Yearly Archives: 2013

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bulk add users to moira lists

I always forget how to do this, but if you ever need to populate an email list at MIT, you can do it through blanche.

http://kb.mit.edu/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=3907064

If you want to add a long list of names to a list, you can put them all in a text file and do ‘blanche listname -al filename‘, or if you want a list to contain only the names in a text file, you can type ‘blanche listname -f filename’ and the appropriate members will be both added and removed

Thus, at a terminal, I would go

narw@ubuntu:~$ ssh nouyang@linux.mit.edu [remote login to athena]
nouyang@dr-wily:~$ vi 2.007ua [make a file with a list of athena usernames. it will accept the @mit.edu but it’s happier without. You can do this with gedit if you want.]
nouyang@dr-wily:~$ blanche 2.007-2013uas -al 2.007ua

voila! done. If you want to double-check they’ve been added, just do

nouyang@dr-wily:~$ blanche 2.007-2013uas


and everyone should pop up. or check online at https://groups.mit.edu/webmoira/

yay!

Additionally, if you’re copy-pasting a lot of stuff (e.g. from stellar) and only want the lines containing emails, you can do
http://lglinux.blogspot.com/2009/08/vim-keep-or-delete-lines-matching.html
:v/@/d
and that keeps only the lines with @ signs. Blanche doesn’t much care about whitespace so don’t worry about it.

e.g.
Nancy Ouyang
    nouyang@blah.edu
    Office: EAST CAMPUS # H208 
    Phone: 2256223  

gets reduced to

    nouyang@mit.edu

and blanche -al just says

Warning: “nouyang@mit.edu” converted to “nouyang” because it is a local name.

and works perfectly fine.

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Software/process for making videos for online learning

This past week I finally got started on my crazy half-formed ideas about an MITx version of 2.007.

Things I learned:

  1. use camstudio for screencasting on windows (free). Note that past 2gb, or less than 3 minutes using the Intel format at 50 quality (see screenshot later in post), the avi files seem to get corrupted and unusable.
    I’d looked into using ezvid, but you can only export to youtube. 
  2. use zoomit (free) to draw on the screen in windows
  3. record in a nice place, not a stone dungeon, because it reflects in the audio
  4. macs don’t like windows-formatted hard drives, so you can read but not write from non-mac-specific external hard drives
  5. MIT specific: the “scratch” folder on the building 26 new media / macathena clusters is per-computer, so you have to log-in at the same computer to access those files. I panicked when fcpx froze and I logged in on another computer and didn’t see anything in the scratch folder…
  6. on linux, youtube-dl blahlink will download the highest resolution version of blahlink video
  7. fcpx does not like flv files, and likes wav rather than mp3 files (if your recorder gives you that option)

hexapods video

(cc zero) made in inkscape + gimp + solidworks screenshot.

OKAY EVERYONE.
I’m still alive! I lolfailed at making a comic over IAP, but that is okay. Because! I ramped back up into happy excited mode! I hope this lasts more than 24 hours. I’m stressed about The Future but what the heck I am now able to convince myself to enjoy the moment and not be all “I should have done this by now” and “f***there’s a million things I should do, maybe i should just sleep instead.”

Thanks, brain. *scrunches face* I wonder about saying things like this when I am trying to find a job. oh well!

Anyway, I spent the last few days working on a video about hexapods, ostensibly to help people understand the design process for 2.007. (I made 18-servo-pod for 2.007 instead of participating in the contest). I’d taken part in a documentary-making class before, which used the final cut pro installed on the macs in the New Media Athena Cluster in building 26.

(We made this: http://vimeo.com/11305828)

But this was a bit different. For one thing, neither of the two hexapods (linkage and 18 servo) work right now. For another, since it’s a video about the design process, basically I am stuck with whatever media I took 2 years ago. So I have a lot less video and more pictures than might be ideal.

Anyway, turns out video editing software (in my case, final cut pro x) is magical and there’s no need about worrying about timing my screencasts with my audio recordings (which are done separately — I probably read each paragraph of the script 3 or 4 times) (The main advantage of reading it paragraph by paragraph is when you make a mistake reading it, you can re-record just that paragraph).

