• Removal of the mats and carpets.  We found huge amounts of areas on the bottom -side of wall to wall that we had *no idea* were being hit repeatedly!  and *man* did they reek once peeled up!  (sad/sucks because I love wall to wall).  only room left w/ carpet now is “cats only w/ human chaperone” in Hunter’s office
• Kitty prozac (half dose/prescription).  Yes, I’m very sorry to say that sometimes psychiatry may be the answer.  Of the 2 sister cats, the “little one” was bullied by the “big one”.  And little one periodically would rear-leg-scratch her chin (where she has a little mole/bump) and make it bleed.  We feed a full dose mixed in to their mixed/shared wet food dinner bowl (mouth injection was just torture for little sensitive one!  she also was too clever to notice “chicken wrapped pill pockets”). chinese herbal pulverized powder helped a bit, but not like the prozac.  So now they both get ~ 1/2 dose, and the stress/bullying has dropped markedly.
• Nature’s Miracle remover/cleaner.  It eats away at the smell/molecules *as well as* making a citrus smell cats dont like.  They maybe won’t “run away” from a treated pee carpet spot, per se, but it’s certainly no longer a place they can hardly avoid when nearby.
• More catboxes, each changed 1x/2x day!  We’re up to three, none covered, all “in the open” (so no chance for big cat to ambush little cat on coming out of the potty box (yes, that happened!))
• Reward catbox peeing with treats she loves.   A coworker who grew up with cats named Sam mentioned how negative feedback (yelling and shoving her face in pee just made her confused and look stupidly “did I do something wrong? why are you mad?”) doesn’t work with cats, but positive does.  So if you stop feeding a peeing/misbehaving cat, they get the message “real quick”, goes the theory.  That seemed a bit extreme, so went with “follow kitty after getting up in the morning” (when I’m around), gentle verbal coaxing (sometimes pre-catnip) to go to catbox and then *lots* of praise and a treat she *loves* after she’s peed.  She’s smart and sometimes doesn’t want to pee (very smell sensitive I think) and pops in/out, hoping for treats on occasion. But now, she gets no treats unless she pees, so she’ll go back in (immediately or in a little bit) and catbox pee and get her treats!
• Years of loving little one to get her 100% trust.  This was ongoing.  She was always skittish, jumpy, and independent.  It took me years to get her to entirely stop hissing at me at times, getting pissy, etc.  The key seemed to never lose my patience with her and suffocate her with waves of love, love, love until she knew I was her #1 ally in the house

So thanks internets, Sam, and all the places and things we tried (many many up until now).  This is the list that has worked for us, and prior to this “little one” could pee our house up good, sometimes as many as five times a week.  It got to the point where I lost my sh*t and started utility-knife cutting up rectangles of the wall to wall and throwing it out — she just would not stop.

My hope is this post may help other owners who adore their cats but are suffering, too!

true love

And as a postscript, “little one” is now The Most affectionate cat ever.  She likes to hop under the covers at about 5am for a few hours and spoon with me, purring happily in our mutual love fest.  I can hardly convey how happy we are to have her happy and “back”, and have teased out this little lovey wonderful thing that was hidden insider her before.

custom heat duct reducer

Using a 24″ x 36″ sheet of (intended for ducting) sheet metal (~$10) and rivet tool + rivets (~$15) I was able to take a 14″ x 8″ opening and create a 4″ deep reducer down to a 14″ x 4″ opening.

This way, this can be an insert into an existing duct and “boot”/box that takes an 8″ pipe of heat into a 4″ deep 14″ x 8″ box.  It can then exhale the heat into a 14″ x 4″ vent.

Why the insert you ask?  Hint: house was built in 1960.  Guess what the most common way to insulate ductwork *and* boxes/registers/boots was back then?   ASBESTOS, YAY!

So while we don’t know it is for sure, it sure looks like it (inspectors clued us in, t00).   So we not gonna mess w/ the box/ductwork that is in relatively good shape and not cut it, etc.

This is all part of a Bigger Project of redecoration we are doing at the bunny fort…

A nice thing about this approach is that you can always glance down anytime you are editing to see which mode you are in (or the emacs lisp code *thinks* you are in).  You can also fork/edit the single “.el” lisp file to add/update the triggers for various modes.

https://github.com/traceypooh/php-htm-mode

Screenshot:

screenshot of php-htm-mode

Hunter, Russ, and I celebrate with an 85-mile day trip during the three day weekend around Mount Diablo, through the legendary Morgan Territory.

Ridden over: Oakland, Canyon, Moraga, Lafayette, Walnut Creek, Clayton, Morgan Territory, Danville, San Ramon, and home!

