charging past the daily limit but not on my watch

That new watch is about to hit the shelves although I can't help wondering how long this version will be around?

I assume it will be on a quick refresh cycle to be faster, slimmer and with lower power use?

Maybe in a year there will be a 24 hour version after the consumer feedback from the first one?

The apparent need for an 18 hour recharge may just be a wind-up?. A watch that lasts less than a day? It goes to sleep instead of monitoring it? Or maybe the answer is to have two watches so that one can be on the charger whilst the other is in use?

I'm wondering what battery technology is being used?

If lithium polymer, we might expect that effect where the battery starts to lose capacity after 200 to 300 charge cycles. The battery university test of eleven such batteries from smartphones shows a 15%-25% battery capacity reduction after 250 charges - that's about nine months and would show a duration reduction to about 15 hours. Now if the watch (my suggested next version) started at, say, 30 hours then it's less of a problem. I suppose, as they say, time will tell.

The next thing I'll want to see is inductive charging, where the various devices like iPhones, watches similar products can be dropped onto a pad, rather than plugged in to be recharged. Presumably all the iOS products will be getting this soon, although I suppose it might require some plastic/ceramics/glass for the case?

i see that even movies get the dress treatment

Some movie video trivia today - sparked by that colourful dress meme that flickered around the internet.

Whilst uploading a bunch of DVDs to iTunes, I accidentally re-encoded an original DVD of The Matrix, from 1999. I noticed that the colour on it was quite different from the one I'd previously loaded - which has a green wash across it.

The newer studio encode kind of misses the point that the original green hue was supposed to be visible only on the bits inside the Matrix as if it was being viewed through a Cathode Ray Tube. And blue for Zion and red for inside the machine. RGB, eh?

Time for a quick Google. It turns out that the studio recut the master to make it look more like the second and third Matrix movies by adding a green hue across the whole movie. To make the box set consistent.

It raises a wider point about the re-mastering that occurs nowadays. It's already obvious that some so-called HD shows on Sky look like upscaled SD and that seems to apply to some of the Blu-rays too, which don't seem to have been cut from particularly high quality source. Equally, some SD DVDs have that extra layering of detail suggesting a very high quality source. I even saw an arabic subtitled Casablanca in colour once, when I was staying in a hotel in Egypt. All that noir lighting gets squandered in the remix. I suppose it illustrates the tinkering that is now possible and the ways that an old movie can be dramatically re-purposed. No wonder there's so many Special Editions/ Extra Footage/ Director's Cuts around.

I usually encode DVDs at their original resolution and keep my limited number of BluRays as discs. The DVDs work out around 1.5Gb, whereas a BluRay might be about 10+Gb, for sometimes a marginal improvement in viewing at normal television distances.

The video extracts of the Matrix above was uploaded by sdude1871 who'd already spotted the weird discrepancies, and decided to do an interesting comparison.

Like that dress thing, I suppose it's in the eye of the beholder.

OM-D EM1 and EM5 MkII - two smokin' barrels?

I've a cupboard full of big Nikon camera equipment, but have progressively become a fan of the smaller mirrorless micro 4/3 system. Although it uses a smaller sensor and less pixels, it still takes attractive pictures with the added advantage of not needing its own rucksack to cart around a decent amount of equipment.

I'm also keen to use a viewfinder rather than just a back screen, so the Olympus cameras have been my favourite ever since the original OM-D EM-5, which was styled to look like an old film Olympus OM System camera.

My diminutive OM-D EM-5 is still great fun to use some years after its original release, and although I have all the gubbins to add handgrips and battery grips (they were a 'free gift' when I bought the camera), I still prefer to use it in its most basic form, which actually feels quite like the 35mm film camera experience.

Since then, there's been various additions to the range, like the EM-1, which is slightly more bulky and has a more grippy body, an economically priced EM-10 similar to the EM-5 but which which annoyingly uses a different type of battery. Now the revised EM-5 Mk II, which is more than a simple swap of parts, it is effectively a complete replacement with a modified form factor and different control layout.