I used a stand-alone mic from a friend, and transferred sd-card files.

Using multiple monitors

My setup was like so:

Note the camstudio video settings, I think way lower would still be fine.. It also used to automatically open the avi file after recording, which got annoying so I turned that off.

I have two monitors, so I set the rightmost one to be 1280×720 resolution, lower than it can be.
Camstudio has a “select screen” option so it will only record one screen. Zoomit didn’t handle multiple screen as gracefully — I ended up making my right monitor the default (bringing the taskbar along with it :'( ) because it would let me type, but not draw, if I activated it (hit ctrl-2) on the wrong screen.

creative commons licensing

you can make your youtube videos creative commons license by default:
I went back and marked all my s*y videos cc, and set cc as default as well.
In addition, I just looked at cc licensing my images, and realized I’d set that as default a while back.
http://support.google.com/picasa/answer/94293?hl=en&

To find cc license videos, just type “hexapods, creativecommons“.

final cut pro x

Relatively intuitive to use. I used option-w to insert gaps (for breathers), cmd-r to “retime” edit the length of clips, and to make the end of a video sustained, I did it hackisly by cutting (b for blade) the end of a video and then using cmd-r to stretch that to however long I wanted it. There’s also automatic audio enhancements — I used “background hum removal’ a lot, and I need to go back and auto-enhance audio for all of them (I spoke rather softly).

other shortcuts: < and > for moving items around, ctrl-= for increasing 1db audio level, alt-w for insert gap.
oh I also learned -12 dB is a pretty standard audio level (depends on if you expect your video to be on tinny computer speakers or on real audio equipment) and you never want audio to reach 0 dB (when speakers distory).

result

The draft version can be seen here:
I need to figure out the purpose of this video so that I can add and intro and conclusion to it. Also, credits. I tried to keep most of the reused videos / pictures in-browser so I’m not directly re-using someone’s video; I wonder if using 6 seconds of the dancing hexapods video is acceptable? Unclear, but I decided in favor of making something rather than twiddling my thumbs worrying about things.
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an incoherent world 004, also why i am doing this

hrm.

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yes, those are rabbit slippers with glasses.

==
oh right, why am i doing a comic?
well, for fun, because there should be more engineering art, because my friends at MITERS say the most ridiculous things that are just begging to be turned into plot bunnies, and to practice drawing.

the idea is to stick crap on the internet and then look back at it in ten years and hopefully be able to measure some improvement. some sort of consistent practice thing. probably i would get better a lot faster if i did Actual Exercises (“deliberate practice”) like learning anatomy or drawing poses or copying existing art or something, but over the years i’ve learned that actually what matters the most is being able to do something consistently u.u Of course, I highly doubt this will be consistent after IAP, but it’ll be fun.

e.g. http://artistadodia.postbit.com/jonathan-hardesty.html (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3031684), although I think the original inspiration is from reading megatokyo from the beginning to … somewhere in the middle, and also from that Right Brain Drawing Book thing that compares some of Da Vinci’s beginning sketches to the later ones.

…these two panels took me twice as long as yesterday, at three hours total (i think around 4 or 5 hours for the first two pages, and page three was a bit over 1.5 hours). now I have to reference backward for the colors and such, also i really should make up my mind what the shipping container looks like, also i have never been inside a shipping container, also i am too lazy to do research, also i have no idea what the setting actually is, also wtf i have to pick clothes for my characters and i want to pick fancy things but then i would have to draw it @__@

i was going to talk about vending machines and smoothing caps, but maybe tomorrow. x.x uweh wow, i’ve barely worked on anything this week building-wise. uh………… i was planning on an update 5x/wk for the next two weeks (the rest of iap) but this is kind of silly. maybe i will do the 2x/wk thing and go build more things <3

i think next week is turn razor scooter into electric vehicle week. i want to do it in a semi-reversible way, it’s just light enough now to carry around inside grocery shopping, so it definitely won’t be with batteries and a motor included. but part of the point of making it electric is to be able to haul groceries with it, hrm.