Palaeontologist: Dinosaur Footprints – Biomechanics – Simulation
As part of a teaching push, I was able to secure a new 3D printer for the lab, to produce specimens for practical sessions (on our Zoology and Animal Behaviour programmes). I actually got it at the start of semester, last September, but have been so busy with teaching I didn't get chance to give... Continue Reading →
My wife recently upgraded her aging 2014 Macbook to a new 14" M1 Macbook Pro. Let me preface what I'm about to say with "I very much dislike MacOS and don't like using macs." Bear that in mind when I say I've never been more jealous of hardware. The MacBook Pro is beautiful, the screen... Continue Reading →
I’ve been testing out instant-ngp recently, it’s an open-source software from Nvidia that generates neural radiance fields. That’s a 3D representation of an object that is fundamentally different from the points or verticies and faces we may be used to. Rather than representing an object through 3D coordinates, connections between them, and colours (i.e. vertices... Continue Reading →
Backing up is super important, we all know this, but we're not all great at it, and almost everyone I know has had an incident, at some point, where important data has been lost. It's not just having duplicates of things that is the issue either - just storing and accessing the kinds of big... Continue Reading →
A few months back I finally upgraded from my trusty Sony Nex-6 to the newer Sony a6400. I've only just got around to having the time to write a review. This 'review' will very much be a ramble about my feelings using the camera, not a technical, specialist review. If you want one of those,... Continue Reading →
I saw recently that COLMAP had received an update to 3.7 in late Jan '22 (I'd previously tested 3.6 a year or more ago), though after a quick, unscientific trial, I didn't notice any particular changes to UI, workflow, speed, or quality of final model, so I didn't think it was worth a blog post.... Continue Reading →
I was contacted just before Christmas by Alan Broun from Beholder Vision, asking me to give it a twirl and write about my thoughts. Beholder Vision, https://beholder.vision/, s a cloud-based photogrammetry solution. That means everything runs in the cloud, rather than on your local hardware. I tend to avoid the cloud-based solutions, because I live... Continue Reading →
One year ago, on Christmas eve 2020, I posted about the Surface Pro X. I was very happy with it, except for one thing - the size. I ended up replacing the Pro X with the Surface Go 2 just a month or so later. My reasoning was that it was about as powerful as... Continue Reading →
Much as the popular view is that palaeontologists spend their days out in the dusty desert digging up fossils, the fact is most of us spend more time at a computer than anything else, and that goes doubly so when your research revolves around computer simulations. As such, a keyboard is probably one of the... Continue Reading →
Yeah, 'Academic' here is more of a stretch than usual... Having been locked down/working from home for however long it's been (12 months? 18 months? a billion years?], and having been using the same computer, tablet, and phone during this time, I've been getting antsy for a new device, particularly one that either fills a... Continue Reading →
Dr Peter L. Falkingham 