Time-Lapse Software

I was looking at a video on YouTube where they take a banana, put a watch on it then let the camera take a picture every second for a whole week.  The banana had a light over it so naturally it got a really bad tan and you could see the second, minute and hour hands just going and going.

Perios by Martin Slovacek.  It’s totally free and you don’t even have to install anything, just download it and run the exe file (after you unzip it of course).  It finds your webcam and starts taking pictures as soon as you find a directory, choose the amount of time in seconds, minutes or hours then click the Start button.  Once you are finished click the Export button and it combines all of those images into an .avi file.

I did find a program that cost $10 but it only works on the computer you register it on.  Every computer after that costs $5.  I guess it’s a small price to pay but if you reformat your hard drive you might have to buy the upgrade for $5.  I haven’t tested that theory out yet and I don’t plan on it either lol.

It’s called Webcam Flix and I bought it for my laptop.  I think it works a lot better because when you go to make the video it just looks way smoother than the free one I listed above.

I’m going to put it on my laptop and have it do time-lapse on the Scooby Doo Chia Pet.  I have a poor mans version of a time-lapse video on YouTube of my Scooby Doo chia pet so I will redo it lol.  It really is lame lol.  I just gotta find it and I will work on that.

Update: I’ve changed some things in this post so if you notice something is different, it is.  I took out the free part in the subject and I added that I did buy the $10 webcam software, only because it’s superior to the free one.  Here is the new Scooby Doo Chia Pet time lapse video I made with it.

Google Chrome OS?!?!

This is coming straight from the Google blog…

Official Google Blog: Introducing the Google Chrome OS

Wow.  That’s so cool.  This is going to be neat to be able to turn your computer on and once it gets past all those tests that you see, you know, where it shows how much memory you have, then all of a sudden you’ve got desktop.  No more waiting for the Windows screen that shows that animated bar at the bottom of the screen.  Instead you are instantly taken right to your desktop so you can immediately start browsing the web.

The only thing that concerns me is if this will allow me to install my Windows programs like the Sims, EverQuest, Adobe Photoshop Elements, Adobe Premiere Elements, Autodesk 3DS Max 2008, my webcam software, my mp3 player software etc.  And will it allow my hardware like my webcam and my Kodak printer?

One of the things that I really look forward to is if this will allow me to play my old Win 98 games that Win XP won’t let me run.  I just hope that this isn’t something like Mac and Linux where you have to buy the Google OS software only which will probably only be a few programs at first and will always only have 10% of the software compared to the 100% that Windows offers.  That’s always been an issue and why I won’t ever have a Mac or Linux again because I want to be able to buy whatever program I want.  It’s really depressing when you go to buy software and the aisle for that OS is just a shelf while the rest of the store is for Windows.

Of course I’ll have to wait until the 2nd half of 2010 for this to become available so I look forward to all of the blogs and pictures and possibly videos showing how well it is on Netbooks.

Edit 2011-02-15: I have been using Google Chrome OS CR-48 since mid December and it does not allow me to install anything and it does in fact have apps that you can install from the Google Chrome store.  They apps install a link to your desktop which are basically just a link to a website.  There are also tons of extensions that you can use and it does work with my printer through the cloud.  No I can’t play those games I listed above but there are other games I can play that are web-based.

I would not want this to be my desktop, it works great as a netbook only in my opinion.  You would still need your regular desktop for your other programs and MMO games.