The online home of Anton Pugachevsky

Goals…

Anton — Tue, 08 May 2012 20:39:18 +0000

Alright, I will admit, picking some of the toughest courses for my senior semester was not the best idea – this semester has been a busy mess. With just a week left, I am excited to make some goals for the summer – and yes, I am feeling a bit sad about leaving (hopefully not for long before I start grad school). However, there are a few things I would like to achieve/do/experience this summer:

Get organized: I don’t know what is wrong with me…but my geeky OCD is somehow gone, and I miss it
Stay fit: I really shouldn’t be paying $25 a month for a gym membership I never use…so maybe I should use it more
Develop: for my own good. With school homework assignments out of the way, I can now invest into some fun development for myself!
Dust off that Nikon: I love photography…and I need to work on some photos, I have thousands of photos that can be “produced”. I also need to set up my portfolio here on the site to show you guys all my wonderful work!
Network – would really like to find more folks who share my interests and passions in outdoors, development, and photography
Meditate – really looking into getting serious about my Yoga…I even ordered a Shakti mat
Blog more? I love this…hopefully now I will have the time I need

Seven is an odd number, but it’s a good start. Please do hold me accountable on all 7 items…resolutions aren’t made to be broken.

-Anton

Creating a seamless looping time-lapse video

Anton — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 16:51:21 +0000

Time-lapse photography has been around for a while but with recent advances in technology and increasing popularity, a lot of us want to be like, or better than Bing.com. Though time-lapse photography can be pretty sophisticated, here’s a very simple tutorial which shows how to create a seamless looping time-lapse video and insert it into a web page as an HTML 5 video.

1. Film
It is preferable that you use a professional camera for your video, however any decent camera will do. (I captured the video in this tutorial with my iPhone 4S). Find a level spot or use a tripod to set up your camera and start recording. You will need at least 15-20 seconds of video to be able to select and crop out 7 seconds for your video, but I would recommend filming for about 30-45 seconds to give yourself more material to work with.

2. Edit
Import your movie into a movie-editing software (I am using iMovie 2011).

Scroll through your video and find about 6-10 seconds which you would like to loop, and make sure there is no vibration or motion of the camera. Select this clip and drag to your timeline – make two copies one after the other.

In order to make this video loop seamlessly we need to have only one seam and have a cross-dissolve transition on that seam – hence the need for two copies (simply because you cannot add a transition between the end and beginning of a single video). Two copies creates another issue – there are now two seams, but because the videos are identical, we can eliminate one of the seams by trimming the video to end and start in the same exact point.

To achieve this, select about half of the right side of the second video and remove it.

Now do the same with the left half of the first video:

Now that the second seam is rendered unnoticeable, add a cross-dissolve transition between the two clips:

Now it’s time to tweak the audio if you are planning on keeping it – just fade out the second clip and fade in the first one for simplicity.

After you have made any additional changes and tweaks to your video – you are all set!

3. Insert into a webpage
Now you can export your video – remember that it is preferable to use mp4 if you are planning on using this inside an HTML5 tag.

All set! That was quick, wasn’t it?

Now here’s how to insert it to your website, blog, or whatever other HTML document:

The HTML5 tag has quite a few options which allow you to resize, mute, auto-start, etc – you can read more about specific options at W3Schools

If you’ve been wondering…

Anton — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 05:01:51 +0000

I think for any blogger, one of the most discouraging things is a dropping visit count. When you are posting regularly and linking to your site, your site enjoys a constant flow of visitors that seems to be ever-increasing. But when the most recent post on your blog is a stale 2-month old post, the diminishing visitor count really does hurt a lot. In light of constant blogging delays, here’s a short rundown of what has been going on, what is coming and when it is coming – if you care to know.

My last semester of college turned out to be quite the opposite from an “easy last semester”, seeing as I took a couple of programming courses and both those in addition to work and senior project have taken a toll on how much free time I have. This year is flying by, it’s crazy to think that it is almost May and I remember ringing in 2012 and going on a ski trip to Colorado just like it was last week. But the semester has been busy and as much as I want to dedicate more time to this website and my overall online presence, I cannot afford to do so, yet.

This semester has been busy. I was in a car accident and dealt with repairing my car, which took more than 1 visit to the body shop because people tend to do crappy work nowadays. Then I spent a significant amount of time looking for a job and interviewing at various places, finally settling with a really interesting position at Liberty Mutual. Then I decided it was time to overhaul my car seeing as it really needed new rotors, struts, and fluid changes, but I decided to throw in a bumper, floor mats, etc, etc, etc – grand total of about $3000. Then I was flooded with schoolwork barely leaving me with any free time.

