I still don’t watch videos on the net very often. I had dialup for so long — bad dialup, that rarely ran better than 19.2Kbps — that watching videos was just out of the question.  Even once I got a high-speed connection, Adobe’s closed-source policy meant that their Flash player was usually somewhere between broken and flaky on FreeBSD, so it was hard to watch videos in a browser.  If there was something I had to see, I downloaded it overnight (or over multiple nights) and watched it later.  So even today, when I’m looking for instructions on something, it rarely occurs to me to look for a video.

That’s a mistake, because some things are a lot easier to show than to tell.  A one-minute video of someone showing how to fillet a fish is probably more informative than a whole book trying to explain it in words.  Plus, all the internet marketing gurus say video is growing in importance, and a lot of people out there are just the opposite of me — they’ll look for a video first before searching other ways — and the search engines are trying to respond to that by featuring videos.  So for a while now, I’ve been wanting to make some screencast videos.  I think they’ve got a lot of potential for tutorials and demos, and I want to do some as teaching aids for my Latin lessons.

I thought I’d get some practice by doing one with my garden pictures.  It took a while to get all the technical details figured out, but I think once I know what I’m doing, this could be a lot faster than annotating a bunch of pictures and typing up descriptions of them all.  I hope you enjoy it.  If you have trouble viewing or hearing it, or have suggestions, please let me know.  More technical details below.

I captured the video and audio with Gtk-RecordMyDesktop.  My microphone is the crummy free one that came with a sound card or something, so if I speak very loudly at all, it pops.  So once I had the video file, I stripped the audio out into a separate WAV file, and used Audacity to boost the volume, and also to suppress some of the popping.  (If I decide to keep doing these, I think I’ll have to get a decent microphone.)  Then I muxed the audio back into the video, and cropped it to a standard size and recompressed it, all with mencoder.

The spinning red circle I used for pointing things out is from the Show Mouse plugin for Compiz, my window manager.  To display and zoom the images, I used GQview.  I’m hosting the video on blip.tv, which is like YouTube except that it’s more restricted to actual shows and documentaries, and not wide open to everything under the sun.

Here are the latest pictures from our backyard garden beds. Read more »

These pictures are from Saturday; just getting them posted now. Read more »

[Before I get to the post, a little blog housekeeping: I just changed my settings so that once you've had a comment approved, all your future comments will be approved automatically.  That way regulars won't have to wait two days for me to get around to checking them, especially on weekends.  Now back to the show.]

Gardening actually began a few weeks ago, but this is my first report on it this year.  We’re trying something new this year, called Square Foot Gardening, where you physically divide your garden up into one-foot-square sections and plant them each individually.  I’d tinkered with the idea before, but I tried to do it halfway, dividing the spots by measuring them instead of building a physical grid.  That doesn’t work very well, because a square foot seems like a bigger area than it really is when you’re planting tiny seeds, and when things grow, they’re way too crowded.  So this time we’re doing it by the book, building the actual grid and planting what it says a square foot can support. Read more »

One thing low-carbers hear a lot is that we don’t eat enough vegetables.  The USDA’s food pyramid recommends 3-5 servings of vegetables a day, but they also recommend 6-11 servings of grain, so they’re insane.  And since they define a  “serving” of vegetables as a half-cup of cooked veggies or a full cup of raw, most high-carb eaters I know don’t come close to that.  (Remember, corn and potatoes are not vegetables; they’re in the grain category.  Neither is ketchup.)

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