tuning in the shine on the light night dial

Lurking in the garage of rashbre central is an old valve radio. It still gets used from time to time and despite its age it presents a very modern set of programming.

The reason I'm thinking of it right now is that I've been asked to take part in a survey.

I know...on the internet there's a survey every few minutes about things like amazon packaging, print cartridge selection, which mobile phone provider, the quality of the service from that small item retailer a few days ago, preferences in groceries, and so on and on.

I've improved my Spamsieve to the point where most of that stuff just runs straight into the junk folder.

This particular survey was intriguing enough for me to say I'll have a go. It's something to do with radio listening habits and run by Mori. They want to check what kind of stuff gets listened to in a week, both indoors and in the car.

I've completed the initial questionnaire and somehow need to keep track of what I actually listen to, starting on Monday. They have given me a handy logbook as well, although I can already predict parts of it.

• A fair amount of Radio 4 (on DAB), but never the Archers. Mainly the Today Programme and PM. Various versions of the News and sometimes Parliament. Useful because it's a walking or driving type of programming content. I hardly ever use television for morning news.
• Radio 6 Music (on DAB), random times of day and driving.
• LBC (on DAB or FM, in the car): sometimes for news. Some of the chat shows go a bit extreme.
• BBC World Service: Sometimes late at night.
• Does Spotify count as radio?
• Does Last.fm count as radio?
• KFOG: the fog head station from San Francisco. Easy listening rock. Maybe this one will throw them off the regular stats? I've still got that little internet radio in the home office.
• Other random internet channels from time to time.

And the one I still miss is Whole Wheat Radio, which used to be streamed from Jim Kloss and Esther Golton's log home in Talkeetna Alaska. I still have some of their live gigs from a variety of musicians recorded into iTunes and they pop up from time to time when I've got iTunes on shuffle.

The survey approach seems to just be interested in traditional channels.

Radio, car radio and 'online radio'. I wonder how it will delve into the mass customisation of music listening and the re-selection of prior programming through iPlayer and podcasts? It doesn't seem to handle that on the setup pages.

I'll have to wait and see.

Considering Kloss and Golton's Whole Wheat was from about 2003-2010, they had already found ways to break from commercial A,B and C list programming, and featured many CDs by emerging independent artists.

Of course, the commercial forces are not too comfortable with this wider and more multi channel listening and so we drop back to the same old stuff on many of the conventional radio channels.

I hope there'll be a few comment boxes when I do this survey.

pebble panic

I've had one of those Pebble things for a while, although I've never got around to writing a blog post about it.

To be honest, I don't really use it and am somewhat uncertain about this addition to wearable social computing.

An odd side effect is that it can send me into a phone panic from time to time.

How's that?

Well, it knows about my iPhone and jiggles around when the iPhone is ringing. No big deal if the iPhone is co-located, but when it's, say, in a different room, it can create a moment where I have to make an extra decision about whether to race to the phone in time to answer it.

Not the best use for a Pebble, I'm sure.

secret squirrel meerkat

Did I mention that the secret squirrel meerkat finally arrived?

I notice that this shadowy figure has already gone into deep cover and that maybe someone I know is wearing the badge instead of their regular security pass.

soft white lights appearing

We seem to be into the gentle addition of lights to the neighbourhood again. Of course some of the main roads have been decked out for weeks, but now its spreading into the residential areas.

I've liberated ours from the garage and thrown them around a few trees and bushes and they all seem to be working. Even the timer still works from last year, so it's been a fairly painless job getting it all set up. I'm told that the 'soft white' colour (yellow) is still appropriate, although I'm not supposed to use the 'white white' or the 'blue white' lights.

I spotted a few roadsigns that some local streets are closed at the weekend for the regular mini Fayre. I'm also guessing that Santa will make a reconnaissance appearance at the end of this week.

Pop Tart Selfie

Snapped with a pop tart. I'm not alone. The strawberry ones work best for colour. Maybe I'll try the chocolate ones for sepia.

back from a spin on the bicycle

I'd been doing pretty well with cycling up towards the end of October, but kind of slumped during November. I don't record every trip, but those I did record were a grand total of eight.

There were a few things that conspired against me, including personal and work related as well as a feeble bug at the start of November.

Anyhow, my legs were somehow telling me they needed to go cycling.

I'm not sure why, but there's a sort of reverse pain where my legs actually feel better now if they've been cycling. I should probably look for that symptom on t'interweb, because it seems to be the opposite of what you'd expect.

Anyway, I clocked about 20 miles today although I took it fairly easy until I get back into the swing. I'm also anticipating that this month could be choppy for cycling what with the weather and later with the christmas pudding.


The blue line on the little diagram of my recent activity shows a progressive increase in my TSS until mid October and then the downward spiral. It'll take weeks to rebuild to the previous level.

Still. I'm glad I took the spin - and no, the brakes were not at the angle shown in the picture. I was resetting them when I took this snap.

snappy happy

Well, I've idly been using the iPhone as my main carry around camera during November, as per my stated plan at the beginning of the month.

It's worked surprisingly well as a compact camera replacement.

I know its 'only' got 8 Mega-pixels compared with the 41 Mega-pixels of the recent-ish Nokia, but I can't help wondering exactly where marketing overtakes results. That's more pixels on a tiny sensor than on a full frame Nikon, for example.

