I am about to finish a movie and need lots of sounds. While visiting the farm this weekend I carried my recorder around to capture some sounds. General nature sounds, some log whacks, shotguns and chickens; chickens on the porch, chickens in the roost and chickens around the yard. You never know when you will need some chicken noises.
This was recorded with everyone's favorite recorder the Zoom H2.]]>
Francis and the Lights has a music video called The Top from their short album A Modern Promise and it looks like he might be amazing. This was shot on film with live audio. All the vocals and bulb smashes are real. Not only that but at A Modern Promise's website you can download a 1080p version of the video at a very high quality in one of Apple's mastering codecs. It took about 4 hours to download and it is incredible quality. The first thing I did was make a Blu-ray disc so I could watch it in the living room in full 120" 1080p quality. Fantastic. Francis and the Lights is really doing everything right.
Both of these videos are available at higher quality on each of their sites but The Top is available at several quality levels at the A Modern Promise site or at my house it is the best.
Update: I spoke a little too soon. That high quality file is great but the blacks are blacker than black and the whites are way over the top. I took it into Color to lift the blacks a bit, roll off the whites and take out the blue shift in the blacks to warm it up a bit and make his suit look a little more natural. Now it looks the best ever and I bought the album and it is really something.
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While doing some sound research I was reading about the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop and looking at some pictures of their old equipment and watching videos of very nerdy Englishmen banging on old tea pots. This led me to
Delia Derbyshire who worked at the Radiophonic Workshop during the 60's and 70's. She has some amazing videos spread through the internet of her just making sounds, primarily for electronic music.
One my favorite themes is the Doctor Who theme song. A guy named Ron Grainer is listed as the composer but Delia was the one who took his song and put together the electronic arrangement that I love so much. Some more samples of Delia's music is on her site. I recommend Moogies Bloogies. It is pretty weird.
The BBC has digitized some of her old tapes found in an attic after she had died in 2001. They are pretty interesting for their time but not up to Doctor Who theme standards. I think that is what I was really hoping for. If she only had a podcast; I could subscribe.
Original Doctor Who theme
A BBC news piece about the recreation of the theme a few seasons later
A few days ago I rented a sod cutter to remove most of the grass in my back yard and make a large garden area. The sod cutter was loads of fun to use. After a little bit of trouble getting it started I would just hold on and it would wiggle around and cut through a huge section of grass. Lots of fun.
It took a little over an hour to cut the sod. Most of the time it went very easily but occasionally it would run into a bump in the ground and I would have to wrestle with the big vibrating sod cutter. It would also need to be lifted off the ground to turn around. Rough stuff.
The progress so far. My reunion and rain kept me from getting all the grass up at once.
This was my first cucumber, two more shortly followed. Cucumbers are some of my favorites.
Fish (pictured left) pointed out that if you had bookmarked elvisripley.com/blog you would be taken to the archive site where nothing was going on.
When I upgraded my site and broke everything, I archived the old site at archive1.elvisripley.com and put the new site here. While I did put a message about the switch on the old site I didn't have anything on the old site/blog and elvisripley.com/blog was pointed to the old site along with all the old links.
Going forward, if you have a link to my site, bookmark http://elvisripley.com and that will point to the latest version of the site because at some point I will probably archive this site and do something exciting or maybe not. I guess eventually I would.
While watching The Totally Rad Show my Xbox 360 froze. I then tried a few times to restart it. Each time the system would freeze during the opening logo. After those few times it would not restart and I got the expected ring of death. I have a pretty early Xbox 360 so I expected it to happen. It looks like July is for Movies.
Update: I got this back after about two weeks of being without. It took a few days for me to send off my old Xbox but it was only at the repair center for a couple days before they decided to send me a new Xbox 360. It is quite a bit quieter which is nice because the first couple of Xbox 360 generations were super loud, mainly from the disc drive.
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My parents have been saving this for a long time and I got a DVD of it on Sunday so it could be shared with the internet. This was during Today's local news update.
Update: KJRH had this taken down. It was probably too embarrassing.
From all those movies I have rated them all 4 stars or higher except Commando which I didn't like very much. It wasn't the movie I remembered it being but it also wasn't that great.