The actual work on my bike was quite simple:

• 1 ratchet-able bolt as the drain plug to release most of the used oil into oil drip pan
• 1 ratchet-able bolt underneath to release the bike’s oil pan and oil filter section

 Russ helped figure out those bolts which I could confirm with a shop manual PDF.  Harder was sorting out what oil and filter to get/use and getting them.  I went with:

• Valvoline SAE 10W-40 Motorcycle oil (for 4-strokes; non-synthetic; ideal for wet clutches) (AutoZone/Walmart)
• K&N KN-111 oil filter (local motorcycle shop)

Putting everything back couldn’t be easier — slipped on new filter to bolt/cover, ratchet-ed the two bolts back in, and poured in ~3 quarts of oil.  I was happy parts were all in good shape and aside from some relatively dirty oil, no badness or surprises for my 35 year old bike.  Phew!

my first oil change

removing bottom bolt and filter

garage work overview

• use macosx Disk Utility
• make a .dmg of Time Machine partition (to another disk)
• wipe out disk
• restore .dmg
• extend partition to full size (or whatever size you want) of disk

Detailed steps:

1. backup one last time with Time Machine
2. turn off Time Machine via preferences
3. open Disk Utility (builtin mac app)
4. select the partition where your Time Machine backups are
5. hit the “New Image” icon in top bar — use the default options (with “.dmg” suffix, no encryption)
6. save the .dmg to another disk that has space (this takes awhile)
7. once that’s done, you can re-partition using Disk Utility the disk that originally had your Time Machine partition on it.  (WARNING THIS WIPES OUT ENTIRE DISK AND ALL PARTITIONS!)  Select each partition on the disk and hit the [-] icon near the bottom of the partition list.  BE VERY CAREFUL AND MAKE SURE YOU HAVE IDENTIFIED THE RIGHT DISK!
8. your disk is now empty…
9. repartition the disk however you like — since Time Machine uses its own subdir, I suggest partitioning the disk to a single partition, full extent of the disk
10. with the emptied disk still selected, hit “Restore” button/tab to the right
11. find the .dmg you made previously as your Source
12. drag the emptied partition (where you want Time Machine backups to go) to the Destination
13. hit the “Restore” button (bottom right)
14. it will ask you to approve scanning/verifying .dmg (yes/OK)
15. (this takes awhile)
16. resize your restored Time Machine partition to full disk (or whatever size you want)
17. turn back on Time Machine backups
18. approve the question about “disk has moved…”

PS: you can also you this technique to move an entire set of Time Machine backups from one disk to another disk (without losing all your backups!)

At my job, I’ve updated the process and way we create our .mp4 files that are shown on video pages on archive.org

It’s a much cleaner/clearer process, namely:

• I opted to ditch ffpreset files in favor of command-line argument 100% equivalents. It seems a bit easier for someone reading the task log of their item, trying to see what we did.
• I no longer need qt-faststart step and dropped it. I use the cmd-line modern ffmpeg “-movflags faststart”

Entire processing is now done 100% with ffmpeg, in the standard “2-pass” mode
As before, this output .mp4:

• plays in modern html5 video tag compatible browsers
• plays in flash plugin within browsers
• works on all iOS devices
• makes sure the “moov atom” is at the front of the file, so browsers can playback before downloading the entire file, etc.

Here is an example (you would tailor especially the “scale=640:480″ depending on source aspect ratio and desired output size; change or drop altogether the “-r 20″ option (the source was 20 fps, so we make the dest 20 fps); tailor the bitrate args to taste):

• ffmpeg -y -i stairs.avi -vcodec libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p -vf yadif,scale=640:480 -profile:v baseline -x264opts cabac=0:bframes=0:ref=1:weightp=0:level=30:bitrate=700:vbv_maxrate=768:vbv_bufsize=1400 -movflags faststart -ac 2 -b:a 128k -ar 44100 -r 20 -pass 1 -acodec aac -strict experimental stairs.mp4;
• ffmpeg -y -i stairs.avi -vcodec libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p -vf yadif,scale=640:480 -profile:v baseline -x264opts cabac=0:bframes=0:ref=1:weightp=0:level=30:bitrate=700:vbv_maxrate=768:vbv_bufsize=1400 -movflags faststart -ac 2 -b:a 128k -ar 44100 -r 20 -pass 2 -acodec aac -strict experimental -metadata title=’”Stairs where i work” – lame test item, bear with us – http://archive.org/details/stairs’ -metadata year=’2004′ -metadata comment=license:’http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/’ stairs.mp4;

Happy hacking and creating!

