First Foray into Balloon Photography

With the help of my daughter, we managed to build and fly our first photography balloon! 


I got the idea from reading an blog post months ago about people using balloons to get aerial pictures to enhance maps.  My daughter and I put our heads together and came up with a simple prototype with the materials we had on hand.  I have since found this site that gives a really good overview of a design:  http://publiclaboratory.org/tool/balloon-mapping.

From the prototype we flew today we discovered the following issues and thus our next design changes:

• Wind drag - Reduce to just one large balloon as the two were catching turbulence from each other as well as from the wind.   The balloon didnt make it all that high due to it being constantly pushed away from us.
• Stability issues - Follow the design from the Public Laboratory link to add stability arms and a better center of gravity.
• String Management - Using a simple spool made it difficult to deploy / retrieve.  Definition going to get a hold of a cable reel.
• Height - Definitely need more than 200 ft of string to get a better angle on the ground

Capturing Firewire 1394 camcorder MiniDV in Ubuntu 12.04

How to transfer MiniDV Camcorder footage digitally via Firewire 1394 to your Ubuntu 12.04 computer:

I have a bunch of old (>10 year) MiniDV tapes laying around that I wanted to transfer to my Smugmug account online.  Mainly because I am concerned about losing the content due to decaying magnetic tape and partly because I am organizing the last bit of imagery I have onto the cloud for easy access across all of my devices.

Once upon a time circa Ubuntu 8.04 I was able to plug in the firewire cable into the back of my PC and into my Panasonic MiniDV Camcorder, load Kino, and everything worked.   This time, it wasnt so obvious.

The problem:

• Kino reports "WARNING: raw1394 kernel module not loaded or failure to read/write /dev/raw1394!"
• The newest Firewire driver does not create the raw1394 device node
• Permissions are not setup to allow for general user access on the /dev/fw0 node
• Bug Report here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/dvgrab/+bug/779680

The fix:

• Create a link to the newer /dev/fw0 node
• $ sudo ln /dev/fw0 /dev/raw1394
• Run Kino as superuser
• $ gksu kino

Hope this helps someone else out there as it took me a good 3-4 hours of searching the net and trying different drivers to come up with this simple solution.

Reduce paper towel waste with this simple method

Shake and fold!  :-)

Watch "TEDxConcordiaUPortland - Joe Smith - How To Use One Paper Towel" on YouTube