Watch the movie

To watch the movie check it out at :

http://www.kublermdk.com/MDK/Movies/The_Cassette.html

Description

This film is about a guy who randomly picks up a Microcassette recorder, seeing as no one is around he puts it in his pocket and walks off, only to be followed by some sort of agent.
She seems to trail off, but later appears directly in front of him, and pulls a gun. He runs off, but and when he thinks he’s finally safe, he finds out why he had so many troubles trying to get away from her.
The short film is onpurposely very ambiguous as it is designed as a ‘seed’ film for Kino Portable. The idea is that other film makers can create their own films based off this.

Production Details

The Cassette was created in less than 48hours, as part of a Kino Kabaret (Adelaide) event. Starting at 11am (I was an hour late) on Monday the 23rd of February 2009, I rocked up with a couple of cameras, and only knew two people.
Within one and a half hours I made some friends, and managed to organise two actors, an assistant, get some props (the microcassette recorder, and the toy gun), write a script from scratch, and then re-write it so I could read it, then head down to the River Torrens to start filming.
It took about 3 hours to film, and we had two cameras (both mine). A Canon XL1, and a small Sony TVR33e. It was the first time I was directing, filming, and scripting all at the same time, and as such there are some small things that I missed, or would have been done better, if I had time. But the whole idea of Kino is that you do good with nothing, do better with little, but most importantly DO IT NOW!

Cast and Crew

Actor : Ashoka
Actress : Hera
Camera A Operator : Michael Kubler
Camera B Operator : Luigi
Director : Michael Kubler
Editor : Michael Kubler

Kino Portable

Kino Portable is an extension of the Kino film making event, that is designed as a non-linear narrative way of making Mobile phone movies.
What does Non-linear Narrative mean you ask? It means that you don’t have to watch the movie in the order of beginning, middle, and end.
Think of a choose your own adventure book, except as short films and on mobile phones.

Suggested off shoots

You could create a number of films based off this one, in a choose your own adventure style. Some suggestions I can think off :

• What is on the tape?
• Why was the tape there?
• Why are there 3 copies of the female agent?
• Who does the woman work for?
• Why was she wearing flip-flops (thongs) ?
• Why is the tape in the guys left pocket at the end?

A tangent film as already been created about the guy who sticks his head out when the 2nd female agent is walking down the alleyway. It was about unexpected film cameo’s, and was created by Fee Plumley (who is also the person who first introduced me into Kino

Watch the movie

You can watch the movie here : http://www.kublermdk.com/MDK/Movies/The_Cassette.html

You empty your wallet’s excess loose change into a container, every day or two. After collecting so much loose change over the last few months or even years the container is full and you want to turn those coins into notes, or worse you need to count it so you can pay a debt.

Due to anti-money laundering laws, in Australia you can no longer go directly into any bank with jars of random coins and expect them to give you the money in notes. You have to go to your local bank (one which you have an actual account with), so they can directly deposit it into your account. Also, if the coins aren’t in properly sorted into nice money bags, then they are likely to charge you a fee for counting/sorting the coins.

Bags of coins

What you need.

• Lots of plastic money coin banking bags.
• Your pile of loose change.
• (optional) Kitchen scales (or something that shows weights to an accuracy of 1g).
• A large enough table.
• Time.

There are a couple of ways of counting and sorting the coins. You can sort them into stacked piles, heaped piles, or directly into the plastic bags. You can also count the number of coins, the value of the coins you have, or simply weigh them.

Weighing the piles of coins

I personally like to stack the coins, then weigh and finally bag them and will now explain my process.

