2012 CBS News
This was recorded before the first ISS re-supply mission.
Category Archives: Video
EAGLE TORCH Lighter
When I bought my gas station coffee this morning, I also made an impulse buy of the EAGLE TORCH lighter.
I don’t smoke, but I have always wanted one of these things … and there it was just begging to take it home with me. It was like – seven bucks. When I lived in Colorado and had a much more active outdoor life, I always carried a lighter … sometimes the ability to start a fire is the difference between life and death. This little guy looks like the perfect thing to carry in my daily bag and would be an excellent edition to a bugout bag. Review below (not mine, but to the point).
I may need to pick up a few more of these …
SpaceX Pad Abort Wide Angle
Via Zero-G News
Mathew Travis has done an excellent job of covering this. Check out his complete coverage at
http://www.zerognews.com/2015/05/07/spacex-successfully-completes-crew-dragon-pad-abort-test/
If you watched the previous post, ABORT ABORT ABORT, you should have noticed one of the reasons that SpaceX will be most cost effective (cheaper) commercial space carrier. The Crew Dragon capsule contains the SuperDraco thrusters used both for abort and terrestrial landing. Every other manned system to date with the exception of the Space Shuttle used or uses a disposable abort escape tower. Look at the tower used for Orion. What a monster … and it is thrown away with very launch!
ABORT ABORT ABORT
Mercury
Apollo
Orion
Crew Dragon
Sigh …
Launch Anomaly (Flight CR-7)
Video
Post event news conference
Pad Abort Test x2
Zombucks | Currency of the Apocalypse
The Martian | Andy Weir
OK
I had my joke
Time to be serious.
This is one fine book. I am listening to it on audio book from Audible.com
Eleven hours
Unabridged
I like audio books. Easy on the eyes. Accessible while driving to and from work. Multi-tasking friendly.
Whether in hardcover, paperback, eBook, iBook, or audio book … READ THIS BOOK. Unless of course you hate science fiction. (Why would anyone hate science fiction?)
The Martian is in the same class as Apollo 13, Castaway, and Gravity. It is a satisfying survival/rescue story replete with lots of techie goodness, human compassion, bureaucratic assholery, and will-to-survive. Prior to seeing the movie trailer, I was unaware of this book. The movie, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Matt Damon is looking better and better.
http://andyweirauthor.com/books/the-martian-hc
Robinson Crusoe on Mars
Synopsis: An astronaut is stranded on Mars and must beat incredible odds to survive until rescue.
The Martian [HD Trailer]
Synopsis: An astronaut is stranded on Mars and must beat incredible odds to survive until rescue.
Kung Fury (Own it)
iTunes
https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/kung-fury/id997778113
Interestingly, the iTunes version does NOT include the subtitles for the “mustache” dialog. Pity.
Street Rage
KUNG FURY
Hackerman
Commentary
True Survivor
The Trailer
Volcán de Colima 28 de marzo de 2015
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPkA19JaHRM
Sergio Tapiro Velasco
Published on Apr 3, 2015
El Volcán de Colima, a lo largo de los primeros meses de 2015 ha dado muestra de actividad, por algo se le considera el Volcán más activo de México. Este video corresponde al 28 de marzo de 2015 a las 22:28 horas. Espero que lo disfruten. Fue una noche increible. Aun tengo mis dudas sobre si era un meteorito o un satélite.
Life in the Back of a Truck
Life in the Back of a Truck
from Sara Edith 5 months ago / Creative Commons License: by ALL AUDIENCES
The shaky life style of working on Volcán de Colima in Mexico, driving around the jungle, watching glowing rockfalls, road trip to beautiful waterfall of Tzararacua, Michoacán, and jungle ruins of Palenque, Chiapas.
Rather low quality footage – HD highly recommended !
Music: Acapulco – Naxxos
Volcán de Colima
Volcán de Colima
from Sara Edith 5 months ago / Creative Commons License: by ALL AUDIENCES
Put on HD for this glowing experience at the Volcan de Colima, Mexico.
Another night spend at the volcano filming and taking photos.
This is from La Lumbre in Colima (Mexico) where you get an excellent look on the volcano from SW, and the lava flow that has reached the bottom of the flank. The glow from tumbling rocks and at last an ash rich explosion.