PS: here is the way we compile ffmpeg (we use ubuntu linux at work, but this script works on macosx, too).

The “idiot lights” are working (still have to get the dang neutral light to turn off when in gear, but otherwise good 8-p)
and now you can hear my little kitty purr

Thankfully, found this post on hondatwins that mentioned the orange and light blue bike lines were actually active lines for when left or right turn signal was on — not that they were positive and negative general lines. It also mentioned a (cheap/simple, yay!) fix to use two 3-amp diodes and tie them in together. A quick putt-putt to Radioshack and $2 later…

Success!

I focus mainly on that in this image, but also some other related notes.

annotated picture of wiring behind headlight

I also have my new speedo’s neutral LED light now turning on when bike is on (but not running) — will see tomorrow if it *also* properly goes *off* when shift up when bike is running.

I used a CB400A wiring clymer manual image that I found online to sort out which wires connect where. I also cleared up quite a few wire clusters that no longer needed to leave the headlight wire storage area and made space for the new connections.

VERY satisfying! Can’t wait to fire her up tomorrow and hopefully the speedo/odometer work properly and track accurately. The indicator lights I could test (blinkers, hi-beam, as well as instrument backlight) work. Will see if my neutral light works tomorrow too (and hopefully will not see the “oil pressure” light come on ever )

mini speedo at Dime City Cycles

I’ll get my hands dirteh and post progress and/or pics as soon as it comes in!

The plan is to combine the current speedometer/odometer with four of the seven indicator lights (neutral, high beam indicator, oil warning light, turn signal indicator) into a smaller chrome combined unit, and just plain omit the other three lights (parking brake, 1st gear, 2nd gear).

Now that I’ve done more than I had planned (“oh, maybe just two bolts today to see if I can figure out more what I’m up against…”) it is time to order parts!

We avoided the 5 and all freeways and started out with about an hour of “country roads” and farm roads that were mostly straight and flat. Next we nearly ran out of gas but recovered thanks to the “reserve switch” to fillup in Tracy. Finally, we started the fun curvy and up-and-down stuff through the northwest backside of Mt. Diablo and had a late lunch in Clayton. We wrapped it up through Moraga, and then our favorite twisty mountain pass up Pinehurst to Skyline Blvd and home

What an wild day!

I’ve named her “decaf” since she’s an automatic (with just “lo” and “hi” gears, no clutch) *and* a cafe racer style modified bike. I’m really pleased she did so well on the first ambitious ride all the way home.

Here’s some bike porn / pix!

These are organized by % Alcohol, guess the direction, Beer Connoisseur!

Goodbye Little machine that could and dream of my youth!

Luke Battling Darth -- ASCII!

luke battling darth
famous painting by ralph mcquarrie
to ascii by “jp2a” pkg and de pooh
(and now green/black — these things are important

found a nice (video lossless, best i can tell) way to convert the video from cameras like my Canon ELPH SD1400,
which is *already* h.264 video + PCM mono audio

to a new mp4 container with aac audio. that part’s easy/cake w/ ffmpeg — but the trick to get the h.264
video part to play in chrome browser and/or with a flash plugin is to get the flagged “yuvj420p” colorspace pixels
to be considered “yuv420p”. it seems like the former is >= 8 bits-per-pixel and has a range wider than the 256 values;
while the later is 8 bit per pixel. ( brief info/notes/background )

at any rate, finally found this nice post:

https://blendervse.wordpress.com/2012/04/02/waiving-the-fullrange-flag/

which refers to this modified MP4Box/gpac tree, to switch the “fullrange” color-related flag off:
https://github.com/golgol7777/gpac

and then, voila! i have a nice little script where i can convert my canon ELPH videos to a html5 video tag and flash plugin compatible mp4:


#!/bin/bash -ex

# convert wav audio to aac
ffmpeg -y -i tmp.mp4 -i audio.wav -acodec libfaac -ac 1 -ab 256k -vcodec copy t2.mp4;
qt-faststart t2.mp4 "$OUT";
rm -fv video.mp4 audio.wav t2.mp4 tmp.mp4;


Luke Battling Darth -- ASCII!

luke battling darth
famous painting by ralph mcquarrie
to ascii by “jp2a” pkg and de pooh

Enjoy!

