize video clips so we can shoot in HD 16:9 wide-screen format and publish in “standard” 4:3 screen format if necessary, or crop 4:3 stills and video automatically to 16:9 format to use with other HD footage. In addition to the GoPro, we now have a new FujiXP pocket camera that can shoot stills and video in 16:9 HD, and a Raspberry Pi camera unit, that is programmable (in Python), that we use for low-res timelapse and security monitoring. The programmable part means we write automated scripts that select the appropriate camera settings and frame timing and assemble a series of still photos into a timelapse movie, using the Linux ffmpeg command-line utility.
So it goes–gradually, the videos we turn out get slimmer and more to the point, if not technically better quality, something we need to work on constantly with prose as well, as an intended 500-word blog post ended up a 3000-word tutorial instead.
