Hi, I’m Phil Nelson, a writer, developer, and audio-visual maker of stuff. I have been making stuff online for over 25 years. I run RetroStrange and Set Side B. Good to see you.
Blog Archives
Awwwww! From David Lynchs cult (and I mean CULT) film Eraserhead! Yes.. The amazing cinematography, lady in the radiator and Victor, the frighteningly cute baby. Why not pop your keys on to a Victor of your own? The Victor keychain is 8.5cm in length and 100 X that size in cuteness! Made from polymer clay, wire and fabric.
You can buy these unsettling Baby Victor keychains from an Australian seller on Etsy
The image above is from the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon title sequence. Pretty iconic, right? It is the result of a new video technique I came up with. For more examples and a thorough explanation, read on:
I was taken by a Strange Mood and created a small combination of shell and python scripts that:
1) Creates a still image from every frame of a given input video, then
2) Compares each of these images against each other, round-robin style, in order to
3) Find the two images (and therefore, the two “shots”) which are the LEAST like each other in the source video.
Essentially it take a video input, and finds the two frames that are least like each other. My theory is that all of this will Tell Us Something. I don’t really know what. This is something like digital mysticism, trying to find the soul of a string of bits and surface it.
The current method is sub-optimal in several ways, for one it takes a long time to run on a laptop. Remember: We’re comparing every second of video to every other second of video, and that adds up. Running the script against a full 22-minute episode of a TV should would require 970921 comparisons, so I’ll set that up to run tonight and maybe it’ll be done by morning? This sounds like a job for EC2.
Some more examples:
`ffmpeg -i input.flv -vf fps=1 out%d.png`
Very useful snippet on the ffmpeg site. You’ll see.
This weekend I started building a media center with the CHIP and an old external hard drive which formerly functioned as my Time Machine backup (here’s the new Time Machine drive). In the process, I needed to delete the old Time Machine backup but NOT format the drive. This proved to be harder than you’d think.
Long story short, the tool you’re looking for is `tmutil`. It exists solely to modify and delete Time Machine backups. Use it like this: `sudo tmutil delete /Volumes/YourDisk/Backups.backupdb`
Instead of just asking for money for my prototype game, Badlands, I’ve created the Scroll of Naming. Visit the Badlands homepage and you can pay $1.50 to add any 3 names to the random name generator in the game. Your submissions will be added to the core game code and distributed with the game to everyone.
Don’t be a jerk. I can / will reject names due to bigotry or other jackassery.
A sort of single screen microgod game that is roughly 10% complete but functional. Free download for macOS. Windows build coming soon. More on the itch.io page.
