After Rose and our fluffy-pawed spaniel Tilly came back from their walk across the muddy fields this morning, Tilly composed the following and asked me to share it, because it might help other canine readers to know they are not alone.
Rose’s supposing my toeses need hosing
Shows Rose is supposing erroneously.
‘Cause nobody’s toes can need quite as much hosing
As Rose is supposing my toeses to need!
I’m somewhat confused by one of our recent purchases, which proudly proclaims on its packaging that it hasn’t been tested on animals.
Jolly good, I thought. Always keen to do the right thing if I can.
There’s just one problem.
It’s dog food!
What’s more, it’s made of chicken! So it’s made of animals, and fed to animals… but at least you can rest assured that it’s not tested on them. What sort of a daft marketing department…?
Ah well, never mind.
Well, Arden Grange, I can report that Tilly, on being given it, wagged her tail enthusiastically and wanted more. So that’s good news for your marketing.
But I’m afraid this means that it has now been tested on animals, so you’ll need to remove the label.
Yesterday I realised I was looking particularly suave and debonair, so decided it would be the right time to point a camera at myself. Mmm…
If you want to try using a decent digital camera for videoconferencing, you normally either need:
something which will capture an HDMI output signal from your camera and feed it into your computer over USB, like the Elgato Cam Link,
or you need some software which can capture the live preview output and make it available to your operating system as if it were a locally-connected camera. On the Mac, I do this with a combination of Camera Live – which makes it avaliable as a ‘Syphon’ server – and CamTwist, which can take a variety of inputs, including Syphon, and blend them into a ‘virtual camera’ output. There are various tutorials online on how to do this. OBS is a similar popular app, but doesn’t yet support virtual camera output on the Mac.
Finally, for some versions of some Mac apps, you may need to remove the app’s signature (which identifies it with a certain set of permissions), to enable it to see virtual cameras as well as physical ones. At the time of writing, Zoom needs:
$ codesign --remove-signature /Applications/zoom.us.app/
P.S. Sadly, various other people have used the phrase ‘One man and his vlog’, so I can’t pinch it on any kind of long-term basis 🙂
Tilly inspects the recent repairs to her castle walls…
If you let me bathe, I shall become muddier than you could possibly imagine.
Tilly, captured on her afternoon walk by my iPhone 6. It’s a pretty good camera in the right conditions, given the size of the lens. Click to see more detail.
If this shot looks vaguely familiar, you might have seen this one a couple of years ago.
My brother-in-law’s dog Joshua got up on the sofa to help me check in for our flights, but it turned out he wasn’t really too interested in Delta Airlines. He was more keen to chat to these girls.
I’ve been experimenting with low camera angles – something that hasn’t been so easy with my Canon 6D, since it doesn’t have an articulated viewfinder, so to get shots like these you normally have to lie on the ground if you want to see what you’re taking. But the built-in wifi means that you can, instead, put the camera down low and use your phone as a viewfinder, which is what I did today.
The shallow depth of field was deliberate – I quite like the effect.
Oh! It didn’t look like that last time!
Tilly in action on a recent walk.
© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser
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