Last nights rebuilding of Marbles the macbook was a surprisingly easy, quick, and pleasant experience thanks to my recent work with bash scripts for syncing. In the past 6 months I’ve written a number of syncronization scripts to help keep my notebook up to date with my desktop machines and ensure that no matter what machine I’m using it always has the most recent version of my data.
All this scripting paid off via the side benefit of making the rebuild almost entirely painless. It look less than an hour to reinstall OS X 10.4.1 from the DVDs that came with Marbles and then run software update to get it upgraded to 10.4.9. Once that was done I hooked into the gigabit network, copied over a few applications, ran my update script and Marbles was back in action.
I remember back in my Windows days how rebuilding a machine and moving data over could be a day long saga - no more of that for me though - an hour and some Unix hackery is all you need now!
Now I just have to keep my fingers crossed that rebuilding fixed whatever system corruption I had that was causing the system hangs to begin with.
It’s been a busy week at work, but I’ve still found the time to put together a couple of cool projects. I finally took the time to wade through all my Lensbaby shots and collect the gems into a Flickr set entitled ‘Best of Lensbaby‘. Check it out for some of my favorites, and to see it grow over time.
In addition I also picked up a copy of EvoCam for my iMac. Bre suggested it as a Photobooth replacement when I was looking to remove the “screen flash” and I ended up falling in love with it for some of it’s more advanced features. At first I was a little hesitant to throw $25 at webcam software, but even after just a few hours I was in love with EvoCam.
It has a really neat way to set up motion activated time lapse movies using the iSight. Basically my iSight is on all the time now. Whenever movement is detected (i.e. I am sitting at the computer) it takes a photo every 15 seconds, and adds the photo as a frame in a time lapse movie. At 24 frames per second playback speed and 15 seconds of real time per frame of video it makes it easy to watch my life go by at a 6 minutes per second. Even cooler is that since it’s motion activated there are no long gaps of nothingness while I’m at work or sleeping.
I’ve got it set to cut the movie and start a new one each day at midnight so I’ll end up with a detailed log of my computer usage, and something that’s actually pretty cool as an art project by itself. Below I’ve posted a quick one that only takes up an hour or so of “real time” and was more of an experiment than anything else - be expecting cooler versions at some point in the near future.
The Quicktime version is very large, but has a keyframe for every single shot in the time lapse so it’s very high quality. I’ve compressed it down to a flash video to show here, but might be making DVD’s to mail out if any of the coming days produce anything particularly interesting or thought provoking. Without further ado:
Taken at Seattle Mind Camp 3.0 - Seattle’s premiere un-conference featuring the best and brightest of technology all under the same roof for 24 hours learning from each other, and exploring our passions. This particular crosshatched image was drawn with a pen by a drawing robot put together by the MAKE crew. The original image was taken with a camera and fed into a computer to be processed by the Drawbot. I took a lot of photos with my Lensbaby. Check out Flickr for 100’s of shots I’ve taken in the last 24 hours.
All in all I had a blast. I actually left a little early (I’m too old to stay up for 36 hours at a go) but had 20 great hours geeking with like-minded souls, and playing a delightful game that was passing around: Werewolf. It’s a great mix of social skills, logic, and really getting to know your neighbor in an effort to figure out if they are the werewolf!
I also got my first chance to get some hands on time with the Wii. Nintendo brought one out for part of the evening and let us get some hands on time with it. I’m very impressed with how intuitive the system is, and was taken aback by how small it was - the Wiimote was about 25% smaller than I had envisioned, and the Wii it’self is barely bigger than a DVD case (obviously wider than a single case - but no wider than 4 standard DVD cases stacked together).
So I’m here at Seattle Mind Camp 3.0 having a blast and I have an observation. A year ago at the first Mind Camp about 10% of the participants had Apple Laptops. Last April at Mind Camp 2.0 about 30% of the campers had Macs, and this time over half of the laptops here are Macbooks or Macbook Pro’s.
Are we the trend leaders, or has Apple really made that much of an inroad into the Seattle tech community in the last 12 months? I realize a lot of companies have come to Seattle that buy Macs for their employees (Google to name a big one) but still - it’s a lot of growth.
Today was the first miserably wet day of the year. Rain was pounding when I drove to work this morning reminding me just how poorly my car handles in low traction situations. Luckily it let up enough by the time I had arrived to snap a few quick pictures of the construction around my office that gets ever closer to the building and entrance I use.
As you can see from the picture the massive equipment is now literally up to the door. I can’t imagine being one of the poor people who’s window looked out on to a back-hoe from 5 feet - I know I would go mad with the distraction.
Aside from the rain today was actually a pretty good day - I got a lot done at work, and have been home for the last couple of hours working on reorganizing my condo and poking at email.
On another good note Firefox 2.0 launched today. I have always loved Firefox from a functional perspective but prefer Camino for it’s speed, elegance, and simplicity. The new 2.0 release is a lot leaner and faster than 1.5 yet improves on usability. Given the power that Firefox brings to the table with it’s extensible plugins I might just have to try using both it and Camino for a while to see what my long term impressions of the new release are.
I’ve re-discovered two distinct technological pleasures: screen and Delicious Monster. Aside from spending a few days of quality time with those two gems I’ve been keeping busy with work and keeping up with my day to day stuff around the house.
Screen is an old session management tool for unix systems and boy is it neat. It basically lets you run terminal programs in sessions, and manage those sessions in very interesting ways. You can connect, share, and disconnect from remote sessions at will making managing multiple context-insensitive applications over SSH a breeze.
Delicious Monster makes a DVD/game/book management tool that I had looked at previously, but not investigated fully. They offer some amazing technologies to make it easier to manage a big collection. Most uniquely it offers easy data entry via the camera built into my iMac by “scanning” the barcodes and pulling all the information down automatically.
It took me a little under two hours to scan, sort, and manage all 300+ movies that I have in my collection. I used a tool called Deliweb to create this nifty view of all my movies.
Check out Cory Doctorow’s interview with Rick Kleffel at the Singularity summit. It’s a great interview and goes into some of Cory’s thoughts on the future, and the economic and social impacts on our society as a result of the onslaught of technology.
