Endikos

Somewhere inside me is a numismatist just trying to get out.  I have a bit of an interest in coins.  The older the better. In fact, I’d love to have a collection of Biblical-era (New Testament) coins.  While this coin certainly isn’t ancient, it is very old.  This is a 1797 British Penny, and it’s massive.  About 1 and a half inches across, a quarter inch deep, it weighs in at about 2 ounces, and is made of pure copper.  It was a gift from my grandmother and was likely on the boat across the Atlantic when her parents came to the US.  Oh and if your curious what the inscription on the reverse side means, it’s a latin phrase. “Georgius III • D:G • Rex •” Is short for “Georgius III • Dei Gracia • Rex”, which is Latin for “George the Third, By the Grace of God, King”.

Today’s shoot was a lot of fun.  These Matryoshka nesting dolls were given to me by my friend Ed when he returned from a trip to Russia.  I love toys and knick-knacks, but these little cats are probably the most novel piece in my collection of fun little things. They’re hand painted and signed, and I took a LOT of shots in various stages of assembly until I got to this little gem.

This little building doesn’t seem much larger than a chicken coop, but it has full-size doors, windows, old electrical hookups, and the remnants of a dirt driveway.  Perhaps it was a shop or lean-to attached to a no-longer-extant house?

So I was thinking that I might try to do some sort of cool the-shop-from-up-high type of shot today, but as I was on my way to the spot I was thinking of shooting from I saw this big mess of long springs all in a jumble.  I thought they looked interesting, so that’s what you get today :-)

There’s this place near my workplace that lined with all these old 1920’s and 1930’s tractors sitting out on “display”.   They looked particularly nifty in the snow and frost.  I couldn’t choose just one to show you today, so I decided that I’d go ahead and post these two for you.

I had my camera with me all day today as my family went to church, lunch, a birthday party with a little train yard, and then back home.   To top it off, today was an awesome wintry day with snow on the ground and hoarfrost covering all the trees and plants. I’d like to tell you that I was able to shoot a whole books worth of awesome photos, but for various reason I barely got two or three shots that turned out poorly.  At home, however, I went looking for interesting things to shoot again.  Not wanting to bore you with another shot of the dog, I went to the basement to see if there was something cool to shoot.  My wife is reorganizing her fabric collection.  What you see here is a small portion of her crafty hoard, but I do enjoy the color and pattern to these fabrics.

Didn’t get out of the house today, so I went around looking for something quasi-interesting just sort of hanging around the house…

I’ve rediscovered a passion for photography.  I’m sure it’s in no small part due to the fact that I work with a rather talented guy that does inspiring work.   So I decided to take on a project that will force me to spend quality time with my new Canon 7D. This is by no means a new idea, there are people all over the web doing this, but I will be shooting and publishing a photo a day for the next year.

To kick things off, I found myself in a local coffee shop today while waiting for my lovely wife.  I snapped a few frames off, and liked this one the best.

In my last article on video transcoding I made mention of a little utility I’d assembled called “Cyphon”.  After I discovered the awesomeness of Handbrake’s command line interface, I decided I wanted to build something that would allow all the video guys at my employer to encode videos for various target platforms simply.   Leave the gazillion-encode-variables-degree-in-transcoding-required stuff to me.  Not everyone should have to worry about that.  Of course Handbrake does an excellent job at taking most of that away anyway, but I still found myself tweaking options to get the best output I could.  I also wanted to encode something Windows users could watch with a default install of windows.  This meant I’d also have to bring in either ffmpeg or mencoder, and mencoder seemed to do the best job at encoding WMV files.

So now to wrap everything into something all my video guys can use, including myself.  I have several options, and they boil down to variations on two major themes:  1) Build some sort of intranet web service where the end user uploads something and gets transcoded video to download a short while later; 2) Build a distributable application that each person can use natively.

For various reasons, I chose to build a little distributable application.  Now while I am a programmer, I’m not really a systems programmer.  I prefer web development and scripting languages, although I do know Java and enough C to build working apps if I have to.  And as lovely as Cocoa and Objective C are, I haven’t learned them (yet – I’m in the process of learning them). Fortunately, I dont necessarily need to know Cocoa or Objective C to write a simple and effective app for OSX (Sorry Windows and Linux Guys, all the video folks here run Macs ;-).  Enter the dynamic duo of Platypus and CocoaDialog.

Platypus lets me  use ruby to write the logic of my app, and CocoaDialog lets me present windows with user-selectable options or notifications to the user.  So now I can knit together a ruby script, handbrake, and mencoder together using platypus and cocoadialog to make video transcoding an effortless task for my video guys.  Platypus even lets me make the icon droppable, so I could make my script do video transcoding in batches or one-at-a-time.

My employer has been kind enough to let me release Cyphon to the world licensed under the GPL, v2.  I’m releasing the bundled app as well as all the original source files I used, including the platypus profile, so you can see what options I used, and how I stiched everything together (the Platypus profile wont work for you right out of the box, as it will have my home directory’s path hardcoded, you’ll need to tweak that to reflect your source paths before it will work). If you just want to make tweaks to the running app, right-click or alt-click the app, choose “Show Package Contents”, go to Contents, then Resources, and look at the “script” file.  You’re probably most interested in “@@encoding_options” beginning at line 22.  There are a few of things you’ll want to keep in mind: 1) I know this will work on OSX 1.5 on an Intel platform, other platforms are questionable.  2)  If you throw a source video at it that doesnt have an audio track, it will barf.   This will be a future fix.  3)  It’s made to be able to accept quicktime MOV files.  I don’t know if anything else will work, because I havent tested it.  4) Keep in mind we have a very specific set of needs, and it meets those needs well. It may not meet your needs without significant work ;-)

All that said, here are the downloads you’ve been itching for:

1. Cyphon v1.4 for OSX 10.5, Intel Platforms
2. Sources for Cyphon 1.4

A few days ago I was growing somewhat despondent while trying to find a way to convert a large quicktime MOV file that had been encoded in 720p HD into several other formats.  After fumbling around for a while and thinking I was going to have to use the commercial (and excellent) Adobe Media Encoder, I found an unexpected gem that wound up exceeding my needs and allowing me to do something truly cool.

Before I unveil the final solution, allow me to tell you a bit of what I’ve discovered along this little journey and a few of the specifics about what I needed to accomplish.

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