I've tried the Nokia but noticed that both the startup time and the 'film wind' time from one shot to another seemed excessive. Measured in seconds, it appeared. A lot of processing to do 41 MP maybe?

For many social occasions that lag could mean the defining moment will have passed. It will still be fine for cityscapes and less timing critical shots, of course.

The Nokia has a proper shutter (instead of an electronic one) and image stabilisation. It means that the camera has a little bump on the back where the lens gubbins is fitted and so from the back the phone looks like a -er- camera.

It's reached a point where I start to think of the things I'd want on a proper camera again and that's where trade-offs start to play out.

I've decided I'll keep to the simpler iPhone form factor, with the smaller jpegs that are easy to manipulate onto web sites and social media.

My sense with the iPhone is that it's 'good enough' for many purposes. Maybe not to crop the pictures, but hey, this is for snaps in any case.

The iPhone camera works fine in daylight or at night in what I'd call 'street scenes'. It doesn't work so well indoors in less well lit areas, although there's a clever flash for such situations. I habitually disable flashes on cameras, but I may need to revive it on this one.

The lens is also quite good at fairly close shots and can do a reasonable job of blurring the background, as long as you don't expect some kind of miracles. The 'zoom' is digital, so the magnification is somewhat artificial.

There's various burst modes and high speed modes too, so speedy clicks are well catered for. I've decided I actually quite like using it, and even the little mode of using the volume control as a shutter button adds to the basic ergonomics.

It'll never replace a decent compact system camera or an SLR, but photographically, it seems to me that this type of phone has reached a good level of general purpose usability.

Maybe next month I'll use it for some kind of mini project.

tracking the specials agent

I should have realised when I saw the huge west London billboard advertisements a month or more ago. They are the ones usually reserved for new prestige car launches and airlines.

They were advertising Maiya the specials agent meerkat.

I had to renew some kind of insurance policy at the time and somehow let the meerkats persuade me to switch suppliers. That and the dramatic change of price, of course.

My reward would be the acquisition of a cuddly toy. Naturally I plumped for the exclusive limited edition one, knowing all along that it will be going to join a small collection elsewhere once it has safely arrived at rashbre central.

Now anyone who has been along the meerkat route will know that they are delivered from Meerkovo by Postkat, who doesn't always take the most direct route.

I checked with Sergei's meerkat tracker, which uses the same technology as the Meer Space Station, and it's indicated that Maiya is now in Dover.

Just because it's reached this country doesn't mean it will take a direct route for the next part of the journey.

and now I'm hearing voices...

There's an interesting old book about building a computer operating system called 'The Soul of a New Machine', by Tracy Kidder. It's about how a bunch of people developed a new computer back in the days when computers had their own offices.

I was reminded of it today when I finally caught my own computer talking to itself.

I've suspected it for some time, but there's usually too much other ambient noise for me to be sure.

But today, when I thought I heard it, I silenced other nearby sound sources, and sure enough, I could hear a little voice coming from somewhere around the machine. It was one of those moments when I actually crawled around under a desk to be sure of the source.

A little voice was coming from one of the flashing light boxes. Of course, it was really some form of Radio Frequency Interference, like you sometimes hear on public address systems, or that sound that clucking sound that old cellphones generated on most office conference phones. Now I know why they put those magnetic rings around wires on certain types of connections.

What also amused me whilst I was tracking down the source, was that the backup disk box nearby was looking suspiciously like another almost sentient computer. A blue-eyed version of HAL, maybe?

Wordless Wednesday

Incoming!

cheatin' back post blues

Got them.
Got them.
Got them.
Got them.


Cheatin’ back-post blues!

Yeah!

Got them.
Got them.
All of them.
Cheatin’

Cheatin' back-post blues.

Tried so hard to stay with it.
Tried so hard so to kill it.
But I can’t every minute.
So I have t-t-to re spin it.
Those ch-ch-cheatin’ back-post

Bloooze.

All the time now.

Cheatin’

Cheatin’ back-post.

Cheatin' back-post blues.

time storage devices

I thought I'd keep the theme of time travel running a little longer this week.

The picture supporting this is of one of a number of time storage devices (TSD) that I have identified. Some of them are quite small, like this window opener and others can be absolutely huge, even larger than London.

I'll start with the small one and how it works.

It looks like an ordinary window opener, doesn't it?

The thing is, it doesn't open the window. That's how it stores time.

I wanted to use it today and discovered that the only way was to find a screwdriver, remove the catch and then re-adjust the setting. It required a special fitting. The fitting required a special drill. The drill wasn't charged and so had to be plugged into the mains for a while.

I think it took me about an hour to open the window.

See where I'm going?

Stored time.

The window catch had stored an hour of my time and was patiently waiting for me to release it.

I guess a medium sized burst mode TSD is Waterloo train station. It works on a slightly different principle, because it can operate on many people at once, unlike my single person window catch.

And then there's a very large scale continuous TSD like the M25 motorway around London, which runs by the ongoing scooping up of thousands of people and a subsequent slow release of their time.

So I've discovered that TSDs can operate in one direction, but now I need to find some that work the other way around.