It’s 12:43 on October 25th, 2021 and it’s been nearly three hours without access to clean water.
My sister just said “I’m going to take a shower”, I respond “there’s no water but check again”. She opens the water tap and says “Oh, this is so bad”
We’re both visiting our Mom in our home country: México. I live in Berlin and my sister lives in San Francisco. Both cities have access to clean drinkable water all day, every day.
My Mom lives in a small 25-house compound in the outskirts of CDMX located in the State of México. Since my childhood and decades before that there have been water issues in this city.
A neighbor who lives in a close compound also mentioned water accessibility problems in the area during the last few days, and as a consequence there is low water pressure or sometimes lack of access to water.
So, there are two issues happening right now while I type: 1. lack of access to clean water and 2. lack of electricity for the water pumps inside the compound, the latter is a consequence of corruption. Some unknown neighbor messed with the electricity meter of the water pumps and the electric company cut the electricity supply for the pumps. Shit.
In the last two years, I’ve been working on a side-project called Ueiya, some of the project’s objectives are to increase efficiency of water usage, raise awareness around water issues and help tackle water issues around the world such as droughts, water insecurity, availability, scarcity, rising sea levels, floods, water pollution, poor sanitation to name a few.
You can check out more about the project and help spread the word here www.ueiya.com, if you like 🙂
It seems water pressure is back, what a relief. I’ll take a shower.
An easy way to reduce water usage is by using a 15-20 Liter bucket in the shower. Place it while the water is heating up and place it beside you while you shower. Later, you can use that water for the toilet.
Here’s an experimental short-film series feat. Haku. It’s composed of 12 videos, with a total duration of 15 min. I made it with an iPhone and a simple movable arm to hold the phone.
A long time ago, I directed and animated a 3 min 3D short-film. This was around the time I was university. I’ve always been fascinated by motion pictures.
In the early 2000’s, like many others web enthusiasts, I learnt how to build basic websites, I played around with HTML and CSS; it was fun. Then life happened. A few years go I re-started to learn programming, I did a Python course but I forgot about must stuff, I never applied it.
This year, I taught myself the basics of programming with youtube videos, an Udemy course, a book, and by asking questions to my colleagues at work: developers, engineers and data-scientists. Access to their knowledge and patience is invaluable. Some of them recommended to apply the lessons I learned by doing a project: the famous learning by doing technique so I decided to mix some of my interests: photography, animation, storytelling, video editing and programming.
The first phase of the project was a playful one. One of the orchids of my apartment was about to bloom so I took the chance and started taking pictures.
In the second phase, I was more systematic. First, I set up the scene: seeds, light, Raspberry Pi and Camera. Ready, set, action! It turns out, that more than 1 seed germinated. I honestly wasn’t expecting them to grow, it’s autumn 2020 in Germany, there’s little sunlight and temperature is decreasing. So, I had to modify the scene after the first seeds grew.
Scene 1Scene 2
This is the raw unedited result of the first 20 days.
Then, in the Raspberry Pi I Command Line I used the below command so the Raspberry Pi Camera would take a 1920×1080 picture every 10 minutes, for a period of X hours.
The example above shows -t 172800000 milliseconds (48 hours) for the duration of the session and -tl 600000 milliseconds (10 minutes) which was the frequency in which I took every picture. This meant that every other day I ran this command in the Raspberry Pi and waited, then every night I turned on the UV light. That’s why you see the colour purple in the video. You’ll see some black frames in the video, those are nights which I forgot to turn on the light.
In macOS terminal, I used ffmpeg and I ran the below command in the macOS terminal to join the frames and to create a video. This line saved me a bunch of time.
This exercise is not over. There are 10 days to go and some editing to do. My end goal is to write a script that can reduce the amount of manual work. Let’s see.
Update: 2020-11-30
It’s ready. The below video shows 720 hrs or 30 days of photographs and this is the edited result, I cut out the black frames, increased the speed and I chose a popular musical piece to add some drama.
I was able to run a python script to join the last 10 days of frames. Here’s the last piece of what I learned.
I wanted to run ffmpeg with Python, to do so, first I installed virtual env.
$ pip install virtualenv
Then I accessed the folder where I wanted to to create the virtual environment, created an environment and finally activated it.
Berlin. Two guys walk into a Café, the Café has no name. The place is messy as hell; half a Café with one big table and half an office with film cameras, equipment, and tons of paper and books laying around.
An old man with white hair listens their conversation and immediately asks them in English what they want to drink. -“Two single espressos, bitte” says the guy in the grey jacket. Twenty seconds later they receive their drink. The second guy asks the old man -“So, what is this place?”-
-“I used to be a film director, now I’m just enjoying life- says the old man.”
The two visitors finish their coffee. The place is still empty, and the conversation continues. -“So where are you from?” Asks the old guy to the young fellows.
-“Mexico”- Answers one of them. -“Pfff, Mexico is Ok, but it is nothing special. And you?”- Says the man. -“New Zealand” Answers with a proud New Zealand accent.
-“Now that’s a country I like. And what’s your talent?”
The New Zealander answers -“Well my profession is a computer scientist” The guy in the grey jacket remains silent.
-“Your Profession?, what is that, I asked for your talent?”
A new customer enters unexpectedly to the Cafe and orders a piece of cake. The conversation is left unfinished.
-“We have to leave” says one of the young guys. Both of them leave.
What is your talent? -“What is my talent?” Whispers the guy in the grey jacket….
México celebrates its 204 anniversary in a few days. ¡Viva México! as we shout every Sept. 15. But wait, why do Mexicans celebrate? – We are living a drug war, we have tons of poverty, a shitty president, and so on and so on. But we still celebrate, it is our home and no matter how bad it gets, we are proud of it, I mean, everybody loves their home. ¿O qué?
“I am not who you think I am; I am not who I think I am; I am who I think you think I am”
― Max Webber or Charles Horton Cooley (because I don’t know)
Disclaimer: Before we begin, and as always, I share my non-scientific and mere observational thoughts with you all.
While the quote above holds true [does it? revision from 2023], in the last twenty years things have gotten a bit more complicated. And yes, the new ingredient in this identity mix is the so-called Internet Persona, our online selves, our Avatars or to keep it simple, our [Facebook] profiles. [or Twitter, Linkedin, VK, Instagram]
Through Facebook we have unconsciously learnt to create and craft stories (fictional and non fictional) around ourselves.
During the last half an hour I tried to avoid this curious website. Then I failed. If you like playing with your keyboard, you like music, colours, and animations then this is definitely not for you.
I like the challenges that January brings. I’ve been living in Leipzig, Germany for the last months and the first challenge that I can think of is to survive the winter.
Living in a Latin country is totally different, nobody actually plans to take out their winter clothes from the closet.
While most Mexicans (including me) complain about the cold, we haven’t got any idea of what a real cold winter is. I’ve learned many things from the German culture and the goal of today’s post is to explain it to you.
