Besides photos I made some promising videos in Japan.
HD, thanks to my new HFR16 HD video camera!
Na de overvloedige bloei was het, na thuiskomst uit Japan verleden week, oogsttijd!
Mooie kleuren, een emmertje vol.
Bloei!
During the summer of 1975 we traveled through France, and it marked the beginning of my interests in visiting the Roman remains scattered all over Europe, the Middle East and North of Africa. My travel website documents many adventures.
1975 is long ago, so not all memories are in good order. In the south of France I made slides of a roman ruine tower, and until yesterday forgot completely where and the name of the thing.
This week I bought the book The Roman Remains of Southern France, a Guidebook, by James Bromwich.
This book helped me identify the site, its is La Turbie. La Turbie was famous in Roman times for the huge Monument that Augustus made to celebrate his victory over the Ligurian tribes of the area.
Weesp, 5 juni 2010. Watersportdag, een prachtige zomerdag!
Meer foto’s hier http://weesp.hansotten.nl/index.php?page=watersportdag
I have made some nice photos of the Römisch-Germanische Museum in Koln last year. And now made that in a fun slideshow.
For several years my websites run on popular opensource packages, based upon MySQL and PHP.
This blog runs on WordPress, the other sites (Personal Interest, Travel, Weesp, Retro Computing, Pascal for Small Computers) on a content management system, CMS Made Simple. And there is the retro forum based upon PHPBB.
I selected CMS Made Simple several years ago (see this blog) and this package, now at version 1.7, has lived up to my expectations. With two themes and five websites it has helped me enormously to maintain the websites. Once configured right, adding content is not requiring any but basic skills.
Simple is something I like. CMS Made Simple has enough ’out of the box’ power and there are sufficient extensions (like Capcha, FormBuilder) to make me happy. Simple does not mean it takes some effort and knowledge to get started with CMS Made Simple. I wish I had a good guide for the first tasks you encounter. Like installing the software and designing or adapting a theme and install the extensions you want. And moving the websites to another provider.
Of course there is help at the website of CMS Made Simple in the form of a Wiki and a community forum. But, as to be expected, programmers are good at programming but not so good in explaining how to use their programs! To start with CMS Made Simple it is expected to be good in html, css, managing web space rented from a provider, managing MySQL and spending time on the CMS Made Simple website. And do that again when upgrading versions (and do upgrade!) or moving your website to another provider or redesign your website.
I wish I had access then to the CMS Made Simple Beginner’s Guide. Written by Sofia Haushildt, published by PACKT Publishing, available as printed book or ebook or both.
This book will help not only the beginner but also the more experienced CMS Made Simple administrator.
This is the Table of Contents (See the whole table here)
Chapter 1: Building Websites with CMS Made Simple
Chapter 2: Getting Started
Chapter 3: Creating Pages and Navigation
Chapter 4: Design and Layout
Chapter 5: Using Core Modules
Chapter 6: Users and Permissions
Chapter 7: Using Third-party Modules
Chapter 8: Creating Your Own Functionality
Chapter 9: E-commerce Workshop
Chapter 10: Advanced Use of CMS Made Simple
Chapter 11: Administration and Troubleshooting
You can see a lot is covered in this book. See here a Sample chapter. In a pleasant and readable style. The author is a wellknown expert in the CMS Made Simple world. The book is Recommended! And by buying the book the CMS Made Simple team gets a percentage, so you help further development!
For $15 including shipment you can buy a mini camera, socalled MD80 mini DV spy camera, on ebay.com from shops in Hong Kong. The camera is really mini, the size of a cigarette lighter. Add a SD card (good quality, or you get jerky video) and make videos! It also functions as a decent webcam and micro SD(HC) reader.
To my surprise this is a very good deal. Video is Standard Definition (720×480, NTSC 30 frames/s) and as you can see it looks rather good. As usual, stability is key for for quality, the MD8o was placed on a stable platform.
The manual is quite bad. I could not get it to work at first, not as diskdrive via USB or as as webcam, the PC rejected it as unknown device.
I found out that only by performing this sequence it will work as diskdrive and webcam:
1. Create a file called TAG.TXT in the root of the SD cardon the PC, (of course with another SD reader!)
2. Insert in the TAG.TXT file the date and the time as follows:
[date]
2010/05/21
16:15
(substitute with your current date and time, this is May 21,2010). Add a blank after the date and the time
3. Switch off the MD80
4. Insert the SD card in teh MD80
5. Turn on the MD80, wait until the blue/red leds stop blinking
6. Switch it off again
7. Install the driver for the webcam on the mini CD (only once)
8, Insert the USB cable in the MD80 and connect the USB cable to the PC
9. Now the USB diskdrive should appear showing the SD card in the MD80.
10.If not, correct the TAG.TXT file, remove cable from the PC, switch off the MD80 and start all over again.
11.Note that the TAG.TXT file is removed by the MD80 if it is accepted, otherwise it has errors and remains on the SD!
12. Press the mode button on the MD80 and now the MD80 works in webcam mode. In good quality!
You will have to repeat this everytime the battery is empty or when you reset the MD80 (I had to reset several times).
No way to remove the annoying date and time stamp on the bottom. Good editing software allows to magnify the video (I use Adobe Premiere in widescreen, requiring enlarging so it moves the bottom out of sight).
Video editing
I made a series of recordings with the MD80, riding on my bicycle in Weesp. The MD80 was clipped to my bike and I will spare you the jerky and moving-like-a-rollercoaster images. Bad idea.
When I stopped cycling and made video recordings manually the results were acceptable. I loaded the more stable parts into Premiere, made a widescreen project and enlarged the 720×480 NTSC to widescreen HD PAL format. That made the irritating date/time move out of view. Of course this magnification means less detail. Combine with shooting manually, not optimal stability. Anyway, the result is not bad at all. Video looks good, errors in color (some light trees turn purple) and jerking if moving.
I know now I can use this minicam to do some video recording I cannot do with the higher quality but larger Canon FS100. See the clip here under.
