Twin Peaks

It's been a while since I mentioned any new gadgets in What's Up, Chuck? That used to be one of its main features. We seem to have most of the gadgets we need.

Until recently we used only Rocky and Silvia for our coffee making. We have a French press but it doesn't get used much.

We got a new gadget. We now have a Bodum Santos vacuum coffee maker. We use it on weekend mornings when we have more time to brew and drink our coffees. It takes about 20 minutes to brew our coffee in it. Somehow, this brewer seems to extract a lot more caffeine than Silvia does. We both get rather buzzed from this coffee.

Jerry suggested that we have some vacuum brewed coffee this evening. As I was getting ready to make the coffee it occurred to me that this was a time-lapse movie opportunity.

I thought that there might be a problem. Usually, after all the water is in the upper chamber I take the pot off of the burner. There's a lot of residual heat in the stove's grate and I thought that it might keep the lower chamber from cooling and sucking the coffee back down quickly enough. There was going to be no way to move the pot off the burner in a way that could be followed smoothly by the camera. I set a fan to blow across the stovetop after I turned the flame off. I figured that the moving air and the heat diffuser would keep the heat in the grate from keeping the pot hot too long. Apparently that worked. After I gave the grounds a stir I turned off the heat and the coffee quickly got drawn down to the lower pot.

Here we see the brewing of coffee in the vacuum coffee maker. It took around 19 minutes. I shot one picture per second and play them back at 24 frames per second.



Damn good coffee!

Bubbles stay on the surface of the grounds after all the water is drawn back to the lower pot. After a long time there will still be bubbles there if I leave the lid on the top. Here's a picture of the grounds after we've enjoyed our coffee. You'll notice that there are still a few bubbles that haven't burst.

Chariots of Fire

Here's one that isn't really worth watching. Unless you want a glimpse of my gams.

I wanted to see if taking pictures of me running and walking on the treadmill at regular intervals and playing them back in a movie would do fun things like making wagon wheels spin backwards in old Westerns.

There are moments of appearing to be walking backward on the belt (but no wagon wheels!) but mostly we get to see me bounce up and down and the treadmill change its incline.

I did two of the treadmill's programmed exercises. First, I did the "Walk in the Park." It runs at a constant rate and increases and decreases the deck's incline. There are seven minutes of that exercise going at 4.5 mph. Then I did the "Interval 1-1" program. That has you go at one pace and inclination for a minute then at another pace and inclination for another minute. Repeat. I alternate between 4.5 and 7.5 mph.

This was shot at a frame each second and played back at 15 frames per second. A minute flies by every four seconds.

White Oleander

Today was another vacation burning day. It was a chore day.

Our yard is lined with oleanders along the front and one side. The oleanders are dying. I thought that cockroaches and oleanders were going to be the survivors of a nuclear holocaust. But the oleanders aren't going to be so lucky. They're dying of Oleander Leaf Scorch (read all about it).

Here's a picture of an oleander that's still on the side of the yard.

That is what oleanders are supposed to look like. (Actually, there are a couple of leaf tips at the top left corner that are showing the scorching.)

Here's one still at the end of the driveway.

Dying.

There is no cure. There is no vaccine. They're going to die.

Instead of waiting until they're dead then starting a new screen to block the view of the highway we decided that now's the time for them to go.

Today I took down the last clump of the oleanders that went across the front of our yard.

Of course (since this blog is all time-lapse all the time) I made a time-lapse video of the process.

I set the intervalometer to have the camera take a shot every three seconds. I play them back in my video at a rate of 30 frames per second. That speeds the action by 90 times. It took a little more than an hour and a half and the video is over in just over a minute (including a four-second title).

After I took the camera in the house I continued to hack at the stumps. There is no way to get them out of there without some heavy duty power equipment. As I was hacking away a car stopped and the driver got out and came over. He's in the tree trimming business and can grind the stumps out. He's a neighbor. I think we'll hire somebody to do that. Maybe him.

This really isn't a terribly interesting movie. If you skip it I won't be upset.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

I finally did what I've wanted to do ever since I got my time-lapse movie gadget.

I spent a nice, warm, Spring day at the San Diego Zoo watching the Galápagos Tortoises while the camera snapped picture after picture.

The Zoo has two recently renovated enclosures for their herds of turtles tortoises. The males and females are segregated. As you know from your reading about Galápagos Tortoises, the various islands of the archipelago host different subspecies of tortoises and they don't want hybrids. So they put males and females of the same subspecies together when the time is right. In the meantime they're kept apart so accidents don't happen.

I got to the Zoo just when they opened and headed straight for the tortoises. I set the camera up at the females' enclosure. The gals were spread around their enclosure. The guys were all clumped up at the near wall so I figured they might not show up well. I set the camera to take a shot every four seconds.

After 50 minutes of filming the females I had to take a break. Nature was calling and I had to answer. They had kind of settled down so it seemed a good time to switch enclosures anyway.

After my brief break I set the camera up at the corner of the males' enclosure. I kept shooting every four seconds. They're in a rather large enclosure and I was using my fisheye lens so I was worried that the tortoises in the distance would be mere dots. It turns out that they show up pretty well wherever they are in the enclosure, at least when they're moving. And move they do. Sped up by in the video they are absolutely hyperactive. But inert at times. At one point they all took a siesta. I thought I was I was not going to get any more action. But after their little naps they perked up and romped around the enclosure again.

The frames of this video were shot every four seconds (15 frames each minute) and played back at 15 frames per second. That speeds the action by a factor of 60.