Odd Lots
- I’m a day late and a shamrock short, but I want to endorse an obscure but wonderful animated film with connections to St. Patrick’s Day: The Secret of Kells . It’s a fantasy about the creation of the Book of Kells, drawn in the style of Medieval illuminated manuscripts.
- Granted that I’d prefer to achieve immortality by not dying, the notion of writing your memoirs for the sake of documentation rather than publication is catching on. I have 67,000 words so far. It’s good practice in writing, and may prove useful against the future possibility that I myself can’t remember what I did in high school.
- Earth is passing through a significant CME (Coronal Mass Ejection) and the aurora have been excursing as far south as Colorado. I had bad weather last night but I’ll check again tonight.
- Chicago’s quirky habit of dying the Chicago River green on St. Patrick’s Day has its roots in detecting illegal sewage dumps into the river. Having grown up at a time when falling into the Chicago River was sometimes fatal, I boggled during a recent visit, when I looked down into the river and saw bottom.
- Our new pope has only one lung. This is less important than it would seem to the uninformed.
- Irrespective of the number of his lungs, is Pope Francis I more liberal than his predecessors? The question is tricky because “liberal” often means completely opposite things to North Americans as it does to Latin Americans.
- A 12-year-old girl is selling kits of Lego bricks that can be assembled into a case for Raspberry Pi computer boards. If ever the phrase “You go, girl!” applies, it would be here. I’d actually like to see a custom case with properly sized gaps and mounting holes for the Pi inside and Lego bumps on the outside, and I suspect at some point the product will appear.
- It’s possible to have too much gold…if you’re a Cray.
- While Carol was raking up the season’s dead leaves, pine needles, and other plant debris from our front “yard” (we have no grass, only gardens) the other day, she found one of these lodged in one of our bushes. It had evidently been there for some time, but within its air-tight case was pratically mint. Still not entirely sure what it can do…nor what to do with it.
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: astronomy · hardware · health · Memoir · photography · religion
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Could that camera Carol found be a type used for “extreme sports” or something like that? I have seen some similar to it in some large sporting goods stores for people who do things like snow boarding off a mountain top (with a few good escarpments on the way down) or perhaps hang gliding off the top of Mount Everest. Of course there are people who jump out of perfectly good aircraft just to parachute down. A practice that was not considered a mark of sanity when I was in the Air Force. You only left the airplane when it was or soon would not be flying any longer!
The Pibow Model A case is alleged to have “Lego-compatible bottom ‘ventilation’ holes.” Other Pibow cases may have these as well.
Two words: Doggy cam
Have you seen the videos taken by extreme sports folks with those cameras? They’re incredible and scary. Here’s the link: http://gopro.com/videos
Maybe you can download the software for it and see what has been recorded.
I pulled the SDHC card and looked at it, and there is a single 4-minute video…of the bike standing still in a parking lot near a local trailhead. I think the owner didn’t really know how to work it, and didn’t know that it was already recording. So when he finally jumped on his bike it looks like he pressed the button–which stopped recording. No other files on the card at all.
I’m thinking it would be a good underwater movie cam for snorkling. (We’re not divers.) The case is watertight and good for several feel of depth, which we’re unlikely to push.
Didn’t you lose a camera at a dog show a while back?
Perhaps the fairies brought this one to you as a St Patty day replacement.
(A poor replacement but better than nothing I guess)
😉
Yes, the karma fairies may have been active here. I lost an $800 G10 at the dog show, having owned it for just a couple of weeks. I’m not sure how bad a replacement the GoPro is, since its specialty is to take 1080 movies. The big problem is that I have no idea how well aimed it is. There’s no viewfinder and no LCD panel on the back. There is some mechanism to export video to a small display–possibly even a smartphone–but I haven’t figured that part out yet. There’s nothing else in the house that takes 1080 movies. I’ve ordered a number of mounts that may help with the aiming problem.
“The Secret of Kells” was a great little film. The significance of the artistic style was probably lost on many of the people who saw it, but appreciated by the rest.
I have actually seen 2 pages of the book of Kells with my own eyes. It was much, much smaller than I expected — but breathtaking.