on our great Great Ocean Road road trip, we happened to visit the cape otway lighthouse. i was actually not very interested in lighthouses when we visited the area (and much more excited about the almost guaranteed koala sightings along the road to the lighthouse), but the entrance fee was included in our accommodation and we decided to checked it out. good decision!
it’s a fascinating piece of engineering, and worth talking to a visitor guide who will explain its history and functioning!
here’s a 360-degree sunset photo taken at wentworth falls in sydney’s blue mountains, a few days ago:
underwater photography is expensive! underwater housings for digital cameras – point and shoot as well as SLR or mirrorless cameras – often cost much more than the actual cameras, and other components such as underwater strobes or video lights are similarly expensive (starting at 500 USD for the cheapest brand name lights, and >1000 USD for the ones other divers recommend). however, artificial light makes all the difference under water, where light is increasingly limited the deeper you dive.
i’ve been taking pictures with a Sony RX100 and Meikon RX100 housing, and have also shot some underwater video using GoPro cameras (Hero 3 Black and Hero 5 Black), but until now this was mostly with available light rather than an external light source. because i can’t really justify buying these expensive parts with my relatively infrequent diving trips, i’ve been looking for a relatively inexpensive way to get lights that can be used both for video and still photography.
after several nights of online research, i have decided on an Archon dive light which is both very affordable and popular in online forums (and therefore tested by the masses).
here’s my new setup:
when upgrading my phone recently and trying not to lose anything, my shazam library got corrupted. interestingly, i could still tag just fine, but then noticed later that i couldn’t actually look up my previous tags — any time i tried to open the list, the app crashed a second later.
if you’re in the same situation, here’s a step-by-step tutorial to recover shazamed songs from a corrupted library:
open Root Explorer (or a similar root-enabled app) and navigate to /data/data/com.shazam.encore.android (or any directory starting with the name “com.shazam”, depending on your version).
open the /databases subdirectory and copy library.db to your computer (either by copying it to your “normal” internal storage and transferring, or by sharing directly from the app). [more...]
the brodribb and choat lab groups (read: my colleagues and i) are currently at the australian synchrotron in melbourne for an experiment to study what’s going on in the stems and roots of living trees during drought. using x-ray microCT, we can look inside the wood and examine whether vessels are functional (i.e. water-filled) or blocked, without cutting into the tree (which can create a range of problems for measurement).
here’s a time lapse video showing how our eucalyptus trees are mounted onto a high-tech robot arm (0.0001 mm precision movements!), centered, and then rotated during the x-ray scan:
the resulting microCT scans have a resolution of 10 micrometers per pixel and can be reconstructed to 3D models. more about that in a future post…
ever wondered what it looks like to rise from the ground through and above the rainforest? the video below provides a 360 degree view along a ride in the canopy crane at the daintree rainforest observatory at cape tribulation in far north queensland, australia.
the compilation includes the ascent from the ground through the canopy, a ride above the rainforest, the sampling of a branch, and the final descent back to the ground.
vivid is a 3-week winter festival of outdoor lighting in sydney, where landmark buildings and popular places throughout the city are brought to life at night.
here are some impressions from vivid 2016:
