Almost midnight sun

We've been through snow today. Not huge amounts, but it is surrounding us. The light packing for this part of the trip means that I don't have a computer until I get back to our base camp, so this blogging by mobile phone will have to suffice.

We've been heading north to the extent it was still light at 2330 yesterday. It was actually kind of light at midnight, but I'd say the half past eleven was a more convincing case.

Because we are in a deep valley tonight, I am pretty sure the darkness will come earlier. And then tomorrow we'll be on board a ship for a nine o clock departure.

dance along a coloured wind

We are in Bryggen at the moment, with narrow alleys dividing the ancient wooden buildings. We're staying close to the water's edge, ahead of the arrival of the tall ships which will begin to congregate for the festival in a few days time.

We've also wandered the higher area around the town, where we could look down into varied fjords and see how the sky is held in place,.

Tomorrow we'll head further north, travelling very light, with just a pocketful of spare clothes.

Anchors aweigh, men, heave away!

livskunstner

I managed to replace the busted communication gadget before packing for some power down road trip time.

We have set the direction to north-east. To the land of bilberries and crinkly-edges.

I doubt if we'll see Slartibartfast, although it might be like another planet.

domesticated HAL = jibo?

Interesting technology. HAL? Open the pod bay doors.

one more cup of coffee for the road

We finished the meeting and did the usual thing of heading away to discuss the next steps. Friday we ended up in a Turkish restaurant. Börek, yaprak dolması, meze and şiş tavuk. Today was simpler. Caffe latte.

That'll do nicely as my last meeting for a little while. Hit the tube and make plans to get out of Dodge.

Find a mainline train.

Then a suitcase.

And maybe even a backpack.

remerkable

So Germany won it.

I looked back to my original percentages which had Germany fourth. My calculations ran probabilistically as Brazil, Argentina, Spain and then Germany, with Argentina at 18% and Germany at 12%. That's three of the top four, but a different end result.

That curious Brazilian defeat messed up my speculation, and the Dutch jumped ahead compared with my percentages which had them pegged with the same chance as England. Unlike England, maybe the Dutch switched off the engines on their return plane?

The post match 'knowledgeable with hindsight' commentaries are running as I speak, but I can't reach the remote control to mute it. I find the general Fifa sleaze takes the edge off this whole competition.

That and my statistics didn't work.

Just like my broken gigabit switch which means I don't have much internet access at the moment.

Mind the gap

Yes, a few days of non-blogging.

I've been working pretty much non-stop right up to Sunday midday.

I shall have to recreate a weekend next Tuesday and Wednesday before I turn my attention to the Summer.

Tour de France in London

I knew I'd struggle to get any pictures at the roadside for the Tour de France in London. I only turned up about 45 minutes before they were due to zoom past and as I'd gone to Parliament Square, it was also one of the prime and therefore crowded locations. The picture above shows my blurry view of Marcel Kittel (3rd in picture) on his way to the Stage 3 victory.

The area along the Mall had been packed since the morning, with people arriving ten hours in advance to get a spot. I considered going to somewhere like Royal Docks, where I could probably have got a roadside position, but thought that there would be more of the atmosphere on the final stretch.

There was certainly a lively crowd and even with a few spots of rain, the numbers just kept growing. I was a couple of rows back and realised that with the cyclists' speed, it would be tricky to even get them into frame.

I'll call my pictures impressionistic rather than documentary. Sometimes it's better to be in the moment rather than worrying about capturing it.

touring by telly

Originally I only tuned in to watch the start of the Grand Depart of the Tour de France from Leeds.

The roads were jam-packed with cheering crowds. I thought I'd watch the opening few kilometres of the 190 to be raced today, up to the official start from Harewood House.

Then three riders made a breakaway just after the Royals snipped the ribbon for the official start.

Maybe I'd watch just a little longer. Somehow it looked as if Jens Voigt would grab the polka dot King of Mountain on his last year of racing. I'd better just watch that as well, I suppose.

I looked at the time again and somehow the finish was now less than 40km away.

I'd better see the Harrogate section I suppose.

I don't think I can do this for the whole tour.

mixing it up with Lily

A sort of follow-up post to last week's Glastonbury, I see that Lily Allen has released her track Sheezus as a set of stems suitable for remixing.

It's a while since I cranked up the music software, but this could be a bit of fun. I've only listened to the original track and separately to the drum and bass line so far. I started to listen to the 'bell' track, but there was a long wait before anything happened.

The 42 minutes of already quite processed stems are here for what starts out as a 3:42 song.

I'll have to fire up the mixer.

a wristed development

I'm still using fitbit as a kind of health tracker. I like that it is stealthy, meaning that I can use it without it being visible, unlike many of the others with their illuminated arm candy. It also syncs wirelessly and without me needing to do anything, except remember to charge it about once a week.

As blogger FAQ mentioned the other day, there's a whole next generation of wearable devices getting prepared, some of which are going for a more analogue look. The Withings Activité is a great example, with its fundamentally stylish analogue watch plus the added accelerometer, altimeter and bluetooth to permit more or less the same tracking as the fitbit.

At the moment various Google and Apple devices are also being prepared, following the announcement of the relevant health kits and similar as the basis of hubs to provide the services. I see Withings and Nike are already 'close' to Apple on these hubs.

As a user of fitbit and also of various Garmin devices when I cycle, I know that there's a certain additional encouragement when there's some metrics to cross-check. It's a bit corny to mention the 'what gets measured get managed' kind of line, but it is true and I know I keep more of an eye on step-counts, calories and heart rate type things as a result.

So if the Apple Quanta iWatchy thingy eventually emerges, it will be interesting to see the trade offs between amount of sensors, battery life, style and 'glanceability'. That last one is becoming a key design point with things on the wrist. How simple are the gestures to change modes and how simple /legible is the actual device?

I suppose style is personal, but some of the watches (including my Garmin) look a bit like something from a cereal packet. As I only use the Garmin watch if I'm doing something that requires bright clothing, then it probably doesn't matter too much.

I wonder if a sensor race will break out? How many sensors/measures make, er, sense?

Easy
1) Accelerometer - to measure steps - in terms of battery use, this could last a year as a step counter.
2) Altimeter - to measure height but also ascents/descents (e.g. flights of stairs). Also battery efficient.
3) Positioning - expensive on battery - a GPS sensor - my Garmin watch has that but it burns the battery fast. Probably takes the battery down to day-ish.
4) Activity rate - such as low, medium, high - the fitbits do this kind of thing from the accelerometer.
5) Need for activity - really a timer. Easy.
6) Calories burned - use a simple calculation from body weight and activity level.
7) Thermometer - ambient temperature anyone?
8) BMI body mass index. Needs weight for this, but I guess the watches will have a link to scales. Even my bike computer can do this.

Fairly easy
6a) Heart rate in watch - tricky on a watch - they usually use skin colour (i.e. to spot the heart beat) but it's an expensive battery user.
6b) Heart rate near watch - what I use - which is a heart rate belt, which is low power and lasts for months. Needs to be picked up by ANT+ or Bluetooth. My Garmin watch can pick up this signal, as does my bike stuff.

Slightly more complicated
7) VO2 max - kind of lung capacity related - a calculation derivable from some of the others, as long as there is also a heart rate being measured. My current watch does this (probably quite poorly compared with a 'lab test')
8) Jiggle - How much up and down in a step? A fancier version of an accelerometer. which can pick up on posture. My heart rate belt does this, I can't see it working in a watch. Also raises a basic question about wrist mounted activity measure. Not much use on a bike, for example.

Needs to link to something else
9) Blood Pressure/Cholesterol/Insulin - I can't see how this would be possible inside a watch type device. But it could store it from another dedicated device.

Other stuff
I suppose payment protocols, ticketing and proximity charging would be other useful non health things to embed.

We seem to have a couple of directions opening up for these devices. Simple sensors with linkages to a glanceable display vs something that tries to repeat most of the phone functions on the wrist?

And then to figure out a style that doesn't look like something out of a toy factory. The wrist is still prime real estate.

wondering about post Aperture photo management

I see Apple are functionally stabilising the Aperture product which I have used for the last few years as the place to store all my digital photographs.

They say Aperture will still work with their next operating system called Yosemite, but the replacement is called Photos and supersedes both the old iPhoto and Aperture.

Like many, I have at least tens of thousands of photos in Aperture, so I guess the transition will be interesting. I'm also wondering about all of the plug-ins, such as the flip across from Aperture into Photoshop, or the other generally useful software like Nik and One.

I could move to Adobe's Lightroom, but I guess I'll wait until I see what Photos provides and whether it's been dumbed-down like Final Cut Pro X was, such that two years later I still have two versions of FCP running on my iMac.

One of the attractions for me of the Mac has been the simplicity of managing it and that 'It just works'. I do hope that these latest changes re not going to start introducing more fiddly-ness to the proceedings.

Many recent software changes are linked to the increasing emphasis on storing things in the Cloud, which I've noticed even MS Word tries to impose nowadays unless over-ridden. It's a great dandy highwayman revenue model too, "Stand and deliver, your money or your data"

I'll persist with my own storage solutions at the moment; the Cloud has its place but in the last couple of days I've seen two different situations where cloud services I use have been unavailable.