So much for my advance planning. It seems half the town that shops on bicycles was at the grocery store same time as I this morning. Only my trip was necessary. I was out of coffee. I was up late testing the security system I’m building. I found the black and white camera setting, and now I can get what looks to be ten hours on a 40 GB disk. Simultaneously I am testing the NTI app that compresses AVI to MPEG. Which itself takes forever even on this computer. Using these tests I may have something, although I am not happy with how poorly the system handles motion. It is definitely better than nothing.
Another item I am considering is filming my bicycle tours. If I could embed video here, I’d show you some shots of cars cutting me off and driving directly into my path at intersections. It is not as dangerous as it sounds, but I consider it an unbreakable bad habit unless they are heavily fined or arrested – something that does not happen for poor driving in Florida unless they practically kill somebody. The police consider it a civil matter unless there is damage, and even then they will ignore charges depending on whether the perp is black or female. (Did I mention I had a black lady hit me from behind in broad daylight a few years back? This is criminal negligence, but all she got advice to attend a two-hour driving seminar. You cannot sue for pain and suffering in Florida unless your medical bills surpass $2,500. I had back aches for a week.)
The picture is of Gulfstream Park. On the way back home I stopped in there to see what all these renovations are about. They shut the place down the same week I arrived here almost two years ago and I have no idea what’s taking so long. The rumor is they used to have free concerts there. It is mainly a race track. I say that because the map at the gate shows a winner’s circle and an amphitheater. That’s a theater for frogs.
I admit, I do not know how these new programs work. I’m running them, but I don’t know how to change them. I mean, I can do the programming, but I have no idea what makes them run. Back in my day, you wrote code and compiled it. Then you ran the program. It is probably because back in my day, the only input was stacks of numbers called “raw” data. Ah, I don’t worry, all I need is somebody to show me once. The MPEG compression is working at 20:1. Great.
There was at least one unexpected side effect of my 35 mile bike ride y’day. When I woke up this morning, I was friggin’ hungry. It has been years since I went downtown in a t-shirt, but since they fit me again, I went shopping. It was like the famine, man. Anybody who says apples would never hit $8 a pound has not been to Whole Earth. They charge triple for growing things the way they should in the first place.
Fred called and I rode over to ChipTech for supplies. To overhear the blonde has an unattached younger sister. That, boys, is something you should always check out before making any kind of commitment. I left the camera running here and quickly found the drivers for all the spare cameras I’ve got around here. This experiment is not over yet. It looks like 8 hours on a 40 GB hard drive. I’m running it to the end to see what happens.
The disk is full, let me get the stats down here. A 40 GB drive fills up with 172,467 frames in 33,203 seconds. The camera keeps working but the recording stops. Around nine hours and ten minutes. Actual size is 29,002,750,000 bytes of poor quality black and white. As with any such program, now problems are springing up. For example, I want to compress the file, but instead I get a message that there is not enough free space to do this. Question – why didn’t the program calculate how much space was needed and stop the recording before it got there? Now I’m faced with the prospect of trial and error finding the maximum size on a process that takes 9 hours per throw.
During the tests, I momentarily hooked up six different cameras. Again, the Argus outperformed them all, including Logitech cameras specifically designed for web cam work. Just plugging the Argus into the USB port brings up more options and menus from the same PCCam software.
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