His camera recorded in 24fps (24000/1001 to you fellow geeks and smartly
did a “2323″ writing/stretching of it to 60i (60 half-frames).
After correcting back to 24fps progressive most of his clips, he’s found ~10-20%
are not able to be put back together visually properly even with CineTools
and manually specifying the “cadence” and sequence starting frames, etc…

I started with code that I wrote to take a small segment of a video
and split the interlaced frames into 1/2 height “fields” and then drop them
down to grayscale to compare them all to each other to find the best matches
(to verify the cadence is right and/or the fields aren’t “off by 1″, etc..)

It uses mplayer and ImageMagick (“convert” and “compare”) for pretty high-quality
extraction of frames from the source video into the 1/2 height “fields”.

So I just do about 0.3 seconds to get 10 frames, and thus 20 1/2 frame fields for analyzing.
It will output the best matches of frames. For example:

php lacer.php good.mov 0.5 0.8


I then extended it into a web page (screenshot above, where I’m left-shifting one field by 4 pixels for visual inspection)
PHP script <== try it out online! (source)
that uses some CSS cleverness (clip property is your BFF!) to interlace together a pair of fields.
It supports:

• field swapping (move one 1/2 image to be the 1st, 3rd, 5th, etc. lines — if it was
  previously the 2nd, 4th, 6th, etc. lines)
• left and right shifting a field
• pairing arbitrary fields
• showing a “raw” 60i telecined sequence
• showing the 60i sequence as a “deinterlaced” 24P sequence

We saw her present slides and background from her book last night at our local indie bookstore. She passed around this gem of an original 60+ year old newspaper showing our downtown as it was!

on MacOS Lion, using the heads of the trees, with direct encoding support for:
x264
vpx / WebM

http://archive.org/~tracey/downloads/macff.sh.txt

A nice recent update to ffmpeg is the ability to decode/read Apple ProRes, too!

Hunter and I had some fun out in the east east Bay and gorgeous farmland countryside seeing how my little ‘Bee can buzz!

Not super sophisticated Ms. Driver — but still lotsa fun and sorta exciting to poach a street for some two-camera iPhone pseudo-documentary…

dumbbunny.org ==> dePooh.com

Should be a fun Halloween!

(they don’t come in black, as pictured

silly fun in one of my favorite cars!

Got to visit with my prof/mentor and he gave me a great tour of the update campus and the changes and new architecture/buildings.

We also got to take a nice long hike around the breathtaking gorge/park near my prof/mentor’s house:

Spending about two days on campus, a few things really struck me:

• After all this time, so much was the same and was so intimately familiar, like burned into my brain.  So, walking around Collegetown, campus, the Engineering & Arts Quads, eating lunch at the Hotel School, reading The Cornell Daily Sun, etc. — all of that felt like I was back in school.  The feeling was really eerie and totally unexpected!
• Distances, physical and mental, felt smaller — I thought it was 20 minutes to walk across campus, but everything’s a bunch closer than I remembered it.
• Everyone is on laptops & smartphones — and it’s campus-wide open wifi.  I don’t know <b>how</b> kids pay attention in Electricity & Magnetism with a twitter feed rolling…
• Everyone is so young!  Given the fact it was only ~3rd week into classes, many of them *were* just out of high school.  The energy, optimism, and hustle was palpable and easy to feel/ride…   Ah, youth!
• (Speaking of which) Although I hear weed is de rigueur in college now, I saw 0 evidence of it there (kinda relieving — esp. if you gonna pay that kinda $ to learn).  Only clear-eyed, sharp, hustling kids did I see.
• The Engineering Quad has a brilliant new building, Duffield Hall, straddling the corners and joining two prior ho-hum old halls.  So now students have an enormously large open enclosed light-filled space with tables, chairs, cafes, and wifi — perfect in-between classes and for informal meetups while FB strategizing your weekend party scene (or more likely study!)  Yay, Geeks get some nice Goodies, too!   I spent a lot of time here and even saw my second-favorite professor and other profs having a (presumably) informal lunch together.

after picking up the panicked little thing, we gently tossed it into dirt, but it looked just unhappy. intuition kicked in and seemed like the soil was too hard so found some damper stuff to move it to. presto! in seconds our little dirt scuba diver was self-buried in moist topsoil and happy. hunter points out “bird food…” but it’s a warm and furry mammal creature!!

