f-log

Sarah has had to have her leg re-broken so that means 6-8 weeks or round the clock support again. She is better that last time but has been keeping me from getting a good nights sleep.

The new operation took 7.5hrs, but that's not what I want to blog about. Because the op. was so long and other risk factors she is on a month of blood thinning tablets to avoid DVTs (deep vein thrombosis).

She was not very happy when she found a painful lump in her leg that got worse over a few days. So we went to A&E, we were there for 3 hours of which 10mins was pre-screening and 15mins was with a doctor who advised a scan, just to be sure.

They made the scan for later that day and we went home for lunch then back to the hospital for a quick scan. 40mins after the appointment time we got the scan, no DVT and nothing under the skin, please wait for a doctor to go through the results. 4hrs later ... yes really 4 hours later we got the doctor to confirm that no DVT and please come back for another scan next week.

Apparently the departments was down two doctors, one who was on maternity leave and no cover had been arranged.

So that was just the greatest Friday ever. 7.5 hours in hospital for 40mins actual action/work. Even had to draft help into picking up the kids from school we were in so long.

Lets just hope they are better prepared next week. FYI the staff at every stage were very good, professional and at no pointed did we feel we were being rushed. The doctor strongly recommend we report the long wait times as he had earlier and as he had suggested to all the other patients we waited with.

Needless to say I managed to catch up on some sleep. Every cloud ... and all that.

After the FTP incident now the amazingly useful tv dig project has died.

The xml feed provider has stopped providing the feed and there alternative is an API that only gives you 24hrs worth of data which is essentially useless for my needs.

https://metabroadcast.com/blog/changes-to-atlas-access

What was my requirements? To get a list of all the films on the Freesat channels so I could set up recording schedules. I also tried to find episodes of certain shows that I wanted to see without having to record hundreds I had seen but that functionality has not been in use for at least a couple of years.
The film list would be formatted by "year of release" or "air date" allowing me to quickly identify new films even on at obscure times and channels. I also colour coded the films by air time to highlight kid friendly films. That last feature is the main reason i am sad to see this go. We always had a good backlog of kid films ready to watch at a moments notice and was invaluable at Christmas.

I have found two solutions, both will require a considerable amount of work to incorporate.
Firstly we have a paid service that is recommended by the metabroadcast post above

http://schedulesdirect.org/

but I really want to avoid that.

the second is odd in the fact it is almost perfect but referenced almost nowhere, indicating it could disappear at any moment.

http://www.bleb.org/tv/

And, although the listing seem fresh there has been no activity on the mailing list for years.

But worst of all, there is not film release data on those feeds so I could not easily identify new films :(

Of course I could just scrape the data from somewhere else but I do not have the time for that or maintaining it.

Here is a little blender I have been working on.

Started with a elongated cylinder that has a curve modifier. The curve is 3D


Then added another modifier, this time an array so the pattern is duplicated. Took ages to tweak so the wire segments lined up correctly.



Finally another curve modifier, this time using a bezier circle that made the coil.


The same curve modifier with a bezier circle made the glass rod. That looked quite interesting not closed, so I added a particle emitter and made the particles light emitters.

To finish it off, I want to add a vortex of paper work flying around with an out of focus background.

So that really did not work and I just manually uploaded that last flog entry.

I have switched to lftp now, so lets see if it works ...
...if you can read this, then it did!

The f-log has not been happy for a couple of days.

I ran my usual update script and it just stopped on the FTP section, tried a few times and then manually but it was stuck.

So I ran gFTP a graphical FTP client and that hung as well. The log window showing
ftp 500 'auth' command not understood

The fun bit was that connection was established AND the DEL command was actioned, just the upload/transfer was not working.

I checked 1and1's status page http://status-1and1.com/ and it said they had no problems. So I assumed it was my fault. Perhaps I had screwed up the SSL support.

And ... after 48hrs its just working again.

Not sure this blog has EVER had downtime before now, not bad for 14 years!

The GoPro has an odd bug that it skips a frame when doing time-lapse, so when I try and use ffmpeg to construct a movie from all the images it fails half way through.

This means I have to duplicate the frame before the missing one. But at 30 frames per second it is not noticeable.

Copy the files of the SD card and shrink them down(from all folders)
find /mnt/sdd1/DCIM/ -iname "*.jpg" -type f -exec sh -c 'convert -thumbnail 600x600 {} $(basename "{}")' \;

Copy the a good frame to make up for the missing one.
cp G0019999.JPG G0020000.JPG

Finally convert into a 30 fps movie
ffmpeg -framerate 30 -start_number 11189 -i G%07d.JPG -codec copy output.mkv


You will notice the odd number in that command 11189 that is the starting file name, not sure what it bases them on but they are always different.