Linkspam: Using Machine Learning for Geoglyph Detection

PNAS has an interesting paper on using AI and Machine Learning to try and identify new Nazca Pampa geoglyphs in the Peruvian Nazca Desert. It’s a fun little lunchtime skim with a few nice images of some of the newly found geoglyphs.

PNAS: AI-accelerated Nazca survey nearly doubles the number of known figurative geoglyphs and sheds light on their purpose

Converting Video to Image Sequences with ffmpeg

Another little aide-memoire masquerading as a blog post; the specific incantation required to turn a video into a named sequence of images with ffmpeg is…

ffmpeg -i <path to source video>  -vf fps=<frames per second> <output directory/basename->%d.png

…where…

<path to source video> is the path to the video file in question.
<frames per second> is the number of frames per second of footage to extract. This can be less than 1 if you wish to extract at a lower rate than one frame per second.
<output directory/basename->%d.png is a composite instruction to create files in the directory ‘output directory’, for these files to have the prefix ‘basename-‘, and for these files to have an incrementing count appended to the end. It also specifies that the output files should be in the ‘.png’ format.

Linkspam: Bop Spotter

Bop Spotter is an interesting little curio; take an Android phone, set it to run Shazam on a loop, and then hide it somewhere (in this case San Franciscos’s Mission district) with a solar panel attached and suddenly you have the the culture-tasting equivalent of ShotSpotter, generating the unique soundtrack to a particular location. San Franciscos’s Mission is, of course, a very particular environment with a distinct feel too it, so it’d be interesting to see how it would contrast with other locations around the world – though I do suspect that most would end in the brief bang of a controlled explosion.

York Historic Environment Record Blog RSS Feed

So the City of York Historic Environment Record department has a an interesting, if infrequently updated, blog covering archeology and historic conservation efforts in York.

Now my preferred way of reading blogs – especially those which are not frequently updated – is to stick that particular blog’s RSS feed in my reader and to let the updates come to me. Unfortunately the YHER Blog doesn’t have an obvious link to a feed, but, after a little poking around at the page’s HTML, I’ve managed to find a URL that seems to work: York Historic Environment Record Blog RSS Feed.

And that should perfect to be fed into your reader of choice!