Milky Way Rises over South Lake Tahoe
Timelapse of the Milky Way rising, shot from South Lake Tahoe, California. This shows two consecutive nights from slightly different perspectives. In the first segment the bright lights at the bottom right hand of the frame are cars descending from Echo Summit on highway 50.
5,998 frames total at 4k 60fps shot on a Sony A7C / 20mm, f1.8, 5s, ISO 1600. Post processed in LRTimelapse, Adobe Lightroom, Filmstro Pro and DaVinci Resolve Studio.
Related Posts
- Stars over Lake Tahoe
- Milky Way and stars over Redding
- Sugarloaf Stars and Milky Way
- Stars from Pine Mountain Lake
- Snowdonia Milky Way Time Lapse
(Published to the Fediverse as: Milky Way Rises over South Lake Tahoe #timelapse #video #stars #4k 4k 60fps time lapse of the Milky Way rising over South Lake Tahoe, California. )
Reviews for April 2023
Spoilers!
Movies
The Thing
I caught the 2011 prequel on Netflix which I completely missed when it came out. The setup was pretty great and then it all got fairly boring once the killing started. As a prequel it's set in the 80's and it's really hard to tell that this is true. There are no cell phones, but then you probably don't have any signal in Antarctica. The vehicles are old, but how often does a Norwegian research station swap out its snow-cats anyway? And everyone is wearing what you'd probably always wear to such a cold destination. It was pretty average horror and I wish I hadn't bothered.
Music
Raw Raw
Nice new K.Flay track.
Podcasts
A Very British Cult
A Very British Cult investigates a life coaching outfit called Lighthouse which seems to be very very expensive and for some reason brings some sort of cheap UK Scientology to mind.
Any Questions
Every so often I'll review a podcast that is a regular listen rather than a series. It feels odd to call Any Questions a podcast as I grew up with it on the radio, but that's what it is to me now.
Any Questions is a long-running comedy panel show in the mold of Just a Minute. Politicians have one minute to talk about a subject without answering the question. As with many BBC panel shows there are many long running gags and in-jokes, like asking for more houses (just not in the community where the program is being hosted this week!), or any question involving HS2.
I went to see it live once but didn't get my question picked. There is a companion program called Any Answers which is less comedy and more care-in-the-community for people who decide to phone in.
I'm Not a Monster Series 2
Series 2 of I'm Not a Monster is The Shamima Begum Story. Begum was stripped of British citizenship after joining IS in Syria as a teenager. The Home Office believes that she is a terrorist and others that she is a victim of child trafficking. Regardless of the truth this didn't turn out well for her and it's hard not to feel some sympathy.
TV
Euphoria Seasons 1 and 2
Euphoria season 1 answers the question: what if Bret Easton Ellis had written Beverly Hills 90210? It's unflinching and hard to watch, a crazy mix of every horrible story about what the teens are up to these days. It makes me want to move my kids to Norway and home school, although I can't due to Brexit. Season 2 answers the question: what if Bret Easton Ellis quit and they had to go with a committee instead. It's initially gratuitous and then gradually becomes boring and self referential. I don't think I'm up for Season 3.
I downloaded this to watch on a flight and all things considered it's probably good that it didn't work. But HBO, really. I've been paying you for years and using the same phone and account for years and the second you don't like the look of my IP address you bail on me? For travel only Netflix really gets this right and works pretty consistently. Every other streaming provider seems to fail horribly at the slightest sign of travel.
(All images included with ITHCWY reviews are the property of their respective owners and are used to illustrate reviews only.)
Related Posts
- Reviews for May 2023
- Reviews for January 2023
- Reviews for March 2023
- Reviews for April 2024
- Reviews for February 2023
(Published to the Fediverse as: Reviews for April 2023 #reviews #video Reviews for April 2023 )
Bangalore and Back, a Time Lapse
The latest installment in my series of Bangalore time lapses. This one is about the interminable journey and all of the airports.
