Earlier this afternoon, I drove down to the Piedmont Center for the Arts to help take down the EBMQG quilt show, Stitch Modern, and to pick up my quilt and bring it home. I took my PlantCam time lapse camera and set it up to take a photo every 30 seconds… I think I should have decreased the delay to take photos every 15 seconds.
Tag Archives: plantcam
PlantCam: Cerinthe Sprouting
These are Cerinthe that I sowed on February 23, 2011. This is their growth from Feb 27 to Mar 3.
I wish the photos were clearer. I had the wrong focus setting.
New iMac Hard Drive…
On Christmas Eve, my 20" iMac’s hard drive began to fail and intermittently work and not work. When I tried using my account, the spinning rainbow ball would just spin and spin and it would take forever to get something to work, so I remembered just forcing the iMac off by pressing the power button.
After a while, it eventually died and all I got was a flashing folder icon with a question mark… so the iMac would no longer start.
I talked with an Apple Support person about a week ago and they told me the the iMac had all the symptoms of a dead hard drive. He said that since it’s out of warranty, I can either try to fix it myself by buying a new hard drive and installing it myself. He even suggested searching YouTube for "hard drive iMac replacement". The second option was to bring it into an Authorized Apple Center, which was Macvolk in Concord.
I opted for the later, since the videos on YouTube were really intimidating… plus I tried to replace the hard drive on my Mac mini and I think I killed it, since it does work. I called Macvolk, and told them I would try to find a day off and bring it in.
Earlier this week, I was telling our Mark (our I.T. guy) and Ed (my coworker) and they suggest that I fix it myself. They said I can do it… hehe… plus they said I can get a 1TB hard drive for under $100… so that’s what I did…
I got the hard drive yesterday in the mail and with the help of iFixIt’s hard drive replacement guide. I embarked on repairing the iMac myself. I was nervous about opening the iMac up and bring it, but after getting through a few stumbling blocks, it started up…
I also decided to document it by taking time lapse photos of my progress. I use my regular XSi camera, but I also used my new PlantCam time lapse camera.
When I review the photos, I noticed that the PlantCam didn’t take photos of my whole progress. It stopped in the middle of it. I then realized that it was because the PlantCam has a programmed shut off time (so the camera would not take photos in the dark if placed outside)… and the time was set to 12 midnight… Oh well…
So after I got the hard drive replace and iMac put back together, I restarted it with a Mac OS X install disk and it worked… It took a while to install the base Mac OS X, since the hard drive was blank… so I left to continue overnight and now I’m installing other programs into it.
One last thought, I think I should get a portable hard drive to use as a backup for this iMac, using Time Machine… If I backup it up before, I could have just restored all the data… There are five accounts on the iMac now and since the hard drive fail, all that data is pretty much lost…
PlantCam Working + Yojimbo + Avatar 3D
Tuesday, January 5, 2009
I brought my PlantCam to work to see if I can get it to work properly because I had trouble with it before Christmas and just haven’t had the time to fiz/play around with it. 
One of my coworkers suggested using a different SD card and low and behold… it worked… so I did a couple of test time-lapse photos of the office and street outside and it totally worked. I need to find a process to make nice fades between the shots. They seem to play smoothly on my Mac, but once I upload them to Flicker, they don’t fade and just switch photos, like a slide show.
After work, my friends Darwin, Janet and AJ treated my out for a birthday dinner at Yojimbo Sushi. YUMM!!!… We ordered a lot but I guess Darwin was really hungry… hehe
When we finished, Darwin and I drove over to AMC Bay Street 16 in Emeryville to try to catch the 9pm showing of Avatar 3D… Despite nodding off at the first 10 minutes of so (I was really tired and sleepy and just eat tons for food, hehe)… I really really loved the movie!!!… Once they got to the evening scenes with the forrest radiating with so much color lights… I stayed up. The main character was also cute (which is always a plus :)… I think this has to be one of my favorites movies… If you have the chance to see it in 3D, do so!!!