I am starting to think that I really love movies and have an amazing living room made just for movie watching. It is more of a room made for sitting and playing board games if the family could afford them during the depression but a movie theater has been crammed in and that works too.
As I have been thinking about building a house and planning out the perfect layout for what I would want to have I have also been looking at theaters and editing suites to plan out a theater of my own. This would be a working space with a couple rows of seats or maybe a couch or two then in the back an editing setup with a computer and all the video and audio equipment.
I have been checking out the best setups possible, really great places and a lower key big theater that I don't have pictures of.
I also looked at the small rooms that editors have set up for themselves in a move called The Cutting Edge and then looking at things like these Red interviews. Most of those interviews are shot in the Plaster City theater linked as the lower key big theater. I am pretty excited about it all and I am pretty excited about making movies on a bigger scale instead of tiny rooms like I make them now. It would be great if this could come together for the finishing of the Bikerfox movie because it needs a lot of finishing. Big time
I decided to try a new screen paint mix for my living room wall. Before I had painted a screen area in the middle of my yellow wall. I have been thinking and preparing for my next projector like always. The big difference between each generation of projector is the brightness of black. Every generation it gets a little bit blacker. My Optoma HD70 is a lot blacker than my Optoma H27 was and the next projector will be even blacker. There is a level where the blacks are black enough and you can start to enjoy truly black blacks as far as your eyes are able to perceive. Knowing that I decided to paint the whole wall to create an interesting projection effect which I will demonstrate below.
Also during this repaint I decided to change the mix a little bit. Before I just used Behr Silver Screen which is a normal favorite. This time I used a mixture of around 70% Behr Silver Screen and 30% Behr White Opal Pearlescent. The pearl paint adds an amazing shimmer to the image. It looks brighter with richer colors but it also looks like a plasma television. It has this glow to it like the light is coming from behind the wall. If you get close to the wall you can see all the micro reflectors doing their stuff but when you get back around 6 feet that disappears and it just looks great. I could probably go higher and might at some point. I will probably go paint, projector, paint, projector, back and forth. And now the examples.
Here is an example of normal HD footage. This is the maximum size of the projected image so there wouldn't be any light grey blacks around it.
Now here a commercial. It is a standard definition commercial that is also letterboxed so on a widescreen display it shows up as a little image. With black blacks you don't feel like you are watching a tiny image in the middle of a large screen because the surrounding black pixels are darker than you are able to perceive so the image is small but you don't feel like it isn't filling up the space. It just is the space.
These final images are much better than a commercial. Below are movies shown in their very wide aspect ratio. Once the blacks get black enough you start to see just the wide image like watching a movie in a theater instead of seeing dark grey bars at the top and bottom. This lack of grey bars make the wide movies seem larger instead of smaller which they actually are compared to HDTV sources.
This new paint mixture buys a little bit of time but during dark scenes the blacks are visible painting the dark grey bars above and below widescreen movies. The increased contrast of whatever my next projector will be in addition to the iris that is in most that brings the black levels down so only the minimum amount of light ever leaves the projector for ever frame shown so you never get the waste light visible in the room.
The set with even more pictures is on flickr if you would like to see the out-takes.
The paints used are Behr White Opal Pearlescent No. 751 and Silver Screen 770E-2 that is also called Silverscreen 770E-2
Here is an image of the screen surface up close with a flash to get an idea of the color and reflectivity. It is very neutral.
A short update on the home server because it isn't to a finished point so there can't be too much to tell.
The first thing I tried was creating a virtual hard drive and using iSCSI to connect it to my Mac Pro. There isn't a native iSCSI client in Mac OS X so 3rd party solutions are the only option. They weren't very stable and using a fixed volume size I lost a lot of the benefits.
The second thing was SMB transfer. This worked very well and was very stable but it used 100% of the server's CPU which limited file transfers to 30-40 MB/sec reads and 20-30 MB/sec writes. If I got a faster CPU this would be just about right.
The third thing I tried was NFS transfer. This was great at reading files from the server and was able to go over 100 MB/sec approaching the limit of gigabit ethernet. (125 MB/sec) Write speed wasn't so great. Sometimes it would be 30 MB/sec but after a while or if another write or read was started the speed would drop to around 4 MB/sec. NFS is probably the best if the Mac OS X to Solaris issues get sorted out. This solution also used around 20% of the server CPU so I had enough headroom to enable compression of the data on the server with no performance hit.
