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.

telly glasto

Working until early evening again today, but then a fix of festival music, from the telly as I tuned into this year's Glastonbury.

The early acts I watched were the right kind of feel-good bands, not necessarily my daily listening, but with a good vibe for unwinding into the weekend. John Newman, Yorkshire soul/Stax/funk singer with a strong band, then the Crystal Fighters who had teleported from deep in the last century, the lightning-interrupted D&B Rudimental, including a twang by Ed Sheeran and some proper pop too.

I know it isn't the same as being there, where the music forms a sort of backdrop to all the other stuff, but it's still fun to watch, with generally good tv coverage by the Beeb.

I gather this year sold out in less than 90 minutes and there's 175,000 people on the site at the moment. I'll be watching.

pull over - your magenta cartridge is low

I've been doing something paper intensive recently.

I just had the little message pop up on the home printer.

"Cartridge low."

I've had to press the reserve tank button to squeeze another 50 pages. I always order a complete set of toner cartridges when I replace the previous set. They seem to cost almost as much as the printer, even when the cheapest place to buy them is Germany and have them flown to the UK.

They also always run out within a couple of days of one another.

Aside from the black being one of those Xtra capacity toners, I'm pretty sure that I print a lot more, say, blue than, say, red or yellow. I can't really work out the exact blend of magenta, cyan and yellow but it is suspicious that they all always run out at the same rate.

It's software counter in the toner packs, I assume, rather than them actually being empty. I understand the business model, but it's still a slight price shock at the moment of purchase.

maybe I can spend a little longer in the attic after all?

Oops.

It's Wednesday already.

I've been zooming around but managed to get today's big meeting turned into a conference call.

Dial-in instead of spending multiple hours travelling to and fro. Then, this morning a couple of us briefly discussed the session in a pre-meeting and managed to reduce it from half a dozen people for two hours each to...

Zero.

We've agreed the next things in a way that avoided the need for the big forum altogether. I reckon it's saved me about 7 hours. And probably saved around 30 person hours all together.

I'm still on the hook though. I'd better get back to my garret and get my stuff done.

I know, I used the video once before, but that was in 2006.

orange berries attract the jackdaws

The tree with all the orange berries is attracting plenty of birds for varied squabbles at the moment.

There was a punch up between a few starlings and a magpie earlier.

This time it's a comedy trio of jackdaws taking the berries, with a couple of young birds the same size as their parents but still wanting to be fed, instead of foraging for themselves.

Windows 8.1 Pro and Windows 7 in Parallels on Mac OS/X

I gather the technical problem affecting the video from last Sunday has spread from the camera to the computers. I'm not directly involved in any of it and am too far away to provide any sort of direct assistance. It seems to be something to do with Windows and compatibility, but I'm not completely sure.

For my movie making I use the Mac mainly, which seems to cope with most things quite well. It's a long way from a few years ago when, with Windows, I had to plug in special hardware accelerators and other general gadgetry and then switch everything else off during the lengthy 'rendering' process.

I do still use Windows from time to time on my Mac. I have that Parallels utility which lets me run multiple copies of Windows alongside the Mac OS/X. At the moment I have both Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 Pro installed, as I'm halfheartedly migrating from one to the other.

In the olden days, when a new version of Windows came along, it was possible to do a kind of in-situ upgrade (very much like with the Mac). Nowadays the upgrade assistant wants me to re-install each piece of software separately. Not a problem with, say, Microsoft Office, but quite an irritation with software that uses separately licenced plug-ins.

A useful addition in Parallels 9 is the add on that restores the Windows menu and desktop to Windows 8.1. I'm no Luddite, but I found the Metro-interface to be something of a dumbing down of the way to interact with Windows on a conventional desktop.

These labour saving devices can take a lot of looking after.

sweetheart deals?

Friday's commuting in London was surprisingly easy. I'm not sure where all the people had gone. Maybe an after-effect of the previous evening's England departure from the football tournament, or a hint that this solstice weekend was going to be sunny.

I didn't really watch the football this time, the continuing descent into scandal around the edges of Fifa take the edge off what could be harmless fun. Instead I made Friday's commute reading the alarmingly accurate front cover of Private Eye.

The Eye is just the sort of place to find out about the alleged claims of Qatar-related bribes in that curious world of untouchable Fifa President Mr Sepp Blatter. He who has provided his Infront fronting nephew Phillipe with World Cup TV rights to resell. Oh and almost half a million VIP tickets, of which 12,000 are for the Brazil final. Then there's the £6.2m interest free loan to his nephew's part owned company to support Match Services AG in providing accommodation in Brazil.

Sepp has called UEFA disrespectful for asking for his resignation over alleged questionable actions. Although he is 'only' in place for another 11 months, just like previous schmiergeld-taking Fifa President Joao Havalange it would seem a shame to spoil such a good thing.

Ker-ching.

London to Brighton BHF Bike Ride2014 - 5 minutes in video

I expect it will be the weekend before the official Team Nemo video from last Sunday's bike ride gets made (no pressure JK).

I found some footage of the 54 mile ride on my camera and as an interim assembled it into 5 minute version of the ride.