every step you take

I've clocked a fair few car miles this week, although it's been at the expense of cycling.

There was a strange moment when one of the online systems I use for monitoring my cycling sent me an automated message saying it was missing my activity.

It links with the story on the front of the Economist this week which is about ubiquitous monitoring and threats to privacy.

I'm not going along the route of the 'life-loggers', but it becomes an interesting challenge to achieve the right balance between functionality and privacy.

More of the systems like Google want to join everything together, presumably to make a better target market of we individuals.

It raises the question around 'Glassware' and similar offerings that can observe and tie things together.

I gather Google won't provide face recognition on the live platform, although I assume that fringe activities will find ways around this.

I already have to smile for the camera every time I enter the United States and the fast lane back into the UK is via biometrics stored in the passport.

The 'next generation identification' systems have subtly become current.

Say "Cheese".

frost

Morning rooftops with the first frost of the year.

They are saying that by the weekend it could turn properly cold. I'm quite enjoying the sunshine we still see at the moment.

I know it's a fuzzy looking picture. Normally I'd use a bigger camera to take something like this, with a bit of a zoom on it. Instead, it's the little iPhone camera using the digital zoom on a high setting.

Big brush strokes?

the lower lower thirds rule

I usually have one of those advert blockers switched on when browsing the internet. I'm not sure what I'm missing, but generally the adverts I do see are misdirected anyway. The cookie crumbs seem to remember what I've already bought, rather than what I might need next.

Television is different. If I'm watching something pre-recorded then hitting the 30x usually does the trick. If it's on-demand, it may still have advert breaks but they don't have any actual advertising within.

So real-time commercial television is increasingly a novelty. I've decided to filter adverts using a specific easy to remember rule. I call it "The lower lower thirds" rule:

"Not more than 8 small print words."

That rule keeps me entertained during many drudgy adverts on telly. I simply decide that more than 8 words of riders and disclaimers invalidates my attention. I could add others about 'no animated animals except meerkats' and 'no quick money' but simply watching what's in the lower lower thirds works well most of the time.

winter tyre time

No, it's not my car, nor my wheels, but it was close to where I was sitting and waiting.

I've had the wheels swapped over to winter mode now.

I can tell the difference easily enough because the summer wheels have six spokes and the winter ones have five. My summer wheels and tyres go on holiday now, down to the seaside at Poole and will return again in the Spring.

When I lived in mainland Europe it was quite common to do this and in some places it was the law. I think it is still relatively uncommon in the UK.

I wonder if there will be a frost?

another wall

It's not that I've run out of ideas, so much that I've run out of time over the last few days to produce blog posts. So here's another wall. This one is something of a self portrait, although its somewhat difficult to discern.

Oddly enough, I quite like this, with a mix of wall, shadow, light from outdoors and some interesting textures.

orange moment

A few plans were changed at the weekend as a result of late breaking news.

Instead of a regular update, here's a picture of the still 'under development' wall in the music room at rashbre central.

It has to be orange, of course, although this picture features diamond shapes instead of the more typical triangles.

splutter

Fireworks this evening, after a day fuelled by Lemsip.

ye olde Fuji X100 gets version 2.01

A couple of days ago I mentioned twisty dial cameras and made a short reference to the Fuji X100. The Fuji uses analogue style dials and I've had one pretty much since it was launched.

It's about three years old now and has been superseded, but a couple of weeks ago a new firmware update was released by Fuji (V2.01).

I have to say, I was quite impressed.

The major niggle with the older version was a sometimes sluggish focus, particularly when in manual mode. There were ways around it, but it illustrates how software can still get in the way even on something ostensibly analogue.

This update provides a real boost to the camera, improving startup, focus speed, focus short distance range and adding a new and useful highlight function.

It is slightly intriguing that Fuji provided this level of change on what is clearly a superseded model.

My guess is that people with 'Classic' X100 wouldn't switch to the updated X100s, so this provides a decent level of comparable functionality and keeps people saying nice things about the brand.

Perhaps it's regarded as a simple engineering update, but it's a bit like getting a new camera.

will the impulse engines hold?

