Sean's blog

2010 January 15th Solar Eclipse (not) seen in Malaysia

Solar Eclipse January 2010, as seen in Henan, China

I was so excited when I heard about there was going to be a partial solar eclipse visible in Malaysia today. It was an annular eclipse in some places, such as this photograph taken from The Malaysian Insider of the eclipse viewed from Henan, China.

It was only going to be a partial eclipse, but even so, I was looking forward to capturing it for my blog. Before you read any further, I should add the video here. Don’t bother watching it, unless you really want to feel as I felt today. It was cloudy. For the whole duration. Here’s the video:

It’s quite nice to see the clouds roiling above my house. Or is it?

USB Camera Obscura

The bit where you can clearly see two layers moving in different directions isn’t bad. If it looks like poor quality, it has been reduced from 640×480 to 320×240 prior to uploading to YouTube, and it was captured by my USB Camera Obscura! Here it is, sitting outside my house today.

The plastic table and chairs came in very handy! My Dell Mini9 was on one (covered in rubbish most of the day – I was worried someone would see it). The table served as a sun-shade to allow me to see the screen (almost impossible otherwise). The other chair was my ‘observatory’.

The cardboard box is the camera obscura. I didn’t actually test whether pointing the webcam directly at the sun would work. The way I see it is that if it didn’t work, there’s a slim chance I’d destroy my webcam, so I played it safe and made the camera obscura. It’s really just a box with a hole in. The image of the sky is formed on the side of the box facing my PC. The hole is facing the sky. I put a single sheet of white paper on the image side of the box to improve contrast. The webcam is rather clumsily taped to the lid of the box at the same end as the hole, but pointing towards the other end (where the image is).

If it’s not clear what’s going on – the video is of the image projected through a small hole in one end of the cardboard box onto a sheet of white paper at the other end – inside the box. The webcam is also inside the box. The dark edges are not the walls and roof of my compound – they’re the sides of the cardboard box, seen from inside. The webcam doesn’t ‘line up’ with the sheet of white paper because I only found out about the eclipse an hour or so before it was due to start! Everything was rushed!

Then all I did was run the magic mencoder command line:

mencoder tv:// -tv driver=v4l2:width=640:height=480:device=/dev/video1 -nosound -ovc lavc -fps 1 -o solar.avi

That tells mencoder (part of MPlayer) to use the second webcam (the first is built into the lid in my Mini9) and create an AVI movie with no sound and 1 frame per second. The low frame rate is still much higher than needed for sky-watching, but was a compromise between not wanting to miss anything, and not filling up the tiny flash drive in the Mini 9. I think I ended up recording just over an hour of video, occupying nearly 2GB on the PC.

And then it was cloudy all afternoon ~:( and now I’m really, really disappointed! Never mind, it was good to go through the whole procedure. The camera obscura seems to work a treat. I think the Logitech webcam I’m using may not be the most sensitive in the world. It’s really hard to tell – maybe I should build in a light-proof eye-hole so I can check in future! There was a bit of light leaking in. You can see in the picture where I’ve tried putting black fabric tape over the corners of the box to cover up the holes. There’s a bit of an orange blur over the video: that’s light leaking in.

Just one last thing: the 1frame-per-second video is very annoying to replay! I changed it into a 20fps video, with this command line:

mencoder solar.avi -vf filmdint=io=25:1,scale=320:240 -fps 500 -ofps 20 -ovc lavc -idx -o solar2.avi

The filmdint filter drops 24 out of 25 frames (so I end up with one frame for 25 seconds of ‘action’). I keep staring at this command line and failing to understand how I end up with just over 1 minute of video from well over an hour’s worth of data. It’s very late now, and I’m a bit sad about the result of my ‘hard work’ today, so I’ll leave that last bit as an exercise for the reader.

Posted in Breaktime, Fixed, Life | 2 Comments »

Added 五官 (face parts) – at wossis.com

Many thanks to Chew Hong Liang, who helped me to test the new ‘Copy cardset’ feature and provided the captions and audio clips for the flashcards. Quite a lot more people were involved in choosing the name for the cardset! 五官 – ‘wǔguān’ in Pinyin was suggested as the best title.

My Chinese is lousy, so when I directly translated ‘simple words for parts of the head’ into Chinese, everybody just lifted the corner of their lip, or one eyebrow! I see that 五官 is translated as “five sense organs” at one website. I’d be interested to know what anybody else thinks.

Wossis isn’t intended to be a replica of Wikipedia. It seems to me that there could be many, many different sets of flashcards for 五官, differing in picture design, in explanatory text, or pronunciation of the words. You can’t normally change another user’s flashcards (though I have just also added a permissions-granting system), to prevent vandalism of your (or your favourite) flashcards. To make it a bit easier to contribute your own version of existing cardsets, I’ve just added a ‘Copy’ facility that will copy anybody’s cardset as your own.

I imagine one day there’ll be a need for a facility to remove copies that don’t add anything to the originals, but are just attempts to pass off someone else’s work as the copier’s. I’m not sure at this point how that’ll work. Drop me a postcard with your suggestions!

Posted in Breaktime, Life | 2 Comments »

District 9 is a better movie than Avatar

District 9

I might never have watched District 9, but Jess came back from her sister’s house with a sack full of DVDs recently. Among the DVDs was District 9. I recognised the “No Humans” warning sign from the limited marketing I’d seen.

I watched the movie on my laptop a couple of nights ago. When I watch a movie late at night, I have to be honest and admit to fast forwarding it if it’s dragging a bit. I did that when I watched Avatar. Don’t get me wrong: I think Avatar is a beautiful movie. Having done some work in 3D simulation and VR in the past, I find it difficult to sit through a ‘fly-through’ if it’s not adding anything to the plot.

