Final Cut Pro, QGIS, Motion, mTracker 3D, mCallouts
Subscribers when released
165
Trivia/Background:
Another attempt to sync up live GPS traces with a map, but this time by exporting the GPS track separately from the background map, so that QGIS’s non-deterministic labels don’t move around.
We synced it up with a timelapse video here, but unless you’re trying to do that, just fake it in Motion - it works way better, because in real life, you start and stop quite a lot.
First usage of mTracker 3D and mCallouts, for 3D titles and tracked annotations.
First appearance of Alex.
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A while ago, we still had a 25km restriction on travel and the Organ Pipes came up as a possible destination we could visit. However, they turned out to be 27km away on further inspection. But that rule no longer applies, so they’re due for a visit.
Then we bring a friend for the 10km walk around Werribee Gorge. Original plan was Mt Macedon, but they’re still cleaning up the fallen trees from the huge storm that occurred there a few weeks ago. It’s a long walk, and a little harder than we expected, and there was a gigantic traffic jam on the “one way” section that’s not actually one way, but it’s well worth it for the scenery.
The last in this series, with some previously unseen dashcam footage at Lowmead.
I thought I had more backstory and unseen footage than I really had, but this was at least something not seen before.
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In the final part of The Story Behind, I cover the rest of the Queensland story - our trip up to Queensland, adventures therein, our holiday within a holiday and some previously unseen footage at Lowmead.
This video, which is also a little out of sequence with the series it’s supposedly in, was made after seeing yet another Reddit post on how great fire steels were.
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There’s a very common item that seems to go into everybody’s survival kit for the very important purpose of obtaining fire. However, is it really any better than a common household item for doing the same? Sure they’re fun to use, but when you’re wet, cold and slowly freezing to death, would you really be able to use it?
Here’s why it isn’t, and maybe you should stick with the less “tacticool” item.
This one discusses the triumphant “end” of COVID closures in late 2020… and then how it went all so wrong after that.
This is the first video to take place outside of Australia, cutting to Auckland, New Zealand.
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I regret making the video about the trip up to Queensland so triumphant. It might have looked like we thought COVID was over. While that’s not what we thought, I don’t think it was misguided to think that it would at least be a bit quieter from that point.
This wasn’t exactly true and it turns out that there was to be much more to the story. More than even I thought - when our luck runs out and we get caught up in it all…
This one discusses the early history of DropTableAdventures and the story of the beginnings of the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia.
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I have a theory that all channels have two sets of videos - before “the incident” then after “the incident”. Here we continue with the story, the early days, and go into how it all went wrong…
So somehow I ended up beginning a series of videos, and this one was sort-of part of it, but sort-of not.
Wonder if the title was too confusing, making it look like it was part 2 of an accessories review they can’t find part 1 of?
Another use of OmniGraffle to draw diagrams here, not common this early on.
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How exactly did we manage to make a 28 minute video on GoPro accessories? Simple - by reviewing 21 of them…
We review our entire collection of GoPro accessories and tell you what’s good, what’s not good, and whether spending more for the genuine article is actually worth it.
00:00 Intro
00:36 The QuickClip
01:18 The Flat Plate
02:02 The Dual Battery Charger
03:04 Jaws - the Flex Clamp
04:34 Adjustible Neck
05:48 MicroSD to SD adaptors
07:04 Chesty - Chest Harness
08:16 Curved + Flat Adhesive Mounts
09:00 RAM Ball Adaptor for GoPro Mounting Plate
09:24 RAM Action Camera Universal Ball Adaptor
10:01 The Handler
10:36 The Head Strap
11:21 Suction Cup Camera Mount
12:43 USB Pass Through Door / Ulanzi G8-7
14:02 The Remote
15:06 Selfie Stick
15:47 Camera Sleeve + Lanyard (silicone case)
17:00 Hand + Wrist Strap
18:01 The Grab Bag
20:34 The 3 Way
21:12 Handlebar / Seatpost / Pole Camera Mount
22:13 The App (Quik)
25:37 Is buying genuine worth it
26:49 Outtro
27:38 Final Tier List
Previously on this site we examined the possibility of using a Caldigit TS3 Thunderbolt 3 dock to provide power to a downstream Thunderbolt 3 device (expensive way of doing it, but this dock is useful for a lot of other things). I said I’d check some of the other peripherals to see what works and what doesn’t, when you use this dock with a TB2 MacBook, via an adaptor.
Here’s the setup in question. A 2m Thunderbolt 2 cable goes from one of the Thunderbolt 2 ports on the MacBook Pro, to a Thunderbolt 3-2 adaptor plugged into the Thunderbolt 3 port on the dock.
So, read on to find out what works, and what doesn’t.