I've been using the Mk II for a while now and aside from the current lack of RAW support in Adobe and Photo (temporary problem), it provides improvements to handling, added stealth and a bunch of new functions. I can see my EM-1 and EM-5 Mk II becoming the main combination when I am specifically out to take photographs because I can take a decent variety of kit without it becoming a weightlifting exercise.

An understated point with both of these cameras is the 5-way image stabilisation, which, in my experience, adds to picture clarity compared with bigger bodied mirror-based cameras. I also find that the electronic viewfinder of the two most recent models is very good, and it's easy to forget that it's a digital screen rather than a mirror being viewed through the camera viewfinder.

I'll have to go walkabout sometime soon to get some comparative pictures.

For now, here's somewhere I frequently pass. It's just along from Bridget Jones' flat and the alleyway used in Harry Potter's Prisoner of Azkaban. It's the lock, stock and two smoking barrels gang hideout, snapped on my original EM5.

gifted replacement for the cockerel...

I see the slyly humorous blue cockerel has gone, replaced with an equally sly gift horse.

The ravages of the financial sector appear to have left the skeletal horse with just a ribbon displaying ticker prices, instead of a proper mouth and all.

William IV would have a job balancing on this Hans Haacke artwork, which temporarily occupies the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square.

...but I'm just not there when, when it's coming to a fight

There seems to be a certain contempt for the UK electorate in the way that the Prime Minister is ducking the idea of a televised debate. He doesn't see it like that, of course, and is already spinning the blame to the broadcasters for not getting their act together.

The other parties are saying it's because he's scared, but I reckon it's all part of the stealthy strategy his back office is using in the election run up.

The idea of any form of scrutiny of policy in a format where the bulk of voters might actually pay attention needs to be avoided at all costs.

A televised series of debates could have topics like Health, Education, UK's place in the world (inc EU and immigration), Economy and cost of living, Welfare (inc housing and pensions), UK homeland defence (inc crime and defence), Workforce (inc tax and inequality).

Of course, my made-up working titles could be snazzed up for viewer appeal, and the whole thing has the makings of an interesting series. Seven Big topics. Seven shows? Or even three shows and a finale?

It's completely at odds with the seven or eight people standing format that Cameron would feel more comfortable with, in a two hour show. With 10 minutes of tops and tails, it would give each person maybe 10-12 minutes of main speaking time. Using a modest six topics, that's about two minutes per topic. Just enough to scratch a surface sound bite.

Fascinating that in these days of increased social media and accessibility, that the party in charge appears to want to hide behind a wall.

Cameron's advisors suspect that the party in charge doesn't do well from these shows and so its easier to torpedo them than to build something meaningful.

Instead, predictably this week we are getting news clips of politicians adjacent to babies after last week wearing hard hats.

Using current projections, the Tories could secretly expect 275 seats, with Labour around 271. That leaves both parties somewhat short of the needed 326 seats for a majority. If the others go 51 SNP & related, 27 Lib Dem and 26 others (inc Greens and UKIP), then it creates a quandary for a divided Parliament with the true balance of power held by the smaller blocks.

For Cameron, an early play of a seven or eight way way debate would illustrate the complexity of managing a non-majority House of Commons. The strategists can rub hands together as this gives more earnest sound bites.

Cameron also knowns he can probably side-step a group debate and still be assured of a personal prime spot where he can say what he likes.

Adding the two events together; confusion from a seven or eight way and then a clear line of earnestly delivered strategist-manufactured crowd-pleasing waffle.

The Tory campaign plan run by Lynton Crosby probably sees it as improving Cameron's chances. As most people become hacked off with the whole system, it could well become the battle of the cartoonish five word sound bites.

That'd be with Cameron in customary truth massage mode. Miliband still learning how to say five words without an Uh or forgetting one. The Greens need to up their horsepower for a broad agenda. UKIP is playing around with self-adapting phrases to suit locale. The Scots have a new Scottish cause-based coherence and Lib Dems have thrown away huge chunks of their supporters.