Related Posts
(Published to the Fediverse as: Bangalore and Back, a Time Lapse #timelapse #video #bangalore #india Time lapse video showing a trip to Bangalore, India and back. That's a lot of 747s and airports. )
Predicting when fog will flow through the Golden Gate using ML.NET
I'd like to make a time lapse of the moment when fog enters the Golden Gate and flows under the Golden Gate Bridge. It's surprisingly hard to know when conditions will be just right though. Often the weather is pleasant at my house while the fog is sneaking through and there is very little chance of me checking a webcam or satellite image. I decided to fix this about a year ago and started collecting data. The best bet seemed to be GOES-West CONUS - Band 2 which is a high resolution daylight satellite image that shows clouds and fog. I put together a Google Apps Script project to save an hourly snapshot and left if running. Here's a video of the data so far, zoomed in for a HD aspect ratio and scaled up a bit:
It's pretty obvious to me when conditions are just right. Could an ML model learn that this was about to happen from an image that was three hours older?
The first step was dividing thousands of images into two classes - frames where the fog would be perfect in three hours and frames where this was not going to happen. I built a little WPF tool to label the data (I don't use this often these days and every time I do I marvel at how the Image control has defaults that won't show the image FFS). This had the potential to be tedious so I built in some heuristics to flag likely candidates and then knocked out the false positives. Because the satellite images include clouds there is often white in the Golden Gate that is cloud cover rather than fog. At the end of the process I had two subfolders full of images to work with.
My goal this weekend was to get something working, and then refine every few months as I get more data. Right now I have 18 images that are in the Fog class and 7,539 that are NoFog. I also wanted this running on my blog, which is .NET 4.8 and will stay that way until I get a couple of weeks of forced bed rest. ML.NET says that it's based on .NET Standard and so should run anywhere.
Having local automl is very cool once you get it working. For large datasets this might not be a great option, but not having to wrangle with the cloud was also very appealing for this project.
Getting GPU training configured involved many gigabytes of installs. Get the latest Visual Studio 2022. Get the latest ML.NET model builder. Sign up for an NVIDIA developer account and install terrifyingly old and specific versions of CUDA and cuDNN. This last part was the worst because the CUDA installer wanted to downgrade my graphics driver, warned directly that this would cause problems and then claimed that it couldn't find a supported version of Visual Studio. I nervously unchecked everything that was already installed, and so far model builder has run fine and I don't seem to have caused any driver problems.
For image classification settings you can choose micro-accuracy (the default), macro-accuracy, logarithmic loss, or logarithmic loss reduction. Micro-accuracy is based on the contribution of all classes and unsurprisingly it's useless in this case as just predicting 'no' works very well overall. Maco-accuracy is the average of the accuracy of each class and this produced reasonable results for me. Possibly too good, I probably have some overfitting and will spend some time on that soon.
After training the model builder has an evaluate tab which is pretty worthless, at least for this model/case. You can spot check the prediction for specific images, and then there is one overall number for the performance of the model. I'm used to looking at precision and recall and it looks like I'll have to spend some time building separate tooling to do this. Hopefully this will improve in future versions.
At this point I have a .NET 6 console application that can make plausible looking predictions. Overall I'm very impressed with how easy it was to get this far.
Integrating with my blog though was very sad. After a lot of NuGet'ing and Googling I came to realize that ML.NET will not play nice with .NET 4.8, at least for image classification. Having dared to anger the NuGet gods I did a git reset --hard and called out to a new .NET 6 process to handle the classification. For my application I'm only running the prediction once per hour so I'm not bothered by performance. That .NET Standard claim proved to be unhelpful and I could have used just about anything.
The model is now running hourly. I have put up a dedicated page, Golden Gate Fog Prediction, with the latest forecast and plan to improve this over time. If this would be a useful tool for you please leave a comment below (right now it emails me when there is a positive prediction, it could potentially email a list of people).
