When I bought some hair wax at the hair dresser the other week, this weird thing was included in the package:
I thought it might be a suction cup or something, but it doesn’t really work well as that. So… er… What? WAHT!!?!?ONE!!!
Mystery Object
Useful Consumer Review
I’ve been filming some concerts the last year or so. I’ve been using mostly normal compact cameras, and they work quite well. The Sony RX 100 II is probably the best one of the bunch.
However, they either stop filming after 30 minutes because of tax reasons (apparently, in the EU there’s an additional tax on film cameras that can be avoided if it’s “not really” a film camera), or the battery runs out after 30 minutes.
Or both.
So it was suggested to me that I might want to look into using a real video camera, and the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera is supposed to be pretty spiffy. It has a big sensor or something. I dunno.
The first attempt didn’t work so well. The built-in microphone red-lines quite easily, even at the lowest sensitivity. So concerts are just square waves of BZZZZB KNKNK BZZKN.
I finally bought some small external microphones and tested them the other… month.
And with that mike, it the audio comes out fine.
The battery life isn’t all that awesome, though. I get about 50 minutes on one battery, so I have to carry extras. And on the higher quality settings it generates a lot of data, to put it mildly, so using a 128GB SD card is required. Unless you want to shuffle SD cards all evening.
Then I noticed that the video looked all washed out and dull. After some googling, that’s apparently a feature. The camera doesn’t do white balancing or normalisation or anything. To leave you (i.e., me, the film professional) with as much detail as possible, everything is kinda grey and boring.
Fixing that is apparently called “colour correction”, and I’ve watched tutorials on that this evening. There’s a number of packages under Linux that purports to help out here, but I couldn’t get Kdenlive to work. Cinelerra wants to recode everything upon opening, which takes hours. The same with Kino. And daVinci didn’t want to install at all.
But I did manage to get Lightworks to install and work, and it’s pretty fast and nice. Although incredibly confusing. I’ve played around with various colour corrections. Here’s one where I went black-and-white with high contrast:
(Note my fabulous “put the camera on the table and then keep on drinking beer” camera technique.)
And here’s one where I just tried to make the white bits less white, but add more contrast:
Oops. I should have increased the audio sensitivity on that one…
Lightworks transcodes to a format that Youtube doesn’t need to transcode, so uploading after colour-correction is quite fast.
In conclusion: I think things are too complicated.
Useful Consumer Review: A Correction
After discovering that Logitech wireless things work much better if I don’t plug the receiver directly into the computer (because science), it reminded me of another Logitech device that I’d dismissed earlier: The Logitech Cube.
And by using an USB extension cord, it, too, has an acceptable range, so I could actually use it for something… if I figured out what I could use it for.
I mean, it only generates two keystrokes:
Page Up if you hold it this way and click…
And Page Down if you hold it this way and click.
Or the other way around. I forget.
If you just put it on a table and click on it, it decides that it wants to be a mouse instead, so the click turns into a mouse click, which is definitely not what I want.
Hm… but I do have gaffa tape. I wonder what’ll happen if I just gaffa the sensor on the bottom.
It works! So it can be used as a single purpose HID button. If I had something where that would be useful, and that didn’t use the Page Down key for something else.
Or… I could perhaps just use the event remapper thing from the previous post, come to think of it. But I don’t really have any projects that would require such a button right now, so back into the Cupboard Of Mystery it goes again.
I apologise for besmirching Logitech’s, er, good? name.
Linux, X and Logitech
I’ve had a Logitech diNovo Mini as my TV computer keyboard for a few years. It works as well as you’d suspect a wireless keyboard to work: It loses contact with the receiver a couple of times a month and needs to be switched off and then on again, but otherwise it’s OK. Doesn’t lose too many keystrokes.
But it’s starting to fail mechanically, I think. The larger buttons (Enter, Del, etc) now only work if I press them… just… so…
I looked around for new media keyboards, but they’re either too big, or unusably small. This was kinda just right. So I went off to eBay and got a couple of new old ones.
At least that’s what I thought I bought. Instead I got a couple of Lenovo TV730 keyboards, which is apparently also called Logitech Mini Controller.
See? Very similar.
