Build video from Images

If you ever want to make a video from a bunch of screen shots, or want to build a time lapse video.

This tutorial works great from Andrew Noske:

Option 3: VirtualDub...... (free, but Windows only)

VirtualDub is for Windows only and was designed for creating and editing AVI files. Once you've installed the program from here. 

1. Open VirtualDub then click File > Open, then select the first image in the sequence.
2. Click Video > Frame Rate, to change the frame rate (once loaded).
3. Click File > Save as AVI to save.

To combine videos, and do cool side by side videos, I like OpenShot (open source) video editor. 

Comet Neowise!

So after longing to see comet Neowise night after night as I began my journey into astrophotography I decided to venture out to Mukilteo beach with my gf. I kept looking for it from home, but stellarium indicated that it was below the tree line. Dang! So off we went! It was a refreshing change of pace for both of us. We found a log on the beach some distance away from some folks having a campfire, so there was some ambient light. 

I setup my new skywatcher adventure pro mount with my canon t4i camera. I shot a total of 14 minutes (@ 30 second subs) with my intervolemeter. I used my EFS 18-135mm lens @ 122mm to zoom in a fair amount.  Below is the result after using deepskystacker to merge all the images together, I used GIMP to tweak the levels, and curves to help bring out the trail detail.

Super cool!

Comet Neowise (7/19/20)

Comet Neowise live from the camera! We could see it in realtime!

Comet Neowise from 25mm focal length, you can see the ferry in the bottom left.

CNC Machine

Random aside - Digging up some old links, I stumbled onto my CNC machine blog post (which at the time I did on a forum).

https://www.cnczone.com/forums/cnc-wood-router-project-log/125139-cnc-engineering.html

Diving head first... Astrophotography!

Canon T4i with new 300 mm telephoto lens

We'll I've thrown myself into the deep end again. This time its astrophotography... Struggling to get a successful image stack of any kind for the past three days. I've been trying my hand @ doing image stacking using my Canon T4i DSLR with static tripod setup pointed at some bright stars in city limits with very low expectations. I must be a crazy person - running out into the neighborhood in the middle of the night with my camera...

I just wanted to go through the motions and see if I could get a stack even if its ugly! I've used standard telephoto lenses @135mm and @300mm zoom and long exposures (5-15 seconds per shot) and attempted to combine with deepskystacker (using both dark's and lights). I tried on vega, denab, and arcturas as my focal spots because they stood out in the sky.


I've made mistakes and gained a lesson from each:

Arcturas - short exposure (1s)

(1) Arcturas - super duper cloudy - probably wasn't worth shooting at all, because i could barely make it out with my own eyes, and camera only picked up like 5 stars at most. Did it anyway cause I need to get my hands dirty. (lots of 1 second exposures) Probably didn't expose long enough to pick up anything meaningful.

Vega - too long an exposure (30s)

(2) Vega - a little better of a night partially cloudy - whisps of clouds went across some of the photos, but in hindsight all my photos were exposed too long (30 seconds) and the stars streaked. I also forgot to manually set it off of auto-iso for pretty much all the data.
(3) Denab - Clear night - visibility index was 23% (my gf told me from some app - no idea what) Neighbors turning on/off lights, i ignored this, and tried to move where in the neighborhood lights weren't directly blaring at the lens. Looking at the pictures, it seems obvious that I wasn't focused right. This was the first night i transition from the 18-135mm lens to the 75-300mm lens, so lots more zoom, but I guess cause I ddin't zoom in on the screen i couldn't tell that it wasn't focused...

Deneb - Focus it stupid!

Oooof! This is a slog. Regardless of throwing these stacks of 100- 170 photos into deepskystacker, I can't get it to produce a single stacked image it can never figure out how to combine more than one image? Can't fault the software when you have crappy input. I guess it can't register the pictures cause it can't find the stars? And so the journey continues...