Cameron's puppeteers don't want to accidentally awaken a new class of voters. They could tip his crowd off to the side.

Popular television broadcasts, electronic voting and things that might disrupt the comfortable seats are all getting the silent treatment.

serious fraud? Just say 'No'

So now the Serious Fraud Office is apparently having a peek into the Bank of England to see what happened when extra liquidity was needed after Northern Rock's demise.

Prior to Quantitative Easing, which electronically printed huge sums of money, there was another scheme which electronically printed huge sums of money. The Special Liquidity Scheme was when the Bank auctioned a mere £185bn to some banks and building societies, in return for non-liquid unshiftable collateral of £287bn.

This cheap liquidity was supposed to be a rescue scheme, but there's hints that the money may have been loaned via some possibly skewed auction processes and cut price fees. At least one bank appears to have already paid a fine based on their SLS fee reductions. By paying the fine early, they managed to get a 30% discount from the FCA.

Naturally, any rigging would be frowned upon although LIBOR rate tweaks and banging the close on the forex fix are both topical examples where this has happened.

I suppose it's all about finding the choke points and, if so minded in a chatty place like the City, knowing how to manipulate them.

For LIBOR, it's about the way that money gets loaned to building societies and certain sized companies. For the forex fix, it's about setting global exchange rates once or twice a day before they all start to wander. For maintaining UK economic confidence its about the liquidity afforded to big banks.

Then it becomes about leverage. As something massive shifts slightly, how do vested interests pick up a piece?

Small shift in LIBOR = large bonus prospect.
Small discrepancy in forex fix = large daily profits and commissions.
Tweaked access to discounted money = vintage wine all round.

Chancellor Osborne is reported as saying he'll give a blank cheque to the SFO for their investigation. It'll be curious to know where the money used to pay it gets printed?

why are spies so heavy on the secret acronyms?

It's a few days until the next round of Apple launches, which will probably include more information about their watch (ask about the battery life), some existing things made slimmer and presumably something news related to their home and television offerings.

They may have some catchup on home offerings. I was mildly intrigued a few days ago when our home central heating published an update to its software licensing agreement (which is via Google). I guess it's the shape of things to come as we all go telemetric.

Around 1/3 of the world now carries smartphones popularly considered akin to the supercomputers of ten years ago. Big business is keen to access all of that interaction and related usage statistics and the trend will only continue as greater access to health and home information becomes possible.

The challenge is to figure out how to use it all for good things rather than bad things.

The Edward Snowdon story (discussed again yesterday in a Guardian briefing) illustrates how movies like Enemy of the State become ever closer to reality. In the recent Kingsman movie the evil overlord manufactures free SIMM cards to get mind control. It's a similar path to the NSA allegedly getting access to phone cryptographic keys to intercept our call meta data.

There's a supposition that the IMP*-ish agencies can tap 1EF* fibre optic cables from tin sheds and then use MVR* with xkeyscore* trigger words to secretly sift through vast content and metadata.

Here's one such architecture award-winning tin shed on the B3315 at what used to be Skewjack Surf Shack: "Web Surf's Up, Dude!"

Theres an awful lot of this 'on the fly' MTI* data for the Nigella* link to cook, so perhaps the content can only be stored for a few days and the metadata for maybe a month?

For regular folk it becomes a question of working out how to live with these fairly unstoppable forces. We'll all have iPhone 8s and their equivalents soon enough. For the politicians, state and big business there's an increasing need to stay in the good space rather than to slither stealthily into a manipulative darkness.

I'm not sure that keeping an old Nokia and some Baco foil close at hand would really provide an alternative.


* MVR = Massive Volume Reduction
* IMP = Interception Modernisation Programme
* MTI = Mastering The Internet
* 1EF = One End Foreign (non USA)
* Nigella = fibre optic wiretap name, operated by FLAG*
* FLAG = Fibre-optic Link Around the Globe, owned by Reliance Communications of Navi Mumbai, India.
* XKeyscore = user friendly, plug-in enabled massive volume search mechanism

viewing shed loads of Jason Rhoades : four roads and a V8 engine

I was reading Lady Banana's blog a few days ago where she was discussing the 'shall I/shan't I?' question about whether to keep her blog running.

