We can use gamification to stop piracy. First, let’s create a fun story. A band of rabid pirates with eye-patches and bird-flu-infected parrots are kidnapping our favorite characters and stars. Level one starts with Captain Kirk being held hostage, and you need to help save him! To save him, you download a special browser extension, and whenever you’re on a page with pirated content, you press a button and tell the heroic navy, with their gleaming white smiles, where the pirates are. When the navy confirms the pirates and stops their latest raid, everyone who helped the navy gets points. When you get enough points, you complete the level and get a reward. The rewards range from access to a legal download of content to a free movie ticket, which would encourage you and your friends to get into the theater again, and their paid tickets would help box office returns. Consumers care about protecting IP, and everyone but the pirates win.

Of course there would be special rewards, too. If you’re at a theater and see someone recording the movie, report them to an employee. Then, the manager rewards you a special power-up, perhaps giving you triple points or helping you automatically finish your next mission. By directly stopping a pirate, you become a hero in the game.

The essential point here is that we give consumers an incentive to help stop piracy. There will certainly be technical details to figure out when implementing this system (e.g. providing easy ways to report links to pirated content as well as pages directly containing it), deals to negotiate to make this work (making sure the rewards are worth it to users), and human oversight (staff to verify the flagged content on less-reported links). Yet with the increasing global losses due to piracy, these seem like small challenges and pocket change in the overall picture. Even if we can’t implement this on a large scale, YouTube and such could implement a smaller scale on their own–report pirated content, get a few ad-free views. Abuse the system, and you see more ads.

Lastly, we as an industry should also think about why people pirate content and how to prevent it. iTunes helped reduce piracy because it provided legal access to high-quality music at a price where consumers found it easier to pay than to find pirated copies. I don’t subscribe to cable yet have heard great things about HBO’s Game of Thrones. There is no way for me to pay to buy just that content–if I want to see it, I have to pirate it. BBC’s Sherlock was trending on Twitter in Australia when it premiered in the UK, even though it legally wasn’t available in Australia. People want content, and in many cases, it’s currently easier to pirate content than it is to pay for it! It should be a telling thing that SOPA/PIPA caused more of an outrage than the National Defense Authorization Act, signed into law on 12/31/11, which allows for indefinite detention without charge or trial of US citizens! If we can work to update our distribution contracts for the digital, 21st-century world, then perhaps piracy will fade away. That should be our end-goal. In the mean time, gamification can help make it harder for the pirates to steal content.

DSLRU

Unfortunately, we recently decided to shut the site down because we weren’t breaking even from it and didn’t see a viable way to increase our business. I wanted to share my experience in case anyone else finds it helpful.

First, let me say that I’m really proud of the site. I think our look and user experience were top-notch. Everything worked as you would expect, from how the content was organized to how you’d purchase courses to how you’d post in the forum. We also launched with some great content, from beginner to higher-end, thanks to a few professors who believed in us. We also had some good momentum initially, by running a contest with Nik Software that entered you in a raffle when you posted in the forums or bought a course.

Our main problem was really a chicken and egg type situation. We needed more content to get more users, but since we couldn’t pay an advance on content and only had about 1,000 users signed up, we couldn’t get content since we couldn’t guarantee users. If I had to do this again, I would definitely figure out how to allocate money to pay people some small amount up front, like a traditional publishing model, and then switch to profit splitting once we hit a payback point.

A PR campaign would have helped, but honestly, effective advertising is expensive. We bootstrapped the site ourselves, putting in our own money and time, and we just didn’t have the cash to invest to advertise. I’ve also done some advertising before with FlipBook, experimenting with some different models, and what I found there is that while it increases brand awareness, it often doesn’t payback the cost in sales. I definitely would do any PR campaign with a PR group who knows how to get you the most bang for your buck.

