Week recap
Weekly recap on important things.
Podcast
Not only we recorded a new episode of Radio Badger with Roisi, Viktor and Robbie, but also previous episode was finished and released all over the Internet. In August it’ll be turning one year, and Roisi had an idea of having live broadcast on that day in front of the audience. Sounds like fun.
Blog on the episode 17 with shownotes and links is here.
Photography
Did a bike trip on Monday to the West End Cameras shop in Euston. Now I have a stock of film developer, fixer, stop bath and photo flo solution from Kodak. It takes 50 min to get on bike from Euston back to Bethnal Green, if you have no idea where you’re going. Got a bit lost, and then rode along the channel pretty much all the way to Haggerston.
This bunch of chems allowed me to successfully process 2 rolls of 35mm film - and with negatives in hand I got a session at the local darkroom for printing. Yesterday me and Stanisla spent 4 hours at Four Corners Film studio doing prints, and seems like both of us enjoyed it big time. I think we managed to do about 40-50 prints, all of them where left to dry in the studio until Monday. Expect some scans soon.
Finished a batch of stereoscopic pictures from my trip to California. If you have necessary hardware - like red-cyan 3D glasses or a 3DTV - have a look.
Web dev
Got pretty excited about PostCSS this week. It’s an elegant solution to skip CSS pre-processing nonsense and simply post-process CSS with whatever extra stuff you might put into it. Practically it is BabelJS for CSS, with lots of plugins already created by the community. There is also CSSnext plugin that allows you to start using CSS4 features. The issue with current project we have is that all styles are in LESS, which somewhat limits what you can do. Since LESS must be compiled first, you can’t put any non-less syntax into it - and so CSS4 features will have to wait. You can still do lots - like lint styles against Can I Use database, and make automatic fallbacks for older browsers. It’s hard to be excited about CSS, but Andrey Sitnik somehow made it possible.
Video
Finally tried Microsoft Hyperlapse Pro preview on Windows by feeding it one of my skydiving videos. It took quite a while to process it, and to be completely honest the result wasn’t great. I think Hyperlapse app from Instagram on the phone would perform better in this situation - but that’s kind of unfair comparison. There are no gyro or motion sensors on GoPro or sport cameras in general, yet there is a need for hyperlapsing (or maybe that’s just me). I think GoPro will get sensors in the next 1-2 generations, and then things will be much easier. But for now smartphone is the tool for hyperlapsing.
Gadgets
We got a smoothie machine, and so far it’s been incredible. Main feature of this machine is 4 detachable bottles of 2 different sizes. Get a bottle, put ingredients, smooth everything together, detach a bottle and take it with you. Large version of the bottle is enough to replace a good breakfast - especially if you put a generous amount of peanut butter and cocoa into it. Must research smoothies with coffee.
Writing
Finished a blog on our trip to Corfu island - accompanied with short film. Also iA Writer is amazing and actually helps with the process. Write - leave it to cool down - review - edit - repeat.