Month: March 2013

Giovanni has been taking guitar lessons since January 2012 so he’s been playing for a little over a year now. He has also been in a band class since November. For this additional hour a week, he and a few other kids his age practice playing songs together. The band who call themselves Infinity² played their first gig at K.J. Farrells in Bellmore on February 10. The Music Emporium did a great job poutting together the event. K.J. Farrells is a great place for local live music. The Sunday afternoon was a perfect time, too, and we just barely missed canceling the event since we had that big snow storm the day before. They had Blonde Ambition on tap, a great beer from the Great South bay brewery. So that was like the cherry on top of a very tasty sundae.

The members are as follows:

• Brendan Tominey – Guitar
• Giovanni Codignotto – Guitar <—- that’s my kid!
• Max DeGeorge – Bass
• Samantha Coppola – Vocals
• Vincent Tenaglia – Drums

Brendan is Giovanni’s friend from school. They are led by a veteran musician Artie Blaurock. Arty has been playing in bands and teaching music for decades. If you google him you’ll see he’s got a lot of experience under his belt. In fact, he was Giovanni’s music teacher at his pre-school.

There were a lot of bands playing that day and Infinity² were the closers. They rocked the house. Here is a shot of a bunch of Giovanni and Brendan’s friends from school, with Serafina as a bonus:

 

Here is a picture of the band after one of their practices:

Here are youtube links to each song. I got them all on video. At the end I have a link to Giovanni’s awesome solos.

Don’t Stop Believin’ – Journey

Wanted Dead or Alive – Bon Jovi

Whole Lotta Love - Led Zeppelin

Before He Cheats – Carrie Underwood

Unfortunately, the audio was cut off on this one. I guess it was good enough to trigger the DMCA hornets? However, I uploaded a copy of it to my website: http://primordia.com/upload/beforeHeCheats.mp4. It’s best to download this link, streaming is not optimized.

Beat It – Michael Jackson

And here is a special video I made that has all of Giovanni’s solos:

The band is working on their next gig. I think the experience is awesome and I’m so very proud of all the kids who played in the band. They are all so very talented. For Giovanni, I’m especially proud of his effort over the past year and how he pulled off some of those difficult solos.

This past weekend, we finished up Giovanni and Antonio’s science fair projects. We wound up doing two projects dealing with electricity. We had changed plans a few weeks ago as our original idea was to grow plants. I don’t know what the kids were thinking when they picked those projects. Electricity is so much cooler than growing plants in different soils and seeing  how they grew. I mean, if we were growing carnivorous plants, that might be pretty cool. But I digress.

Antonio’s project was called “Is this connected to  that” and it was about an electrical circuit and conductive materials. Antonio build a tester himself from instructions on the intertubes. We got a little buzzer, some alligator clips, some wire, a battery holder and a few batteries. Here is a diagram of what he made:

Antonio generated a chart of materials that conducted electricity. We also tried a few light bulbs and saw if we could make them glow. We couldn’t make the household ones glow cause those require a lot more voltage. We had a few small 3V tiny light bulbs that lit up fine. When it came time for an Ikea 12V bulb, we had to use 8 batteries in series. Here is a picture of that bulb all glowy:

That’s our unit with 8 batteries, here is the finished 3V tester with buzzer:

We also experimented with a lamp, seeing that the switch broke the circuit and removing the light bulb also broke the circuit. The cool thing was that all of this was new to Antonio so he learned a ton. I also learned that 8 batteries put together in series can create quite the sparkle show if you don’t pay attention.

Giovanni’s project saw the construction of the world’s simplest motor. Here are  the components:

This was a pretty fun project. We used neodymium magnets, which are always a lot of fun. They are also a pain in the ass cause they draw things from quite a distance and it’s not uncommon to get pinched in a sudden and painful manner. The laser tachometer was very cool. It’s rated at measuring speeds up to 100k rpm. We were able to get this motor spinning at 4900 rpm, which is pretty damn fast. We spent a lot of time eliminating friction and making sure the motor was balanced. WD-40 was our friend. Giovanni and I had a little contest to see who could get the thing spinning the fastest. We did a bunch of trials with different number of batteries.

Here was some of our raw data:

Magnets	Top Observed Speed in rounds per minute (rpm)	Notes
2	200	Could not really get it going
3	2400	Super-well balanced
3	2800	Super-well balanced
3	1200	Slight wobble
4	1900	Well balanced, low friction
4	1200	Well balanced, low friction
4	900	Wobbled
4	4400	Super smooth
5	1200	Well balanced, low friction
5	4900	Super smooth
5	1520	Well balanced, low friction
11	4400	Super-well balanced

We massaged the data and were able to see these trends:

 

 

We would have ran a lot more trials to get a better statistical distribution, but getting the thing up to speed was not easy. Sometimes we could not get friction eliminated. Sometimes we expecte the batteries were getting drained. It really wasn’t easy. If I were more handy, I would have tried to build some kind of rigging that would keep things more stable, but I’m not that handy.

Until next year!

Starting in 2013, I created a new iPhoto album that contains all of my RAW images in Adobe’s Digital Negative (DNG) format. My camera is set to shoot in RAW + JPEG. The RAW get converted from Sony’s proprietary RAW to Adobe’s RAW via Adobe’s Digital RAW Converter app. Photos from my iPhone are also in there, but since I have my NEX-6 with me on most occasions  I don’t wind up taking pictures with my phone very often. The JPEG images that my camera saves side-by-side with the RAW are necessary since that’s the only way to get full-resolution images into my iPhone via Sony’s PlayMemories WiFi app.

These RAW images take up a lot of space, a lot more than a standard JPEG. Images are from 10MB – 20-MB for my 16Mp camera. So, getting rid of crappy shots, the sad majority for me, is crucial to making sure I don’t chew up valuable hard drive space on sub-par photos.

I use iPhotos star ratings to manage this. All photos that are targeted for long-term savings are rated. Unrated photos are collected in a Smart Album with a simple rule, “Show all unrated photos”. I quickly go through this smart album and use the Apple keys Command-N, where N is 1 through 5. Typically, for a large number of photos, I’ll either mark photos as 2 or 3 stars in this pass. 2 basically means, “probably delete” and 3 means “probably keep.” Since I’m in a smart album, it begins to empty as I rate photos. When I’m done, the album is empty,

In a second pass, I’ll go through the most recent events and create a smart album with all photos with 3 stars and pick the photos I actually like. I’ll rate these with 4 or 5 stars.

I also try and delete bracketed or mulit-shot photos which are simply redundant. That can take more time.

Phone and iPad Synchronization

I have a few standard “Smart Albums”  that are used for synchronizing with my phone. These are albums for 4+ star photos, 5-star photos and for last 90 days. I also exported “best” photos from 2010, 2011, and 2012 and include just those photos in my 2013 album. These are synchronized on my phone too. This way, my phone has photos I thought were best from 2010 to now in addition to any photo I haven’t deleted in the past 90 days.

Deleting Photos

When it comes time to delete photos, iPhoto gets a little  finicky. I can’t move photos from the 1-2 star smart album directly to the trash. For  some reason, iPhoto thinks that’s not a valid thing to do. I can’t flag all of these photos and delete them from the Flagged folder, either. I can go through each photo individually, reveal it in the event, and delete them one by one this way. That would take too much time.

The only way I found to do this is to search for all photos and sort this view by rating. I can then select all of the 1-2 star photos from the search results view and move them to the trash.