January has been nearly all timelapse at ITHCWY. First up I have my annual New Year's Eve production, this time a portrait of the Embarcadero in San Francisco. Apparently the Port Authority and US Army Corps of Engineers have a plan to lift this stretch of shoreline by 7 feet to protect it from climate change. I also got a chance to visit Miami, and produced a timelapse of the skyline and the world's latest largest cruise ship, the Icon of the Seas. It's so big it can spell it's own name out using windows as pixels. This is the ship causing the climate change that necessitates lifting the Embarcadero. Finally some present day construction, two months of light rail track replacement on my street.
This movie hangs on the fact that dealing with the owners of your Airbnb showing up and needing to stay there is way harder to deal with than the actual end of the world. This is totally true and pulled off in a masterful and cringeworthy way. I loved Sam Esmail's Mr Robot and there are similar vibes and shots at work while leaving the world behind. I think it's supposed to be more explicitly about race, but nearly every line would work without that dynamic. The social awkwardness here is universal. The ending is great as well. Highly recommended.
Level 16
Level 16 is about a residential school for girls who will get adopted soon. Of course something darker is going on and it's pretty dark. It's super derivative but nicely done and worth a watch.
Rebel Moon – Part One
Rebel Moon has an incredible visual style, a disturbing bad guy and some off-brand lightsabers. The dialog is clunky and I have already forgotten the plot. I'm sure I'll watch the second part and maybe it ends up going somewhere but this installment is just pulling the gang together in the style of the first few minutes of an A-Team episode with a decent SFX budget.
Music
Lazy
I love a lot of Baby Queen. This one is an anthem for my current Saturday morning.
TV
Doctor Who 2023 Specials
I drifted out of watching Doctor Who at the start of the Jodie Whittaker / Chris Chibnall era. It has always been an uneven program with some silly concepts occasionally punctuated by enough sci-fi genius to make it all worthwhile. With Chibnall that equation changed for me and it just seemed boring. I was pretty excited to see that Russell T Davies was back at the helm and the four specials were pretty good, an unexpected encore for David Tennant and Catherine Tate and a brief introduction for Ncuti Gatwa. I'll be tuning in next year to see how Davies and Gatwa do once out of the confines of Christmas Special land. I couldn't be happier that the TARDIS is recognizably the machine from my youth even if it is filled with questionable ramps. What was great about the 80's TARDIS is that it was bigger on the inside but only a little bit. You have complete control over time and space and you just move the walls over a foot to fit in a hatstand (I know, there was more behind another door, but that rarely came into play). I really hated the steampunk control room and I hope it never comes back. My fondest wish for the program is that the Doctor drops his sonic screwdriver down a wormhole and has to start relying on his wits a bit more. An occasional plot device has become almost the only plot device and he's a Time Lord not a superhero Anyway, fingers crossed for the next series.
For All Mankind Season 4
For All Mankind is getting into middle age, but it's still a great series. This installment is all about an uneasy Mars base and the future of space exploration. Also some moonshine.
Slow Horses Season 3
Slow Horses just keeps getting better. A must watch series.
(All images included with ITHCWY reviews are the property of their respective owners and are used to illustrate reviews only.)
Timelapse of Miami from South Beach. One cloudy night and then a nice sunset. At the end you can see a night departure of the Icon of the Seas, the new largest cruise ship in the world.
My poor street has had the works over the past few years. PG&E upgraded the gas lines. Then everything got ripped up for new water mains. We got two new poles. And then new sewers. I'm a little surprised the houses are still standing.
Over the last couple of months the train tracks for the L Taraval have been replaced. They're only two years younger than me, but I'm happy to report that they looked in much worse shape. Here's a time lapse of the whole process:
You'll see that they opened a chasm right in front of my garage early in the project and the plan called for it to be almost the last hole to fill in at the end. I'd be more excited if the L Taraval went anywhere useful. When I moved into my house it stopped right in front and then whisked you quickly downtown. Since then that stop was removed, and then the L terminated at West Portal to make room for M and N people and has been replaced by a bus for the duration of the pandemic and track replacement service.
With perfect comedic timing we also just got a letter from PG&E saying that they now need to dig everything up all over again. Probably we need medium rather than high pressure?
I have a tradition of making a time lapse of San Francisco on New Year's Eve. This year I focused on the Embarcadero:
The time lapse opens with a view of the Bay Bridge from Cupid's Span in Rincon Park. Then behind the Ferry Building for two departures and one arrival. Next is a view of downtown from the middle of Pier 7. From there some Embarcadero proper from the perspective of the glass tiles looking towards the Exploratorium and then looking across the street at Coit Tower and the Transamerica Pyramid from Pier 35. After that we have the Richmond Bridge visible behind Alcatraz and Angel Island and the SkyStar Wheel in its new home, both shot from the end of Fisherman's Wharf. Finally the Golden Gate Bridge with some brave swimmers in the foreground at Aquatic Park. This is just past the Embarcadero but I broke the theme a little to get all three bridges.
(Published to the Fediverse as:
Embarcadero #timelapse#video#sanfrancisco Time lapse of the Embarcadero in San Francisco on New Year's Eve 2023, from Cupid's Span to Fisherman's Wharf.)
Catfood Earth 4.40 includes the latest time zone database and also some fixes for the locations, volcanoes and weather radar layers. If you use any of that please update.
I'm slowly replacing myself with an LLM. Currently I'm on Rob 2.1 which features a fine tuned version of GPT 3.5, retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and some prompt tuning. You can chat with it in the comments. Don't worry, it's not blogging yet, the aim is to start sending it to some meetings.
I got the Aura Carver Mat for Christmas. It's a nice 10 inch digital photo frame with great Google Photos integration - hook it up to an album, invite people to the album, add photos. You can also use the Aura app for sharing but a Google Photos album is way easier. I got this to replace an Echo show because I had started spending too much time switching off all the ads. Even after you've toggled off every bit of marketing fluff the thing still shows you ads. It's one thing if it was sold as ad supported but quite another to continually sneak them in via software updates. I like Alexa and so I replaced it with the Echo Studio (so much sound) and this frame which so far just works.
One minor detail is that this frame is designed to sit on a desk or shelf and does not contemplate living on a wall. I designed this discrete shelf for wall mounting. It's pretty small which is good, I'd recommend some double sided tape or similar to stop the frame from sliding sideways in case you're as bad at using a spirit level as me (or live in an earthquake zone, also like me).
OpenSCAD code below, or grab the STL from Thingiverse.
(Published to the Fediverse as:
3D Printing a discreet wall mount shelf for the Aura Carver Mat #etc#3dprint#openscad#thingiverse#alexa#amazon STL and OpenSCAD for a wall mounting bracket for the Aura Carver Mat 10 inch Digital Photo Frame)
Winter starts right now for those of us at the top of the planet. It's summer time down under. Winter Solstice 2023 rendered in Catfood Earth (03:28 on December 22, 2023 UTC).
(Published to the Fediverse as:
Winter Solstice 2023 #code#winter#solstice#catfood#earth The exact moment of Winter Solstice 2023 (03:28 UTC on December 22) rendered in Catfood Earth.)
