f-log

FYI - I am collecting all the screen shots for the Christmas tree animation. There are a few and they are large, most more than 10x my old file size.

My Moto G awesome Android phone has finally bitten the dust after 4 years. Charging it required a specially adapted cable and two rubber bands. The cable had two tiny metal brackets supper glued to anchor the rubber bands that held the power cable in the phone. Nothing else would would work!

I had tired multiple cables, had different people look at it including other Moto G owners. I had tried cleaning the socket, used jewels lens and found nothing. No obvious obstruction or bent component.

What I would love to talk about is my replacement phone the Google Pixel 32GB Really Blue (that's the model name "Really Blue"). But instead I need to note down that setting up the Pixel to use my Pebble Time watch has been annoying.

The transfer software did a good job of pulling all my apps expect for Fdroid across but of course they were missing the settings. Got all of updated manually and tried to get the Pebble app to sync. Eventually worked out that I need to kill the Bluetooth on the old phone, that was in range.

All looked good except my favourite watch face Enigma was nowhere to be seen even though lots of the custom ones I had were. Tried a few times to set it in the app and keep getting back "No internet connection". But I could go on to the Pebble store and select new watch faces and apps!

Turns out that Amazon S3 is down for most of the internet and that is where Pebble store the package files :(

Was getting very worried that Pebble/FitBit were not honouring their promise of keeping all the servers alive until the end of 2017 (at the minimum).

The Christmas animation, yes, I know it's February now.



I will be adding notes on each component in the video. Tree, tinsel, lights, presents, ball and video compositing.

There is an out standing flog menu, that I am working on.

Yearly review (bottom of my list)
Christmas Blender video (might do this in the next 10 mins)
Christmas Blender tutorials (need to revisit where I got with these previously)
Blender 3D tentacle video and tutorial
Start modelling 3D raspberry pi 3 (preferably before a 4 comes out!)

Sarah wanted me to spend a little time making a 1 minute video she could use for her business. The example she showed me was flying images form Facebook.

I took the challenge and we used Audacity to put together the multiple voice recordings she had made. Then I used Blender with the "Images as planes" Add-on enabled(it's built in but disabled by default). I then spent far too many hours trying to get the planes to animate towards the camera at the correct times.

Although the final cut did basically what I envisioned, it was not what Sarah wanted. When showing me the Facebook animation again I could see that it was not the animation she was looking for but the simple slide-show nature of the videos. My solutions did not leave the images on the screen very long and to quote "it was just animation".

I thought about how my mind had jumped to the 3D planes solution and I wondered if I could use Blender with no 3D. this time I setup the video sequencer, imported the audio track and all the images. Then it was just a process of arranging them and adding cross fades.

Making sure the Playback sync AV option was on it was just a matter of scrubbing backwards and forwards, shuffling the start/end times to fit the speech.

From complete a complete disaster that took 3+hrs to a simple and perfect solution that took 30mins. Most of that 30mins was spent trying to work out why my cross fades were going backwards every now and then. I thought they were using the positioning of the tracks(channels) but it was related to which track was selected first that indicated the cross-fade from track.

Apple Macs make me physically sick.

Got so stressed out following Apple's official instructions only to find that not only do they not work but there is no error message or way to find out what went wrong!

Hours wasted, so we gave up but then Microsoft gave us some jip and now the Mac is still not working properly.