We’ve been having a lot of lightning here recently – just a bike-ride nuisance, we thought, until one fateful morning in June. We entered the studio to the familiar yet oh-so-delicious smell of burnt electronics.
A power surge had quite selectively attacked one computer in the lab… you guessed it, mine. Our resident IT guru diagnosed it as ‘fried’ and he was absolutely right; the motherboard had basically detonated in one corner, and two capacitors had literally blown themselves off the board and ricocheted around in the case. Pictures:

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The strangeness off it is, other than the motherboard, nothing else (CPU, Power supply, HD, RAM, etc.) was damaged… the thunderstorm/surge theory seems to be borne out by the fact that 4 or 5 machines went up in smoke in the same period of time, and it stopped with the installation of surge protectors everywhere. Still, I’m quite amazed that I’m sitting at pretty much (one motherboard swap later) the same machine, typing this post.

One of our two tech goals for tube is to have a nice autorigging system for blender. Today I demo the beginning of such a system ( called rigamarule ) which is actually a rig-retargeting system that can work with (or without) etch-a-ton (in blender 2.49).

After recording, I realized I hadn’t shown what rigamarule is, so I made this little addendum for the curious:

There’s actually one small last script, dr_taggert.py , that tags each bone with it’s bone ID, and can optionally clear it.. sometimes, dr taggert likes to segfault.
All the scripts are GPL licensed, and I’ll release them after they’ve gone through some milestone tests.
High resolution .ogg video available here and here.

Oh, in case you didn’t notice, I’m using the video element in html 5 with a flash fallback for older browsers… thanks to all who helped me earlier 🙂

Just got my audio recording working for gtk-recordmydesktop in linux… after blaming pulseaudio, turned out the problem was in an alsa switch (that is hidden by default in the volume control), for my HDA intel laptop: the “input source” option for recording wasn’t set to the internal mic, meaning you could tantalizingly turn it on and hear the playback (risking ear-splitting feedback in the process) but not actually record that to any device.
Thanks to my efforts, I now have a custom .asoundrc with a pulse device, a new set of knobs and monitors (pavucontrol) bewildering sitting on top of my original volume control, but I probably didn’t need all that at all (but I’m not messing with it! it works now, and that’s all I care about)

So, expect some screen-capture demo things coming to a production blog near you, courtesy of gtk-recordmydesktop, pulseaudio and alsa (and an hour or so of ranting and hair-pulling)

Quick one here (very last minute of me)
I’ll be going to the Open Video Conference in NYC, to give a lightening talk on Friday and do a panel on video editing on Saturday…
obligatory url: http://openvideoconference.org/schedule/