Various

The other day I copied the GPS tracklog for a walk I'd done to my PC, and saw there was another tracklog saved on the GPS as well. It was from when I'd put my GPS on and then decided not to go out. But I forgot to switch the GPS off, and just left it in my bag. Despite being still all the time it was switched on, the tracklog shows quite a bit of movement. Here's a close-up of some of the tracklog:

This morning I was working on an article for my photo tips website. I wrote the main points for the article yesterday evening, but it still took me all morning to flesh them out to a full article.

In the afternoon I did a bit more work on my ebay wordpress plugin, and on recipes for my recipe website. After that I tried to find if an image was causing Windows Movie Maker to crash.

In the evening I watched the last episode of season 1 of Star Trek Enterprise with Mauser and Bo. After that I finished off my flash stencil thing. Then I started writing a blog post for my photo website.

Making a cake and watching football

This morning I started preparing my pog website update, then went to Church.

After Church I cooked dinner, then me, Mauser, and Bo watched an episode of Star Trek Enterprise. I updated my pog website, then me and L made a cake.

In the evening I watched the African Cup final, which was quite a good match. It was Zambia vs. Cote d'Ivoire, and Zambia ended up winning 8-7 on penalties (the match finished 0-0 after extra time).

Annoyingly I didn't get to finish the descriptions or upload my panos today. So although I'd finished processing them yesterday, they will now have to wait until at least tomorrow before I can put them on the web.

Pano processing

This morning there was a really nice hoar frost covering everything. But I got up quite late (about 8am), and by the time I'd had my breakfast, done the washing, taken a few photos in the garden, and put food out for the birds, the frost had started to melt.

So I decided that rather go out and take photos of trees covered in half melted frost, I'd stay in and work on processing the panos I took yesterday. It's kind of annoying because the same panos I took yesterday would look a lot better if I'd taken them this morning. As well as the hoar frost making the trees look much nicer today, the sun was also clearer rather than shining through hazy clouds. (Sun shining through hazy clouds usually just results in a large lump of sky being blown out white in the photo).

In the evening I also watched an episode of Star Trek Enterprise with Mauser and Bo and played on Secret of Mana with them.

I managed to finish processing the panos I took yesterday, but I haven't finished doing the descriptions for them all.

Going on a snowy walk

It snowed a couple of inches overnight, so before breakfast I went out in the garden to feed the birds. Mrs blackbird swooped down, first landing on top of the bird table roof, and then moving to the washing line, squawking like GIMME SOME FOOD!. I did throw some food towards her, but she wouldn't actually eat anything until I went back inside.

I put out some general bird seed, and also some mealworms and sultanas. I think the blackbirds prefer the mealworms and sultanas, while the sparrows prefer the seed.

The weather was sunny (well sunny and cloudy) this morning, so I went out on a walk. On part of the walk I saw there was a manure pile with lots of birds on it. There must have been about 20 robins, 5 dunnocks, and a few black birds.

I got as close as I could (it was on the other side of a fence. Unfortunately the longest lens I had with me was my canon 100mm macro, which was too short. So I didn't get any good photos, but I did enjoy watching the birds for a bit.

Just as I was taking a photo of a Robin, he jumped away. Despite the camera using a shutter speed of 1/400s, the Robin is still quite visibly blurred in the photo. So they must jump pretty fast. This is an extremely heavy crop:

This Robin (on the left) had an interesting breast, much whiter than the other Robins, and with dark streaks:

And here is a Dunnock:

The birds were eating insects from the manure. I did wait around for quite a while hoping that a bird would land on a post next to where I was standing, but they never got very near me. A 500mm lens might have been okay to get some reasonable shots.

In the afternoon I sorted and geo-coded the morning's photos.

In the evening I watched an episode of Star Trek Enterprise with Mauser and Bo. I read some photo websites and started processing one of today's panos.

Pano processing

This morning I did some recipe website work. Then I checked my flickr and found someone has added me as a contact. I checked their photostream / profile and they have plenty of good photos and seem to be interested in the same things as me, so I added them as a contact as well.

Looking at their photos, I found this Extension tube hack for reversed lenses. I had seen such a hack previously and was hoping to do the same someday so I could have an MP-E equivalent in Nikon mount. (Reversed 18-55 lens with extension tube hack).

