Stay Indoors. Take a trip to Geneva · 10:09pm Apr 9th, 2020
How are you all coping at the moment?
Here in England, I am stuck at home, allowed out once a day for exercise. It has been a confusing past few weeks. Things I had been planning for months were abruptly cancelled, and I then had to quickly make new plans. I am fortunate that I have a place to live and have a job. I have been trying to assist some others unfairly threatened with redundancy, which is rather stressful, much more for them than me.
While managing all this. I decided to try something new from home. With all our public events cancelled, my group of science communicators has been talking about producing more on-line resources. I exchanged some emails with colleagues about plans to make videos. I then realised we need to stop talking about doing it, and actually do something. After two weeks messing around, learning how to record and edit video and sync screen capture with audio, I can present my first amateur video creation – a tour of CERN in Minecraft:
ATLAScraft is a project I have been promoting for the last year or so. It’s a model of the CERN site and ATLAS detector, with plenty of games explaining how particle detectors work. I think it’s very good and deserves more attention. But like many games, it takes some time to find all the interesting bits. I wanted to record a walk-through to show how to find them. As there are now vast numbers of tired parents, stuck at home with bored kids, I reasoned that what they need is to have the kids pestering to download a particle physics game. Please take a look and share it with Minecraft fans.
Having taught myself how to record and edit videos, maybe I should now try something with ponies?
I was hoping to get the NewTek NDI driver for video handling, but although they say its free to download, they want you to register on the website first. So thats out the window.
Really nice piece of kit as well. Apparently they created SMPTE standard origionally? Frame synchronisation over networks between multiple video sources?
VOIP is annoying.. I miss the 90s version where you could just use a plug in on IRC.. now its all man in the middle client, sever, registration and people laugh at the idea of IRC even being considered.
Apparently they snuck an entire library of banned books into China by hiding it in Minecraft, because nobody sane defends themselves against things they don't realize are possible. (This is the same reason "crazy enough to work" occasionally works)
That is cool.