a very small galaxy
chez Tracey Jaquith
Welcome to Tracey's little nest on the internets!
This site is a hybrid of normal pages (see navigation
above) and blog entries (see below).
I'm into software, video, and
time-lapse photography.
Happiness:
JSON
CSS
PHP5
ffmpeg
yoga
(secular) Buddhism
Our
extra fluffy kitties of luff
My future fantasy clothing line site:
très-sie.com
Now, let's start the show...
iphone and external mic sennheiser mke 400 can rule the galaxy!
natively compiling ffmpeg, mplayer, mencoder on MacOS Lion (with x264!)
OK, I’ve revamped my script to compile these tools:
ffmpeg
ffrobe
qt-faststart
mplayer
mencoder
on MacOS Lion, using the heads of the trees, with direct encoding support for:
x264
vpx / WebM
http://www.archive.org/~tracey/downloads/macff.sh.txt
A nice recent update to ffmpeg is the ability to decode/read Apple ProRes, too!
camaro 0 to 60 test
2012 Camaro V6 Transformers Edition “Bumblebee”
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…
Cute Scion IQ coming to states
Hunter and I hit the SF auto show before Thanksgiving.
Aside from the obvious super car perfections to like (eg: Ferrari 458 Italia) this was my favorite. I love little cutie-pie everything….
bitchn camaro
i um, got a new toy. it actually *is* the transformers special edition. so if i wake up early some morning and surprise it still in its crimefighting autobot mode…
domain change
same great space, new shorter url
dumbbunny.org ==> dePooh.com
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Laundry for The Empire
Should be a fun Halloween!
(they don’t come in black, as pictured 
Double awesome art in financial district
I’ve loved this cute local art feature at my bart-to-bus stop
Captions are:
“I’m here to fix your car”
“But I don’t have a car!!”
and now it’s even more awesome with the tagged line over it
“Bankers took it”
Go #OccupyWallSt !
more books for Internet Archive!
My boss had the great idea for me to time-lapse record 48 hours of a book donation, cataloging, and moving event. It was held in one of the longest buildings at Fort Mason, San Francisco and wound up giving the Internet Archive over 125,000 *more books*!
drifting lotus elise on playstation
OK, this was harder than it looks to pull off, but after a lot of practicing, I finally got the hang of drifting corners with this car and managed to score big points on all four of the drifting zones.
silly fun in one of my favorite cars!
Return to Alma Mater
I returned to Cornell, my college home of five years, for the first time in just over 15 years!
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.
bloviate
the most awesome word in the world — at least right now
bloviate
i wish i had that in a spelling bee!
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mole rolls to freedom
hunter and i were biking the other day parallel to the caldecott tunnel / 24, and were horrified to see a mole, midday, just rolling over and over again down the hill/pavement. we think maybe a huge rainstorm drove it out and it got lost trying to not drown on the road. they are **ALL HANDS**, no limbs! poor thing was made to dig/swim only, not walk/run.
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!!
star wars steampunk amazing art
this stuff from Bjorn Hurri is just fantastic!
click image for more:
natively compiling ffmpeg, x264, mplayer on mac (with builtin x264 and webm encoding)
i’m very pleased that after years of hacks here and there, all three heads of the current codebases pretty well build natively on mac (snow leopard) for
- 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://www.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://www.archive.org/~tracey/downloads/libvpx-360p.ffpreset
http://www.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!
star wars 1977 reedit night
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!
internet archive holiday party time-lapse
This was our 2010 work holiday party where I used iTimeLapse w/ my iFone to make my longest time-lapse ever — over 8 hours (sped up to play in about 2min 30sec!)
This features great music from Hunter!