Enough about the events of this semester. Though I keep on saying that I will post more often, but never quite end up doing so – it will happen, someday. I have a rather ambitious vision for my website and YouTube channel. This website will be getting regular posts, in addition to a portfolio of my photo work, as well as coding projects which I will be posting and advertising on here as soon as I get started on them. Speaking of coding – I am hoping to start working on a couple of WordPress plugins and a theme in the near future. I am also planning to get heavily involved in a non-profit project to increase awareness about the prospects of the Maine North Woods National Park, and will be designing and running an online campaign.

As far as the YouTube/vlogging goes, I am planning on compiling those numerous video ideas I have already filmed waiting on the SD card in my camera.

And probably the highlight of the next couple months will be my trip to Washington, Oregon and California – keep an eye out for some exciting vlogs and photos.

Anyways – this is just a short rundown of what’s been going on, now I need to go clean out my room because we are having new carpet installed next weekend and everything has to leave the house, which is a pain.

Cheers
-Anton

So what about the MacBook Air? Apple, please do innovate, more!

Anton — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 08:02:11 +0000

Up until a couple years ago, I have been a Windows geek. I loved it and I didn’t want to know anything else. College changed everything. Sure, I am willing to admit it, the “cool factor” definitely did play its role, at least in my initial exploration of Macs. But it didn’t start with a Mac, after all, I’ve had an iPod Nano and an iPod touch for a few years. Apple has been the underdog in computing for the large part of the 1990′s, but with the arrival of the iPod – everything changed. Apple became an incredible innovator and a company that placed the user experience and quality first – not something that many other companies do. Nonetheless, Apple has been able to gain vast market shares with their portable devices, and has had some tremendous improvement to the marker share of OS X devices thanks to their usability and stability.

I think companies have a burnout too. Google had its burnout soon after the glorious peak of their popularity for their search engine – seeing as about half of the new products they introduce today are unfinished and of very poor quality. I wouldn’t say that Apple has burned out, but I think we are all starting to realize that filing patent lawsuits to prevent competition will not do Apple any good in the long run; and with Steve Jobs’ passing last year, Apple lost a visionary it relied on for bold moves and direction. Sure, there are plenty of bright individuals who will take the lead, but Apple has been slow to react to ‘stagnation’ of their products.

I love all of Apple’s products, and I am not planning on buying anything BUT an Apple product any time soon – but I do think they need to ramp up their innovation just a tad, because while loyal customers like me may have patience, but the global market does not.

Here’s a scoop on what I think many of us would expect to see from the upcoming MacBook Air/Pro line:

New iPod parts? Not from iRepair

Anton — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 04:27:26 +0000

So a couple months ago I sent in my Nano for the 1st generation replacement program (due to a supposed explosive battery)…right – so that was a horrible decision, because I didn’t want the 6th generation iPod Nano. Anyways, so then I went through tons of calls to Apple, telling about how I was mistreated, and yes, I scored a new iPod touch, which I sold on eBay because I already have an iPhone. So then I decided to return myself a Nano, somehow. After looking on many online retailers, I found that the cheapest new 1st generation Nano is $350, so that was out of the picture. So then I decided to buy a used Nano and some parts, specifically the front and back plates to make it look nice and shiny.

I ordered the parts from iRepair, an online electronics parts retailer. Not going to say that iRepair is consistently bad, but what I received was horrendous.

So yeah, think twice before you buy supposedly “new” parts from an online retailer like iRepair.

Anton

iPhone battery fix, before iOS 5.1

Anton — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 04:32:28 +0000

Contrary to advances in battery technology (of which there have been very few), people charge their phones more often today than they did 5 years ago. When I had my first cell phone, which was a basic “candy bar” phone, I could go three days easily without having to charge my battery. Last year I got my first smartphone – iPhone 4. iPhone 4’s battery life was okay, I could go two days without charging my phone. That being said, the battery life was substantially worse than on any feature phone I ever had.

Some months later, I decided to upgrade to iPhone 4S (which I have done for free), and although it turned out to be a better device with more features, battery life was a kill. After upgrading, my battery would go down to only single percent digits by the end of the day, not even 24 hours! Having heard about this issue on the news, I waited for iOS 5.0.1 software update which was supposedly going to resolve any battery issues people had. That didn’t do it.

