Elvis Ripley Dot Com {b}

November 27, 2008 • 3:31 am 1

Jeremy Photo Shoot with Birds and Smoke


I had to get a video camera or two for Ida Red’s podcast. Because I now have a camera around, I can shoot some video more often. I could have always done that probably but most cameras have expensive memory or stupid tapes to deal with so it was kind of a pain to do it for fun, especially when I wanted to just keep the camera going for 30 minutes.

This video is me taking some pictures of my friend Jeremy standing in a pond holding his dog with some smoke and there were some pigeons released. It all happened in about 30 minutes not including planning and then it was over. The pictures are fantastic and I will put some of those up when the right one is picked.

I like videos that show me working on stuff.

Update: Here is the article The Bird Man of Lookout Mountain that the for which the photo was taken. Doing this photo also led to this article about what I eat around town.

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September 2, 2008 • 1:39 pm 2

Recording Sounds

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elvis recording chickens

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.

chicken noises

This was recorded with everyone’s favorite recorder the Zoom H2.

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July 13, 2008 • 1:48 pm 2

Big Backyard Garden Part 1

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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.


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The progress so far. My reunion and rain kept me from getting all the grass up at once.

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This was my first cucumber, two more shortly followed. Cucumbers are some of my favorites.

This was my first cucumber

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May 31, 2008 • 9:28 pm 0

May is for Movies

I watch quite a few movies. I try to keep the momentum of movie watching going and probably watch 5 a week, sometimes a little more and sometimes a lot more. Over the last month I have watched these movies. I may have missed a couple but this is most of them.

  • Juno
  • Conspiracy Theory
  • National Treasure: Book of Secrets
  • Blades of Glory
  • The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing
  • Speed Racer
  • Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
  • Iron Man
  • Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
  • Hitman
  • Hulk
  • Charlie Wilson’s War
  • The Orphanage
  • Stargate: The Ark of Truth
  • Zathura
  • Youth Without Youth
  • Spider-Man
  • I’m Not There
  • Cloverfield
  • Sunshine
  • Ghost in the Shell: Solid State Society
  • Elizabeth: The Golden Age
  • The Golden Compass
  • Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: 2nd Gig: Vol. 7 (7-Disc Series)
  • Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: 2nd Gig: Vol. 6 (7-Disc Series)
  • No Country for Old Men
  • Night Watch
  • Commando
  • There Will Be Blood
  • Michael Clayton
  • The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
  • Hidalgo
  • Battlestar Galactica: Razor
  • Shoot ‘Em Up

    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

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    • April 25, 2008 • 7:16 pm 111

    New Projector Paint Mix Creates a Great Experience

    I just moved so there is a new list of projector posts coming. Check this link to see them all.

    Link to All Projector Posts


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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    • 5:22 pm 2

    Storage Server Project 2 – Successful But Slow

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    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.

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    April 16, 2008 • 7:08 pm 0

    Storage Server Project 1 – Failed Attempt

    Sun Fire x4500

    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.

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