Tuesday, February 12, 2008
This bird had flown |12:51 AM| I built a video capture computer this past weekend, for $200. A handful of years ago $200 would buy you CD-ROM drive. The future is awesome. I'll admit some pretty serious ignorance regarding the deeper video capture workings of Ubuntu, but with sufficient research almost anything can be built. I knew about all the other components, and I've installed Ubuntu before.
Anyhow I was trying to think of a way to describe the process without boring the living shit out of everyone, because I'm proud. I could, perhaps, (a public service) make a post correcting all the incorrect information I ran into, but until the whole thing works that'd be kind of prematurely arrogant. Especially since like 10-15 tutorials were involved.
The issues were so nebulous and outside of my experience as to approach a surrealistic painting. The status messages might have been errors, some of things that were working would just vanish before my eyes, I was a babe in the woods.
The first idea on explaining the process was, imagine a house with no windows, and there is just one door. You want to get into the damn house. The door has no knob, just a big green button. When you press the button it clicks, and you hear what sounds like a backwards cuckoo clock. The door does not open. You make some phone calls, a guy with terrible grammar shows up, and hands you hinges. You are still doomed.
Perhaps:
It's like trying to bake lasagna but, the recipe is scattered across 8 cookbooks, in different languages. You can identify the shapes of words, you start to recognize when they're repeated. Eventually you figure out that you probably don't need all these eggs.
The oven keeps making that damn cuckoo noise.
But these are not helpful. I was ignorant, I am less ignorant, but I still don't totally understand how some of this shit works. I have pages of notes, 18 bookmarked websites, still more to learn, and it's absolutely wonderful.
This bird had flown |12:51 AM| I built a video capture computer this past weekend, for $200. A handful of years ago $200 would buy you CD-ROM drive. The future is awesome. I'll admit some pretty serious ignorance regarding the deeper video capture workings of Ubuntu, but with sufficient research almost anything can be built. I knew about all the other components, and I've installed Ubuntu before.
Anyhow I was trying to think of a way to describe the process without boring the living shit out of everyone, because I'm proud. I could, perhaps, (a public service) make a post correcting all the incorrect information I ran into, but until the whole thing works that'd be kind of prematurely arrogant. Especially since like 10-15 tutorials were involved.
The issues were so nebulous and outside of my experience as to approach a surrealistic painting. The status messages might have been errors, some of things that were working would just vanish before my eyes, I was a babe in the woods.
The first idea on explaining the process was, imagine a house with no windows, and there is just one door. You want to get into the damn house. The door has no knob, just a big green button. When you press the button it clicks, and you hear what sounds like a backwards cuckoo clock. The door does not open. You make some phone calls, a guy with terrible grammar shows up, and hands you hinges. You are still doomed.
Perhaps:
It's like trying to bake lasagna but, the recipe is scattered across 8 cookbooks, in different languages. You can identify the shapes of words, you start to recognize when they're repeated. Eventually you figure out that you probably don't need all these eggs.
The oven keeps making that damn cuckoo noise.
But these are not helpful. I was ignorant, I am less ignorant, but I still don't totally understand how some of this shit works. I have pages of notes, 18 bookmarked websites, still more to learn, and it's absolutely wonderful.
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