There didn’t seem to be a single opportunity in District 9 to fast-forward! Every scene in the movie seemed to add something new to the plot, to the characters, or to how immersed I felt in the story.

I’m not going to spoil District 9 for you by giving the plot away, but it has something for everyone: it’s a tear-jerking love story, it has an immense space ship, it has corporate greed and double-dealings, betrayal, enemies turned friends, comedy, aliens, huge guns and some fairly in-your-face political comment that borders on defamation!

I would recommend District 9 to anyone, unless you’re the sort of person who says “gross” a lot, or you’re under 12 years old. Bear with the start of the movie: there’s some fairly heavy scene-setting going on, but it’s all important later on. Enjoy it!

Posted in Breaktime, Life, Philosophy | 2 Comments »

Unrequited love and Malaysia

The Nut Graph asks this morning “Stay or leave Malaysia?”. I think they published an article on the theme of Unrequited Love not so long ago, but I imagine it’s a recurring theme for many Malaysians, or anybody who has ever lived here for long enough to develop an ‘attachment’ to the country.

The Nut Graph’s article reminded me of going to watch my daughter in her school’s end-of-year graduation ceremony last month, where she sang her heart out on stage for Negaraku (‘My Country’ – Malaysia’s National Anthem). This is a bit off-topic for my blog, so I guess if you know Malaysia, you’ll catch the drift – and if you don’t, maybe you can enjoy the clippings. Make a cup of coffee and have some tissues ready, if you’re a tissue-kind-of-person.

Robert Burns nearly always puts these things best:

“Anna, thy charms my bosom fire,
And waste my soul with care;
But ah! how bootless to admire,
When fated to despair!

Yet in thy presence, lovely Fair,
To hope may be forgiven;
For sure ’twere impious to despair
So much in sight of heaven.”

But to be honest, if I get the time and the opportunity to dwell, I prefer songs. A big favourite of mine is Etta James singing “I Would Rather Go Blind”. She would give anything – even her freedom

“Most of all, I just don’t want
just don’t want to be free”

… as long as her relationship doesn’t end:

Listen to the plaintive question in Lauryn Hill’s “Ex Factor” …

“Who do I have to be
– to gain some reciprocity?”

… in this home-cooked version on a terrible webcam. I think this girl does a great job of the song. I post this version because it’s not just superstars who have these feelings – and not everyone who can vocalise them is lucky enough to be a superstar! I hope you can adjust your ears to make up for the terrible quality of the microphone she’s using:

Her desk organisation seems like mine. I hope that plate isn’t representative of her diet! Just in case you found the sound quality too awful to bear, here’s Lauryn’s version – it’s not on the same budget:

I’m sorry that Robert, Erin and Lauryn aren’t actually Malaysian. I could have used namewee’s Negarakuku – which I happen to think is superb. We should remember that unrequited love is something all people everywhere around the world share – always have, and always will. “Walking away” isn’t always easy. What makes unrequited love so hard is always hoping that everything is going to be great, if you can just get through one more painful episode.

It’s a tough choice: abandon hope – and “just accept it” (sounds familiar?) – or abandon love. I’m not going to pretend I have any relevant or even useful advice. I just ‘experienced a strong emotion’ (I think Woody Allen said that once) and thought I’d share it. Time to get back to work.

Posted in Bolehtics, Breaktime, Life, Philosophy | No Comments »

DVD player died, Ubuntu / NVIDIA TV-Out saves the day!

The complaints from the kids were finally overwhelming. Their VCDs and DVDs kept ‘sticking’ and restarting, but seemed to play OK in our PCs. I couldn’t bear the thought of replacing the DVD player, I can’t help thinking it’s next week’s antique. We have an old LG TV for the kids. We’re not confident about replacing it with a flat-panel: the glass screen copes with some awful abuse!

Ubuntu TV - Choosing what to watch next!

A cousin recently gave us an old PC (I’m an old-PC magnet!) they said was ‘too slow’, so I thought I’d use it to drive the TV instead of a DVD player. Most of what we watch is downloaded anyway (shhh, don’t tell anyone, this is just between me and you, ok?), so it would also cut out the task of converting and burning files onto disks.

The old PC that was too slow turned out to be a 3 GHz Pentium – easily fast enough to cope with movie playing! All it needed was a video card and a wireless card. I had a cheap Edimax wireless card lying around, which works great with Linux. The PC had an AGP slot, so I found a GeForce 6200 with TV-Out cheaply in a local store. After installing Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Kipper) on the PC, it just worked straight away!

It needed some fine-tuning with nvidia-settings so that it drove the TV at 800×600, and I bumped up all the fonts to 14 point, as they’re not otherwise easily readable. One last job was to set the PC to auto-login, so when it’s switched on it boots straight to a desktop.

Our 4-year old daughter can open the ‘movies’ folder and start her own movie. I much prefer this style of using a TV. I didn’t have a TV in my house from 1989 until 2006, after Emily was born. I really don’t want to receive someone else’s ‘feed’, and don’t really want to plug my kids into one either.

The kids seem happy with the new setup. In some ways it’s better than the DVD player – some of our discs had 8 hours of video on! With the 1-click, 1-video model, they’ll choose a movie, it’ll end, the TV will go blank, and they’ll carry on playing with their toys until they remember they can start their own movies. I’m much happier with it than I am with the never-ending A/V of broadcast TV or long-play DVDs.

We tried Tetris (well, Gnometris), and Nibbles but Emily really didn’t seem to get it. It looked just fine on the TV though, so perhaps I might even have managed to delay the purchase of a game console for a few years too! I’m so cheap…

Posted in Breaktime, Fixed, FOSS, hardware, Life | No Comments »