So for now I will go with the second method, SMB and upgrade the CPU to something with a few more cores and a higher clock speed.
Update: After some more tweaks I was able to get a little under 50 MB/sec for both reads and writes for most situations. Lots of tiny files still dropped to lower transfer speeds. The processor is still maxed out most of the time.
Update Again: Actually I may not have changed anything. Sometimes it just seems to go faster. I haven't figured that out yet.]]>
My current project in my spare time is to build one of these Sun x4500 servers for a normal price. It is a really exciting project. It is also the first complete build of a PC that I have ever done. I have taken a few PCs apart and upgraded parts and added things to them but my history with Macs has left me with a series of computers mostly built by Apple with core options.
I ordered did as much research as I thought I needed and ordered all the parts and really had a great time. I got a really efficient and low power AMD processor and a super great motherboard and case but I made an error in picking out my parts. The motherboard I picked out was super popular and full of wonderful reviews but it was also too new. I thought I was being pretty careful and I was but I underestimated the progress that had been recently made with Solaris. I think that if this had been a year from now the situation would have been fine but Solaris is still in the process of moving from a big slow OS to a more versatile and progressive OS.
So after I had a working PC build running Solaris and Spinrite but not network accessable, among other things, I am sending the motherboard back and will try again in a few days, maybe over the weekend. ]]>
If you were to check here you would see that I said Portishead was a very subtle band. They sure are most of the time. They have a concert on Current tonight that should be pretty interesting. They went back to their old school and did a show in the drama room.
Their new album comes out in a few weeks and they will probably be playing only new material so I thought I would let you know how much I enjoyed their new music. It is really just what I was looking for. It is very Portishead but it isn't like what they did 10 years ago. It is hard to explain what is different but it sure is. Sometime it is like old Portishead and sometimes it is like Terminator 2 but most of the time it is like Eraserhead so that is pretty good.
One time during Spring Break my family and I went to Dallas to see Portishead at the Bowlerama. It was getting close to Spring Break and I don't think Angelene and I had anything to do and I needed something to wear to prom. (This is a picture of me at a simulated prom.) I got a very nice Versace green velvet suit that judging by that photo is very large but it was the style at the time. People thought it was crazy amazing so that is all that mattered.
Over the last couple of week there has been a lot of chatter about getting great internet pants. These are pants built for knowledge workers. The general consensus is that the 5.11 Tactical Tac-Lite Pro is the best pant for people who sit for most of their day.
I ordered a pair for myself a few days ago and as you can see they are still not found. I am really looking forward to them because I have a few late night projects coming up and I could really use some good sitting clothes. I think the main idea that if you are sitting around you want something room so you can move your legs around and get comfortable. I think that is the idea. Updates to follow.
If you would like to watch a 3 minute walking review of Internet Pants you could watch that here.
I just did all those examples so I could also see if it worked and have a quick access to a group of links to click and see if it works tomorrow. It should be pretty stable going forward and as long as I don't have a /blog or /content everyone should be alright. All of the /blog links were from my WordPress based site and the /content links were from my Drupal based site. It would have made a lot of sense to create an archive when I moved from WordPress to Drupal but I didn't think about it at the time or maybe it didn't matter.
The big 3 blogging platforms are WordPress, Drupal and Movable Type. I am now on Movable Type after trying the other two and am pretty impressed. It made a big shift in the last couple of years and has adapted to the way the internet has grown. Those are things Movable Type says and it seems like they are right.
I think the reason I switched from Drupal was because it could do anything you wanted but you had to set it up. I think that for usability it is still another generation away. For a large site I wouldn't hesitate to use Drupal but for my own site ease of use was what I was most interested in. With Movable Type the only probably I had starting out was the problem of what does Movable Type think it is supposed to be? After I got a hold of that I think I got a good handle on it all. There is also a great iPhone interface for managing posts and comments, that is the kind of thing I am looking for. I don't want loads of power if I can't use it easily with my iPhone. Movable Type, because it is more user oriented, will be much more likely to have an iPhone app for management like Windows Live Writer.
Below is a sample of my QuickTime embed code with a nice javascript play button that should work with all templates now. I like that much more than any solution I have found so far. I used to watch Get Smart all the time.