Jul 02 2008

Car Alarms And Lasers

Category: Friends,Kazakhstan,PersonalChrisM @ 12:55 am

Last night (well, a couple of hours ago) was the first night of celebrations. The reason? This city’s (Astana) birthday as being the capital of Kazakhstan. Also, the president has his birthday around this time, so it is a joint celebration. Anyway there was huge firework display with some lasers. The sights and sounds all the way from our flat window was pretty spectacular. They will apparently be repeating the spectacle each night by the river, though whether it will be to the same scale remains to be seen. Hopefully Ira and I will manage to get a little closer sometime, and I’ll try and figure out which settings will work best on the camera. Probably not tomorrow, as Dave is coming over to get drunk catch up and listen to some of his new tunes discuss deep intellectual matters.
Oh, and the car alarms? In the car park near us, despite being a good 10/15 minute walk away, all the car alarms were set off by the bassy booms from the fireworks!

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Mar 01 2008

IT and Cats

Category: Dasha&Kittens,PersonalChrisM @ 5:04 pm

This week I started giving computing lessons to a colleague of Walton. She came round with her laptop, and we are going through basic skills, as well as how to save time by learning various shortcuts. One hour of pure IT can be a bit much for the non-geeks out there, but luckily Karra and Muska (our kittens) were on hand to provide occasional distractions. Some of the cat products in our flat have seen better days – one of the toy mice had its ear ripped off whilst my pupil was here!
We also got out the squeaky mouse that sits on the end of an elasticated fishing rod-type affair. Karra tends to watch it jumping around, almost as though she is analysing the patterns of its movements, then pounces when she thinks she has the best chance of holding on to the grey squeaky furry thing 🙂 Muska on the other hand will carry out all sorts of aerial acrobatics in her quest to trap the prey.
Once I had changed the batteries in their other favourite toy, we had a little laser show going on. I picked it up last September, as a replacement for the little laser pen we had previously been using. This version has two lasers, some mirrors and a couple of motors, to create pretty geometric patterns on the floor, and normally grabs the kittens’ attention. Hmmm, how old are kittens once they become cats?

Anyway, we need to find some new toys for them sometime, so I’ll keep my eye out in the local shops and online, to see what can be found.

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Aug 30 2007

Astana Day Concerts Videos #4

Category: Friends,Kazakhstan,VideosChrisM @ 2:33 am

OK, as you may have read from earlier posts, I have been experimenting trying to find the best way to encode videos to ensure high quality clips on YouTube. So far things have not gone well. I have ascertained that I do need de-interlace the raw DV video from my camcorder. I have tried different ways of resizing from 720×576 to 320×240, including clipping, adding letter box strips, changing the aspect ratio, all to no avail – the video quality is still far worse than previous videos I’ve uploaded. I have tried both DivX and Xvid codecs, with medium to high bit rates, but I always seem to end up with quality that would look bad coming from an old mobile phone.
For now, I shall continue posting the videos as they stand. If someone has an idea about how to achieve better results, let me know. Similarly, if someone would like to have a copy of these, let me know which interests you, and we’ll sort something out…

First we have a short clip of the lasers being tested during the 7th Act at the Astana Day concert. Why have I included it? Watch out for a video taken later in the night, that shows just how impressive the laser show was 🙂 As a small techy point, although the square and X don’t appear contiguous, to the naked eye, they were solid…

Here we have The 8th act singing in Russian…

Lastly (at least for this post), we have Alex, Ira and Ira’s Mum after the 8th act…

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