Another problem we encountered was that everyone was starting to get into the educational pool, and often sites provide content for free in order to promote something else they do or sell, even if it’s just banner ads. DPReview, for example, is expanding to offer training material for free, and they make money from other parts of the site. We don’t like ads and wanted a clean experience, but well, we failed. We also did have free content, but our hope was to monetize it through conversions and not ads. Turns out we weren’t getting conversions.

We also set out to solve the fragmentation problem, where you can find lots of info by searching, but you never know how accurate it is or how well formatted it is. Plus each author has to setup payment processing, self-publishing, etc.. Lastly, if we have one good repository of learning material, hopefully people would come back again and again to learn something new.

If you ask someone, they’ll say they’re OK spending a dollar or two to have guaranteed-good content, and authors seem to like the idea of having someone else handle the publishing/payment aspect. And in practice, it doesn’t pan out that way. People are fine getting the info for free from any random Joe Photographer, and PayPal and such have made it easy enough to setup payment processing that Joe Photographer prefers to do it himself and keep 100% of the profit. I do think if we’d reached a critical mass of content, this wouldn’t have been an issue, and our original idea would’ve proven correct.

I guess the moral of this story is that it takes money to make money, and even though we had a well-executed idea, to really build it up to reach critical mass, we would’ve needed to risk more on the site.

Tinning the wires on a Turnigy Plush 12A ESC

I have to say this whole project seems to be about timing–timing because it’s just really becoming feasible to use a multicopter (a newer type of device) to lift cameras, only recently has first-person view flying become really reasonable, and only in the past few months did Mark start to get into RC aircraft. I think I would’ve ripped my hair out, trying to figure out all the pieces and connectors without Mark’s help. Fortunately, we’re documenting our build process carefully so that you can benefit from Mark’s brain, too. He’s posting everything on his blog under the “arcticopter” label.

Yesterday, we started to actually build the copter. Mark walked me through the various parts, explaining what everything does. Given there are so many parts, let me share briefly what I learned to help you decipher hobby websites, should you decide to build your own copter!

There are two types of props, APC Slowfly (these words are used interchangeably) and direct drive. Slowfly blades push more air than the smaller direct drive props, and they spin at a lower rate than direct drive because they’re doing more work. They draw more power, though, to spin the blades.

The props attach directly to a motor. We’re using a Hacker Style motor (Hacker’s a brand, but ours is a knock-off), which looks like an inrunner motor, where the shell of the motor doesn’t move at all, but it’s an outrunner, meaning the shell does move. There are rubber bands you can put around the prop to protect them and the motor in a crash if you choose, but they can break off and become a projectile, especially in a cold environment, so we may or may not use them.

There are three wires that come out of the motor, and an ESC (electronic speed controller) with three wires will connect to the motor’s wires. The ESC applies power to different combinations of the wires, which causes the magnets inside the motor to cause the wire core of the motor to spin.

Mark solders the ESC wires into their connectors

The last wire from the ESC connects to the control board (in our case, a KK board).

For our power supply, we’re trying two initially, a Turnigy 2200 mAh 3S 25C and a 3000 mAh 3S 20c. Bigger batteries (like a 6S brick) can power larger motors, but they won’t get you longer flight times. 3S means that there are 3 LiPo cells inside and 6S means that there are 6. Each is separate from the other, an important fact to remember while working with them.

For instance, every 5 charges or so, you need to do a balance charge, which will charge each set of cells but also drain them as-needed so that all the cells have the same charge in them.

What’s a bit funky to me is that unlike your laptop or field LiPo battery, which is calibrated for a particular battery type and has calibrated its display accordingly, everything with these RC batteries is in pure voltage. For example, if the voltage in the Lipo drops below a floor, about 2/3 of its max voltage, the battery stops being as effective, and if it drops to 0V, it’s dead and unchangeable. But obviously if you drain your laptop’s LiPo battery to 0%, it’s not dead.

It’s also possible to overcharge a battery, causing it to puff up and start spewing fire and destruction. We’re putting extra long wires onto our charging cable so that we can keep the battery in a fireproof LiPo bag while charging, and never leave the batteries unattended while charging.

