Ant-man’s Camera December 1, 2021
Posted by stuffilikenet in Applications, Awesome, Geek Stuff, Photography, Science.add a comment
Oh sure, it needs a nice camera bag. But at least it works well enough for Science.
Local Color January 29, 2021
Posted by stuffilikenet in Awesome, Mutants, Photography, Uncategorizable.add a comment
Around the corner from me on King Road in San Jose. This is possibly the nicest bit of graffiti in my admittedly suburban neighborhood. In fact, I don’t recall seeing any in my daily 3-6 miles of walking around the neighborhood (old people need lots of exercise to stay fit) except this lovely bit. It is certainly a mutant with the Buddha among the cactus and the Mayan dragon and all.
Purple Perfection January 4, 2021
Posted by stuffilikenet in Awesome, Octopus, Photography.add a comment
Chrono-synclastic Infundibulum February 12, 2020
Posted by stuffilikenet in Brilliant words, Photography, Toys.add a comment
I texted this picture to my stepdaughter. She wrote back:
“Did it work???”
“Can’t tell; everything is still weird.”
NOTE: it’s funny how you can remember something as strange as “chrono-synclastic infundibulum” and spell it off the top of your head after having read it once in high school, nearly fifty years ago.
Whale Skeleton in the Sahara January 29, 2020
Posted by stuffilikenet in Awesome, Photography.add a comment
Wedding Photo January 28, 2020
Posted by stuffilikenet in Photography, Uncategorizable.add a comment
I’m the tall one in the back.
Two-headed Bearded Dragon December 23, 2019
Posted by stuffilikenet in Awesome, Mutants, Photography.add a comment
Octobrella December 11, 2019
Posted by stuffilikenet in Awesome, Mutants, Octopus, Photography, Publishing Tools.add a comment
Purloined from reddit.
3D Scanning to Print (Photogrammetry) October 8, 2019
Posted by stuffilikenet in 3D Printing, Applications, Awesome, Geek Stuff, Photography, Publishing Tools, Star Trek Technology.add a comment
Due to an unfortunate incident while moving from the very parted lips of Hell (Greenville, CA) I have had to replace a few parts on my Casio CDP-120 piano keyboard. Basically, the highest key (C, for those who need to know) was/is smashed and needs a replacement. Aha! I have this iPrusa printer and can whip up a new key post-haste using Fusion360 to measure and design a new key. Right?
No. It’s a part with surprisingly complex geometry, so I thought I would try photogrammetry to create a model and see how that works. I never tried this before, so what could it hurt? Can’t be any harder than Fusion360 to master. Right?
No. There seems to be no (free as in beer) software which can do this which is simple enough for me to install (grumble, grumble) on this company Mac, and I’m not sure company policies built into the security suite on this company Mac would permit it (grumble, grumble) anyway. Since my replacement Windows box isn’t here yet (grumble, grumble) I have to pay for a cloud-based solution…Altizure.com. So I took 56 pictures of the C key an octave down with my cellphone camera, submitted them to Altizure.com‘s loving embrace and was rewarded with a fairly competent render of my key:
I say “fairly competent” because it has lots of hole in the sides. No matter; I can probably fix it in software modify it in Fusion360 to fill in the holes. I will likely need to use Fusion360 to get the dimensions useably correct in any case.
Now I have to steel myself to pay the subscription rate of something like $70 per project. It would be worth it if I was a company making a prototype with great prospects for the future…but I’m not (grumble, grumble).
The key costs about five bucks from Casio’s parts subcontractor, plus six or so to ship it. I know which I am going to choose.
It’s a shame, really; I was looking forward to monkeying around with it. Maybe next time.
However, I don’t give up easily; I got 3DF Zephyr and used the (limited to) 50 pictures in it at the highest defaults in the wizard to create this render:
My army of loyal and discerning readers may notice a bit of degradation here and there…yeah. I will try again, but this took an hour or so and was NOT automatically rendered, but went through stages. In all fairness it would have been shorter if my graphics card had CUDA…but I don’t have a graphics card, just whatever Lenovo thought was cheap but still enough to get by on. Still, it needs work, and it’s midnight. Possibly updates to follow, if I get any sleep.
EXCITING UPDATE:
I got a better render with 50 pictures and the most extreme settings I could figure out:
It’s got the holes that Altizure’s render had, but 3DF Zephyr is free to use. Now I have to figure out how to make the save-able form of this (an .obj file) into an .slt and thence to gcode. With luck, I will have a hideous key to use before my real one arrives.
Fluorescent Pink Flying Squirrel February 8, 2019
Posted by stuffilikenet in Mutants, Photography, Science.add a comment
Not a punk band name, the North American flying squirrel fluoresces pink at night under ultraviolet light. Not a mistake, either:
“I looked at a ton of different specimens that they had there,” Kohler said. “They were stuffed flying squirrels that they had collected over time, and every single one that I saw fluoresced hot pink in some intensity or another.”