While we are still waiting for the next major update of iOS – 5.1, I set out on a quest to figure out if I can pinpoint exactly what feature is killing the battery life so quickly. First thought? Maybe I was forgetting to close the apps I was running. That wasn’t the case, since I try to close all apps whenever I am not using them. Then I thought, maybe iOS 5’s flagship feature – iCloud is what’s eating up my resources, so I decided to turn off iCloud backups. Sure, turning off iCloud saved me maybe a few percent in the course of the day, but it still was not good enough.

Another big battery leeches are the location services which constantly try to keep the position of your device to perform certain system tasks. Turning off location-based iAds, Diagnostics & Usage (which is also a privacy measure), and Setting Time Zone, as well as Traffic and Compass (if you are not using them) should substantially improve battery life. So I gave it a try and yes, battery life improved slightly yet again.

After reading countless forum posts on Apple’s support forums as well as watching multiple videos on the problem, I was having a hard time finding the culprit. Then, I decided to evict Siri, sorry girl. Siri certainly eats up some amount of data, plus processing power when you are using her. But perhaps there was something in Siri that always ran in the background? As it turned out, there was.

Siri has a not-so-useful feature called “Raise to Speak”, which can be enabled or disabled in the Siri section in General Settings. By default this feature is enabled. After disabling “Raise to Speak” feature, I have noticed huge improvements in battery life. Before disabling the feature, my cell phone would display 5%-10% battery life by the end of the day. After – about 30-40%. Though 40% at the end of the day of light cell phone use is not great, it falls in line for more normal battery capacities.

So don’t let Siri always spy on you to see if you are about to talk to her. Disable “Raise to speak” and just ask her whatever you were going to ask by holding the home button.

Overall, I think users who complain about poor battery life, like myself, largely just forgot that the new device, specifically the new OS have extra features which are always running in the background, which naturally decreases battery life. In total, I achieved an average 30% increase in battery life (at the end of the day-light/average use) by:
1. Turning off some location services
2. Turning off iCloud backup
3. Turning off Siri’s “Raise to Speak” feature

The latter accounted for the most of this improvement.

Give it a try, let me know if this works for you or not.

Colorado, a race against time, a race for a beautiful adventure, I arrived

Anton — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 06:34:12 +0000

Hello world,

I am laying in my hotel bed half asleep right now after a long day of skiing (second day here in Colorado), and I just decided to through together a short teaser trailer for what’s coming at you once I get back home and have a little bit more time to put all my videos together. I brought a book to read on vacation, I was planning on doing some editing and business work, however I have my doubts now – coming back from skiing every day does not leave me in a mood to do anything but relax and sleep.

Anyways, for what it’s worth, here’s the clip:

See ya all soon.

Aquarium Vlogging

Anton — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 06:35:02 +0000

Yup, it’s been a while, and I’ve been slacking, but it was a long vacation and I am a little slow getting back into the swing of things. Or maybe I just had too much holiday food. Anyways, to kick the year off, Gabby and I went to see some of them fishes at the New England Aquarium, it’s a pretty chill place, even for big kids.

Happy New Year!

Anton — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:52:01 +0000

Dear readers,

As 2011 is coming to an end, we look back and all the highlights of this year and mourn for the losses and celebrate victories and achievements. In the final minutes of this year, we all have our moments to recall – we all had our downs and ups. Some of us mourned, some of us celebrated. But let us leave everything in the past year and ring in new, 2012 year! Personally, New Year’s eve was always a special time for me. I think it’s a truly magical time that brings us all together in the name of peace and unity among people of all nations and creeds.

As the clock is running short on this New Year’s Eve, I would like to wish everyone a very bright, successful, personally fulfilling (whatever that may be for you!) and safe year.

A little aside from me, the last vlog of the year:

P.S. Celebrate it specially, since it might just be the last New Year’s eve as we know it.

Oh, and some footage from ringing in 2011!

iOS as an Enterprise Platform

Anton — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 20:02:42 +0000

Here I am pitching for Apple, free of charge. You are welcome, Apple.

A couple years ago when I was an intern at a large financial company over the summer, everyone had corporate Blackberry phones. Oh boy. As ludicrous as may seem, but enterprises still use Blackberries. However the winds have been shifting, and iOS has been steadily emerging as the new top-pick for enterprises seeking a balance between features and security – and only Apple has been able to master that balance, so far.

Here’s a white paper I threw together so all of you decision makers out there can make well-informed decisions.

iOS as Enterprise Mobility Platform (PDF)