I published a chart on here a few days ago about the UK energy gap. Co-incidentally, the wider discussion has turned up in the news now, along the lines of whether the UK's impulse engines will hold through the winter.

There's a fancy report produced every year by UK National Statistics for the Department of Energy and Climate Change which covers the main UK Energy sources. I've pasted a couple of quick extracts from 2013.

Alongside the actual production of energy, there are various levels of inefficiencies in the subsequent transmission and distribution. I know some of this is down to physics, like power lines sag more when they are heavily loaded (because they heat up).

There's still some interesting stats though.

In the UK, the DECC charts show that for electricity, the distribution and transmission losses appear to be bigger than the actual power output available. You have to read the chart from left to right. What goes in, and what comes out...

I may be reading this wrongly, but it looks as if that 567.5TWh transmission and distribution losses is bigger than the circa 350TWh of available power?

That powerline sag and related distribution loses 5-6% of electricity. The DECC diagram seems to suggest rather more is disappearing.

Hold that thought and I'll add in the specifics of the renewables power feed. It currently looks as if its own complicated conversion processes are also rather inefficient.

I know its measured in different units (ttoe), but it also seems to show big losses.

Of course, it's great that more renewable forms are being identified, with biomass being more than 70% of the current renewables, wind about 20% and hydro about 5%. The target is to get to 15% of all power from renewables by 2020.

I'm kind of wondering how this will play out in the upcoming debates. And whether I need to buy some candles. Although, wait, they are energy inefficient too.

is a tweet like two punched cards?

I know there's actually 80 columns to an old IBM punched card, but I somehow think of a maximum tweet being like two punched cards.

On the old punched cards, columns 73-80 were for sequencing and 72 was reserved to signal that a continuation card followed. So pragmatically 70 characters per card, or half a tweet.

So I've always sort of thought that twitter has harnessed a short messaging platform for chatter using a maximum message length of two IBM cards.

So if we treat Twitter as an I.T Company, somehow it's single idea and its ramifications is today valuing the IPO capitalisation of twitter at around $30bn.

That's between a quarter and a third of the total market capitalisation of IBM ($117bn).

Or if we treat Twitter as an advertising and media organisation, its market capitalisation is about double that of BSKYB ($14bn).

Hashtag 140 character big business? Hashtag traderorinvestor?

Almost Wordless Wednesday and posted late

Trying to get out of the woods with this NaBloPoMo by back posting Wednesday.

That makes me up-to-date.

twisty dial cameras

An intriguing development on the photographic scene in the very month when I've decided (just experimentally) to take most of my photos using an iPhone.

Yes, Nikon have just introduced a new digital camera that looks very much like...an old film camera.

This Df unit looks very much like a last century Nikon Fx film camera, albeit with some fancy electronics inside. It will be interesting to see how this gets reviewed against the rest of the DSLR cameras, seeing how comprehensively it breaks the normal DSLR mould.

I've wondered whether digital cameras could get away from complicated layered menus and back to simpler twisty dials. This seems to be a reasonable attempt to do just that. I've only seen pictures of this Df and I've a feeling that it might be lighter in the hand than expected and also missing things like split screen focus.

It's also rather expensive in its current guise, apparently costing more than Nikon's fancy D800. It also seems to come with a new 'retro lens' as the only option - albeit one without an aperture ring, which I find somewhat curious. Something of a half-way house.

Whether it is the start of a new camera line, or the end of proper mirrors in the next generation of conventional Nikon DSLRs remains to be seen.

It will also be interesting to see whether, in design terms, the old-school look really does stand up in the 21st century or if its simply a market testing experiment. I'm wondering if the next 2014-ish conventional Nikon DSLRs will start to use the dials again too?

Nikon's recent raft of announcements somehow reminds me of London buses, where there can be a long gap and then a whole load come along in one go.

Of course, it's not the first camera to go along this analogue look route; my Fuji X100 does it as a kind of 'alternative to rangefinder' camera, admittedly with some early teething troubles that took a while to fix.

My little Olympus OM-D is another camera that has taken the more twisty dials route, seen here with a few of its old-timer friends.