Sunset & a Starry night & Sunrise & Explosion.
The pictures are from mid October.
Music: Spleen United – My Tribe part II
==========================================================================
SpaceX Crew Dragon Launch Pad Abort Test
I want
Guess which one …
The Life
Joking Bad
If you loved Breaking Bad,
you MUST watch this video
ISS Earth Time Lapse – ESA
Found this at the Register
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/28/earth_timelapse_video_blue_dot/
I’ll be mellow …
… when I’m Dead
Hell
X Marks the Spot
Via email from
X Marks the Spot: Falcon 9 Attempts Ocean Platform Landing
During our next flight, SpaceX will attempt the precision landing of a Falcon 9 first stage for the first time, on a custom-built ocean platform known as the autonomous spaceport drone ship. While SpaceX has already demonstrated two successful soft water landings, executing a precision landing on an unanchored ocean platform is significantly more challenging.
The odds of success are not great—perhaps 50% at best. However this test represents the first in a series of similar tests that will ultimately deliver a fully reusable Falcon 9 first stage.
Video of previous first stage reentry test with soft water landing
Returning anything from space is a challenge, but returning a Falcon 9 first stage for a precision landing presents a number of additional hurdles. At 14 stories tall and traveling upwards of 1300 m/s (nearly 1 mi/s), stabilizing the Falcon 9 first stage for reentry is like trying to balance a rubber broomstick on your hand in the middle of a wind storm.
To help stabilize the stage and to reduce its speed, SpaceX relights the engines for a series of three burns. The first burn—the boostback burn—adjusts the impact point of the vehicle and is followed by the supersonic retro propulsion burn that, along with the drag of the atmosphere, slows the vehicle’s speed from 1300 m/s to about 250 m/s. The final burn is the landing burn, during which the legs deploy and the vehicle’s speed is further reduced to around 2 m/s.
Landing legs deployed just before soft water landing in the Atlantic Ocean
To complicate matters further, the landing site is limited in size and not entirely stationary. The autonomous spaceport drone ship is 300 by 100 feet, with wings that extend its width to 170 feet. While that may sound huge at first, to a Falcon 9 first stage coming from space, it seems very small. The legspan of the Falcon 9 first stage is about 70 feet and while the ship is equipped with powerful thrusters to help it stay in place, it is not actually anchored, so finding the bullseye becomes particularly tricky. During previous attempts, we could only expect a landing accuracy of within 10km. For this attempt, we’re targeting a landing accuracy of within 10 meters.
A key upgrade to enable precision targeting of the Falcon 9 all the way to touchdown is the addition of four hypersonic grid fins placed in an X-wing configuration around the vehicle, stowed on ascent and deployed on reentry to control the stage’s lift vector. Each fin moves independently for roll, pitch and yaw, and combined with the engine gimbaling, will allow for precision landing – first on the autonomous spaceport drone ship, and eventually on land.
Similar steerable fins can also be seen in this test video:
The attempt to recover the first stage will begin after stage separation, once the Dragon spacecraft is safely on its way to orbit. The concept of landing a rocket on an ocean platform has been around for decades but it has never been attempted. Though the probability of success on this test is low, we expect to gather critical data to support future landing testing.
A fully and rapidly reusable rocket—which has never been done before—is the pivotal breakthrough needed to substantially reduce the cost of space access. While most rockets are designed to burn up on reentry, SpaceX is building rockets that not only withstand reentry, but also land safely on Earth to be refueled and fly again. Over the next year, SpaceX has at least a dozen launches planned with a number of additional testing opportunities. Given what we know today, we believe it is quite likely that with one of those flights we will not only be able to land a Falcon 9 first stage, but also re-fly.
The Race – Backstory
This is the story behind The Race …
Christmas 2003, “Number One Son” gave me the very first Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T1, that he had picked up while studying abroad in Japan. It had not yet been released in the states.
Image courtesy of Steves Digicams
The specs were impressive for the day: 5 mega-pixel, 3.6″w x 2.4″h x 0.8″d (91mm x 60mm x 21mm), 6.3 oz. / 180g. Click on the camera image for a review and detailed specs. My cell phone in 2004 was the standard flip phone. I don’t even recall if it had camera. If it did, it was worthless.
