Kyrylo Yasko - Page 2 of 8 - not only travels

raking

I returned from Montenegro already 3 days ago and still can not finish raking pictures (I brought about 4 thousand of them) . The process seems to be simple, but out of habit I can’t sit at the computer for a long time – my eyes turn red, my throat tickles, snot flows, my temperature rises … Maybe I have an acute respiratory disease?The process of sorting out photos after a trip looks something like this:

Sort photos by day. Each day in a separate folder, for example “2011-08-25 bobots cook and ice cave”
Send to separate subfolders all the blanks for HDR and panoramas. Start automatic assembly of panoramas and HDR.
Swear bad words for a long time because the panoramas stubbornly warp and wander.
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Leaving for Montenegro

Today I did not sleep until 5 am – I thought what to write here… It’s a joke. In fact, the last night before a long journey, I traditionally devoted to drawing maps for GPS. It’s very reassuring and gives you confidence. Therefore, now I am so calm that I can sleep even standing up. Although deep down I still hope that both on the train and on the plane there is where (when) to lie down.

Yes, about the trip – I’m going to Montenegro, to explore the new hiking route along Prokleti and Durmitor. I’ll be back at the end of August, don’t be bored!

The first time I shot time lapse

Time Lapse is a video with the effect of speeding up time – when the clouds rush through the sky like crazy, and people are fussing funny below. To shoot such a video, you need a tripod, a camera on which automatic shooting is possible and the sky (preferably). I have had a tripod and a camera for a long time, but I reached the sky only today. While the children were sleeping, I snapped 300 frames and made my first time-lapse from them.

It turned out, of course, crooked. Especially editing and overlaying sound. But thanks for that too. I am now in terrible time pressure – I am getting ready for hike in Montenegro< /a>, and therefore even half an hour for any garbage is a luxury. But what am I justifying, see for yourself…

TV shows are convenient

I used to think that people watch TV shows because they don’t have a choice. Like, it’s cheaper for greedy TV channels to buy one soap opera and close the issue of evening prime time than to constantly look for suitable feature films, risk being misunderstood and spend millions on it.But now the era of mass and high-speed Internet has come. Everyone has access to tens of thousands of feature films. So no – it is the series that become the main “food” of Internet viewers. Why? TV shows are convenient!I figured this out by watching my family trying to decide which movie to watch tonight. There are only two key search parameters – it is necessary that the film be in good quality, and correspond to the tastes of ALL those present (which is determined exclusively by experiment). It usually takes at least half an hour to find such a movie (which takes place in heated debate), and sometimes there is no consensus. This tedious process is the least reminiscent of rest. And the efficiency is depressingly low – an hour of searching, for the sake of two hours of film.

Quick focus video on a DSLR

Experimenting with shooting video on a DSLR (Canon 600d), I constantly encountered focusing errors. As you know, in DSLRs there is no normal autofocus for video. It is impossible to use the “focus by image” mode because it is torture (you press the shutter release and the lens starts buzzing back and forth for a long and tedious time until it gives up without focusing).Well, I’m trying to master manual focus. But not everything is simple here either. Everything looks great on the small screen of the camera, but when I get home and download the files to my computer, I immediately see that I constantly missed focusing. Even using the 5-10x auxiliary zoom to focus doesn’t help much.To be honest, all this is terribly depressing and the thought arises that one should not take a steam bath and shoot a video on a soap box (there is an infinite depth of field and everything is ok with autofocus). But it’s too early to give up, besides, today I found in the settings one more option for focusing video and LiveView – fast.

The secrets of our brain – the wrong book

The book “Secrets of our brain. Or why smart people do stupid things” (authors Sandra Amodt and Sam Wong) I read easily and with interest. And only now, having sat down for a review, I realized that the book is wrong and teaches bad things.At first glance, everything is cool – an entertaining story about the work of the human brain, a minimum of tediousness, full of relevant topics – how to lose weight, how to become happy, what is love and a drug buzz. And all this from the point of view of neurons. The message is simple – you will understand how your mind works – you will be able to use it more effectively. But as soon as I listened to my heart…

Retouch = Retouch (re-touch)

I, like many amateur photographers, want my pictures to look cool. For the sake of this, I agree not only to invest big money in the Japanese economy, but I am also ready to spend half an hour processing photos before showing them to friends or posting them on the net.

