Stripe Scanner

Stripe Spotter: Available Here

Hello there, time for another review.

The stripes on zebras are unique to each animal, and realising that, the development team behind Stripe Scanner set out to create a program to recognise individuals from their stripes.

Now, this is not my area of expertise, I’m a diatoms man rather than a big game man, but I have done a module in African Biodiversity, so I do know a little bit.

Using photographs I’ve taken in South Africa and Kenya, I set out to create my own database of animals using their program. Here are my thoughts:

The UI is very simple, identifying animals is pretty easy, select the body part and press Identify Animal….

Now, here is where I ran into some difficulty.The images I took are from 2007 and 2009, so I have no idea which animal is which… To create the database you need to have a base population of identified zebras, with which to compare the later photographs. I lack this, so my database consists of guess work as to which are new animals.

Due to this, when I came to adding an individual from thousands of kilometres away, from Kenya, what should’ve been distinctively different stripes, the similarity is much higher than it should be. (0.46)

All in all, I think this is a valuable program for those who need to process a large local herd of individuals if you have a base number of photographs of identified individuals to work from. My example has a poor collection of disorganised photographs, of quality too low for a proper identification, so this test of the software was not really sound.

But all in all, worth checking out if you’ve got a lot of zebras to identify!

Download Here

Before the Dawn–Deathstar Rising

The playlist is available here, or by searching Deathstar Rising or Before the Dawn in Spotify.. or you know.. buying the CD! I think it’s on Itunes…

Okie dokie, another little review. This s a music review of what is probably my current favourite Melodic Death Metal album.

The first 2 tracks, The First Snow and Winter Within really give a feel to the rest of the album. Very epic guitar, nice mix of clean vocals and growling, (I got stuck there.. what’s the opposite of clean vocals? I was going to say filthy vocals! but that suggests inappropriate language) Unlike a lot of the Death Metal out there, the singer can actually sing clean vocals well.

Deathstar, the 3rd album on the track has a very catchy guitar part, which I often find myself humming along to, and the chorus I’ll often burst out into growls “ONE BY ONE!” ..then forget the rest of the chorus and wonder why everyone is staring at me.

Another of my favourite tracks on this album is Butterfly Effect, another great example of very catchy melodies, and an awesome mix of harsh (AHA! that’s the term for it!) vocals and clean. I think the whole album has an interesting change to the usual Before the Dawn format. Most other songs have quite harsh choruses, and clean vocals in between, like one of my other favourites by Before the Dawn: End of Day from the album “Decade of Darkness.”

Overall, Butterfly Effect is an awesome song, I’ve no idea what the harsh vocals are saying but the chorus is awesome: “Can’t define, what has caused this chain reaction. Wings of a butterfly, brought the storm to my direction”  - It’s an awesome chorus!

The bonus tracks, available on the later commercial release of the CD include an acoustic version of “My Room,” which is another one of my favourites by this band. I’m not sure about the live bonus tracks…. I prefer the studio recorded ones, they’re more… polished.

I ordered the CD on preorder, and got it a couple days before it was released with a rather nice T-shirt.

Overall impressions of this album are very good, I do love it, and it has helped me get through writing my dissertation, so that’s always a bonus! So yea, check it out, link is ^^^ Up there for Spotify.

A couple of their songs are on their facebook page:

BOOK OF FACES!

Enjoy!

Skippy, signing out 1216 Zulu.

Bzeek!

I feel I should share this little discovery of mine with the class. But I should preface it with some back story first. I live in Botton Village in North Yorkshire, it’s in the middle of nowhere, and the buildings are made of mahusive bits of rock. The internet that we do have had to be forged from the raw… CAT5 cables… It’s wired basically is what I’m getting at. Now, I have a phone, it’s a shiny Android, a HTC Hero to be precise. It uses WIFI, something that we lack with all the… stone, it’s just not a practical method of connecting to the internet. So I have a slight problem with updating everything and synchronising all my music off Spotify onto my phone. (BTW, Spotify is awesome… just to let you know. I’d highly recommend it if you live in Europe, if you dont live in Europe…. MOVE TO EUROPE! We’ve got… rain, and…. land, and shops and stuff, it’s amazing!) But I am getting side tracked.

So, the problem is I need wifi to sync Spotify on my phone. Survival basics, what do I have, and what do I need?

I have: Laptop, wired internet and a data hungry phone

I need: Wifi…

Solution: Bzeek

What this little rascal does is creates a local Wifi network around your computer, which you can then use to access the internet with all your little devices.

There is a slight downside of this in that the WIFI is available to anyone else who is near, but the upshot is that if anyone uses your internet, you get paid. So all in all, it’s not too bad! It’s all secure and tight, and when you’ve finished synching your phone, you can just turn it off.

So far it does seem a little slow, but that is partially due to the slow internet here…. I’m trying to sync 9 songs up, started 10 minutes ago.. and it’s still on 9 songs left to sync… but I have every faith in the technology!

Diatom Diagram

Diatom Diagram by ~Skipperthepilot on deviantART
Just a quick little diagram I drew in Illustrator for my dissertation. I've got a couple of weeks left now before it's got to be finished... Slightly concerned that I'm going to screw this one up completely.. but we shall see.
I'll put the PDF up here when it's all finished and marked... just in case someone wants to steal my work :)