I have a similar thoughts occasionally, but know that the blog provides a quiet backbeat for my various activities. It was never planned, but it provides a kind of extra stimulus as I go about my various situations.

I'll admit, I sometimes sit down with a blank head and nothing to say. Other times I have a log-jam of ideas and even several partly written posts, many of which don't make it out of draft status.

Take the other day. We'd haphazardly stumbled upon a new show at a gallery, after meeting for coffee.

It's a show of work by the late Jason Rhoades (1965-2006) and officially opens on 6 March.

The first item was a sort of shed containing a V8 engine. I thought it fitting for an artist described as having a lifestyle in the fast lane to have a running V8 engine block amongst the work. Like it had kind of sprung from the car and landed on the wood blocks. An 'almost makes you lose your mind' kind of moment.

This was the kind of show where you could feel like there was a dialogue with the artist. Instead of it being all about "look at what I've made", it was much more a kind of playful discovery.

If the CHERRY Makita - Honest Engine Work looks messy, it is still only on a low setting compared with some of his later work which can feel something like walking through a crash site. There's a piece called the Creation Myth, which takes up a large room and tries to illustrates how humananity processes information, forms memory and synthesises new ideas, whilst simultaneously dealing with the messy process of actual living.

It's a visceral piece, not for the faint hearted and the creative aspects include a hydraulic hay baler which appears determined to fuse with whatever is happening in the next gallery. There's scars on the wall to prove it.

As well as the larger items, there were a selection of smaller pieces; a kind of deflated Jeff Koons silver rabbit re-imagining and a pink reference book which I'm sure would be used on the other 'over-18s' floor of the show. This other floor wasn't formally opened when we visited, and I'm guessing that some of the proposed material may have needed to be carefully considered.

Rhoades seemed to use dissonance and effects to shock and there's a real possibility of some of the over-18s floor being curated out, given these sensitive times.

For an artist who is no longer with us, this adds to the character of the pieces and turns them into a kind of life performance.

I'd provide a warning about this show. I'm pretty sure it will divide people starkly based upon whether they can find the dialogue that the artist probably intended.

a close encounter of the not quite genius kind

Before I arrived:

"That's quite vintage, isn't it?" said the store guy.

This was the second place the machine been taken to attempt to get it running again.

"...We don't support vintage devices."

It was a MacBook Pro 15 inch. Intel processor. The power supply had gone dead. No little orange and green light.

This was after taking it to the nearest dealership on Sloane Square. They'd gamely tried to make it work by plugging in the newer style power leads (which won't fit, of course). They tried three.

"There appears to be something wrong with the socket on the side of the machine," they'd said.

Next stop Regent Street. The mothership. Big beams of light.

An appointment with a Genius.

Clue 1: The machine was handed over. He nearly dropped it. "Whoa, that's heavy!"

Clue 2: "It won't open!"

"No, you need to press the catch."

(fumble and confusion)

"Here, let me do it."

Genius takes a look.

"No, we don't have ones like this, but you might want to try resetting the SMC." Immediately upgrading the level of acronym.

"Is that like the PRAM? - we've already tried that," came the bluffed response.

"Er, can you make an appointment for Monday? We'll have someone else here who may know more."

"No, I'll ask someone else."

Later, I arrive and am told...

"It's dead. It was fine earlier. I don't think the battery is charging - I took it to three stores."

Me: "Let's plug in another charger."

Rummage in bag. Plug in different charger.

Green light comes on. Press power.

It starts working.

Solved.

orange, silver and blue/white

Yes, bicycle time again.

The heavier orange bike gets a few outings at this time of wet roads, but in truth the silver bike on the turbo is the one getting the most use until things clear up.

My so-called main bike (white and blue) is resting and in need of maintenance before I dare use it again.

Still, the my TSS Training Stress Score has started to go up again. At least until I ate that cinnamon bagel.

bun fights at the not-OK corral

I've been watching that television series about the House of Commons.

