Shallow Thoughts : : Aug

W is for Whiptails

Late summer is whiptail season. Whiptails are long, slender, extremely fast lizards with (as you might expect) especially long tails. They emerge from hibernation at least a month later than the fence lizards, but once they're awake, they're everywhere.

In addition to being pretty to look at, fun to watch as they hit the afterburner and streak across the yard, and challenging to photograph since they seldom sit still for long, they're interesting for several reasons.

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V is for Video Editing with Shotcut

I have a new camera, a Sony a6100. Frustrated with the bugs and limitations of my ancient Rebel XSi, I decided to jump into the world of mirrorless cameras.

So far I'm pleased with it (though sometimes frustrated by its Byzantine menu hierarchy). One of its nice features, which the Rebel didn't have at all, is movies, and I've been shooting a lot of short movies of radio controlled airplanes when we fly at Overlook Park.

That's the problem: a lot of short movies. I'd like to make them available on YouTube so that my fellow pilots can see them; but uploading a movie to YouTube is a low and elaborate process, and uploading eight or so short clips of less than a minute each is just too much work. It would be so much easier if I could edit them together and upload just one movie.

Time to learn some basic video editing.

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U is for Unreliable UI (or: Why Firefox's "Do this automatically this from now on" checkbox is so flaky, and how to work around it)

It's been a frustration with Firefox for years. You click on a link and get the "What should Firefox do with this file?" dialog, even though it's a file type you view all the time -- PDF, say, or JPEG. You click "View in browser" or "Save file" or whatever ... then you check the "Do this automatically for files like this from now on" checkbox, thinking, I'm sure I checked this last time.

Then a few minutes later, you go to a file of the exact same time, and you get the dialog again. That damn checkbox is like the button on street crossings or elevators: a no-op to make you think you're doing something.

I never tried to get to the bottom of why this happens with some PDFs and not others, some JPGs but not others. But Los Alamos puts their government meetings on a site called Legistar. Legistar does everything as PDF -- and those PDFs all trigger this Firefox bug, prompting for a download rather than displaying in Firefox's PDF viewer.

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