(BTW - short Thunderbolt 3 cables like this one are passive and also work for USB 3. Longer TB3 cables (>1m) are active and only support USB 2. This is why the Thunderbolt 3 cable seen here is successfully being used with the USB 3.2 SSD enclosure at full speed. Thunderbolt 2 cables, however, are all active - hence the price.)
With a while having passed since the last adventure, and another COVID lockdown in progress, I decided to make something.
This is what became of the “10^2 subscriber review” promised in the Blackdown Tablelands series.
Season wise, this one’s a little strange, but if I made this one the start of season 4, it would leave Season 3 with only two episodes after Season 2’s 24.
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There’s a bit more history before the first video, and how we got into making them. Can’t go out at the moment, but can tell you that story.
So where we left off last time, I had a 10Gbit Thunderbolt 3 adaptor, and a mid-2014 Macbook Pro that I couldn’t plug it into.
I found out that you can in fact use the Thunderbolt 3 to 2 adaptor in a “backwards” configuration. I purchased the 2m TB2 cable - quite expensive at $65 for the cable. This is because although Thunderbolt 3 allows for short passive cables, all TB2 cables are active. Surprisingly, purchasing brand new from Apple was actually the cheapest option over anything on Amazon or eBay.
I bought the TB3 to 2 adaptor off Amazon for $9. That’s suspiciously cheap, and the one I got was labelled for sale in Brazil. Given Amazon’s approach to stock fungibility, it probably wasn’t even the one that the seller put into the system.
There’s just one catch - it doesn’t provide bus power from the TB2 side to the TB3 side. I looked for a third party adaptor that did, but Startech was the only 3rd party vendor to ever make one and that one doesn’t even support reverse mode.
Just to make sure I was right about this limitation, I tried it anyway. As expected, it didn’t work.
The other way round - a TB3 Mac using a bus powered TB2 Gigabit adaptor works fine.
So what we need is something to inject bus power - preferably something quite cheap. I looked for a suitable cable, but finding nothing (I’m really surprised I can’t find something), I heard others had success with docking stations.
Searching eBay finds that the StarTech TB3DKDPMAW was available for as low as $60 (without power brick). It only takes a 12v DC barrel jack, so this seems pretty cheap and easy.
Why so cheap and unwanted? It only does 15w USB PD back to the host, meaning that unlike other popular docks on the market, you can’t charge your laptop with it.
This isn’t a problem here, because we can’t charge through Thunderbolt 2 anyway, so you’d expect that at this point, I’d have bought this obscure bit of largely unwanted hardware that might do exactly what I want. But I didn’t.
By the time I get it shipped to me, and dig up a suitable power brick, it’s approaching half the cost of a CalDigit TS3+, a very popular Thunderbolt 3 laptop dock, that has tons of ports and the capability to charge the connected laptop at near 90 watts.
When I inevitably buy a new MacBook Pro, I can use the dock with that, rather than relegating the old dock to the bottom of a “random cables” drawer - making this a much better investment.
So I borrowed a CalDigit TS3+ dock from someone who already had one, while I wait for this one to arrive.
The old fileserver was filled with a mixture of 3TB and 4TB disks, which were starting to become increasingly unreliable. The ZFS pool couldn’t expand until all the 3TB disks were replaced with 4TB, the SAS card they were connected to was obtained suspiciously cheaply as it was an uncommon chipset variant that’s not supported very well in Linux, the onboard SATA had persistently many read errors on one of the ports, I never quite liked the HTPC case it was in, and fixing any of these problems would inevitably require replacing most of entire server.
So a new fileserver was built in a 2RU rackmount case. 8x 12TB drives fill the front panel which has drive bays rather than the drives being internally mounted. 64GB of ECC RAM is fitted to the motherboard, with all the drives attached to 8 onboard SATA ports. It’s running an AMD CPU, because the current generation allows ECC on all CPUs without onboard graphics if the motherboard supports it (unlike Intel where only the high end Xeon line supports it). Two NVMe SSDs are installed on the motherboard - a 256GB one for the OS to boot from, and a 1TB one for L2ARC. A NVidia GT710 provides graphics, should the console ever need to be used - and maybe I can use it for hardware H.264 decoding/encoding to transcode some media later on - although I’m not totally sure it’ll be faster than doing so on the CPU.
It’s much more interesting with the top off…
I did, however, need a low profile 10Gbit network card. You may recall a long time ago, I picked up a bunch of Mellanox ConnectX-2 cards for about $35 each. Now, nearly four years on, the later ConnectX-3 cards are now selling for about $50, so I bought two with full height brackets, and a third with a low profile bracket (for a few dollars more). All three subsequently turned up with both kinds of bracket included.
Top left: Intel dual-port gigabit. Top centre: Mellanox ConnectX-2. Bottom row: Mellanox ConnectX-3, times 3.