We ended up getting a big charger, a Turnigy 4×6S, which can charge 4 batteries at once. As a tip, once you’ve selected the voltage and current (look for something called the charge rate, which is typically 2 * the battery’s milliamps) to use to put into the battery, press and hold return on the charger to start the program. And if you’re going to let the batteries sit for a while, don’t store them full. Use the storage program to drain the batteries to a safe storage level.

We also purchased a 25 amp power supply for the Turnigy, which is a big beast. This combo is great because it can charge 4 batteries in about 30 minutes, but it might not be portable enough for some remote locations. I also think the power draw would be a bit high, should I need to run it off my portable power pack and solar cells, but we’ll figure that out later.

Next up will be balancing the props (making sure they’re evenly weighted on both sides) and really putting everything together!

The main thing I dislike is that Sachtler’s website said it had an integrated flat base, which I assumed meant that I could use it with my Gitzo tripod, but that’s not the case. With many of Sachtler’s heads, they have bundles where they basically give away the legs (and I would’ve spent the extra money to get one of their bowl-head tripods), but unfortunately they didn’t have that deal with the Sachtler 4588 CF legs, which would fit the Cine DSLR nicely. Fortunately the Manfrotto 325N bowl to flat base adaptor fits the Cine DSLR perfectly (you need to use one of the other screws that comes with the 325N), but it adds a lot of bulk to the fluid head.

The other challenge I had was how to setup the base plate so that it would work with RRS plates, as I have them on all my cameras and larger lenses. What makes this extra hard is that the camera and lens plates are at 90° angles. The Really Right Stuff PCL-1 turned out to be the perfect answer.

The Really Right Stuff PCL-1 mounted to a Sachtler Cine DSLR baseplate

I was worried about mounting it to the base plate, as the RRS screws don’t fit the baseplate, but it turns out that the included two baseplate screws fit reasonably (I had to use the adaptor that came with the PCL-1 to make one fit the center of the PCL-1). I put one into the far end of the PCL-1 and one into the center. I do wish those screws were a bit longer to mount more securely, and I might buy a replacement down the road.

I looked at a bunch of other solutions, including having two baseplates with the RRS clamps just mounted right to the plate and using cheaper/smaller RRS mounts, but after lots of digging and price-comparing, this seems to be the best option for my needs, as it’s simple, lightweight, and relatively low-cost.

RRS PCL-1 screwed onto a Sachtler Cine DSLR baseplate

The main difference between turning things on the first time and later after you’ve synced your transmitter is that only for the first time will you turn the helicopter on (by plugging in the battery) before the transmitter. Otherwise, turn the transmitter on first and make sure the rotors are set to the lowest level so that you don’t injure yourself with the blade accidentally spinning up.

Also before your first flight, look closely at the swashplate (the piece connecting the blades to the body of the helicopter that translates your commands for the aileron or left/right and elevator or forward/backwards to changes in the blades). What I found is that my aileron control was flipped from the sim for really flying the mCX. Fortunately flipping it was as easy as taking a screwdriver and moving the knub by the aileron control at the bottom of my transmitter from the top to bottom.

When I first went to fly, I discovered that my helicopter’s trim was way off. I slowly brought up power to the rotor, not letting the helicopter lift off, and looked to see how it wanted to move. What I found was that the top rotor stopped spinning right away, causing the helicopter to spin counter-clockwise immediately. At first, I wondered if my helicopter was broken, but then I spent some time adjusting the trim on my transmitter and got it as close as I could to trimmed (meaning it didn’t really spin or drift in any direction). Finally, I increased the power to the rotor and let it lift off! I did my best to hold it chest high in a tail-in hover for the next few minutes, and wow did the 6ish minutes that my battery lasted go fast!

I’ve tried a few more times, too, and have now been practicing hovering with the helicopter’s left side towards me as well as moving it from point A to point B, with a tail-in hover at each point.

