Pete and I went slacklining last week and I brought along the camera for a quick timelapse.

Watch in HD at Vimeo.

Let’s start with the camera. I’m using my 20D and I purchased an intervalometer from Amazon that allows me to shoot at virtually any interval and not have to haul my laptop with. You can also tether via USB to Canon software on Windows or use gPhoto on Linux. You can find many tutorials about shutter speeds, intervals, and more by searching.

Once you have a series of photos, you need to assemble them into a movie. I am using VirtualDub 1.9.9 on Windows for this task, because it also gives me a few extra features I appreciate: resizing and deflickering, which smooths out any exposure differences from frame to frame. I shoot JPEGs that need to be resized a bit and so I resize them to 1080×720 or 1920×1080 in VirtualDub. Another free program for this is ffmpeg on Linux which I’ve used successfully; I prefer VirtualDub for the two filters above.

Next comes editing which is where I splice together different clips and add background music. You can do this with a variety of elaborate and expensive tools, but this post is about free so I’ll emphasize Windows Movie Maker (on Windows XP and Vista) which has been superseded by Windows Live Movie Maker which I have not used. On Linux I recommend Pitivi, which ships with Ubuntu 10.4 by default. I’ve used it once and it seems perfectly sufficient for basic splicing, fading, audio, etc and is very easy to use.

If you are interested in some free music to back your timelapse, a few resources are jamendo and a general directory of resources. This is something I’m just learning more about, so you’re on your own here.

Finally, upload to vimeo or YouTube.

Kit contents - American Pale Ale from Brewer's Best

Grains in a cheesecloth bag

Steeping the grains to make wort

Adding liquid malt extract

Bittering hops

Lots of boiling and hoppy smells

Finished wort. Delicious.

Transferring the wort to the fermenter via siphon

Pitching the yeast

Installing the airlock

Shazam! Fermentation!

Done fermenting - about 1 gallon of trub rests on the bottom of the fermenter.

Time to bottle.

We used two types of bottles: capped, and flip top.

Filling the bottles one by one. Everything is sanitized before the beer touches it.

Capping the bottles

All capped up

The fruit: 4.5 gallons or 2.25 gallons each. Time to let it carbonate in the bottle.

Two weeks later & time to enjoy my American Pale Ale.

Timeline of the process:

November 22: brewing
November 23: fermentation is rocking
November 29: transferred beer to secondary container to avoid some sediment (trub)
December 2: bottling
December 9: Mr. Eager opens a bottle, and it’s definitely not ready yet.
December 17: respectably carbonated and tasty
January 4: only one pint left, time for a new batch of homebrew!

Just one of our designs

I’m pleased to announce the launch of my second online business, Mistle Mail. This new service allows you to customize your own Christmas e-mail with your own photos, text, and Christmas letter, while we worry about delivering it to your friends and family. It’s an economical and eco-friendly approach to sending your holiday greetings this year! You can send an unlimited number of emails for one low price.

Megan and I would love to hear some feedback on the service! Please check it out and let us know what you think.

$('input.saveApplication').bind('click', function() {
... other code ...
$('#application').submit();
});


The issue was caused by having an element with ID ‘submit’:
<input type='submit' id='submit' value='Submit'>


Once I realized what was happening it made sense but it wasn’t immediately intuitive to me. If you have this error double check your IDs and rename as needed!

Please take a look and let me know what you think!

How to send e-mail birth announcements
Unique online birth announcements

It turns out that the solution is actually really simple. The code is below:

$photo = imagecreatefromjpeg("original.jpg");
$watermark = imagecreatefrompng("watermark.png");
// This is the key. Without ImageAlphaBlending on, the PNG won't render correctly.
imagealphablending($photo, true);
// Copy the watermark onto the master, $offset px from the bottom right corner.
$offset = 10;
imagecopy($photo, $watermark, imagesx($photo) - imagesx($watermark) - $offset, imagesy($photo) - imagesy($watermark) - $offset, 0, 0, imagesx($watermark), imagesy($watermark));
// Output to the browser - please note you should save the image once and serve that instead on a production website.
header("Content-Type: image/jpeg");
imagejpeg($photo);

Note: It’s a bad idea to do this on the fly for each visitor. I strongly recommend watermarking an image once and then using that image for your website.

The beauty of these stoves is how light and simple they are. Most people construct them out of aluminum cans, cut, sanded, and drilled into the correct shape. It only takes me 20 minutes and two pop cans to build a fully functional stove, one that can boil a quart of water. The fuel is simple — alcohols such as methanol or ethanol — and is generally safer than white gas or other fuels.

To be honest, I’ve grown tired of my Optimus stove breaking on trips. I’ve had more problems with that stove than any other, and though it works very well when it’s working, I’m ready for something simple.

For the curious:
The Art of the Alcohol Stove
Penny Alcohol Stove
Pepsi Can Alcohol Stove
Penny Stove Construction

View the Announcement

I’m planning on launching a new e-mail birth announcement website in January 2009. Baby Tattle E-mail Birth Announcements