The sketch book I mentioned a couple weeks ago has finally been released! To recap (just in case you accidentally ended here and have no context), it is a travel sketchbook depicting our experiences while travelling around the world these past April and May.

I’ve finally settled on building a simple HTML(5) page with a sprinkle of Javascript to navigate the bigger images. Something that gets the job done, which is showing you my crazy sketches!

I might possibly build a Kindle version in the near future, so if you’re a Kindle user, stay tuned ;-)

In the meantime you can read a bit about the background and the “tools” in the project page.

That doesn’t mean that I won’t be posting stuff to other websites such as plus or twitter, as I’ve noticed that many people use them as a mixture of human RSS aggregators and comments section.

Onwards to this year’s projects/resolutions: since this is the year the world ends, I decided to make sure my projects are finished before that happens. I don’t want to leave an incongruent mess of unfinished stuff for future space-archaeologists to decipher, if there’s something to be found on Earth after the great cataclysm or whatever it is that will exterminate us. I’d rather make it easy for them to make sense of what it was all about.

One of the first things I have finished this year is my first ever travel diary of sorts. It depicts our journey from London to Hong Kong, then Tokyo, San Francisco and finally New York this past April-May 2011, with special guests such as Aaron Koblin, Jeri Ellsworth and moot (to mention a few). It was quite entertaining to draw famous people! Although I am not sure my interpretation is very truthful, but that’s part of the fun anyway!

I just finished scanning it a couple days ago, and I’m still trying to decide what’s the best way to publish/share it. In any case, I still have to crop, align and export all the pages (the 60+ pages) so I’m pretty sure I’ll get some ideas in the meantime, either by myself or in the comments (hint! hint! hint!) ;-)

Robot Media just moved to a new shiny office in Barcelona’s Eixample and we had a welcome party to celebrate with friends. While discussing the party “features”, we had this crazy idea where we would assemble a video out of many other videos with robotic stuff.

I immediately thought that was a job for ffmpeg, as cutting the videos manually would be super tiring and we didn’t have much time for that.

So I assembled a quick script that read a text file with a list of collectively sourced YouTube URLs, then used youtube-dl for downloading the videos, and finally called ffmpeg to extract three second slices from the videos, resized and padded them as required (to create a Full HD version), and finally appended all of them together using the amazing MP4Box.

After that, I placed the half gigabyte file in the very capable hands of mr. Eyeclipse, who added the Robot Media watermark and a tint of “corporate blue” with After Effects. Maybe that could have been done with ffmpeg too, but getting the right tint hue wouldn’t have been as interactive (and immediate) as with AE.

We then placed the video on loop in the office TV. Party guests were challenged to identify and tweet the name of ten robots appearing in the video. Only one person managed to do that, and he got a full set of robot stickers!

The script is slightly messy so I haven’t got round to publishing it yet. I’ll do that soon, so that you can create your own crazy randomized mash-ups with just a couple of YouTube URLs.

Few days after the party I remembered the supersupercut project that was unveiled at past seven on seven project on New York. Back then, they mentioned they had used already “cut” scenes in the project they showed, so the scene detection process was manual.

This time when I checked the supersupercut website, it turned out they are now using something called Shotdetect, an open source piece of software that can detect scenes in videos! Damn! I should have checked it before! That way I would have been able to select slices from different scenes, as sometimes there are several clips from the same scene and it looks like it’s the same clip.

Though it would be even more interesting if it could detect things such as faces or objects appearing in the scene and then filter scenes according to that (e.g. return scenes that contain robots). Surely there’s some sort of academic thesis on this waiting to be implemented by Adobe on the next CS iteration!

In any case: food (or software) for thought. It goes to the list of “things to revisit” at some point; hopefully it will get into my “bag of tricks” too, just as MP4Box and ffmpeg did :-)

By the way, it was a pleasure to find out that both ffmpeg and MP4Box are available in ArchLinux’s repositories, and they are very recent versions too. Excellent! No more compiling from SVN just to get things such as WebM supported! Beat that, Ubuntu :-P

Which means that Instantanea has an update! The first in many months! (I actually had been working on a myriad of things since then, so I’ve got an excuse).

It’s not an exceptional big update but provides for the top couple of things people were repeatedly asking for:

1. the ability to change the folder where pictures are stored
2. and the ability to configure whether the device vibrates (or not) when a picture is taken

The first one was really a MUST if people wanted to use Instantanea to take pictures and have them automatically uploaded to Google Plus, since for whatever the reason Google Plus doesn’t seem to be listening to changes in the Media files in the phone, and apparently only checks the /DCIM/Camera folder. So if you want, you can reset the folder to that location with a simple touch, and get your Instantanea pictures uploaded to Google Plus easily.

The second feature was also something people wanted semidesperately, as when phones get older, they also get slightly cranky and they vibrate in a junky, erratic way–just as if they were to fall apart, in other words. I saw that effect on a somewhat old Nexus One and immediately understood this was pretty relevant.

Finally Instantanea now has a way nicer shutter button, designed by none other than the mighty Mr.doob! Yay!

Which feature(s) would you like to have in the application?

Something else I’ve worked on today is making the code compatible with Python 3. As I moved to Arch Linux recently, I found they’re really on the bleeding edge, and therefore they are already using Python 3, instead of the “legacy” 2.6/8. But aafm was written with Python 2 in mind, and it wouldn’t work with 3. Firstly because I was using the old style “print”:

But Python 3 requires parenthesis:

Evidently, that wasn’t difficult to fix ;-)

The worst came when I found out that there isn’t a PyGTK version that works with Python 3 anymore. Or in other words, PyGTK is deprecated starting with Python 3. I was stunned: did I really read that? are they really deprecating PyGTK?! how are we supposed to write GTK apps in Python then?!.

But fear not: we can still write GTK applications with Python, although we’ll be using PyGObject, which will use automatic object introspection to wrap around the GTK library instead of waiting for someone to write the PyGTK wrapping code.

Unfortunately since the PyGObject project page looked so futuristic and “in progress”, I decided that I’ll wait for them to sort out their minds and decide what they want to do with GTK, GObject and GWhatever. Specially since my code worked by simply changing the shebang to use python2 instead of just python–and it is an “official” and sanctified solution.

This is funny but also very bewildering. I mean, just try to imagine how desperate people might be in order to use this silly tool of mine which requires so many steps to install. Just try to imagine!