After you finish nerding out to this 300 step Rube Goldberg machine, watch it one more time.
See the shake? See how it makes you crazy because it’s out of focus and shaking? When you create video or photos, do you have similiar feelings when viewing your creations? Your old pal db have a keen fix for you. Easy and can be relatively inexpensive and will improve everything that you do with a camera.
Use a tripod. Here is a good one to start with.
Sure, we all want to feel and try to look like a professional photographer, dancing around the room snapping away as if our subject was a top super model and we are making mad bank from our photos. Truth be told, we aren’t professional photographers (yet), aren’t shooting super models with $10k worth of gear. We are taking pictures and videos of our kids, food and ourselves riding bikes.
When I take photos and video, I really like them to be clear, in focus and as shake free as possible. That’s why I use a tripod. Also, when shooting with a tripod, you will find that those shots in rooms that have less than ideal light will come out nicer, no matter what camera you are shooting with. No need to get into the nerdery of why, just know that a tripod makes things better.
Stop taking crappy video and photos. Motion blur is only cool when you are photographing F1 cars, not when you are trying to snap the kids and Grandma in front of the Christmas tree. Get a tripod and use it.
For those times when you don’t have a tripod handy, here are some of my favorite tricks to keep the shots steady.
Doesn’t matter if you are using an old point and shoot or a brand new fancy DSLR
Rolling into week 2 4 of not having cable TV. I don’t miss it even a little and I haven’t heard any complaints about it not being there from my housemates. And, at this point, I would grade the experience a solid C. A solid C that I just increased to a B+.
The biggest hurdle so far as been the Adobe Flash Player on older Apple hardware. Trying to use a first gen Intel Macbook as a home theater PC (HTPC), as it turns out, doesn’t work that great. The CPU gets hammered, there isn’t enough graphics power and it’s a little low on memory. Any video playback was poor, especially any web based video. Just not enough horsepower to get the job done.
Enter the Macbook Air. There are a pair of them in the house of the 13″ screen variety. Small, light and wicked fast. And, as it turns out, quite the video playback machine! With the correct cable connected, it will drive the 45″ LCD television in our system, at 1080p, no sweat! Even when I tried Hulu and Youtube, playback was smooth, the sound was perfect and the video output was clear and crisp. On HD Youtube videos, they look as good, if not better, than cable even did.
The next step is to streamline the setup and make it easier to operate. Currently using Plex to manage our content that is stored on an external USB drive, but Plex is installed on the machine the drive is not attached too. Makes performance a bit rough sometimes, especially when a computer goes to sleep.
Also rough when using the Macbook Air is the lack of a remote. You kids out there probably don’t remember, but there was a time when televisions did not have color screens or remote controls. Actually, that’s not 100% correct. The kids were the remote controls when Mom or Dad wanted the channel changed. TV watching was almost an aerobic activity!
This system will be a work in progress until it’s not. Ideally I would like to add a Mac Mini or build my own home theater PC running any number of linux distro’s. The trick would be to make it quiet and small enough to fit in my home entertainment system, and not run at a bazillion degrees.
Stay tuned.
WordPress. Open source and free. I use it everyday. I make money from it almost weekly. It’s a giant part of what I do.
Since it is open source, anyone that uses it should feel compelled to somehow give something back to the WordPress community. Many people think that you need to spend time squashing bugs in the core code, or developing sweet plugins and themes. Sure, those all work, but I’m not really good at either of those things.
What am I good at? Training, implementing and thinking so far out of the box you can barely see the box. That’s what I do to give back and part of the reason why I volunteer at my local Wordcamp in the Rockstar Bar. That’s just a fancy term to say that if you have a question about WordPress or a problem with your WordPress or you are looking to have a discussion about WordPress, this is the place with nerds that are available to help you out. And this year I did.
Overall, it was a pretty great day of WordPress and I’m glad I was able to take the time to participate. As an added bonus, because I showed up, I received a free-for-life account at WP Engine, a premium, WordPress-only, web host. Expect a full review of that in the coming weeks.
If you have to use WordPress, are curious about WordPress or looking for a place to meet other WordPress users to swap stories and tips, I highly recommend hitting up a Wordcamp near you.
Quite possibly my newest favorite thing. I’ve been using it long enough to actual talk about it here, in the hope that you will also adopt it as your newest favorite thing. And it’s called ifttt.com. That stands for If This Then That. Very simple, very logical. It allows you to do something with one of your internet services and then make it do something with another. As an example:
If a new photo gets posted to Instagram then post it to Flickr using the data from the Instagram post and these tags that I specify.
While the possibilities aren’t endless, they are pretty close. And I’m finding uses for this everyday. There is a good chance that you are reading this because you saw a link on my Facebook page. My nerd machine did that. If you ever see my profile photo change on FB, you will also see it to change on Twitter. My nerd machine did that, too. It works with Instagram, Gmail, Google Reader, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Flickr, RSS, LastFM, Evernote and more! If you can think it, it can probably do it.
Best part to all of this is that it’s free! And, since it awesome and free, I’m going to make it known right now that the second they offer a pro version that I can pay for to make sure that it sticks around for as long as possible I’m in.
The first time you log into ifttt.com you might be overwhelmed. Not a problem because it’s also social! Other nerds have shared their “recipes” within the site to give you an idea of what it can do and give you some to get you started.
Worth checking out and worth giving your time too, ifttt.com is made from pure awesome and unicorn tears. You should try it out because I’m sure it will become your new favorite thing as well.
When we last spoke, I had done the math and research into cutting cable television service, the cord, at home. This weekend, I took another step in that direction with a few additions to the entertainment center. We are currently planning on 100% disconnect after the Oscars.
Needing a way to get live television into our home, I added an antenna. Nothing fancy, just an amplified indoor HD antenna from GE that I picked up at Target for $25. Luckily, here in the greater Phoenix area, over the air service, from what I have heard, is pretty great. Those stories were all correct. There are about 40 channels that I’m able to pick up, all with varying quality, over the air. For sure I get the 3 major networks (ABC, NBC, CBS), all in full HD with great sound. Picture quality as good as it was with FiOS. We are also able to pickup our local Fox affliate in ok quality and 3 PBS channels. Add to that about a dozen different hispanic channels and a very low power music video channel, and we are looking pretty good.
Wanting a way to watch shows that we miss live or aren’t available legally otherwise, I am temporarily repurposing a first gen Macbook into the entertainment center. It’s not ideal since it needs a keyboard attached to work with the lid closed, but for now, it’s a good start. I’ve bookmarked about a dozen sites for viewing television content, internet videos and photographs. I’m also going to turn this into the plex server which I hope will improve performance.
Since this is an older Macbook, video performance isn’t as good as I would like, but it does drive the 44″ LCD TV without any issues at 1280×768 (75mHZ) through the display port into the television’s VGA port. Audio will come from the headphone jack into the receiver via a Monster cable made specifically for that job. That cable was acquired back when I was still rocking an XBox in California.
Here is our current setup that we are using to make the leap into cord-cutting.
Next step is storage. While we don’t lack for storage, we do lack for organized storage. In total, we have almost 6TB in external storage available, but it’s scattered over 8 drives attached to 2 iMac’s. I’m going to put 2TB of that into a Network Attached Storage device that I have been testing and like quite a bit.
Overall, we are looking at saving more than $100 per month by doing this and are very excited to get started!
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