Updated 2023-03-12 23:24:
After building some tooling to quantify this first model I have some hard metrics to add. Precision is 23%. This means there is a high rate of false positives. Recall is 78%. This means that when there really is fog the model does a pretty good job of predicting it. Overall the f1 score is 35% which is not great. In practice the model doesn't miss the condition I'm trying to detect often but it will send you out only to be disappointed most of the time. I'm not that surprised given how few positive cases I had to work with so far. My next steps are collecting more training data and looking more carefully at the labeling process to make sure I'm not missing some reasonable positive cases.
Related Posts
- Google Cloud Vision Sightings
- Golden Gate Bridge Timelapse
- June Gloom
- Timelapse, Week of Jan 31 2022
- Fog over Twin Peaks
(Published to the Fediverse as: Predicting when fog will flow through the Golden Gate using ML.NET #code #video #ml #fog Using Microsoft's AutoML in ML.NET to build an image classifier that predicts fog flowing under the Golden Gate Bridge. )
World Webcams 2
This is a 4k sequel to the World Time Lapse movie I made many years ago. It also uses webcams from the Catfood WebCamSaver database. I used a Google Apps Script project to save frames, upscaled to 4K using Topaz Gigapixel AI, turned the upscaled frames into movies with ffmpeg, and finally edited the highlights together with DaVinci Resolve.
Related Posts
- World Time Lapse
- Time Zone Time Lapse
- 4K One Year Global Cloud Timelapse
- West of West Portal
- Catfood: WebCamSaver and PdfScan
(Published to the Fediverse as: World Webcams 2 #timelapse #video #catfood #webcamsaver #4k A 4k time lapse of many different webcams around the world (from the Catfood WebCamSaver database). )
Timelapse of San Francisco Clouds After Various Atmospheric Rivers
Four time lapse sequences of cool clouds over San Francisco at sunset following the January 2022 sequence of atmospheric rivers.
Related Posts
(Published to the Fediverse as: Timelapse of San Francisco Clouds After Various Atmospheric Rivers #timelapse #video #clouds #sanfrancisco #sunset #4k Post atmospheric river (January 2022) sunset time lapse from San Francisco, California. )
San Francisco 311 Cases Animation
This animation shows a random sample of 311 cases that have a photo and specific location. It covers July 4, 2013 to January 5, 2023. Created using the 311 dataset plotted over a street map of San Francisco.
Related Posts
- San Francisco Crime 2003 to 2021
- Assassination Coordinates
- San Francisco New Year's Eve Timelapse 2020
- San Francisco Street Tree Datalapse
- Coronavirus Visualization Update
(Published to the Fediverse as: San Francisco 311 Cases Animation #etc #video #animation #sanfrancisco #311 Animation of a sample of San Francisco 311 cases from 2013 to 2023 (photo and location) )
Reviews for January 2023
Spoilers!
Books
Borne
Borne by Jeff VanderMeer is a Ballardian visit to a ruined city where biotech from a mysterious corporation has spread out and taken over. Borne is a fast growing lump of said biotech, found on a giant flying Bear by a scavenger called Rachel. Then, things get weird. Excellent book, and there is another installment called Dead Astronauts which I will get to soon(ish).
Movies
Berlin Syndrome
Australian girl falls for the wrong German guy, much captivity and violence ensues. Meh.
Emergency Declaration
Emergency Direction is a Korean film where a hemorrhagic virus is released onto a plane. It's reasonably diverting although fairly predictable. What I loved about it is that the introduction banged on about what a big deal an emergency declaration was and that it was martial law for a plane and they could land with top priority anywhere. By the time the captain declares an emergency half the passengers are dead, everyone else is infected and at least two countries had threatened to shoot them down. But being the title of the film they linger on it like it's a big deal that will change everything.
Lou
Allison Janney plays Liam Neeson rescuing a kidnapped child. I enjoyed it a lot.
The Lost City
The Lost City with Sandra Bullock, Channing Tatum and Daniel Radcliffe is trying to bring Romancing the Stone back. It's funny.