But reading the comments on that page, they pointed out that the aperture is mechanically controlled in Nikon lenses. I had forgotten that, and that fact would make doing the extension hack pointless for me. The only reason I wanted to do it was so that I could shoot with the lens wide open for focusing, and then the camera automatically stops it down when taking the photo.

The hack would probably work with aperture control for canon lenses, but since I already have the MP-E and don't have any canon extension tubes, I'm in no hurry to try it.

The rest of the day I processed a couple of Scotland panos.

Here's a rubbish picture I drew to check the pressure sensitivity of my wacom tablet was working. (Often it doesn't work in Photoshop when I first plug it in and I have to restart Photoshop, and sometimes even then it doesn't work. So I always test it before opening large files rather than opening the file only to find I have to close it again because the pressure sensitivity isn't working.)

Trying to make a video

This morning I was happy to find that Photoshop had finally finished exporting the animation / video it had been processing for much of yesterday and overnight. Unfortunately, there was no video file on the Desktop (where I had told it to save), so I assumed that it had just given up / broken.

So I tried Adobe Premiere to see if that would work. It took ages to import the images, then after that there didn't seem to be any easy way to add all the images to the timeline and change the total speed of the whole thing.

Next I tried Windows Movie Maker. This loaded all the files, let me choose the duration of each image, and wasn't super slow! But when it came to exporting the clip, I clicked to change the export settings, and it crashed. The 'More Information' link brought me to a Windows Live Movie Maker support forum thread, which requested that people include certain logs and reply with them as a private message.

Then, when I was preparing all the logs needed for the Windows Live Movie Maker error report, I found that actually Photoshop had saved the video okay afterall. For some reason the file was not visible on the Desktop, but was visible if you browsed to the Desktop in Windows Explorer.

By this time I'd already all the necessary crash report logs for Windows Live Movie Maker, so I thought I should post them to the forum. But, there didn't seem to actually be any way to send a private message, so I just posted asking how to send a private message.

I did some more work on the article I was doing the video for, and found that I needed another video, this time a screen capture video. So I shot the video using Wondershare Demo Creator and used my Olympus LS-5 to record the sound. But when I reviewed the video, the cursor appeared as an hourglass whenever I was in Windows Explorer, which was no good.

I have had this problem with Wondershare Demo Creator before, when recording a video of me using Photoshop. The problem then was only existent in Photoshop x64, in the 32 bit version the cursor appeared properly in the video. So I thought that maybe Wondershare Demo Creator just always shows the cursor as an hourglass when recording activity in any 64 bit program.

I tried finding a 32 bit version of Explorer. Instructions I found on the web said that the 64 bit version is C:/Windows/explorer.exe, while the 32 bit version is C:\Windows\SysWOW64\explorer.exe. It doesn't make sense to me that a 32 bit version would be in the SysWOW64 folder, but that's what the instructions said. Unfortunately, neither one made any difference, and Wondershare Demo Creator would still record the mouse cursor as an hourglass when using them.

I did try searching windows for files names explor, there are quite a few explorer.exe files stored there. The explorer.exe files stored in C:\Windows\SysWOW64\ and C:/Windows/ were both different sizes. And all the other explorer.exes the search found were the same size as one or the other. So probably one is a 32 bit version and one is a 64 bit version. It's just that Wondershare Demo Creator didn't like either of them.

So I tried finding a different screen recording program. I found one recommended called screencast, which I have used before and not found much good. However, I thought it might be improved, and so might as well give it a try.

I downloaded it, and on first try it played back the recording really fast. After a couple more tries I got the speed recording at real time. I tried putting the recorded clip into Adobe Premiere, but it got really messed up and full of strange artefacts.

So I tried a few more different settings in screencast, one became really strange colours when put into Premiere, and another resulted in footage that kept jumping back and repeating itself every second or so. In the end I did get some reasonable footage out of it by recording at 50fps and using the Cinepak codec. Even at 50fps though, the footage seems quite jumpy, more like 10fps or something.

All this recording and testing took most of the afternoon.

In the evening I watched an episode of Star Trek Enterprise with Mausre and Bo, then wrote this blog post.

The rest of the evening I looked at places to visit in Ukraine.

Waiting

Most of today I have just been waiting for my computer to process a video. Very annoying as it makes the computer slow I can't seem to copy / paste files from the desktop while it is working.

In the morning I also made an orange and cinnamon fruit cake. in the evening I watched an episode of Trek and a Western called Ride Lonesome with Mauser and Bo.