What to do

1. Make sure your table or work area is clear.
2. Empty the container of money onto the table. If it’s a REALLY big container then you may have to do it in batches.
3. Sort out the different coins into stacked piles. I personally start by picking up 90% of the 50c pieces. Putting them into my hand to make a stack and putting them into a group. Then as I’m picking out about 90% of the 20c pieces I am likely to come across some more 50c pieces that I previously missed, I’ll usually pick these out, and put them onto a heaped pile, near the stack of other 50c pieces. Repeat the process for the other coins ($2 and $1′s), then you should only be left with the 10 and 5c coins. Instead of picking up each of the coins, I usually find it’s faster to simply slide them into the different heaps, then pull some of the coins off the table and into your other hand, which should now be half full, so you can make them into stacks.
4. Don’t forget to remove any foreign currency coins into their own pile, out of the way.
5. You should currently have bunches of sorted and stacked the coins, you will now need to weigh them.
6. Using the reference table below, put the required weight of coins (looking at the weight/bag column) onto the kitchen scales. It’s usually ok if you are out by a gram or two. Put those coins into a money bag, and if you are pedantic, or dropped some coins, re-weigh the bag (it’s likely to be around a gram heavier).
7. Repeat step 6 with all the coins of each denomination (type). If you have left over coins which don’t add up to the required weight then you won’t be able to bank them. Put them back into your original container for the next time you count your coins.
8. You should now have a bunch of plastic coin bags… FILLED WITH COINS! I usually count up how much money I’ve got.
9. Take the money to the bank. As you are probably carrying multiple kilograms worth of change, you’ll want to make sure that whatever container you try using can actually carry the weight of all the bags. Also, try not to get robbed.
10. The bank will basically do what you just did, except with a slightly more advanced set of scales, which can actually detect when you haven’t put the correct number of coins, or even if you counted some foreign coin as a local one (in which case it’ll error). I usually carry an extra coin or two of each type at this point so that if I did miss a coin I can add it to the bag and get the full amount, especially as some banks might not accept incomplete bags.
11. The bank will deposit the money into your account. At this point I usually head to the nearest ATM and pull the money out in notes, unless I actually want it in the account.

—–

Reference Table

This table details the coin denomination, the average weight of each coin, how much each bag should be worth, how many coins per bag, and the approximate total weight of the coins per bag.

—–

Glossary

Stacked pile - A pile of coins where the coins are on top of each other.

Heaped pile - A bunch of coins where they are spread out over an area, usually only a couple of layers thick.

Money bag/coin money bag - A plastic bag with small holes in it that utilises a ziplock seal and is designed for holding coins of the correct amount for when you deposit them at the bank. Usually the bank can provide you with these.

Heaps vs Stacks

Tips and Tricks.

Don’t have any coin bags? Ask they bank! They’ll almost always be happy to give you the coin money bags because they know they are likely to get them back, but mainly because of how annoying it is as a teller to have to rip your non-standard bags, and put all the coins into a counting machine, or worse, have to sort and count the money themselves because you completely stuffed it all up. This is when they are likely to charge you.

Want to count the coins? A great way of speeding this up is to create a stack of 10 coins, you then make the stack next to it the same height using the same coin denomination, and there you go, you’ve now got 20 coins, and only had to count ten! This also works the other way around. When you want to check your counting, if you have two stacks you think are the same number of coins, if you put them right next to each other and they don’t line up, you’d better recount them.

I determined the average weight of each coin by weighing 20 of them, and dividing the total weight by 20. I could tell when the coins I had were a bit heavy because the outcome wouldn’t be a nice number. I tried another set of 20 coins and it’d usually be only a gram heavier or lighter, but the average weight per coin would make more sense. You could also just use wikipedia.

Holding a stack of coins in my hand

My money collection

I had about 6.2kgs worth of loose change. 799 coins in total which were worth $362.35, although I could only bank $320. Nearly 2.2kgs of it was in $39.20 worth of 20c coins. There was also about 177grams worth of foreign currency (I’m not sure why there was so much, I think I’d actually collected some and accidentally put them into the change jar).

My bags of coin collection ($320 worth)

March 2009. Created by Michael Kubler, mainly for my own personal reference so I don’t have to work all the weights and numbers out again next time.

I recently got sick of manually entering in the current date, and month for a personal (private) wordpress post that I use to keep basic details of what I’ve done for the day (computer exploded, Zombies attacked, met an awesome girl, etc..).

I actually hadn’t updated it for months because it was too much of a pain, so I wrote a PHP script that outputs the name of the month, the current date, and then an unordered list with some ‘-’ place holders to stop WordPress from removing the the list.

Please note, that the script is pretty basic, and just shows the next 100 days.

For those that do know what PHP is, you’ll know that you need to actually get a web server (like Apache) to run it. The code is very basic, but shows the power of for loops, and the date, and time functions of PHP.

