mult.ifario.us

As a follow-up to my last post about iMovie '08's "support" for AVCHD, I've now got a usable workflow on my G5.

First up, the AVCHD clips are on the order of 5x-10x smaller than the transcoded versions, so it makes sense to store the original AVCHD clips and only transcode for the purpose of editing and assembling a larger clip.

Second, a couple of guys have done the work of wrapping FFmpeg up as a MacOS application ("Voltaic", shareware, $30), and the transcoded clips work just fine with iMovie '08. (I haven't done a careful comparison of clips transcoded with iMovie and Voltaic, but the results with Voltaic look acceptable so far.)

I was actually excited to see iLife '08 come out because of one small feature in iMovie:

I took "AVCHD support" to mean that HD footage from my camcorder (Sony HDR-SR1) was finally supported, but trying to import AVCHD video in iMovie on my G5 pops up an error dialog:

The fine print isn't linked from the iMovie product page or from the iMovie applicaction help, but there is a camcorder support document that links to a knowledgebase article that explains that AVCHD support is Intel only for the HDR-SR1. (Oddly, other cameras appear to have no problems with AVCHD import on the G5?)

That little issue might be worth an asterisk on the feature list.

After reading the recent Time article about Baby Einstein, I have wonder if early childhood education about statistics and logical reasoning can prevent bad studies in future generations. The authors of the cited study have an ax to grind on the subject, and that's not necessarily a bad thing — I don't think any reasonable person would fail to be appalled by the statistic in the article that 90% of children are spending two to three hours a day in front of a screen. Nonetheless, I find this statement troubling:

Three studies have shown that watching television, even if it includes educational programming such as Sesame Street, delays language development.

I'm willing to accept a statement that babies and toddlers who watch more television also develop more slowly than their peers, but that hardly establishes a causal relationship. Dubner and Levitt would try to convince us that both outcomes (watching television and slower development) are correlated to the socioeconomic status of the parents.

I should figure out some way to make money off of post hoc fallacies — some way other than writing books and publishing articles that contain them, that is.

As a heavy GMail user, I see a lot of Google ads. I used to enjoy the relatively random nature of the ads, but now I just wish I didn't see the same ads over and over again. If Google is going to track my online behavior, then maybe after the 1,000^th impression they'd get the hint that I don't want to work for them in Bangalore and stop showing me that ad... (Advertisements for jobs at Google are the primary offender, actually.)

Three random thoughts for the day:

• If the Internet is converging on a collective consciousness, then it doesn't surprise me that it's full of relatively low-brow content.
• I wish that the people who designed our gas range had provided it with controls that made it impossible to turn on a burner with my ass.
• Like lots of other folks, I was hoping to spend this weekend reading a hot new book, but my (hard) copy hasn't yet arrived.

I spent some time cleaning up in our yard on a recent weekend, and in the process, I ran across a good-sized spider that I didn't recognize. It had a leg span of around an inch and a half — good-sized by Pacific Northwest standards — and my ill-informed initial guess was that it was probably a harmless and beneficial wolf spider. I've been trying to get the kid interested and informed about spiders, snails, bees, yellow jackets, ants, beetles, turtles, frogs, and other animals we come across, both in terms of identification and in terms of information (don't touch this one, touch that one if you want, tell Dada if you see one of these, etc.). I showed the kid the spider, snapped a couple of pictures, explained that it was a look not touch type thing, and it eventually crept off under the fence. So far, so good, too — ever since she got over her irrational fear of bumblebees, she's been both respectful and interested in whatever creepy-crawlies we come across.

Based on my knowledge of the spiders around my home town of Portland, OR, around 200 miles south of here, I made the assumption that the most dangerous insect or arachnid in the area was the mean and aggressive yellow jacket. However, after I did some Googling and reading to figure out what kind of spider we'd found, I may need to be more careful. The hobo spider (Tegenaria agrestis) is becoming common in the Northwest and has a very nasty bite, at least anecdotally. At least one source claims that there is no strong medial evidence to support the assertions that the spider has necrotic venom, but I won't be conducting any experiments.

The unfortunate thing is that the hobo spider is indistinguishable from its otherwise harmless cousins the Common House Spider (Tegenaria domestica) and the aptly named Giant House Spider (Tegenaria duellica) other than by size or by examination under a microscope. I exchanged a couple of emails with a friendly arachnologist about the spiders, and he claimed that I'd never heard of or come across these spiders in my youth in Oregon because they were introduced in British Columbia some time ago and have only recently extended their range into Oregon.

It turns out that I've got a few of the duellica living in the yard, and they are big. They're not tarantula big, but they're at least double the size of any other species of spider that I've seen in the region. Out of curiosity, I baited some of the funnel webs around the yard with dead yellow jackets and then wiggled the web with a twig to see who came out to claim the free meal. In one case, a spider with a legspan the size of my palm and a body as thick as my pinky lumbered out, grabbed the snack, and carted it back under the window sill where his web was. I'm on the fence between making sure that the kid knows not to stick her finger in the web and relocating the spider, but I'm probably going to take the relocation option. (I'd prefer not to kill the spider; the duellica is good to have around, as it displaces and/or kills the agrestis.)

The 2007 Fremont Solstice Parade happened yesterday, and while it wasn't as creative as last year's (photo set), it was still interesting to see what the community came up with. The combination puppet and costume in the middle below was my favorite, but the photo doesn't really do justice to how natural the motions of the puppets were. The real disappointment this year was with the hooting and hollering from the crowd, where that kind of meathead behavior hadn't been as apparent the previous year in spite of an equal number of naked or effectively naked people parading around.

Here's a link to my 2007 set. The shots are cross-posted in three photo pools, but don't bother if you've got issues with nudity or liberal politics. (Here's a set with some good shots of the cyclists getting painted before their ride.)

As taking pictures goes, I took my D200 instead of the Leica Digilux 1 that I was using last year, and I continue to be infinitely happier with the DSLR than the point-and-shoot. The D200 has been particularly nice for the minimal power-up time and the ergonomics of the controls; I can dial-in a different ISO setting, bracket five shots across +/-2 stops, and squeeze off a pile of frames in a second, all without taking one hand off the kid sitting on my shoulders. (The "prosumer" features double as dad-friendly features...) While the Leica took good pictures and was my first digital camera, my previous camera was venerable a (non-digital) Minolta XD-11 that I'd inherited from a relative back in the early 1990s, and no amount of digital convenience could make me forget the level of control provided by the the SLR.