Ligts on, Lights out

Went to the Half Machine to help out with the LED boxes to get them wired up for use on Roskilde Festival in summer.

The display boxes were fitted standard power and data connectors for daisy chaining units. Internally the boxes each have one power supply providing current for four PCBs, each controlling 4x8 pixels. Pixel data is shifted from one board to the next via a ribbon cable. In their original stadium scoreboard configuration, similar ribbon cables simply connected the last PCB from one box to the first one in the next. The new design employs plain CAT5 cables with two RJ45 connectors on each box to make daisy chaining units easy regardless of how the stacks of displays are arranged.


Today was also Lights Out day, some kind of energy conservation awareness thing where people were supposed to switch off their lights between 8 and 9pm. To promote the event, billboards and posters in town featured some sort of demented panda creature inside a lightbulb shape, which really made no sense to me. But then again I don't watch TV so I don't know what ads they might have run.

In any case I think the event probably misfired. Officials from the municipal power supply did not registe any noticable drop in power consumption, and indeed the street lights remained on in all the outer town districts as well as in many homes in midtown where also most of the shops had left their bright street facing commercial signage on, so the net effect didn't feel very dark at all. Police had supposedly upped their presence to guard against mischief in the dark which wasn't.

However, the flagstones were still damp from afternoon rain which made for a few dozen good pictures with interesting, somewhat different and moody light scapes than the usual plain looking copenhagen.

The last Hi8 tapes

I'm slowly transferring to harddisk the contents from a heap of old Video8, Hi8 and DV tapes shot over the past fifteen years. The Hi8 tapes are proving a bit of a problem. I don't own any fancy equipment for digitizing S-video, other than a now rather naff and antique Sony TRV18 camcorder which I then hookup to the Hi8 with a ridiculously overpriced Monster cable carrying stereo audio and S-video.

The low-fi, 100% analog setup

Some 8 or 9 years ago I had limited access to a Media 100 iFinish workstation, using which I converted some of the same Hi8 tapes to DV (with the same camcorder hooked up). Unfortunately much of the converted content has been lost, so now I have digitized the tapes again using the above shown solution.

Compare the footage I create this way with the old iFinish tapes, I was not particularly surprised to find the TRV18 S-video capture performing somewhat poorly against the by now antique but still pricey professional equipment. Maybe before I convert any more Hi8 material I should shop around for affordable better-quality S-video digitizers.

Started work on editing some old DV footage from the C&O canal:



This was shot on a GL1 and a VX1000. I wish I had been able to afford buying a VX back then. It was such a nice camera.

China's Tibet

I recently joined a small upstart firm developing some pretty interesting CE products. We're traveling to Shanghai in a couple of days to meet our manufacturing partners there. I've never been to China before so I'm pretty excited about going. Not particularly looking forward to the grueling 12-hour flight down there though; already started charging all my gadgets to keep me entertained or at least distracted the whole way.

alight with the glow from charge indicator LEDs

Turns out that flying to China is a bit more complicated than any place I've traveled to before. For one thing, unlike flying to the US where you can usually get away with just signing a visa waiver while on the plane, you actually have to get a visa made at the local chinese consulate. Naturally this can't be done too simple or too convenient. 

The best way to deal with the bureaucratic rubbish is by downloading and completing an onerous multi-page application form, which when it comes down to it is not substantially more horrid than the paperwork you do when you fly into the US from Europe. 

The Chinese Embassy here has its visa consulate office in a separate building; a plain white house that looks to have been a private residence until recently. The lawn facing the street sports an assortment of trees and flowerbeds, and a half-empty concrete lined pond in which the wind causes a very old and algae covered leather football to gently drift about.

Inside the sensation of being in someone's house is underscored by a comfy couch and coffee table arrangement in front of large picture windows overlooking the garden. The wall decor is somewhat spartan, however: Numerous magazine racks each holding one copy of a glossy brochure irresistibly titled China's Tibet. The stories about Happy and Prosperous and Sensible Tibetans who Collaborate and Behave Properly are beautifully illustrated with lush photos of snow covered mountaintops and smiling children and monks. Of course. 

I picked up an informative leaflet about the evil Falun Gong movement, which to Beijing is evidently as Psychiatrists are to Tom Cruise. 

In the comfy consulate couches sits people completing and carefully double-checking their application paperwork. There's the sound of coins being handled: People are counting the wads of cash they are bringing to pay for the visa stamp service, which runs to about USD 180 for a visa good for 12 months. (Credit cards not accepted, sorry). There are helpful directions to a bank with a cash machine less than half a mile away.

West Virginia country drive

Old Hi8 dashcam video made back in the summer of '99: A peaceful drive in the West Virginia countryside, from somewhere outside Berkeley Springs to Paw Paw, on a small dirt road off Route 9.

