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Practice with the Canon XH A1

Byrichard
Reading Time: < 1 minute

With a screen resolution of 1920*1080 interlaced this is one of the higher resolution cameras currently on the market at the moment. It’s beautifuly designed for camera men rather than engineers (unlike the red). I already wrote about earlier.The light wasn’t so interesting but here are 11 seconds of footage. (92 megs) Right click to save the footage as this will not behave properly in browser

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Two very different types of Qik videos

Byrichard

We climbed the ladder for two different reasons.

Today both a friend and I are among the top qikkers of the day. Whilst Documentally of Ourmaninside.com was in Milton Keynes getting an iphone 3g and streaming a number of videos on the experience I was filming dancers at the Geneva lake Parade. Both these events have appeal for different reasons.

We’re used to watching videos of Americans getting the iphone and doing a variety of geek events and for once we had the English experience. It’s not a very visual occurrence but at least it’s been streamed and shared. He also took the opportunity to speak about lifecast, a new way of sharing the media you generate over a day.

The Lake Parade is a very different type of event. It’s the type of event photographers and camera oeprators go to in order to get video and photographs of girls dancing to music. It’s only once a year and previous years have been better. I like the fact that I can go to the event with a phone, stream video straight to the web and all without the hassle of a camera and laptop.

I’m commenting on the latter because it’s the second time I see someone walking with a laptop in order to do some live streaming of an event whilst I’m very light. I could have shot in high definition but everyone’s doing that. What interests me is going to an event, finding some action, sharing it live as it happens and not have any real post production concerns.

In general live streaming from mobile phones is an interesting way of covering events that does not get much publicity. As a result the audiences are not as large as they could be but that will change. It’s just a matter of getting people used to the idea of webcams and live streams being more interesting than a static twenty meters from where the action is happening.

The Skipped Walk Due to Air Pollution
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The Skipped Walk Due to Air Pollution

Byrichard

Today is an unusual day. Originally I had planed to walk over one thousand meters up the Jura, before realising that I had too little sleep, so I decided to sleep a little more, do laundry, write a blog post and then eat lunch.

Lazy

After lunch I didn’t feel like going for a walk, still. That’s highly unusual for me. I don’t know whether it’s because I am tired from a mediocre night of sleep or whether it’s because of the heat that hasn’t left yet. It’s the 9th of September and it’s still 29 to 30°c. I feel slightly under the weather so I’m skipping the walk.

Air Pollution

[caption id="attachment_10685" align="alignnone" width="250"]Signicative air pollution according to the Geneva Air Quality App Signicative air pollution according to the Geneva Air Quality App[/caption]

Part of my reason for skipping the daily walk is that I noticed that the air has been polluted for several days in a row. According to the air2G2 app the air is highly polluted at the moment. It’s especially Ozone. This is due to the heat, the lack of wind, and people’s overreliance on polluting cars.

Heat

To have 30°c at this time of year is rare. If it was cooler I wouldn’t hesitate so much to go for a walk, but there is the nuisance of dog walkers that is back. Every time I go for a walk I need to adjust my route to avoid the dog walkers. Dog walkers like to walk with their dogs off leash, and dogs like to approach and theaten. Overnight I counted that I have had at least 4-6 dog attacks in the last few years, so if my fear of dogs is getting worse, it’s because I am being harrassed by dogs more regularly.

Riding with Electric Bikes

Another reason for saving my energy today could be for an entirely different reason. Tomorrow I will probably be riding with electric bikes, and although I can comfortably keep up, I do burn a lot of energy. If I save my energy today I should have some, spare, for tomorrow.

And Finally

If I was walking by myself, and then cycling by myself, and then walking by myself, and living according to my own rythmn then I’d be fine, but since I can knacker myself, and then be pushed beyond my limits the next day, it makes sense to take rest days. The Swiss Weather forecast wrote a blog post about the current anticyclone and air pollution. I seem to be thinking like the weather people at the moment.

Half Way Through To This Year’s Cycling Goal.
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Half Way Through To This Year’s Cycling Goal.

Byrichard

So far this year I have been cycling for 680 km in 33hrs with a height gain of 6800 meters. In this time I have used my narrative clip 2 device to document the ride with a picture every 10-30 seconds as I want to focus on riding rather than other things. I like to have as high a moving time as possible so I usually stop once I get back to my starting point.

By cycling I see the landscape at a slower, more interesting speed. I see the roads, I smell the vegetation, I feel the heat and I feel the cold. I also discover small paths that I would not take in a car or on a scooter. In practicing this sport I get to know the landscape. I also get to see seasonal changes.

This year I have cycled in the rain, in the snow, in the wind and on days like today. Today it was sunny and there was no wind to fight against. It made the ride more pleasant.