Add some recent news coverage exchanges from the floor of the House and extracts from the new Caroline Lucas book. Mix with a few of the expense listings from public record.

It continues to paint a fairly dismal picture of the State we're in.

Current news has touched on the sufficiency of MP salaries. At least one MP appeared to not notice he even had a salary from Parliament.

I decided to take a look at MP salary and expense turnover. By casually pivoting the MP IPSA expense records (I used 2013) the average expense amount claimed by an MP appears around £38k per annum, plus generally another £120k for payroll for their staff.

The biggest single item is still accommodation/rent at an average of £8.7k (although for those that claim it is closer to £16k) and office rental at an average of £6.1k. I've included a quick screeengrab from a small part of my Excel on the left.

If we add the £67k salary and the average expenses of £38k together, we're hovering at just over £100k of turnover per MP, before the addition of their staff allowance of apparently around £120k.

I know some MPs are very hard working, but whenever we peek inside, we cannot avoid the impression of a boys' school misbehaviour of braying and paper waving in the Commons.

Add the whips archaic bullying tactics to herd MPs through the voting lobbies instead of having electronic voting. There's a huge industry of paper-based Bills without decent summaries.

The recent TV show illustration included MPs literally camping out in offices for days to get to the front of the line to get a slot for a private member's Bill. Those that get a slot at Prime Minister's Question time are 'encouraged' to ask questions that mean the Prime Minister can trot out polemic.

The Friday Private Member Bills are bullied and traded with the threat of no support or filibustering to talk them out of time if they won't play along.

I know we all call it a democracy and the obvious argument is that it could all be a lot worse.

Agreed it could be a lot worse, but that's no argument to not make it a lot better. It would seem that it is still in the vested interests of those in power to keep it the same.

Cameron has already stated that even if the main Parliament buildings requires refurbishment, he will want to keep it largely as it is. No semi-circular chamber and e-voting when the two party sword-waving serves him and his class so well.

adding some indie movies to my iTunes library using Handbrake and MetaZ

I was recently reminded by blogger Naomi that my DVD player can support multi-region DVDs. Useful if I really want to see something that isn't available in the UK. Mostly, our DVD player hardly gets used because of online films, but I did that thing to get it to work properly for all-region playback again.

It made me think about getting a few more movies that were on my 'want-to-view' list but which were not available on any of the streamed services.

I hit eBay and to my surprise found a random bundle of around 30 DVDs which were nearly all ones I wanted to see. It looked far more curated than most of the eBay 'job-lot' collections which are suspiciously like the unsellable ones from a car boot sale.

So I took the plunge and bought the inexpensive bundle. It turned out the fella selling them was on a meditation retreat somewhere, so they took about three weeks to arrive. Now I've a fresh selection of recent and mainly indie film titles to work through.

I'll add them to my iTunes library as well, so a spot of Handbrake + MetaZ is required to get them converted.

The thing about that particular combination is that it can make the videos looks the same as others downloaded from the iTunes Store, complete with the plot precis, actor and production credits, certificates, run-times etc.

I mainly convert videos on the Mac using Handbrake's 'Normal' setting. It nearly always finds the correct DVD track of the main movie and a couple of decent soundtracks (2 channel and 5.1). Occasionally a movie with a Theatrical and a Director cut will cause it to ask which one to use.

If there's subtitles, dubbing or a director's commentary (like some Swedish films that have an alternative English language dubbed soundtrack, or foreign films requiring subtitling) then there's usually a customisable combination, although for most movies there's no need to tinker with any of the settings.

MetaZ can be run after conversion and adds the same information that the iTunes store includes. It's slightly more fiddly with a TV series, although Handbrake happily handles multiple episodes on the same DVD.

The end result seems to me to be indistinguishable from the iTunes layout, and the video quality can be at the highest level available from the original DVD.

It's a handy way to keep videos catalogued, compared with having them laying around in cupboards and shelves and makes them available on demand, from any device including when I'm stuck on the bike turbo.

Which reminds me...