Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
It’s that time of the year again: a pair of hens and about a dozen chicks have been cruising through the yard. The chicks vary from softball- to football-sized, so we think the hens are tending a creche.
The chicks are, of course, insufferably cute…
We haven’t seen a hen with chicks roosting in the trees this year, but that just means they’re using trees near the creek rather than ones we can see from the house.
Tom Turkey Closeup
That cute thing the chicks have going for them tapers off pretty quickly as they grow up.
Wow, are those big toms ugly!
But it works well enough for turkeys, so who are we to complain?
Watching the tree frogs crawl up the tent from inside let us see how they move: hand-over-hand up the fabric. A dozen of them crawling along was spooky…
I took a movie with my pocket camera that turned into an 8 MB AVI, which I can’t upload here. Most of it isn’t all that interesting, anyway, an observation which hasn’t stopped YouTube dead in its tracks yet, but we can do better than that.
A pair of Free Software programs extracts the interesting part and produces a (somewhat) smaller animated GIF that works with WordPress.
A bit of browsing showed that I wanted frames 227 through 265 and that the frog was pretty much in the upper-middle of the image. So, crop a 320×240 image around the frog from those 640×480 frames:
cd frames
mkdir stills
for f in `seq 227 265` ; do convert frame-$f.jpg -crop 320x240+160+60 stills/still-$f.jpg ; done
Then convert them into an animated GIF with a 500-ms frame rate (the -delay ticker is 10 ms):
cd stills
convert -delay 50 still-2* frogwalk.gif
It’s a 1.6 MB wad, but gets the message across: frogs keep three paws stuck to the floor.
Remember, that little guy is moving at glacial speed in the GIF: those 40 frames of video last just over a second in real time.
Memo to self: MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 only support video-style frame rates around 30 fps.
Update: Regular reader Przemek Klosowski showed me how to generate those numeric sequences on the fly, without using a for loop:
There's this neat Bash construct {1..10} that you can use directly after ffmpeg:
convert -delay 50 still-{227..430}* result.gif
You can even skip every nth frame:
convert -delay 50 still-{227..430..5}* result.gif
We bicycled along the Pine Creek Gorge rail-trail in north-central Pennsylvania on a Rails-to-Trails Conservancy group ride, camping at schools and campgrounds along the trail. Quick summary: for four days we rode in the sun and slept in the rain.
Tree Frog – Natural Light
As we set up camp at Pettecote Junction, the wet ground was hopping with tiny tree frogs. It was impossible to avoid stepping on the critters. When we got the tent set up, they swarmed up the sides between the tent and the rain fly; perhaps they had an imperative to get above the flood?
The lines in the tent fabric are about 3.7 mm apart, so the frogs are perhaps 10 mm from snout to butt. That size rules out everything in our RTP Eastern Reptiles & Amphibians book except the Little Grass Frog, which used to live only south of Virginia. The spot pattern doesn’t match, either, although they’re said to be highly variable. Who knows what’s going on in these degenerate days?
Tree Frog – Flash Illumination
They didn’t like the mesh vent screens, favored the rougher tent fabric over the smoother seam binding, and didn’t seem to mind falling off the tent.
This scary-but-innocuous fellow landed on our doorstep last night.
Staghorn Beetle
He’s a staghorn beetle and, as nearly as we can tell, uses the mandibles to demonstrate his superiority over the rest of the staghorn beetles in the neighborhood.
They’re doing well in their new home, building out comb on the foundation. The queen is in good shape, laying eggs as soon as the workers finish the cells. The workers seem to be feeding pollen directly to the larvae rather than storing it, which makes perfect sense. They’re taking two quarts of 1:1 sugar water every day!
Either you already know what this is all about or you really don’t want to know.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 