Troll
Roar Uthaug is the undisputed master of Norwegian disaster movies. Troll is less enthralling than his waves and earthquakes and tunnels though. There is a scene with some helicopters toting church bells that is worth the price of admission (free with Netflix) but the ending is very underwhelming. Also, a lot of it reads like a criticism of a multicultural Norway what with Christianity having driven the Trolls out to start with, and the need for church bells to scare the beast away. Then that plot is dropped and a Muslim soldier is introduced like some scriptwriters were fundamentally at odds with each other. Reasonably fun though.
Music
Habits (Acoustic)
I'm listening to a lot of Tove Lo at the moment, and this acoustic version of Habits is why YouTube beats the living daylights out of any Dolby Atmos enabled streaming service.
Podcasts
Crypto Island
Crypto Island from PJ Vogt barely got started and then slowly died with months between episodes. Vogt tells a good story so it was worth a listen when it occasionally appeared but it was hard to piece together. I'm looking forward to whatever he does next, and he's apparently working on something.
The New Gurus
New Year's resolution: write more reviews. I stopped using Goodreads for anything meaningful a few years ago but had integrated it into my blog CMS to automatically post reviews. As a result these have become a little sad. I've just whipped up a new review system that doesn't use Goodreads as motivation to both write more and to review things that are not books (gasp).
The New Gurus is a BBC Podcast presented by Helen Lewis that surveys all kinds of modern woo. From bitcoin to productivity via health scams and equity training. As a skeptically inclined person I loved it and binged the whole series over a couple of days. Helen concludes that the New Gurus are mostly men mostly looking to find the right path to masculinity. I think you always need to be looking for what they're selling beyond the obvious - if it's vitamin supplements or a political candidacy the cult suddenly makes a lot more sense. With only half an hour per topic I also found myself wishing she could spend more time on each - I'd happily listen to a series on most of the subjects covered here. Highly recommended unless you're a believer in which case it will probably make you quite mad.
The Reith Lectures
I always enjoy The Reith Lectures, it's what the BBC is for. They also have a massive archive which is fun to dig through. This year has four speakers covering FDR's four freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.
Two standouts for me. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie covered freedom of speech, and in the sense that I understand it, which is that you might get offended. An absolute barnstormer of a lecture. At the other end of the spectrum Rowan Williams mounted an incredibly poor defense for the freedom to worship. His central point seems to be that we need to prioritize minority opinions (i.e. Anglicans) in order to make progress on human issues and to the best of my recollection religion has usually been dragged to the new consensus at the end rather than the beginning. He also cloaked this intellectual dishonesty in feminism and gay rights which is frankly offensive from the former leader of a church that won't marry gays and doesn't think women can handle the job. I loved both for very different reasons.
TV
Bosch Legacy
I enjoyed the Bosch series on Amazon Prime. I haven't read the actual Bosch novels (there are a lot, if I start I might ever end) but I have read the four that costar Renée Ballard and those are pretty good. So I had high expectations for this new series.
Bosch Legacy is not on Amazon Prime, it's on Amazon Freevee which Amazon somewhat confusingly describes as a 'premium free streaming service'. Sounds too good to be true, and it is. It's chock full of really bad ads. I pay all kinds of money to avoid ads but in this case you can't even buy the series on Amazon, you have to choke down those ads to watch it. It's not as clunky as Hulu, but it suffers from not having many advertisers and so by the time I've seen the same ad for the 50th time I loathe that company with a vengeance. I'll never buy their products in the future out of spite, and if I happen to have any in the house I'll use the ad break to throw them out. Also, after using Hulu once I never did again. I think Freevee is in the same category.
At least all those ads paid to bring Bosch back to the faithful, right? Well, yes and no. The core cast of Titus Welliver, Mimi Rogers, Madison Lintz are fantastic and the plot is there, but the production is cheap and shows it. Early on Bosch's nice house which must cost a few bucks to film in gets red tagged and he's forced to move into some generic office. And they can't afford many cameras or crew either, there are regular cuts that just look off (like in a conversation when switching between actors and the person is clearly not quite where they should be). Overall it was OK, but tainted by being too cheap and in a bad streaming neighborhood.
