Slow Apple TV Downloads – it’s your DNS

No, I’m not kidding.  Because Apple TV’s content is served through akamai the exact host your Apple TV receives it’s content from is determined by DNS.  It appears that the big DNS servers (google, OpenDNS, etc) send all of their customers to the same hosts thereby bottlenecking the ATV’s.  Using OpenDNS a movie rental on my Apple TV Gen 2 was taking 2+ hours.  When I changed the DNS setting on the ATV to use TWC’s, it took less than a couple of minutes to for a movie rental to be ready to begin.

Never would have guessed DNS settings would have been the source of a slow download.

Art 106 – Project 2 – Survivor Resuce

This video shows the NCHART team performing a rescue of a survivor trapped on a simulated roof prop. In the video the first rescuer is lowered down to assess the situation and the survivor. He determines that the survivor is suitable for a victim assist harness. As the first rescuer is placing the survivor in the harness the second rescuer is lowered to the roof where he clips in the survivor and they are both hoisted to the aircraft. The initial rescuer is then hoisted into the aircraft.

Editor’s Note: This video was produced in iMovie, exported to quicktime, then uploaded to vimeo. For some reason there are a couple of jumps or places where the text overlays don’t line up with the scenes. I’ll go back and retouch when I can carve out the time.

Art 106 – Digital Collage

Somewhere in my week 3 / week 4 sakai-induced brain spasm I managed to not post my digital collage. And that’s a shame. For you and for me. So here it is in it’s massive MB’s of glory.

The above work is available in it’s 8.5×11 PDF version (or in it’s 389MB photoshop version upon request).

Editor’s Note: I think I remember why I didn’t post this when I finished the assignment … I’ve spent the last couple of hours trying to get the PDF file to upload to my AFS space all to no avail. Sigh. If only I knew someone in the IT world. The file is now linked from my sugar sync account. I think I might retouch a couple of those photos again.

Art 106 – Lesson 9 – A Sense of Place

Shooting video was fun. For the first 15 takes. Then it’s just repetitive. Get it? Anyway. It’s very difficult to get a fuzzy four legged actor to cooperate and do smooth shoots with a wobbly tripod. Again iMovie was fun. The project themes that you can choose from (while not helpful for this assignment) make creating a video from your vacation or other event truly effortless. Anyway. Back to the assignment. Next time I’ll direct and hire out the camera work.

Art 106 – Lesson 8 – Video Editing

The week of lesson 8 was busy with work projects, UNC football EMS coverage, packing for NCHART training … and more … here’s my first video composition. These clips were obtained from the Prelinger Archives.

The three clips used were a Folgers commercial, a Sunbeam Bread commercial, and video of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.

Art 106 – Clement Valla

I present to you a selection of the works by Clement Valla. In html or quicktime [60MB].

In the Artist’s own words:

I write instructions and computer code in order to explore systems. My programs are generative. They rely on chance, randomness, repetition and recombination in order to produce complex and unexpected images that lie on the boundary between nature and artifice.
I find systems that produce unintended artifacts, unexplored juxtapositions. Glitches, not designed effects. I collect these strange occurrences.

Note: For some reason the quicktime video has a tendency to get stuck and replay the Sequence of Lines or Sequence of Circles videos. To avoid this, click on the grey area of the slide to move to the next image.

Here are a few links to interesting online resources that I stumbled across in my research:

Red Bull Street Art View

Art 106 – Lesson 5

This week’s topic was animated gifs. I know what you are thinking – so 2000 right? There’s this thing called flash or better yet, HTML5 … anyway … animated gifs still have their place and learning about them is a good fundamental.

This might make it to the SORS homepage. Clint will probably kill me if I do it. Never stopped me before.

Note: you may need to click on the image to have it load the gif directly if the animation isn’t playing. I think there’s something with layer transparencies going on.

By the way, if one say, wanted to do animated gifs in Photoshop instead of GIMP, one might use this tutorial instead.

Art 106 – Week 4 (Lesson 3)

Not a fan of sakai. I managed to last week have what I thought selected as lesson 3 but was in fact lesson 4. As you can see below, Lesson 3 was selected on the left menu, Lesson 3 was displayed in the header on the main page, nonetheless, I was on lesson 4. It wasn’t until I looked at my fellow students’ images on their blogs that I noticed my error. Thankfully I caught it before I copied and pasted my blog post for the wrong week. Wouldn’t that have been confusing? Anyway.

Now on with the homework.

Contrast Image

Brightness, hue, saturation; RGB adjustment, colorizing. Oh my.

Grayscale adjustments make for a nice B&W photo.

Art 106 – Lesson 3 (Conquering Winter)

Winter is my favorite season. I like snow. I really like snow. Maybe you can tell how much I really like snow.

I call this one … Hanging Around

And of course I feel like we all feel … Go Heels!!

Art 106 – Lesson 2

The following images are from lesson 2 assignments.

Here’s the cropped NYC skyline image.

Here’s the GIMPTRICKS image and the image and …

And finally, free form image creation.