This morning I am mostly being hoisted by a petard. My own petard.

Me: I'm not sure I really understand the problem. Could you articulate it in a different way with different words? My Two Year Old. Again.: NooooOOOoooooOoooOooooooOoooOoooooOoOOOOooo!

Major update to Open Source photogrammetry software Meshroom Meshroom has for some time been one of my top choices for open-source or free photogrammetry software, offering a really deep amount of customization and tinkering. However, while this blog made a big splash early on reviewing all the…

I say the videos on my YouTube animals in motion playlist are for research and reference, but sometimes they're for fun too. Here's an 8 week old kitten playing, at full speed and slow motion youtube.com/watch?v=E0tP...

[Academic Tech] XREAL Air Pro 2 – Immersive Augmented Reality Glasses At the recent SEB conference, I traveled sans laptop, working on the assumption I could do everything urgent on my OnePlus Open. I could... but what I found was that some tasks just needed a larger screen (specifically…

Supercomputer pushes frontiers of LJMU research From modelling the evolution of the cosmos to simulating how dinosaurs would have walked, researchers at LJMU are pushing the boundaries of science, tech & medicine. ➡️https://www.ljmu.ac.uk/about-us/news/articles/2025/8/4/prospero-5-anniversary

Always a joy to see @arielcamp.bsky.social 's sketch notes from conferences

The new focus stack + pixel shift on the new Nikon Z8 firmware is awesome! Those numbers are mm. 25 focus positions, with 32 pixel shift images at each position, totaling 64GB of RAW images before merge and stack. Nikkor MC 105mm.

Watch Peter L. Falkingham talk about his #BiologyLetters review of the methods used to study dinosaur locomotion, covering extant taxa, bones, muscles, and footprints: cassyni.com/events/RAu9V... #palaeontology

Probably gonna need to downsample that 1.5 /billion/ triangle mesh.

How do they come up with such cringey titles for mandatory online training...

New paper led by Tash Prescott - we applied equations for speed, etc that are commonly used on #dinosaur tracks to tracks made by living birds we could watch and time. TLDR: equations aren't even nearly close. Animals moving freely on compliant substrates very different to steady-state lab data

RealityScan 2.0 Released (formerly RealityCapture) As I’d previously noted, RealityCapture has been re-branded to RealityScan, to align branding across desktop and mobile applications. With the rebrand come some major new changes: AI Masking Smarter Alignment Aeriel LiDAR Support Quality Analysis…

Sparrows feeding in slow motion (available in 4k on my youtubes: youtu.be/YTVgpIOIxrE)

FYI for those doing #XROMM, we've now moved everything over to github: github.com/XROMMPackages

Modern image formats – which is best? Experimenting with .AVIF and .JXL Despite having a terabyte of OneDrive storage (which I've been enjoying for years, though I'm starting to look at Proton as an alternative - that's for another post), it's very nearly full, and a big portion of that is photos:…

Reality Capture being rebranded to Reality Scan 2.0 soon: www.cgchannel.com/2025/06/epic... If they happen to also lose the CUDA exclusivity on this release, it might be the last thing in my workflow tying my to nvidia #photogrammetry

*SERIOUSLY PYTHON???*

I feel these would make good reference for pterosaur palaeoart petapixel.com/2025/05/30/p...

What the heck happened to 3D Slicer in recent years? It used to be the go-to for segmentation, but it seems loads of tools and functions are missing, and all the documentation is based on old UIs and functionality. It's a complete mess.

Lots more videos like this on my Animals in Motion youtube channel - good for biologists and animators: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

Wanna see a Goldfinch eating dandelion seeds in slow motion? Of course you do: www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hKn...

Was at the park photographing birds, got this video of ducks being bastards: (CW: Ducks mating) youtu.be/PKfe6MfNJQE

Reconstructing dinosaur locomotion. Read the #BiologyLetters review: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/... #palaeontology #biomechanics

New #openaccess paper in JVP on more #machinelearning for classifying #dinosaur footprints www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Did some bird photos at the park, here you go: Ducks!