• x264
• ffmpeg
• mplayer

here, i’m making sure that i compile in static version of libvpx (Webm) and libx264 (h.264) video packages so that the ffmpeg can easily make hiqh quality h.246 and webm transcoded videos.

http://archive.org/~tracey/downloads/macff.sh

So we can make nice (2 pass video) ~768 kb/sec 640×480 derivatives like so (alter “-r ” as appropriate):

# make WebM
ffmpeg -deinterlace -y -i 'camels.avi' -vcodec webm -fpre libvpx-360p.ffpreset -vf scale=640:480 -r 20 -threads 2 -map_meta_data -1:0 -pass 1 -an tmp.webm


ffmpeg -deinterlace -y -i 'camels.avi' -vcodec webm -fpre libvpx-360p.ffpreset -vf scale=640:480 -r 20 -threads 2 -map_meta_data -1:0 -pass 2 -acodec libvorbis -ab 128k -ac 2 -ar 44100 tmp.webm


mv tmp.webm 'camels.webm'

# make h.264

ffmpeg -deinterlace -y -i 'camels.avi' -vcodec libx264 -fpre libx264-IA.ffpreset -vf scale=640:480 -r 20 -threads 2 -map_meta_data -1:0 -pass 1 -an tmp.mp4


ffmpeg -deinterlace -y -i 'camels.avi' -vcodec libx264 -fpre libx264-IA.ffpreset -vf scale=640:480 -r 20 -threads 2 -map_meta_data -1:0 -pass 2 -acodec aac -strict experimental -ab 128k -ac 2 -ar 44100 tmp.mp4


qt-faststart tmp.mp4 'camels.mp4'


our preset files:
http://archive.org/~tracey/downloads/libvpx-360p.ffpreset
http://archive.org/~tracey/downloads/libx264-IA.ffpreset

Nice things about the h.264 derivative:

• plays on all iphones and ipads
• browser video tag and/or flash plugin compatible
• starts immediately, seeks immediately even before entire video is downloaded

hope this may be useful!

Yes We Can!

russ and i without our normal masks

We had a blast watching our favorite film Monday night at our new “work theatre” (as opposed to “home”) and my new accurate prop replica pieces came in for the event!

This features great music from Hunter!

The camera weight and size meant it couldn’t go up train hills or tight spaces, so it was a flat track with “elbow room”.

Choo choo!

I’ve added a carbon hood, racing rear spoiler, custom wheels, weight reductions, and engine tunings to bring it to something crazy like peak 650 horsepower. Really fun to personalize it a bit! The replays are fun — especially when you do spectacular crashes and jumps. You can customize the pictures from all sorts of different camera angles. Virtual reality, indeed!

Bali is culturally fascinating — full of very happy and cooperative people unlike any place I’ve seen. Here are some interesting tidbits/observances:

Bali is an amazing isolated place whose people typically lives communally and is based off of the agriculture of rice. Despite being part of Islamic Indonesia, the vast majority (70%+) of the people are Hindu (with a mix of Animism from Bali’s indigenous roots).

We saw everything we could, ate their amazing food, and tried to soak up as much Balinese culture as we could!

You can see more formats and information here.

I got this supercute mini-laptop last year

I had been using Ubuntu linux Lucid (10.4) and just upped to Meerkat (10.10). (Both were Netbook Edition).
I’d never gotten video acceleration to work before and was stuck w/ ~1-5 fps video most of the time.

Doing the widely suggested:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gma500/ppa && sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gma500/fix && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install poulsbo-driver-2d poulsbo-driver-3d poulsbo-config


bricked my vaio 8-( well, i mean, it gave me root login w/o X/windows ability but… 8-p)
but 2-3 apt-get remove, reinstalls, hunting google later, found the apparent saviour (I did 1000mb from 2000mb recommended here):

sudo nano /etc/default/grub
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash mem=1000mb acpi_osi=Linux"
sudo update-grub

booted clean! *immediately* got ability to use proprietary vaio accessory to output VGA to external monitor (a first!) and brightness up/down hotkeys working. (brightness to work even at all!)
but best of all, video and appearance *and everything* (moving windows, starting applications) was *so much faster* visually!

cmd-line video playback with:
sudo apt-get remove mplayer
sudo apt-get install gnome-mplayer gecko-mediaplayer

so this is *all* i have done, aside from starting w/ vanilla install (with just a few changes to help w/ SSD instead of HD) of lucid upgraded to meerkat.
(personally, i’m still working on getting suspend/resume to work (seems to work but the display doesn’t come back on — been like this the whole time) and to get hibernate to work — prolly will go with some kinda memory stick to dump to)

UPDATE!

suspend/resume working now with change to suggested “gma500 fix”

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gma500/ppa && sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gma500/fix && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install poulsbo-driver-2d poulsbo-driver-3d poulsbo-config

I think this additional suggestion may have fixed sleep/resume (but it’s possible it was just the gma500/fix related packages in live above:

sudo mv /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/99video /usr/lib/pm-utils/99video