keep fishin'

Best impulse buy I've ever made... sometimes trolling Boing Boing at 2am pays off.

That settles it, I'm buying a Zune.

Here you can see the pet-keeping/photography project that's been playing out on my desk for about five weeks now. Several months ago I purchased a space-age Antworks ant farm from ThinkGeek, but it languished unused since I couldn't find a single ant marching around outside in the San Francisco winter. So in March I finally broke down and bought a packet of harvester ants from teh intarweb. About 25 of the hardy beasts arrived several days later, having all survived the trip sealed in a tiny plastic tube. It's probably for the best that I got these, since they're substantially larger and easier to see than the tiny black ants you tend to find on the ground around here, and less likely to escape through the air holes.

Having "mounted" my Canon A80 on a pile of cardboard and books and convinced VMware and Ubuntu to talk to it over USB, I started snapping away. The ants' traveling papers warned about biting, so I mellowed them out in the fridge for a few minutes before tapping them into the farm. A few minutes later they started to move around, and half an hour later a particularly clever gal (they're all female!) discovered that the gel was chewable. And the rest is, well, you know.

To create this video I started with 30,781 frames and edited down to about 7,000 where something interesting was happening (they spend a lot of time relaxing by the blue LEDs). To get to 24fps and a reasonable run time, only every third frame was used, and I reduced the 3 megapixel resolution down to 640x480, compact enough for Vox goodness.

While this video shows the overall action fairly well, the details are only really visible at higher resolution. The non-flash-video source for this clip can be grabbed here; if I can find a good place to post one, I'll put together an HD version.  Anybody know of a good place to host hi-res video?

Ellie, the newest Six Apart office dog, saws some logs.