His Dark Materials Season Three
The BBC/HBO version of His Dark Materials wraps up with season three based on Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass. What a fantastic trilogy. And after the disappointing film this adaptation is a revelation. Pullman is going after the Catholic Church specifically and religion in general, but in a world of materialized souls in the form of daemons and actual angels. In the end the church is defeated and the multiverse saved by individual sacrifice more than the army assembled for the final battle. What a heartbreaking ending. Amazing.
Jack Ryan Series 3
Jack Ryan is back, thwarting an attempt to overthrow the Russian government. Right now that seems like it might be a good idea? Is he the baddie? This is very much Tom Clancy's and not Tom Clancy, but for Season 3 they've figured out that in a spy thriller the plot is of little consequence if it's happening with urgency against a backdrop of beautiful European cities and I'll watch that all day (or at least for a few nights). The main problem was watching this the same month as Slow Horses.
Slow Horses Season 2
I love Mick Herron's Slough House books and was very excited that Apple adapted them for TV. The second season just dropped, and it's even better than the first. Still very faithful to the book but the characters are more comfortable and distinct. I hope they start work on the Oxford Investigations as well (a different but also good set of Herron books). With the first season I was very unconvinced by Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb (in my head this role was played by Daniel Ryan). Oldman has managed to get a lot more Lamb-like for season 2.
The White Lotus Season Two
The second season of The White Lotus is good but not great. There is a moment when Jennifer Coolidge's Tanya McQuiod asks for an Oreo Cheesecake and it's such a devastatingly wrong thing to ask for at a hotel in Sicily but a humanizing moment at the same time. But this series is more of a murder mystery and less of a tone poem. It's just a little less lucious, and outrageous and funny and relaxing. Please stop now and don't make any more. We don't need to go to The White Lotus Rochester Parkway.
Treason
Treason on Netflix is a brief five episode double-crossing spy caper. It's a little soapy - sort of a Harlan Coben's Bond, if that Bond was stuck in London.
(All images included with ITHCWY reviews are the property of their respective owners and are used to illustrate reviews only.)
Related Posts
- Reviews for December 2023
- Reviews for August 2023
- Reviews for October 2023
- Reviews for April 2024
- Reviews for September 2023
(Published to the Fediverse as: Reviews for January 2023 #reviews #podcasts #helenlewis #mickherron #bbc #pjvogt #video #jeffvandermeer Reviews on I Thought He Came With You for January 2023 )
Assassination Coordinates
Testing out some shapefile code with a zoom into San Francisco. This uses five different shapefiles:
Country borders are from Eric Muller's fips-10 shapefile.
States and US Counties come from the United States Census Bureau.
San Francisco 5 foot elevation contours from DataSF.
Finally the street map for San Francisco is from data.gov.
These are almost all based on different projections and I did my best to actually line everything up but if you're heading over for coffee it's probably best to stick with Google Maps.
Related Posts
- San Francisco 311 Cases Animation
- San Francisco Street Tree Datalapse
- San Francisco Crime 2003 to 2021
- Coronavirus Hikes: March 2020
- Timelapse, Week of Jan 17 2022
(Published to the Fediverse as: Assassination Coordinates #etc #video #sanfrancisco #shapefile #animation Animation that zooms from a global map to the streets of San Francisco using five different shapefiles. )
Landing at SFO
Time lapse of a Boeing 777-300ER landing at San Francisco International Airport (SFO).
Shot on a Pixel 6 Pro in 10x timelapse mode wedged into a window with the blind closed. I thought I'd just get some clouds but happily the crew didn't force us to open all the blinds, so the video shows us entering California with heavy clouds (a plane with contrails going the other way right at the start), clouds clearing as we cross California and then the full landing. Bit of dirt on the window unfortunately but still quite happy with the result. The flight was from Frankfurt.
Related Posts
(Published to the Fediverse as: Landing at SFO #timelapse #video #sfo #sanfrancisco #plane Time lapse video of a Boeing 777-300ER landing at SFO. )