PS - I just bought this EQ6-R Mount from Agena AstroProducts. It was a tough choice between agena and High Point Scientific. Simple fiscal difference made it simple. Probably going to shoot with my camera and these standard lenses while i hunt for the right Celestron EdgeHD... Wish me luck!

Git tipsheet

Great GIT tip sheet here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/git/comments/bwwqr3/git_cheat_sheet/


The following are git commands that I found useful:

To create a new branch with your existing content (you're already linked to a remote origin)
git checkout -b newbranchname

To see difference between branches:
git diff gitlogid file_that_you_want_to_see_diff

To merge two branches:
git merge

To look at git log more carefully:
git log --oneline --graph --all

EASY Semantic Segmentation Tool!

This thing is great! Rapidly can create semantic segmentation. The only feature I'd like to add is a slider for adjusting the watershed / image cv thresholding algorithm to change its sensitivity. That said, it looks like incrementally applying watershed can help you iterate to the regions you want segmented anyway

Download Binaries

Github Repository

Config file to revise classes and colors.

How to move docker data directory to another location on Ubuntu

I ran out of space on my root drive as i downloaded some NGC docker containers on my linux box. I immediately needed to free some space up. With a 8GB docker image, something needed to move.

https://www.guguweb.com/2019/02/07/how-to-move-docker-data-directory-to-another-location-on-ubuntu/

This lets you move it to another drive - which is the reason I was doing it, my root directory ran out of space. Then I made a ubuntu install thumbdrive and booted ubuntu from the drive. This is sometimes called a "live linux boot disk".
(1) I shrunk my windows partition so there was room for the expansion using windows disk management.
(2) Then I used gparted to do two operations to expand the size of my root drive. Apparently I couldn't just expand the root partition, i had to do a "move left" operation first into the hard drive space I had freed up, then I did a right expansion on my root partition which worked! (I couldn't do it in one operation - gparted gives errors.)

Delightfully gparted comes with ubuntu!

DeepFake Test!

https://youtu.be/aKJpW0yPmO8

I used code from https://github.com/AliaksandrSiarohin/first-order-model to do this. Deepfake technology is here. Whether that is good or bad. I did test the fashion weights as well. I can see there are several applications possible with this... It took me an hour or two to get everything working. It's astounding where we are today.

Recording Screen in Ubuntu

Ubuntu Screenshots
"printscreen" button. It saves to picture folder by default
https://askubuntu.com/questions/346864/how-do-i-take-a-screenshot


Recording Desktop
(1) If you want to record without downloading anything on ubuntu:
https://tipsonubuntu.com/2018/06/09/record-gnome-desktop-ubuntu-18-04/

(2) Another good screen casting software (open source) and works effectively while playing games - is OBS. https://obsproject.com/download) is made for game streamers and lets you manage multiple video streams simultaneously.

Setting up Linux computer for ML (cuda drivers)

As I've setup several desktop computers with ubuntu for on-prem ML, sometimes installing certain nvidia drivers on ubuntu can cause the graphics driver to throw an error while booting and then will give you a black screen. Here's a setup of commands to fix it:

1. Reboot machine and go to recovery mode using grub (Advanced Ubuntu)

    a. Enable Networking

    b. Drop to Root

2. sudo nvidia-uninstall #To remove all  remaining nvidia drivers, to ensure clean install

3. sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa

4. sudo apt-get update

5. sudo apt install nvidia-418 #Could try a newer one, but this was the most recent driver that worked for ML for me on my 2080Ti card

6. Reboot - this should've fixed it.

7. nvidia-smi #will show you if cuda and gpu driver version

Update: Windows + Anaconda with tensorflow 2

While tensorflow 2.1 is out now, I just wanted tensorflow 2.0 in my conda environment, after some experimentation this simple set of commands does it:
conda activate tf-gpu-cuda9
conda install tensorflow

To install tensorflow 1.14 in a conda environment:
conda activate tf-old
conda install tensorflow-gpu