And here my troubles began. This Logitech came with a different, smaller receiver:
The receiver works fine under Linux, but I could only get about two meters range. (That’s seven microfurloughs in Imperial measurements, I think.) But I had it plugged in like this:
After bitching about this on IRC a bit, I tried using an USB extension cord. Like this:
And then I got, like, an 11 meter range, through two (pretty light) walls! So the metal in the computer case messed up those radio signals or something? Ok, we’re on! This is doable!
And then I discovered that some of the keys don’t work in Xorg. In particular, the PgUp and PgDown keys give exactly zero X events, according to xev. That’s no fun.
I fired up the ever-useful evrouter utility:
quimbies:~# evrouter -f -d /dev/input/event* "Logitech TV730" "/dev/input/event9" none key/402 "fill this in!" "Logitech TV730" "/dev/input/event9" none key/403 "fill this in!"
key/402? That’s a suspiciously high number. And duckgoing around shows that this is a well-known ancient X problem: X can’t deal with events that has a numerical value over 255.
This was reported as a bug at least as early as 2007, and apparently they (sort of) started working on it. But they didn’t fix it. Instead this very nice person wrote a simpler fix that allows you to just remap these problematic keystrokes into other keystrokes. Yes, it’s a hack, but if you’re not going to provide a real solution in 8 years, I think it might be better to just include the hack, don’t you think?
Obviously the Xorg people didn’t, so you still have to build your own evdev_drv.so. The link up there has good instructions on how to build and install this driver into your X, so I won’t repeat that.
For my device, I put the following into my /etc/X11/xorg.conf:
Section "InputDevice" Identifier "Logitec TV730" Driver "evdev" Option "Device" "/dev/input/tv730" Option "event_key_remap" "402=112 403=117 272=89" EndSection
This remaps the weird PgUp/PgDown keystrokes into the normal ones.
To get the device to show up under that name, I put the following into my udev setup. This is with the current Debian; your mileage will vary.
quimbies:~# cat /etc/udev/rules.d/10-tv730.rules
KERNEL=="event[0-9]*", ATTRS{idVendor}=="046d", ATTRS{idProduct}=="c52b", SYMLINK+="input/tv730", GROUP="input"However, it’s not totally unproblematic. If I pull the receiver out and then put it back in again, X will sometimes not believe that it’s been inserted:
[3275248.027] (**) Logitech TV730: Applying InputClass "evdev keyboard catchall" [3275248.027] (II) Using input driver 'evdev' for 'Logitech TV730' [3275248.027] (**) Logitech TV730: always reports core events [3275248.027] (**) evdev: Logitech TV730: Device: "/dev/input/event9" [3275248.027] (WW) evdev: Logitech TV730: device file is duplicate. Ignoring. [3275248.032] (EE) PreInit returned 8 for "Logitech TV730"
So…
Youtube and “unsupported device” redux
I posted yesterday about my extremely useful Youtube-based weather monitor not working properly any more. I thought Google had changed the video format or something — refusing to play videos when using mplayer.
After adding more debugging to the script that runs the monitor, that turned out to be incorrect.
Here’s the search result for a song by Dollboy:
Searching for Dollboy+The%20Ventriloquist (200) Duration: 236 (https://youtube.com/devicesupport) Duration: 232 (Puppet Dancing in South Africa) Duration: 324 (Ventriloquist Dummy Creepy Doll Makeup Tutorial) Duration: 449 (Creepy Broken Doll: Hair, Makeup, and Costume Tutorial!)
One of the results in the search is the “unsupported device” video! And my script would pick that video if it’s the one that has the most appropriate duration. And it seems to be in the result set for any searches:
[larsi@potato ~]$ ./src/flutter/flutter "" "foo" Searching for foo (200) Duration: 245 (Foo Fighters - In The Clear) Duration: 236 (https://youtube.com/devicesupport) Duration: 271 (Foo Fighters - The Pretender)
So this is just Google’s way of saying that their old search API is being phased out? I’m using the
https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos?q=$search&max-results=10&v=2
API. And this seems to be the case: The API v2 is being discontinued. The v3 API requires an application ID, and it’s more JSON-ey, but it looks like it should provide the same functionality as the v2 API.
It’s nice of Google to notify the users of the v2 API that this is happening, I guess, but it would have been nice if the video said something about the API instead of just saying that the device was unsupported.