Playback speed is double of normal rate.
Music is KLF: Elvis on the Radio.


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Kanusti gloms a meatball @ 1000fps

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Simple experiment with a HC7E camcorder, using its 250fps smooth slowmotion mode which records a short burst of high-framerate video to memory at something like 1/16 resolution of normal HDV video. I took this video (of my sister's dog eating a meatball) from the camera and quadrupled the framerate using the MSU interframe interpolation filter for Avisynth. The filter works pretty good so long as you have continous, linear footage. It doesn't detect scene transitions, however, so the transition from video to the black frames between the shots kind of looks weird.

MSU frame rate conversion filter:
compression.ru/video/frame_rate_conversion/index_en.html

Apparently there is a newer version of the filter which is much more advanced, but it is only available for commercial licensing.

Lab : Komponent 131

About a month ago I went to the LAB:Komponent 131 concert on the lovely M/S Half Machine barge in the South Harbor. "8bit klubben" (The 8-bit Club) delivered visuals for the event. It was lots of fun! Good atmosphere, lots of friendly people, interesting DJs.

The barge itself is an old so-called "Engineering platform", purchased for scrap value by a collective of artists for use as concert venue and art stage. It last saw active engineering duty during the construction of Storebæltsbroen.

The barge is presently semi-permanently moored on Teglholmen, in the Copenhagen South Harbor.

Half-Machine wouldn't be "half" as cool as a concert venue if it didn't have the lovely stacks of LED display blocks (salvaged scrapped stadium scoreboards) for blasting the dancers with strobing and pulsating patterns of red and green bright lights from the LED stacks behind the DJs. The blocks are controlled with Arduino boards programmed and wired up by 8-bit klubben, and they are simply lovely, even if they're missing a pixel or two.
Right now only a handful of blocks are hooked up. Possibly this spring we will be able to hook them all up (there are 26 total, each with 16x8 pixels) with Processing (maybe using Wiring as an Arduino alternative) so we can run PC controlled graphics and video on the display blocks - this would allow us to use more interactive patterns and live video from the audience.

Another visual from 8-bit klubben - a camera / projector combo with Processing painting pretty light graffitti in response to user provided highlights from laser pointers or LED flashlights.

This video tracker painted people as swarms of green pixels in between abstract geometry and checkerboards.

My video from the event (slightly over-edited!)

Visiting the neighborhood fortress.

My friend Thomas Pluck seem to have a lot of fun with his blog, so I decided to put one up too. Hardly anything special, I know - but this will be my truck. My vehicle for late night roadside dumping of things into internet ditches. It's been about six years since last time I had something resembling a proper website up and running, but that don't mean I haven't been accumulating content all the while. I'll be posting old and new stuff randomly while (my) interest persists.

Today, the twenty-third of march has been designated Easter Sunday in accordance with ecclesiastical mystery mathematics of dimly recognized relevance — although I suppose a couple days off is nice, as was the weather — dire snow storm prognostications from the weather service turned out hyperbole.

I actually had a few projects I needed to work on this sunday, but the sunny weather proved a strong procrastination lure. Took my camera and went for a short drive a couple kilometers out in the Copenhagen outskirts to Bagsværd Fort, an old cannon fortress built in the 1890s as part of the Northern city defense line, supplementing Vestenceinten, a moat and embankment slash artillery line to the West and South. This large and expensively constructed project never saw real battle, and became mostly obsolete when the first warplanes flew just a couple of decades later. The defense system was kept manned and on high alert for the duration of World War I, but the anticipated Prussian invasion failed to materialize.


By the time the germans actually did invade a few decades later, the city defense system was largely irrelevant and disused, but the german troops nevertheless manned it. Presumably the structure had some use in protection against land invasion from Allied forces or civil uprising. In any case the Nazis spent more effort on constructing and staffing the Danish segment of the Atlantic Wall along the Jutland coast.


Bagsværd Fort was a triangular construction surrounded by a dry moat. It was armed with 8 120mm guns, four of which at a gun emplacement at the outer point of the triangle.

It's still there. It was easy to find. Parked right outside the main gate. The "dry" moat surrounding the fort is of course muddy as is par for the season, but given that ground temperature was close to freezing it was pretty easy to get around. There was very little wind or traffic, all I heard was birds songs of spring imminent.


Considering the fort is in the middle of an urban area, the graffitti and vandalism was less than I expected. It seems to be in pretty good shape overall, has probably received recent maintenance. I like the architecture of the place.


The reinforced concrete guts of the fortress is now apparently used as a film depot. The fort grounds are part of some kindergarten or communal youth program, it seems - the kids' bunny cages stands right in the firing line, how cruel.


Nobody was there on this sunday, except this red skirrel kept a beady eye on me the whole time.
So there you have it, Pretty much a pointless excursion but that's okay, could be worse.