niji to the bug

Link to YouTube if the video isn't embedding properly.



A boring 15-minute video I made to test my GoPro and iMovie. It's just birds on the feeder and the cat watching them--if you need to chill out and watch birds it's great for that.

If you just want the highlights reel, there's a moment of action at 7:30 as Sora jumps onto the windowsill and scares some birds, then he starts sniffing the camera about 8:00. Be sure to stop it before then if you think your heart can't handle the excitement. What I think is our female cardinal, Hera, flies down about 7:00. Around 12:40, you can catch a glimpse of a house finch stuffing sunflower seeds down the gullet of one of its young on the feeder on the right, and at 13:00 they fly up to the fence and the almost-grown chick continues begging.

Wildlife seen: house finches, white-winged doves, cardinal, house cat (inside).

I'm working on how to export it in HD because of course I am. I made some more video this afternoon that features a squirrel climbing down the pole and grabbing seed from the feeder on the right. I bet you can't wait.

We had storms come through yesterday evening. Yesterday was also trash pickup day, and our street is slightly inclined, so you can guess that there were large rivers of runoff flowing curbside, right through where the trash bins had been put out. Most people had put their bins away by the time the storm began, but a few hadn't. Wind blew open the lids of several, which most likely produced a noxious soup inside them ('round here we put trash in plastic bags before tossing, but there's always ones with holes or something else that causes nasty-smelling leaks).

And one of the bins from up the street decided to go walkabout. We caught sight of the bin majestically sailing all the way down the street--we had no idea where it came from, and it was raining pretty heavily--so didn't bother to chase it. It was a magnificent(-ly hilarious) sight, and the capper came when the bin followed the rules of the road and halted at the stop sign.

( Proof! )

Bought a GoPro camera this week, because I WANTED ONE and not because I had any need for one. We are both highly impressed at what this thing can do. It uses a 64G microSD card, and will also shoot at 1080p. So you get 3.5 hours of hi-def video onto a card THE SIZE OF MY THUMBNAIL. Actually, slightly smaller than the size of my thumbnail.

The limiting factor is battery life: I set the camera on the windowsill to film the bird feeders while we went to theg rocery store and breakfast, and the battery died after a bit over an hour of that. XD If I count the time earlier this week I spent messing about with it, it will probably film for about 1.5 hours before crapping out. You can get a separate battery pack that will just about double that length.

I plan on doing minimal editing (mostly to remove the boobtacular shot as I set the camera up at the very first--I'd be tempted to leave it in, but it's also extremely unflattering of my face and head XD), then uploading the results to YouTube so you can have an hour of bird- and cat-watching if you need to just chill.

The finch babies are out and pestering their parents, by the way. I can hear one going FEEDMEFEEDMEFEEDMEFEEDME from my office as I type this right now. With luck I've got at least one doing that on video. :)

Sitting in the waiting room at the doctor's office (nothing major, just a follow up on something previously), and OH GOD WHY DO WE HAVE TO HAVE A TELEVISION ON? It's playing some sort if special medical-office channel giving tips about health BUT WHAT IS WRONG WITH SILENCE?

Sent from my Apple ][e