While practicing this flying, I’ve been doing more reading and investigating. My friend and co-worker Mark Harrison has also been getting into RC flying, and he’s been keeping a blog at http://eastbay-rc.blogspot.com/. He’s got some great info on there about both low-level electronics (both for planes and helicopters) and links to some cool flight videos.

It turns out that he’s been looking at multicopters, too, and we’re looking at building one together since our goals line up quite well (my goal’s to use it as an intermediate step to practice flying on, working up to a goal of using a larger copter to carry my big cameras whereas his goal’s to use this quadcopter to carry a GoPro or similar to do some aerial photography along the California coast). He pointed me to the arducopter and the KKmulticopter. Both seem to get better reviews than the Gaui 330x and have some pretty cool features. The KKmulticopter can hold a heavier payload (5kg, according to this post) but doesn’t have an accelerometer and has no intentions to add one (so if you take your hands off the controls, it’ll come to a level hover but continue traveling in the direction it was flying before). The arducopter has more features, but the kits are out of stock everywhere that I’ve seen (Mark told me they’re transitioning to version 2.0, and I’m not sure when we’ll see it available).

Tiny Blade mCX2 helicopter with a Lego vehicle for scale.

The next question is what to do with the flight sim? First, pick your helicopter model. There’s a Blade mCX you can start with, or try a bigger helicopter (I’ve been using a TRex 500) that’s a bit harder to fly. Step two is learning to hover. Phoenix has some useful tools to help. There’s a training mode that will handle the rudder controls (which controls elevation) for you so that you can just focus on keeping the helicopter steady. The training modes also let you control just one axis (or multiple axises) so that you can focus on keeping it stable side to side, front to back, or the nose pointed a certain way. Try practicing with the nose pointed away from you, to the left, at you, and to the right. It really messes with your mind when you reverse the orientation!

Once you’re ready to try putting it all together, leave the training mode and turn the landing precision target on (it’s under Site options). That’ll give you a ring of concentric circles to practice hovering over.

Spend time just hovering your helicopter, touching the controls as little as possible. Also try having the heli’s nose at different orientations. This will take you a while to learn! If it doesn’t, I’m jealous.

While working with the flight sim, try reading around the Internet and looking at ads to see what’s going on. Two great sites I’ve found are Helifreak and AP Landing. Helifreak has great info about flying and building, but keep in mind the people there are more interested in the hobby (building and 3D flight) aspect of their helis. I’m interested in using it as transport for my camera, and AP Landing users seem to skew more towards that mindset.

While doing all this, I’ve also been looking at what helicopter I might want to purchase to really use with my camera. I’m starting to think that a quadcopter of some sort (which has 4, 6, or 8 sets of blades) would be the best choice, as they’re supposed to be more stable and a bit easier to fly, and they have decent lift ratings while still being electric (much easier to deal with in remote locations than gas/nitro). Quadrocopter and RC Hobby Helicopter sell Droidworx frames (including ready-to-fly ones), and RC Hobby Helicopter builds their own carbon fiber frames, too. The current Droidworx heavy lifters can lift a Canon 5D MkII, but they’re coming out with a cinema series soon designed to lift the RED Epic. There’s also ones like the Draganflyer, but those seem incredibly expensive and don’t lift as much. The iPhone-controlled Parrot Drone is also neat, but it can’t lift a real camera.

Gaui 330x Quadcopter

Over the past year, I’ve switched to using Dropbox for my Documents folder (with encrypted disk images for specific parts), which lets me keep my files in sync between my laptop and desktop without a thought as well as automatically backing them up offsite. For my older documents, I have an Archived Documents folder on my Drobo S.

For a long time, I tried keeping another drive at my office, which I’d periodically bring home and sync with my Aperture library. Unfortunately, I found that I was very lazy about actually bringing this drive home, and even if I were better, given the bay area is susceptible to a wide-scale event (earthquakes), I was worried that I still could lose data if there were a big earthquake. What I’ve been trying to find is an easy-to-use offsite backup solution.

