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Research Paper in 36 Hours

It’s always fun to watch time-lapse video, but my business partner Justin Hankins has taken it to a whole new level. Justin had to write a sixteen-page research paper in 36 hours. So he wrote a Ruby script to have his iSight take a photo every minute. That’s how we roll at Meticulous — like crack children.

You can check out the results (with accompanying soundtrack from Underworld) at Research Paper in 36 hours on YouTube.

Posted by jathayde on June 29th, 2006 |
Filed in Meta, Photography

2 Responses to “Research Paper in 36 Hours”

  1. Nowak Says:
    June 30th, 2006 at 10:42 AM

    Where can I get some of this Underworld music from?

  2. Justin Says:
    July 6th, 2006 at 09:32 PM

    Wow, that’s painful to watch again. Those 16 pages were the last of 50 pages I belted out in two weeks. yuck.

    Anyway, here’s the command line application to trigger the iSight snap. I don’t remember how it unpacks, but I simply stuck the file in /usr/local/bin. After that, all you have to do is:

    isightcapture /path/to/FILENAME

    and it’ll do the trick. There are several options that can be passed, from dimensions to file type. Once that’s in place, it’s as simple as setting up a script to trigger it and then rigging it into cron to do it automatically. I did a simple bash script (sorry for the ruby mistake, John) that looked like this:

    TIMESTAMP=`date +%Y%m%d_%H%M_%S`
FILENAME='/path/to/'$TIMESTAMP'.jpg'
/usr/local/bin/isightcapture $FILENAME

    Additionally, you can include 2 lines to grab a screencapture at the same time, which you can then place side-by-side. The full script would look something like this:

    TIMESTAMP=`date +%Y%m%d_%H%M_%S`
# iSight
FILENAME='/path/to/'$TIMESTAMP'.jpg'
/usr/local/bin/isightcapture $FILENAME
# Screenshot
SCREENSHOT='/path/to/'$TIMESTAMP'_screen.png'
/usr/sbin/screencapture -x $SCREENSHOT

    Save that somewhere as something like capture.sh and then set up a cron job (crontab -e) to run the shell script every minute.

    Voila! Oh, and Nowak, you can learn more about Underworld at dirty.org.

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