Time Lapse Videos of the Garden (3 of 3)

This is the last video in this time lapse series.

In this video I've removed all the images taken between 8pm and 5am. Don't worry, I didn't have to do this by hand! All the videos save with a similar file name which has the date and time in it so I wrote a little regular expression that deleted all the files with a 00 - 04 or a 20 - 23 in the hour slot. The commands looked like this:

rm 00A8F9005FCC\(IPCamera\)_0_2013????0{0..4}*
rm 00A8F9005FCC\(IPCamera\)_0_2013????{20..23}*

The rm command you should be familiar with, then it is the camera's MAC address (I think) followed by the name in brackets then _0_ (for some reason, maybe camera number) then the 4 digit year, 2 digit month (single digit wildcards), 2 digit date (single digit wildcards) then the 2 digit hour. Notice in the first command I put the first digit of the hour outside the curly bracket, I just wasn't sure 00..04 would work so opted for 0..4 instead. What came after the hour digits didn't matter so I just dropped in a multi digit wildcard.

Time Lapse Videos of the Garden (2 of 3)

The camera looking out to the garden has been running for a while now. Since about the 28th of March given the date of my last post on it. As you can imagine it has gathered quite a large collection of images, 18,000 at the last count! So I thought it would be a good a time as any to give another time lapse video a try.

I used the same script as last time but made a slight change so it would create a copy of each image with a 5 digit number rather than 4 (cause we have over 9999 images) and out the video with a greater frame rate (20fps instead of 4).

x=0; for i in *jpg; do counter=$(printf %05d $x); cp "$i" /tmp/img"$counter".jpg; x=$(($x+1)); done
ffmpeg -f image2 -r 20 -y -i /tmp/img%05d.jpg garden.avi
rm /tmp/img*

The results were less than satisfactory (don't watch the whole video, the first minute or so gets the point across):

Germinating the Veg

I was going around the shop the other day and it suddenly dawned on me just how late in the planting season it is getting. The terrible weather recently (terrible for gardening that is) has made it impossible to get into the garden which would have been a perfect time to get some germinating on the go but the bad weather also made it feel a lot earlier in the year than it actually is.

Thankfully it's not too late and most of what I'm looking to plant out can still be planted in April. I dare say with the low temperatures planting out a little later than usual may even be beneficial.

So here is what I bought:

London Science Museum

I don't really post unless I am demonstrating something or talking about my plans but this post is a little different. (Don't worry it's only a short one.) It is also one of the few times I will post the same post on both my computer related blogs: workingwithcomputervision.blogspot.co.uk and czandg.blogspot.co.uk.

This weekend I went down to London with family and during the trip we visited the Science Museum and I thought it would be nice to share a couple of photos of the exhibits from the computing related departments.

There was some pretty cool stuff there demonstrating both the history of computing and the present day (if there were any future orientated displays I didn't notice them.)

Here are a few that caught my interest enough to get photographed (Keep in mind I'm not a huge history buff so although there is a lot there only a handful really grabbed my attention):

Time Lapse Videos of the Garden (1 of 3)

I've gotten quite into hillwalking this year. In fact I even have another blog dedicated purely to that which I will shameless plug here: it is munrochallenge.wordpress.com and it details me and my friend Martyn's attempt to climb 52 munros this year. (We've managed 3 so far.) As part of this new hobby I signed up to a few on-line forums to meet other people with similar interests and one of the forums I go on frequently is the one at walkhighlands.co.uk.

It was on here that a user known as Alastair S (probably his real name!) posted up a thread talking about a little computer program he had made. What it does is connects to public internet cameras anywhere in the world you point it to and downloads an image from them once every minute. When it has a large collection of these images it creates a video out of them which is played back at 20 frames per second. This hence lets you watch an entire days, weeks, months or even years worth of footage in just a few minutes. It's a technique known as 'time lapse video' and it can make for some very interesting videos. Here are a couple he has produced so far:

Braemar Snow Gate

Fixing the Sankey Water Butt

So given its mostly good reviews I bought a Sankey 210L Water butt from B&Q and was pretty happy with the purchase given the size of it and the fairly sturdy design. It is a bit on the expensive side and having to buy the stand separately was a bit annoying but I weighed it up and decided to go for it anyway. Big mistake!

The Sankey 210L Water butt 

After having it in the garden for a few weeks I found it kept falling over. Not sure if it was being pushed or blowing over because of the wind so I decided to fill it about a quarter of the way with tap water to weight it down a little. It was at this point I found that the water butt leaked through the tap!

Gardening Plans for 2013

So as you can see from this picture taken today (21st March) even though we are officially in Spring it still isn't quite gardening weather.

So instead I thought I'd share my plans for this year with you.

This year is going to be all about colour! What I want to do is create a rainbow effect round the border of the garden going from violet colours on the left round to reds on the right with all the colours in between in the middle.

Really this shouldn't be too hard since I plan on purchasing plants this year rather than growing them myself. I know, I know, it's cheating, but I just don't have the time to dedicate to growing from seed just now and especially not for the amount of plants I think I'm going to need.

The plant of choice is going to be Primulas; they are colourful, readily available, quite hardy and don't cost the earth.

Other than the border I'll probably give some vegetables a try again. Most of the hard work of digging up the lawn to make space for a vegetable patch was done last year so hopefully I can give more time to the tending of the veg and actually get something to show for it this year. We'll see...

Finally I'm going to plant some roses in the little strip of garden I have to the left of the house. Putting the water butt there (which needs the seal fixed btw) isn't enough as it keep getting blown or pushed over. Some thorny roses should do the job and I'll spend the little bit extra money to get fragrant ones which will hopefully add to the garden overall.

Or at least that's the plan if the snow ever leaves...