The team and I had a bit of fun with a camera to make a video for the TRACKEVOL project. @rebeccalowes.bsky.social is the only one on bsky I think... We may make more throughout the project, because regardless of the video quality, it was fun to make! www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwNr...

The Peppa pig "guinea pig"...

A little write up on our team, ~1 year in!

New paper on Pterosaur footprints, led by Rab Smyth: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

In case anyone finds this useful, I've now added a 'shape fitter' to the #blender extensions library, allowing you to fit spheres, planes, and cylinders to vertex selections: extensions.blender.org/add-ons/shap...

Great job opportunity for a vertebrate palaeontologist in Copenhagen: eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A...

So... is it just me or is the whole manuscript central/Web of Science/ORCID linking a massive pain in the arse and a bit broken mc: "log in with UserID or orcid", click orcid -> takes you to web of science "login with userid or orcid", click orcid -> go to ORCID and log in, bounce back to WoS ...

Our #ASABSpring2025 conference kicked off with a blast (from the past) today🔥 We had an incredible talk by Dr. Tom Fletcher and Tom Land from Silverback Films 🦍, accompanied by Camilla Affleck from Liverpool Screen School 📽️ and Prof. Peter Falkingham from LJMU 🦖

I really like @zen-browser.app but any site that requires username password like this just always fails, and I have to return to a chromium browser. I think this is a firefox issue, but does anyone know a solution?

My northern PhD student to my french post doc "does France even have a type of cuisine?"

This morning's admin: Chase up a finance helpdesk ticket I opened in _November_ that still hasn't been answered. Being asked by our grants people to "please move equipment out of the "equipment" tab and into "non-staff". Equipment doesn't go in the "equipment" tab of our grants portal, apparently.

Using the addon ZotMoov to keep PDFs in your own cloud storage for syncing externally.

Yesterday my lab and @arielcamp.bsky.social 's lab met up at @ljmuofficial.bsky.social for an #XROMM workshop. A fun time was had by all.

My Blue Oysters just today!

Very informal quick 'n' dirty Blender addon for finding possible range of motion poses: github.com/pfalkingham/... Still in development, but may be useful to some in this form. Video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQL4...

A few months ago, PNAS published a study claiming obscenely large stride lengths in a small dinosaur track were evidence of pre-avian flight. Ichnology can suffer from 'just so' explanations and overinterpretation. Lallensack and I propose a far simpler explanation - that this is not a trackway.

In a fit of coding insanity, I decided to port my Maya tools for generating LIGGGHTS input files to @blender.org as an addon (github.com/pfalkingham/...) AND I made a LIGGGHTS/LAMMPS importer for Blender to visualize outputs (github.com/pfalkingham/...) Very janky and buggy, but working:

Genuinely one of my driving factors for moving as much research t @blender.org as I could was the amount of crap Autodesk installs:

Right, I'm willing to entertain the idea of re-encoding my 800gb photo collection. JPGXL or AVIF? I feel this is betamax v VHS all over again and I don't want to pick the wrong horse.

There's something very pleasing about these parallel pheasant trackways in mud, captured beautifully with Reality Capture #photogrammetry Photos + model area available on figshare: figshare.com/s/7b3c543074...

[Academic Tech] Oneplus Open Apex Edition (after 2 months) I moderately recently upgraded my phone from the Samsung Fold 3 to the Oneplus Open (OPO). As per usual with my tech, through a combination of selling the old gadget and picking the new one up 'as new' on ebay, I was able to keep overall…

Here is the official account of ProgPal 2025 ⬇️ @progpal2025.bsky.social Stay tuned 💪🤓 #conference #studentlife #student #palaeontology #science #research #academia

Figures must be this dimension, and this PPI. But they must also be below 30MB. Me after an hour of fighting with various means of compression and downsampling while maintaining resolution and size:

Just pop this research from microsoft here without comment: t.co/e255eMKwMf