In order to expand the search, the team at Northland College in Wisconsin went to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and gathered more specimens. In all, they researched over 100 specimens ranging across numerous states, all confirming the “pink theory.”
I mean it’s not hunter’s orange, but it’s a start.
Tentacle-nosed Catfish February 8, 2019
Posted by stuffilikenet in Mutants, Photography, Science.add a comment
This is one of six catfish species recently discovered in Amazonian basin rivers and streams.
Cute little creatures, aren’t they?
AI Detects Rare Syndromes From Images January 9, 2019
Posted by stuffilikenet in Applications, Photography, Science, Star Trek Technology.add a comment
Rare disorders often present with patterned discoloration of the epidermis, distortion of features and other visibly-detectable aberrations in appearance. Marfan’s syndrome presents with long, flexible body type. Noonan syndrome may present wide-set eyes, and Down’s syndrome is well-known to nearly everyone. Now, researchers have developed a facial analysis framework, DeepGestalt, using computer vision and deep learning algorithms, that quantifies similarities to hundreds of genetic syndromes based on unconstrained 2D images. DeepGestalt is currently trained with over 26,000 patient cases from a rapidly growing phenotype-genotype database, consisting of tens of thousands of validated clinical cases, curated through a community-driven platform. DeepGestalt currently achieves 91% top-10-accuracy in identifying over 215 different genetic syndromes and has outperformed clinical experts in three separate experiments.
In results published in Nature Medicine, DeepGestalt outperformed doctors in diagnosing patients with Angelman syndrome and Cornelia de Lange syndrome versus other disorders, and in separating patients with different genetic subtypes of Noonan syndrome.
It’s a neat study in that it controls for a bunch of conditions including ethnicity and gender, so it’s a bit more robust than previous studies.
Homework: [PDF] https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.07637
Barbie pagoda fungus (Podoserpula miranda) January 3, 2019
Posted by stuffilikenet in Awesome, Mushrooms, Photography.add a comment
Image shamefully stolen from Reddit.com
Breakfast at Kitten-ese December 3, 2018
Posted by stuffilikenet in Photography, Uncategorizable.add a comment
We cleared the table and seats for breakfast, but before we could sit…
Needs No Title November 20, 2018
Posted by stuffilikenet in Photography, Uncategorizable.add a comment
Arizona Exposure October 30, 2018
Posted by stuffilikenet in Photography, RV and camping.add a comment
Arizona is pretty much paradise in the winter months. We spent the winter of 2017-8 there and had an interesting time staring at Nature’s landscapes. It was a bit of a shock for me to realize how much I like desert landscapes. I really didn’t expect it.
Someday I will learn how to stack images, and then I will show you only one photo. Until then, however…
Please bear in mind that all sunsets are much redder than my camera will capture,or my eyes are really going (could be).
Yellow Creek Campground May 29, 2018
Posted by stuffilikenet in Mushrooms, Photography, RV and camping.add a comment
in Plumas County is a delightful PG&E-owned small campground with nearly no amenities. It has eleven campsites, two without raccoon boxes, two vault toilets and at least running water.
It is, however, beautiful beyond compare. Located on a meadow with a stream
passing one-third of the campsites and with a canopy of pines and firs to shade the campers, it’s a little garden spot all its own…and then there are the mushrooms. Oh my goodness, the mushrooms.
I fear I have left out a few. Don’t worry; it’s raining right now so I should have new ones for you soon.
I relaxed after a hard day of squatting to photograph mushrooms (that weren’t there when I left camp this afternoon) by photographing their newer brethren, freshly emerged into my camera’s eye while being serenaded by at least six different kinds of birds (a red hawk among them) at sunset. After dark there are frogs to keep the gentle susurration going, so that my sleep is as peaceful as can be…except knowing there are black bears about (my first day here there was a mound of bear evidence[1]).
Also, there are cute ice flowers to be admired, if you look carefully for them.
1. I may continue to use “evidence” as an euphemism for all things scatological in future.
Glories March 4, 2018
Posted by stuffilikenet in Photography, Publishing Tools, Toys.add a comment
I grew up in a devoutly Methodist household, and we had paintings of Our Lord which often featured the suggestion of God’s presence through rays of light streaming through clouds. In fact, I don’t usually see these rays which I call Glories all that often; apparently the particles necessary for such diffraction are rare enough that glories don’t come standard with every sunset.
Then, too, when I see them I don’t have a nice camera with me…just my cell phone. The current default camera app in Android 6.0.1 does not feature exposure control, making it very difficult to catch the rays (usually sunsets present as a bright band of yellow in my camera). Thankfully, the Google Play store offers other camera apps, such as CameraZOOM. I have been able to finally capture a good enough sample to share (cropped in The GIMP):
Glories near Lake Havasu
EXCITING UPDATE: Glories viewed from ISS
Stuffilike.net 