This was the first camera I could carry in my pocket. I could take it everywhere. With the USB cable I could relatively easily transfer pictures from it to my computer. I had QuickTime Pro on my computer and realized that if the pictures were numbered sequentially QuickTime could turn them into a movie. I began to experiment with stop action animation and time lapse photography. The Race is one of my best.
I had to build a holder for the camera in order to mount it to a tripod. The actors were my sons’ Warhammer figures, Russian toy cars I had collected in the 90s while working there, other toy vehicles, a cat toy, and a robotic spider.
The entire video at 6fps (frames per second) is only 30 seconds long. I filmed the actual race first on the 19th of June and then decided to film the starting line sequence the next day to extend the length. I initially used the Beatles Birthday as the soundtrack. The final 30 second cut lived on my work computer for over a decade, copied over with all of my files each time I got a newer PC.
Last week I decided to try to get it onto my iPhone. I guess I could have done a USB iTunes to iPhone transfer, but that would have meant upgrading the decades old iTunes that I never use at work. So I emailed it to myself via Gmail.
It opened fine on my iPhone, but the sound would not play. I opened it in iMovie and then managed to add Birthday to the soundtrack. Here I digress. For reasons unknown iMovie would only recognize recently purchased songs on my iPhone. Here I digress again, I just discovered that you don’t get the iCloud download icon in Music if WiFi is turned off. I can’t find the setting in 8.1.2 to make it visible. Back up one digression, so I repurchased Birthday and used it.
However, when I attempted to save it back to my camera roll I got an error. After many hours of frustration I decided to look for video format converters on the Apple App Store. I ended up buying two:
The Video Converter – Convert videos to and from file formats! by SmoothMobile, LLC https://appsto.re/us/rD2p1.i
MConverter Medias Converter by bill santiago https://appsto.re/us/59UVL.i
I am not endorsing either of these … and there are many others to choose from.
The original version of The Race was in MOV format and needed to be converted to MP4 format. Once done, I could export it to the camera roll. Then I decided that Born To Be Wild would be a better fit. So I redid the 30s clip again.
Now to upload to Vimeo.
All for 30 seconds of audio. How do others get away with uploading entire songs, albums, music videos, movies?
Alas it is what it is. So I searched iTunes for Royalty Free Music, found
Instrumentals for TV Productions, Podcasts, Movies, and Jingles by Royalty Free Music https://itun.es/us/MZVNv
and chose the first recording for the soundtrack. It was 99 cents.
I liked the song enough that I created the looped versions in order to be able to play the entire song
I don’t know anything about DRM (Digital Rights Management), but I have to assume that that 30s clip of Born To Be Wild had a DRM tag that immediately told Vimeo “NO NO NO”. I suppose it could have checked a Shazam-like audio database, but how does that explain all the other entries the are longer and more blatant. I assume there is a way to strip off the DRM tag. I need to investigate this.
There has got to be an affordable way for individuals to license mainstream audio at an affordable price for use in homemade videos posted to the web. See my rant https://contrafactual.com/2014/12/14/21st-century-i-p-2/
Anyway back to the making of The Race. It was old-school “arrange the figures, take a photo, move the figures, take a photo, repeat” … 181 times. I couldn’t walk the next day – my thighs were in agony.
Speaking of old-school, if you haven’t seen it check out the 1979 Wizard of Speed and Time by Mike Jittlov
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoLhLn9hVkE
I’ll (click)
be (click)
seeing (click)
you (click)
21st Century I.P.
RANT
Hey Googstapos … To paraphrase Arlo Guthrie, “You’ve got at lot of damn gall to come after folks who include copyrighted music in their YouTube videos when you collect and store FOREVER every damn bit of personal information you can about us to be used against us to try to sell us crap we don’t need!”
OK … That about sums up the rest of this post. This is an incoherent rant. Deal with it.
Weggieboy’s comments on my JOSIV5 post hit a nerve.