And yesterday, having seen enough in the network of wonders of Photoshop, I decided to steal an extra 40 minutes from the night and watched a short video (see below) that teaches the basics of retouching. It turned out that this was quite enough to please his wife in the morning with her portrait with perfect skin and light lifting. Moreover, I received a “social order” for the production of a series of glamorous shots especially for Odnoklassniki.

How do I buy a SLR

I come to the store… Yes, it was in a real offline store, I did not dare to buy a DSLR through an online courier. So, I go into the store, my mood is upbeat, I’m a little worried, but at the same time I’m determined to spend a bag of money. In other words, I carry the full range of emotional experiences of a blissful shopper.Understand, computers in my life, I have already bought more than once. Refrigerators and washing machines – even more so. This is my first time buying a SLR. And the fact that this thing is expensive and at the same time useless (after all, this is a whim, you could continue to take pictures with a soap box), gives what is happening some special flavor. I love to feel the taste of life, so I swim slowly and thoughtfully to the counter of the store.

How to start blogging

This blog is actually three hundred years old this Saturday, but for the last 3-4 months it has been completely abandoned. So I had to make some effort (almost violence) on myself to start leading him again.And for some reason I decided that I should start not with a normal article, but with some kind of introductory stupidity – a stupid excuse post. He will take the first blow, the pancake will become a lump and rolling forward will pave the way for subsequent releases – more meaningful and interesting. So you don’t have to read further here, go straight to the next post.

To Crimea by car – review of the route through Odessa

In 2011 we decided to go to Crimea (from Kyiv) along a new route – through Odessa. Before that, we drove through Pervomaisk and through Zaporozhye. The decision was taken spontaneously – in the sense that we did not have any evidence that it was better this way.As a result of the experiment, we ended up … in the Crimea (1020 kilometers in 15 hours), but even now it is quite difficult for me to assess the attractiveness of the route. I’ll try to tell you in more detail, and you decide for yourself – to go or not to go.

The film “City of Thieves”

Bandits in America also wear tracksuits! This is the main piece of news I learned from Ben Affleck’s “City of Thieves”. Films about bank robbers and other criminal characters make up a significant part of the film distribution, and they probably showed clothing typical of the criminal environment more than once. But I had to put on a tracksuit and sneakers for such a handsome man like Ben Affleck, make him go on a date in this, so that I did pay attention to some kind of absurdity of this style, and actually that it still exists.

News about the earthquake in Japan.

The whole world is chained to TV screens – people watch endless news releases about the earthquake in Japan. Everyone is watching, but I’m holding on. Our TV has been disconnected from the antenna for a month now and only shows what I ask it to. As a result, we learned about the Japanese disaster much later than the rest of the world by accidentally turning on the radio in the car.And you know, there is some positive in this. Not that the Rising Sun washes away in waves, but that it does not become the main entertainment of the day for me. After all, many hours of contemplation of television news is just entertainment. Or not?

Error 500 Internal Server Error when updating WordPress

Today I was updating WordPress from 2.9.1 to 3.1 and of course ran into an error. After I uploaded a new version of the engine to ftp, the blog stopped opening (both the frontend and the admin panel) and gave out only the classic “500 Internal Server Error” message.

Redownloading did not help, looking under the hood did not help either. I rushed to look for a solution to the problem on the Internet and it turned out that there were very few Russian articles about it. Strange, am I the only lucky one? I tried more and more search queries, but the result was disappointing.

I had to look in the logs on the hosting…

How to make a voiceover for a video?

Recently I have become interested in video editing. I edit mainly videos about my travels, distant and not so far. And then gradually came to the desire to do voice acting for the video. Not a song in the background, but the text, the voice. The question is new to me and in some places frightening, and therefore especially interesting. A kind of forbidden fruit.In short, I ate this apple :) And now I can share my impressions and tips on reading the text for the video.

