What I learned today: Get elevations from Photos

Getting Elevations from Bricks in Photographs

Three vertical bricks = Approx: 8”

Example: You measure out a count of 18 (3 bricks each) from a wall, multiply 8”, then divide by 12 giving you a total height of 12.0′

In that example I used the “Count” tool in Photoshop CS4.

Land of Cockaigne is gone!

Developer of my favorite synth: Quantum 64 (a video game sound synthesizer) Mikko Hyyrylainen seems to have gone AWOL from the web – I cannot find his website anywhere. So I have decided to archive his work here, minus Morpheus – since I cannot find it anywhere. If anyone knows where Mikko Hyyrylainen’s new website is I will take these down immediately. All of these synthesizers/effects were created by Mikko, I take no credit whatsoever.

Edit: Morpheus has been added! Thank you Peter!

	Morpheus is a velocity sensitive FM sampler with 2-pole multimode filter. User can use any individual wave sample as modulator and other one as carrier signal. It’s concept is very simple but it can produce a wide range of quite unusual dark ambient, noise or industrial atmospheric sounds in the spirit of David Lynch’s Eraserhead. When wide stereo sample is used as a carrier (for example pad with lots of reverb) one can achieve interesting stereo textures. These sounds beg for huge delays and reverbs. Be not alarmed about the size of the download, it includes few samples for the factory preset patches.

	Little Duck is an emulation of the classic analogue stereo filter bank. It has five different filter modes, triangle LFO synced to it’s internal pulse clock and an envelope follower with sidechain operation mode.

	Oberon is an attempt to imitate the classic analog polysynths. 2 special oscillators with sync. 2 envelopes. 1 LFO. A special 2-pole double filter.

	Panzertank PM4 is a virtual phase modulation synth very much like the famous FM synthesizers. It has four sinus operators (oscillators) with individual APDSR envelopes, detune and velocity sensitivity. There are six schemes or algorithms to construct the sound.

	Phibes electric organ tries to capture the sound of those sweet sixties organs. It is definitely no Hammond B3 or Vox Continental but rather some obscure and cheap east-european imitation of them.It has 9 drawbars with five different tones and, independent vibrato, tremolo and rotator effects and staccato mode. Even though Phibes organ is quite simple instrument, it is very CPU-intensive with over ten oscillators and filters.

	Quantum 64 is a harsh and aliased digital synth with single DCO and multimode filter. It is inspired by Commodore 64’s SID sound chip but it definitely is no emulation. The two special ingredients that make the soul of Quantum 64 are the arpeggiator and the degrader/quantiser unit.

	Satyr Features: 2 oscillators with variable waves. An additional sub Osc. Noise generator. Ring, FM & Amplitude modulation and sync. 3 ADSR time/level envelopes (2 assignable) with delays and manual triggering. 2 variable LFOs with sample & hold. Internal clock for BPM synced LFOs. 16 different modulation destinations. 2 filters – one 4-pole lowpass and one 2-pole multimode. Filters can be in parallel or serial mode, among others. There are two versions of Satyr available: normal Satyr that is 4-note polyphonic and Satyr-8 that is 8-note polyphonic.

HQ Automen 5.0 Xvid settings.

Rifftrax are some of my favorite downloads from Usenet, unfortunately they are encoded in an .mp4 container with dual audio (one being the riff, the other the original from the movie) – Lifehacker today alerted me to a good free video transcoder called Automen. Now I use an old Tvix box at home to watch my downloaded videos, and they need to be in .avi format – so here are my HQ Xvid settings so I can watch my favorite rifftrax movies on my Tvix box.

1. If the video is dual-audio select “Audio PID 1″
2. Codec: Xvid
3. Video Resize: Original Size
4. Final Size: 1170.00
5. Video Preset: XviD 1 pass Quality High
6. Audio Quality: Lame Preset: 128
7. Everything else should be to its default setting… now click start.

That’s it!

Why I’m not voting…

1. I can’t vote, I haven’t re-registered in three years… opps.
2. The Libertarian party has gone down the crapper, they chose Bob Barr as their candidate. What the hell were they thinking? If you don’t know who this person is just ready this too-good-to-be-true Wikipedia profile. OR just let The Onion do the talking…

Views:
Pretty much the same as Ron Paul’s, but without the avuncular charm

Issues:
(1995–2007) Trying to control the faith, sexuality, reproduction, drug use, and national allegiance of every single American. (2007–) Aw, Fuck it.

Looks Like:
Effeminate maître d’

Role In Clinton Impeachment:
Finger-pointer

Average Time To Summarize Libertarian Philosophy To Stranger:
4 hours, 16 minutes

As President, He Pledges To:
Use his platform to apologize for things he supported as a Republican

Jobless since June…

It is almost November and I’ve been unemployed for the longest stretch in my entire life. After L-3 Communications let all of the temporary workers go, I thought it would be a matter of days before I would have another job. Time keeps ticking away…

My mornings consist of constant Monster, CareerBuilder, and Dice look ups to see if anything has come up in my area of expertise. I have submitted my resume over 118 times to different companies – can it really be this bad? Dominoes Pizza won’t call me back… which is fine by me! I don’t need to deliver their stupid pizzas anyway.

The biggest disappointment is that I have very good contacts, each of them wants me to work for them – they just don’t have the money in the budget right now. The next time I hear this I’m going to punch somebody in the balls.