Post (Taken with instagram)
Installing Apple’s new beta OS, OS X Mountain Lion, is a rather straightforward affair, as noted by Matt Gemmel. He made a quick write-up on installing Lion in VMWare Fusion and it mostly holds true for installing the new operating system. However, as easy as it seemed, I did run into a few hiccups:
1) When creating your new VM make sure that you set it up to use at least 2 processor cores. With only 1 core (the default, even when selecting 10.7 64-Bit) I ran into an issue where, after the installation performed it’s final reboot, the Account setup steps were never presented thus putting me directly to the login screen. It’s kinda hard to login to your brand new OS without an account. Changing the processor settings to use 2 cores fixed that.
2) Installing the VMWare Tools will cause a kernel panic when booting up. Turns out that preventing the Physical Memory Management kernel extensions from loading cures this problem. I followed these steps provided by Rob Griffith and everything went hunky dory. I’d like to know a little bit more about what other effects disabling that memory management has, but for the time being I can deal with it.
Things that cannot screen for breast cancer and things that can.
Do you have the new Google navigation like this?
Do you hate that wasted space of a “black” notifying you of the great “new way to navigate Google”?
Do you use Safari?
Then you owe it to yourself to download this Safari Extension. It removes the message and bar therefore giving you your precious pixels. It should work on all Google properties over either HTTP or HTTPS.
Black Bar Banisher: BlackBarBanisher.safariextz
“Black Bar Banisher” is just some CSS that turns some parts invisible and restructures some box sizes. If you’d rather not install an extension, or are running another browser, you can grab this CSS:
#gb{
height:72px !important
}
#gbx3, #gbx4 {
height: 0px !important;
visibility: hidden !important
}
#gbpr {
height: 0px !important;
visibility: hidden !important
}
.gbpro #gbu, .gbpro #gbn {
top: 0px !important;
}
.gbpro #gbx1,.gbpro #gbx2 {
top: 0px !important;
}
#gbbw, .gbpro.gbesi#gb #gbbw {
top: 72px !important;
}
.gbpro.gbes#gb, .gbpro.gbesi#gb {
height: 72px !important;
}
.gbpro #gbq, .gbpro #gbu, .gbpro #gbn {
top: 0px !important;
}
In December 2011 my wife and I took a vacation to St Lucia for our honeymoon. It was the perfect place to toy around with making a video with footage from the iPhone 4S. We spent eight days there hanging out at the beach, swimming, snorkeling, and sightseeing — all while I documented our adventures. This is a brief essay about how it all come together.
Gear
With 1080P recording, built-in image stabilization, and 64 GB of storage this thing was a champ at taking great shots. Even when recording the sunset clip (over an hour in length) it didn’t overheat.
Telephoto Lens for iPhone 4/4S
My wife had purchased this for me earlier in the year and I hadn’t found much of a use for it until this trip. It comes with a removable zoom lens, a hard case with standard thread mount, and a table-top tripod. This allowed me to get super low with some of the shots.
Barring all of the controversy surrounding this application I purchased it, and have so far loved it. It was easy to import the footage and dump it into a project, and outputting to Vimeo was really simple and quick.
Footage
I had no narrative in mind when I started shooting these clips. I didn’t really think about what I was going to do with the footage until about a day or two into the trip. I just started looking at things the same way that I consider taking a picture: what angles make for interesting shots? What will I want to remember when I come back? What would others like to see? This sense of purpose motivated me to keep an eye out for interesting subjects. It wasn’t until I returned to the US that I started thinking about how to compile all of them into a video sketch.
Music and Editing
When bringing clips into a timeline for editing I start off by selecting the music that will accompany the video. Choosing music that matches the mood is the first step I take when making short-form films, as it helps to form the narrative of the overall piece. The trick was to find something that would work well and be free to use.
Conveniently Nine Inch Nails released their Ghosts I-IV album in 2008 with a Creative Commons license. I say “conveniently” because this album is something of a mish-mash of musical sketches that are fairly short in length, and run the gamut of musical emotion swaying between hard and heavy, to light and airy. For this video I selected 13 Ghosts II among three other candidates, 21 Ghosts III, 22 Ghosts III, 28 Ghosts IV. 13 Ghosts II has the right mix of playful piano and simple bass line that matches the relaxed spirit and feeling of the footage.
Totals
Shots Taken: 50
Shots Used: 22
Length of Footage: 1 Hour 46 Minutes and 59.42 Seconds (1:46:49.42)
Length of Longest Clip: 1 Hour 8 Minutes and 20 Seconds (The time-compressed sunset shot at the end)
Length of Shortest Clip: 6 Seconds (The window view after landing)
For gods sake. iPhone OS 4 will be revealed later this week and AT&T still hasn’t provided us with the legitimate data tethering plan they promised us last year. WTF. If Verizon can offer a Palm Pré Plus with wifi tethering for a decent price I’m hoping that AT&T can follow suit and offer something competitive. Perhaps this all lies with Apple and they aren’t willing to field complaints about loss of battery life. It doesn’t matter who has the answer to the question, what matters is that it’s been almost a year and we still haven’t received something that was promised.
It would seem that I’m likely to be a minority in this thought but I’m currently appreciating the lack of multitasking in the iPhone / iPad / iPod Touch.
I recently purchased an iPad along with Pages, Apple’s word processing app. It occurred to me, in the course of prepping for a research paper, that I would not be able to skim back and forth from a web browser to my document as easily as I would be able to on my laptop. At first glance I thought this would be an issue but soon realized that without the distraction of the internet I could actually be more productive with my writing. Another side effect of this is greater retention for the subject of my paper. I would actually be required to spend the 8-10 seconds remembering what I just read about and not just quickly darting back and forth between browser and document like I would normally. It’s anyones guess as to how this will pan out but as for me? I like it.
“Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.” — http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/04/the-collapse-of-complex-business-models/
Robot Death