The film “Radio Wave” – readiness for a miracle.

“Radio Wave” (Frequency) is an ordinary film about the “butterfly effect” or “paradox of the murdered grandfather” (it’s almost the same thing – just time replaces space). The hero miraculously changes the past – problems begin in the present – he solves them again and again changing history.Good movie with good actors. But it’s a very standard story. And this is the standard that alerted me …

And the smoke of the fatherland is sweet to us.

Smoke barely perceptibly wafted from the open window. Apparently at a nearby construction site, something is burning again. But for some reason, my thoughts did not linger on the word “construction” (the repair is finally completed). I did not think about campaigns, where there is more than enough smoke. Moreover, I did not turn to the topic of “sweet smoke of the fatherland.”Sweet taste of India – that’s what I remembered, as soon as I inhaled the smell of smoke. The first hours in Delhi at night, the search for an overnight stay at the Main Bazaar and the crazy day that followed. My first encounter with Asia was a trip to India in 2009.

Official website March 8

I didn’t invent this. Nearly a thousand people search the official website for March 8 every month. Considering that tens of thousands of people are looking for the address of Santa Claus, this is not so strange. So, the idea has the right to life.Imagine, you go to the official website on March 8, and there … What is usually “cling” to official sites? All sadness and tedium. No! We will go to the unofficial fan forum on March 8th. It’s much more interesting. 40,000 visitors a day, 5,000 registered members, and 80% of them are men.Actually, initially I planned to develop this idea about the forum, fantasize and try to joke. But in the course of studying the issue (the history of the celebration of March 8), two curious facts were revealed:

Rotation of songs on the radio

Recently, I began to listen to the radio much more often because, firstly, I spend a lot of time in the car, and secondly, rock has revived in Kyiv – a radio station whose broadcasting format largely coincides with my tastes (a lot of rock and heavy classics).Watching the rotation of songs on Radio Rocks (the same station), I noticed an interesting fact. It seems that this station is not a “hit” one, and that is why it is not obliged to limit its playlist to a dozen songs from the top of the charts. On the contrary, there is an opportunity to be nostalgic to the will – to actively use songs written over the past 60 years (something that can more or less be attributed to rock). Thus, the playlist expands to impossibility – these are hundreds of thousands of tracks. Songs on the air could never be repeated at all.But they repeat themselves and do it often.

The real cause of the unrest in Egypt

In the morning, they said on the radio that they were on the trail of villains in Egypt, who at the end of January took advantage of the unrest in the city and stole the statue of Tutankhamun from the Cairo Museum. There is a version that the villains were random people and took the first thing that came to hand. Perhaps it was. But to be honest, the first thing that came to my mind after the release of the news was a slightly fantastical theory.Like, the true cause of the unrest in Egypt is the robbery. In the sense that the riots were organized in order to sneak into the museum under their cover and kidnap Tutankhamen or something else less noticeable, but more important. Imagination immediately draws a picture of another Masonic conspiracy, a secret sect, whose adherents, having despaired of finding a common language with Hosni Muburak (in terms of issuing an ancient artifact to them), solved the problem in a different way – they expelled the intractable ruler with the hands of the crowd and took possession of the desired object.

127 hours – a film about a climber

Of course, the hero of the film “127 hours” was not exactly a climber. What he was doing before getting stuck in the crevasse could be more like canyoning or even multisport (given his bike ride and swimming in an underground reservoir). But the conversation is not about terminology.Talking about what I (as a viewer and as a tourist) was thinking while watching this hilarious movie:

It’s not surprising that this guy ended up in an emergency (more precisely, in the ZhP). He constantly took risks: when he rode a bike, when he jumped into the water, when he ran along the route).
I wonder where I saw this actress? (Only a week later I remembered – she plays a bore in “House”)
I started watching “127 Hours” with my wife in vain. Even without any creepy movies, she worries when I go to the mountains.