Now I am not a lawyer and I don’t even play one on TV, so I have no legal insight here. But consider the following: let’s say
-
I invite you to my house to listen to my LP record of C. W. McCall’s Convoy
I invite you to my house to listen to my 8-track of C. W. McCall’s Convoy
I invite you to my…
View original post 1,050 more words
RMLV
The Race Multi-Loop Variable fps
June 19-20, 2004
181 images originally @ 6fps
Each loop is at at a different fps (frames per second) to display different levels of detail.
RML
The Race – Multiple Loops
“The album version”
See also https://contrafactual.com/2014/12/11/the-race-radio-edit/
The Race (Radio Edit)
Battle Axe Anyone?
SOG
SOG Specialty Knives and Tools
I am not a collector of knives and tools, per se, but I do appreciate well made technology. SOG is one of these companies … with a history. I discovered SOG while investigating various multi-tools. They have an excellent selection of very well built and functional multi-tools. (http://www.sogknives.com/tactical/multi-tools.html)
After much back and forth I finally decided to order the black Powerduo Multitool shown below.
http://www.sogknives.com/tactical/multi-tools/powerduo-black-oxide.html
Below are some fascinating videos on the history of SOG.
Take point
Interview w/ Spencer Frazier
Remember, try to restrain yourself. You probably don’t need to buy them all.
Orion
Overview
Launch
Splashdown
Port Charlotte Scottish Barley
A Critmas present from a very good friend.
The video says it all.
http://www.bruichladdich.com/the-whisky/port-charlotte/scottish-barley
In an alternate reality I would retire to Islay, preferably in or near Port Charlotte.
The Glass Age
I discovered this over at the
Cool high-speed video!
Part 1
Part 2
Astronaut
Guillaume Juin
http://vimeo.com/guillaumejuin
If you enjoyed that, be sure to check out these other ISS time lapse videos on Vimeo.
F-Bombs for Feminism
Lockheed Compact Fusion Reactor
Can this be real?
The Skunk Works mind-set and “the pace that people work at here is ridiculously fast,” he says. “We would like to get to a prototype in five generations. If we can meet our plan of doing a design-build-test generation every year, that will put us at about five years, and we’ve already shown we can do that in the lab.”
The early reactors will be designed to generate around 100 MW and fit into transportable units measuring 23 X 43 ft. “That’s the size we are thinking of now. You could put it on a semi-trailer, similar to a small gas turbine, put it on a pad, hook it up and can be running in a few weeks,”
Thomas McGuire, AviationWeek interview (see link below)
Wow …
Links
http://m.aviationweek.com/technology/skunk-works-reveals-compact-fusion-reactor-details
http://sploid.gizmodo.com/lockheed-martins-new-fusion-reactor-design-can-change-h-1646578094
http://www.businessinsider.com/scientists-bash-lockheed-on-nuclear-fusion-2014-10
Rubicon Technology
With the demise of GT Advanced Technologies, one might ask where Apple will get its Transparent Aluminum? Perhaps more accurately, who is currently supplying Apple with sapphire, since there is some question as to whether GTAT ever got the Mesa Arizona plant up and running.
One answer might be …
To harvest the crystal, we use a very thin diamond-cutting wire.
Pay close attention to the 4:00 minute mark of the following video about Rubicon Technology’s sapphire production.
Perhaps Rubicon was and is the manufacturer of the sapphire Apple uses for the camera lens, fingerprint scanner cover, and watch crystal … with Apple planning to transition to GTAT once production was up to quality and capacity.
D
Bent | Consumer Reports
Patently Apple is reporting that Consumer Reports has done their own test regarding bending iPhones.
Click the image above to read the full Patently Apple article.
Much ado about nothing?
Breaking Badfinger – one year later
Today is the one year anniversary of the Breaking Bad finale and my post Breaking Badfinger.
25 Years Later
April 11, 2011
Pandora’s Promise
Former anti-nuclear environmentalists reevaluate their position on nuclear power in light of the Fukushima disaster.
They present the past, present, and future of nuclear power including Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. Their conclusions will surprise you.
uBreakiFix “Official” Bend Test
Take that Moon landing deniers!
Bent
After watching this I looked closely at my iPhone 5s …
… sure enough … after a year it has an ever so slight bend at the lower volume switch. I carry it “naked” in my left front pocket. Hmm
Contrafactual 