For the past couple of years, I’ve used PhotoShelter both to drive my website and to host my RAW files (I upload large JPEGs for the public galleries but also have a RAW folder with my originals in my archive). I’ve been pretty happy with that, but PhotoShelter doesn’t let me upload my Aperture database (so I would lose all of my organization), doesn’t support backing up generic files (like my iTunes library), and isn’t very cheap. I’ve been spending about $50/month to backup 200GB of files with them, meaning that I had a lot of data (such as every video I’ve shot) not being backed up remotely.

Online backup is becoming more common, but I’ve heard mixed things about actually retrieving files from Mozy, Carbonite, and others. Plus I have about 1TB of data to backup, and uploading that initial backup over my DSL modem would take about a year. None of those services (as of this writing) offered a way to send them a drive to seed the initial backup. I’m also not sure how long each of those services will be around–what happens if/when they go out of business?

Enter Amazon S3. With S3, I create a bucket (sort of like a remote drive) that I can put whatever files I want into. I pay per GB uploaded/downloaded and a small fee each month per GB stored with them (it costs me about $100/mo to store a bit under 1TB of data, which is about on par with what PhotoShelter charges yet far more flexible). But the best thing is that you can send Amazon a drive with your files to seed your bucket so that you only have to wait about a week for all your files to be backed up offsite. That service is called AWS Import. You can also send them a drive to download your bucket onto to restore your files, rather than waiting for them all to download.

I will say that I’m finding syncing/updating S3 to be somewhat slow. I was hoping that I could use a product like ExpanDrive, which makes an S3 bucket appear like a drive in the Finder, and rsync to update my files, but they don’t play nicely. Panic’s Transmit 4 seems to be the best solution, as I can login to S3, select two folders, and press Sync.

I was really excited to to find this program, Arq, which the developer wrote to specifically let him do remote backup from a Mac with S3, but unfortunately it’s not compatible with backups that you’ve seeded with AWS Import. The flip side is that if you backup with Arq, it preserves your folder structure (unlike JungleDisk) and encrypts your files. If you have a fast connection (*cough*FiOS customers) and less data to backup, I’d highly recommend using this tool to manage your S3 backups.

We’ll see what I think a year from now, but for now, I’m pretty happy with this solution. Dropbox keeps my important documents at my fingertips, and S3 stores my huge photo library, iTunes library, and document archive safely (I think Amazon claims 99.999999% reliability) at a reasonable cost ($100/mo or so).

Jigokudani Monkey Park Timelapse from Josh Anon on Vimeo.

One of the neat moments from here was when a monkey decided to reach out and touch my lens. I had actually picked up a cold before coming to Japan, and between the sulfurous hot springs and the fishy food, not being able to smell anything turned out to be a good thing.

Next, we headed up north to Hokkaido, stopping first in Tsurui. Here, we were shooting hooded cranes at the Otawa-bashi bridge, the Akan international crane center, and the crane sanctuary. But boy was it cold (-27°C one morning)! One of the highlights for me was getting this shot of eagles fighting in mid-air. I also took this timelapse of the stars over the Otawa (or Otowa) bridge.

Otowa Bridge Timelapse from Josh Anon on Vimeo.

From there, we headed to Lake Kussharo to photograph whooper swans, and it was pretty amazing listening to the ice on the lake creek and re-freeze as the sun set.

Next up, we went up north to Rausu to photograph a Blakiston’s fish owl and stellar sea eagles. Unfortunately, the seas were too rough and the ice was too far out in the channel to shoot eagles, but we got some great shots of the Blakiston’s fish own. There was an incredible wind/snow storm one morning as well, and even the swans had trouble in it.

On our last day, we woke up early, shot sunrise, and raced back to Kushiro to catch our flight to Tokyo. We went out shooting Tokyo that evening, and ended the trip on a great note with some Nepalese food.