I went to collect a book I had reserved at my local Wolverhampton Library, and as I had the item issued, I was offered a free tea bag.

Bemused; politely; I said no, thank you, I don’t drink tea.

P.S. Wolverhampton Libraries, why can’t I reserve a book on-line if it is NOT on loan? quite often I would prefer you to send the book to my local library if it is in the Central Library on the shelf. And I know your system could do it!

Basically I wanted to be able to use my DV camera to take single frames, which could then be rolled into a finished video.

A little shell script follows, which does just what I need, using dvgrab and ffplay.

#!/bin/bash
# script to take a shot with DV camera

count=1
calldir=`pwd`
wrapdir='wraps'

function help_me
{
echo -e "HELP!"
echo -e "h - shows this help!"
echo -e "s - takes a shot"
echo -e "p - shows a preview of all the shots so far"
echo -e "w - writes the shots to a wrap file in ./$wrapdir"
echo -e "q - quits\n"
}

help_me

if [ ! -d $calldir/$wrapdir ] ; then
mkdir $calldir/$wrapdir || exit
fi

while [ "$ans" != "q" ]
do

echo -e "I'm waiting for instructions:(h|s|p|w|q)"
read -sn1 ans

if [ "$ans" = "h" ] ; then

help_me

elif [ "$ans" = "s" ] ; then

echo -e "grabbing a frame"
dvgrab --every 25 --duration 1 2>/dev/null
echo -e "grabbed $count\n\a"

count=$(($count+1))

elif [ "$ans" = "p" ] ; then

echo -e "Preview"
cat $calldir/*.dv | ffplay -
echo -e "Preview ended"

elif [ "$ans" = "w" ] ; then

echo -e "Wrapping up"
echo -e "Creating in in $calldir/$wrapdir"
echo -e "Enter filename for wrap:"

read filename

cd $calldir/$wrapdir || exit

cat $calldir/*.dv | dvgrab -stdin --format dv2 $filename 2>/dev/null

clear

# reset count after wrapping file
count=1

echo -e "Tidying up last wrap: deleting $calldir/*.dv"
rm $calldir/*.dv

echo -e "Preview wrap"
ffplay $calldir/$wrapdir/$filename*
echo -e "Preview wrap ended"

cd $calldir || exit

elif [ "$ans" = "q" ] ; then

echo -e "Quitting...\n"
exit

fi

done

Last time I tried Audio on linux I found it to be a sorely disappointing affair. That was some 6 to 12 months ago.

On my old Windows box I had an E-mu 1820, but when I bought it I didn’t know that Creative didn’t like to help out by open sourcing their drivers. (How many people have bought M-Audio cards now, knowing that they can get Open Source drivers for it!) On my old Windows box I thought that card was going to stay, until week before last…

I had had some recent successes with getting jack and pulseaudio playing nicely. I had had a play with Ardour and loved it. So I bit the bullet and gave it a go.

I now have glorious multi channel playback and recording via my E-mu audiodock, so I have taken the opportunity to throw together a few recordings of my poetry. The first couple were straight recordings with a bit of reverberation added for ambience.

Virility

The Tree I Wish I’d Been

The most recent is a full on four and a half minutes of sequenced sound and samples

A Rude Awakening

If you are viewing this on the site you’ll see the above links as little embedded mp3 players, courtesy of the very smart wpaudio plugin.

“I borrowed a book three months ago.  I can’t remember who wrote it or what it was called, but it was blue.”

So we got to thinking about how you could construct a search in a modern online catalogue to help with this query.  And that is how www.colourphon.co.uk was born.

We are building what will become a service, to take an image and return the most frequent colours in both a human readable and machine readable form.  If you have a look at the example links below, you will see results of our weighted ’scan’.  This analysis attempts to add weight to colours that it finds most frequently toward the centre of the image.

Need an example?  These examples will take a moment or two to calculate…

Try this one: Test number one. An ISBN lookup.
This one: Test number two. A Weigted URL
Or this one: Test number three. Another URL

Thought provoking? We’d welcome your comments over on the colourphon blog.

Just came across this useful looking data while looking for Haringey Central Library. Visions of people “lost in carparks”. Is this a prank? or is it a determined effort to come to the aid of people who never seem to be able to get out of carparks without going round twice?

The real answer may be that it is deliberate data or errors to act as a fingerprint so that any infringements of rights can be traced…

Technorati Tags: car park, google maps, google, GPS, Haringey

But we are back online, Broadband is enabled, and wireless rules.

So what have you been up to in the last month?

This vivacious group return once more for an evening of pieces they have lovingly created. From the early stages of simply staring at the dreaded blank page to the last night and the post show blues, you can join the creative journey as it heads to it’s final destination. A rollercoaster of an evening is on offer with some of the best new work in town.19:45 Tue, 10 Jul 2007, Courtyard Centre for the Arts, Hereford – Studio £2

This is looking to be a good evening. We are in the midst of rehearsals now, after all writing our own piece. Style and theme vary greatly, from the tragic to the comic to the unnerving… but I am sure that you will laugh, cry and be challenged by these pieces.

Come and see us – only £2 – Bargain at twice the price!

So with feelings of dread – I set about trying to see just how much of a mess my hard disk was in. Case open – seemed to be spinning – so something was happening…

Ok let’s try a linux boot CD, see if we can see anything from there… nope.

Ok lets try a parition magic boot disk and see what we get? success, I can see the drive and I can see the partitions. I run a few checks which all report OK. next step then is to get a new drive – then I should in theory be able to copy the partitions into the unallocated space and – fingers crossed – all should be well.

I bought a new disk, got it home, opened it. Doh! should have read the label on the box more carefully, I had a SATA not a PATA drive (I had never noticed that IDE had been renamed!). Took it back, got the IDE drive, popped it in the machine, fired up partition magic and – after several hours copying the partitions the data is all there and good. Now I just have to write a new master boot record for the drive and all will be well.

Oh yeah, and I had to set a flag in windoze registry to allow LBA-48 so that windoze would see all 320GB of the new drive.

But enough, on with “reveal five things about yourself”…

1. Lime jelly is a favourite food, along with Lime Marmalade and Chocolate Limes, so when i wrote a CMS (very simple, and runs www.timhodson.com), I was going to call it lime jelly. However, I couldn’t because at the time there was a site using the name. So I plumped for a second favourite, (second as in alternative) which was teacake.
2. I once was the male chorus in the Sound of Music Playing a member of the Von Trap household staff , a guest at the party, the Vicar, and a Nazi Youth. It was a three and a half week run, and as well as being some what fatigued by the end of it, I never want to hear it again!
3. I am a children’s entertainer (in what spare time I have left at the moment), performing Albert Ironstain’s Puppet Theatre.
4. I am a perfectionist, and believe if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing properly. Consequently if I don’t think it’s worth it, you have no chance…
5. I collect Meat Mincers, currently having around 30. I use one that looks exactly like this one on a regular basis. Perfect for breadcrumbs and chopped nuts, and is easier to clean than the food processor!

But who to Tag? Tony Hirst, Bonaria Biancu, Jules, and I think everyone else has been ‘it’.

Technorati Tags: meme, 5 things, five things, 5things