If you don’t know what PHP is, then don’t worry, just click on the Script button below, then you can copy and paste the contents into WordPress (or whatever blogging program your using), alternatively when you are looking at the script you can right click, and [view page source], or whatever your browse calls it, then copy the raw HTML, and paste that into your blogging program.

Script : http://www.kublermdk.com/web_widgets/Months.php
Code : http://www.kublermdk.com/web_widgets/Months.phps

Example output.

You can download the PHP code from http://www.kublermdk.com/web_widgets/Months.phps (then rename the extension to just .php)

The actual PHP code :

More information :

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/11/10/2414895.htm

http://www.pcauthority.com.au/BlogEntry/127342,australian-internet-filters-have-backdoor.aspx

Are you prepared for the onslaughter?
‘What do we want? BRAINNNnnnns, When do we want it? Brainnnss’

Let the brains.... Mmmm brains

Join me tonight, for some moaning, groaning, and brain crunching fun.
I’ll be the photographer with a knife through his shoulder (or maybe head).

Hi everyone,

Unfortunately due to time constraints, I simply do not have time to write the quality and quantity of posts that I had previously been aiming for.

Instead of trying to post once a week on random things, I am currently aiming on posting more tutorial/informational posts when I have the time.

These will be things that I know about, such as what is required to get a website up and working, PHP programming ideas, or maybe how to setup a portrait photography studio, and in time I’d like to do some video based tutorials. Probably starting off with some Photoshop techniques, and branching out into using a camera, or how to setup your Internet connection. Note that at points I might not post for over a month, that’s usually because I have a large job (like I currently have), and is the nature of being freelance.

I will also be posting the odd random bits of information, and some occasional personal venting or trumpet blowing/promotion.

In the mean time, I hope to continue my Photo(s) of the week, even if I sometimes skip a week and double post.

PS : If you have any requests for information/tutorials on things IT, Web, photography, or video related then leave a comment and I’ll see if it is within my capabilities.

Well, some time ago, before I had this blog, my domain was used to host a video I had created.
The music video, used footage from the Beta of the World in Conflict computer game, which I managed to be a part of, and the song ‘Hell March‘ which was one of my favourite songs from the RTS game Red Alert.

The video below goes for 3mins and 18s and is hosted on Vimeo.

World In Conflict from Michael Kubler on Vimeo.

Full High res version available for direct download [102Mb]

Well, it’s offical.

The Schoolyard Justice short film has been officially released worldwide for public display.
http://www.syjmovie.com/v2/movie.php

Way to many hours trying to get everything working, and I’m sure there are still some issues, so let me know.
At the moment the local premiere is likely to be held on Thursday the 10th of July, however Rodney still needs to re-organise everything.

Today is a day of many values.
It is World Blood Donor day. Which I celebrated by giving whole blood, something I haven’t done in nearly 1.5 years.

It is also Friday the 13th, and to celebrate the leaving of a great person from our place of work, we have christened it ‘Pop your collar‘ day. That is, every Friday the 13th you are to honour those people that have left your place of work. Those amazing people who brightened up your day, that you looked forward to seeing, but now, are replaced with an empty space, or a newb.

You have the option of either popping your collar for an hour, or for the whole day. If you are really cool you can pop 4 collars.

I recently installed the new Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), on my Asus laptop.
The laptop previously had a play around install of Feisty Fawn on it, however I couldn’t remember the password, and after using the live-CD I confirmed there was nothing on the 10Gb partition, which I nuked, to install Hardy Heron.I use the laptop on weekends in Windows XP, so I can use Photoshop (and no, the Gimp is not an alternative to Adobe Potatoshop… yet).

Anyway back on track.
I am glad that the Ubuntu Live CD finally has gparted by default so you can look at the hard drive partitions and do tricky things without having to use the install wizard, or burning a gparted live CD of which I couldn’t find mirrored by Internode, and sourceforge downloads have been slow recently.

On thing I will mention. I was using GRUB (the boot loader) to be able to select between Ubuntu and Windows XP. I had previously set it to default to Windows XP, however after installing Ubuntu it changed the default select option to Ubuntu.
Not really a big deal, and I highly doubt it would have happened if I simply ran

>sudo apt-get  upgrade
>sudo apt-get  dist-upgrade

In any case  my next change will be trying Ubuntu Studio

PS : This post was 3/4 written up within 48 hours of the latest Ubuntu release, however I got distracted posting it… my bad.