The Blog of Ian Mercer.

Timelapse video using the GoPro HD Hero

This weekend I tried the time lapse mode on my GoPro HD Hero. The weather wasn't great but the results were fairly impressive. On the 60s interval mode the video was a little bit jerky but on the 10s mode it came out really smooth. The battery life was good enough for several hours of filming but it would have been nice if it was longer.

The other issue was in dealing with the sunset which caused the camera to completely wash out the bright details.

Apart from these minor issues I'm overall still very impressed with the GoPro HD Hero in both video mode and time-lapse mode.

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Time Series Data Compression

This new technique to compress the time series data collected by my home automation system seems to be working really well.

Ian Mercer
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Photography

My photo collection now has over 150,000 photos taken around the world and close to home. Most recently I've been shooting with a Sony A9. Prior to that most photos were taken with a Canon 5D III

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Digital Twins are never identical

Digital Twin are an online representation of a real world object, a copy of its properties in the digital world and a way to send updated and commands to it. In effect I've been making them for years but now they have a trendy name.

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Ian Mercer
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Why smarthomes are hard

Why automated learning is hard for a smart home. The perils of over-fitting, under-fitting and how the general unpredictable nature of life makes it hard to build a system that learns your behavior.

Ian Mercer
Ian Mercer
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Collinearity test for sensor data compression

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Ian Mercer
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Iceland photos

Photos from a trip to Iceland pre-pandemic.

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Ian Mercer
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Bird photos

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Event blocks

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Ian Mercer
Ian Mercer
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Logistic function - convert values to probabilities

Another super useful function for handling sensor data and converting to probabilities is the logistic function 1/(1+e^-x). Using this you can easily map values onto a 0.0-1.0 probability range.

Ian Mercer
Ian Mercer
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ATAN curve for probabilities

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Ian Mercer
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T-Mobile home internet

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iBeacon meetup in Seattle - January 2015

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Aurora photos

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Juvenile Red-Tailed Hawk on the fence today

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Ian Mercer
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How to shoot good video

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The Hoh Rainforest - Olympic National Park

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Ian Mercer
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Canon Powershot D10 Underwater Camera

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A better way to share photos ...

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Twitter links for Week beginning March 8th

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Future proof your home with a new conduit system?

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Shortened URLs should be treated like a Codec ...

Expanding URLs would help users decide whether or not to click a link

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Tagging File Systems

Isn't it time we stopped knowing which drive our file is on?

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WMPnetwk.exe started using 50% of my CPU

Uninstalling Windows Media Player - the end of an era

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Introducing Jigsaw menus

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Giving up on Internet Explorer

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New Home Automation Server

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Dell upgrades - a pricey way to go

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Preparing for death

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