The technology I took on today’s ride was my narrative clip 2 to take pictures of the bike ride, my Crosscall Odyssey+ phone, the Cateye Evo+ and finally the Suunto Ambit 3. I also took the Ricoh Theta S but never stopped to take pictures. For future rides I should fix it to the handle bars. I could bring you with me on my next bike ride. Of course I would keep just the interesting bits of the ride. I can throw away the rest.

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Airport security can be fun

Byrichard

When you fly a lot you get used to the antics of airport security. Sometimes you see people get angry and flustered by their stuff being searched. Sometimes I’ve felt that way as well.

Today was amusing. My bag went through the x ray machine and since it was so full of books dvd and more they wanted to look inside. No one else was passing through at the time so I joked about how they had to keep busy. One of them joked about having to find something to confiscate to keep himself entertained. Shame I had nothing of interest.

I chatted about the DVD in my bag and about a series related to the first one and it was generaly quite friendly.

Hey, when you’ve flown five times in two months you’re bound to be more relaxed about certain aspects, especially when you’re in no rush because you gave yourself enough time.

Facebook Is Down

Byrichard

Social networking websites should never be down because their success comes from three factors; ease of use, accessibility, and reliability. With a good layout and good interaction, the website attracts the novice as well as the weather-beaten web surfer that’s seen it all. Accessibility is about it being easy to use on all browsers, whether mobile phones, laptops, or desktops. The third one is the key.


Facebook down


source 


One of the reasons I’ve moved away from Hotmail and yahoo is that they became slow and clogged up in spam. What this meant is you’d waste a huge amount of time waiting for pages to load and even more time deleting all the junk. That’s why I moved. Myspace is another case in point. Whilst it’s an interesting website there are several flaws such as page load time, too much freedom in layout, and more.


Facebook is currently the flagship of the social networking community worldwide because it’s simple, fast loading, and reliable. Today that has not been the case and I hope that they are not going to take too long with their upgrades. It was working fine therefore taking the website offline with no visible change in layout is just inconvenient and will see me looking for another solution… in fact, I have one. My website. This has been a constant since 1997 and has seen me through my IB, my HND, my BA, and now career building.


We’re living in a different age. Anyone can follow me on Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Tumblr, and one or two other websites but my flagship is my part of main-vision.com because this is where I have full control of the website. Facebook has become a very useful tool thanks to the number of people joining the website but recently they’re going through a bad period. I’m not talking about a bad period where they’re struggling to keep users or make money but rather bad in that it’s a hormonal teenager trying everything at once before gaining the stability of a mature website like Flickr after it was bought by yahoo or last.fm after CBS purchased it.


Whenever a website goes down I wonder about my future use of websites. One of the greatest things about RSS feeds is I can operate facebook remotely due to all the apps they’ve added. I add a few RSS feeds, take a few website API and it gives the impression that I’m on Facebook more than I really am.


The worst thing about social networking websites is that when they start offering a crap service you have no choice but to keep using them in order to keep in touch with what friends are doing. Last night for example I went to an event which was advertised both on Facebook and on myspace. There were not that many people but it was a practical way to keep in touch. That’s why I went to a silent disco, a silent rave, and know what others are telling us they’re doing.


I hope that this is nothing more than Facebook sneezing and that the quality of service we have grown to expect from the website resumes once more.

chatGPT, GPT3 and Reading Time

chatGPT, GPT3 and Reading Time

Byrichard

Time for a new discussion to take place. Reading time. Do you read through articles or do you skim them. Is reading the headline enough or do you read every word of the article? I ask because in the age of chatGPT and GPT3 I would ask the same question as I asked about social media.


If you want to discuss ROI for businesses and PR firms or advertisers then you need to discuss ROI for users too. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter wanted to control the timeline by using a “home” feed. The Home feed is an algorithm driven feed that shows you popular content, rather than content by friends, that you and they would converse about. The result is a lonely social media experience. The ROI goes down, That’s why I took a break from Twitter to play with Mastodon and revive my blogging habit.


Now we’re coming to the new discussion, about chatGPT. From the tests I have run with chatGPT it is a glorified encyclopaedia rather than AI. It spits out predetermined answers, rather than showing signs of learning and logic. I played with Copperman years ago, and other projects. With those, the more you chatted with the app, the more intelligent it would become. With chatGPT it always gives standard responses. It’s boring. It has no humanity. It has no character.


Writing is a creative process. You sit there, knowing that you want to create content but you need to spend time thinking of ideas, and then you need to write to the word count that you, or others has set. That process injects humanity into what you write. It also means that someone has taken the time to develop an idea, and maybe even proofread it.


By making it easy to generate content for WordPress and other platforms chatGPT, GPT-3 and other technologies are making it harder to find content worth reading. One of the biggest challenges when looking for content., reviews and information about products is the spam. the boiler plate content that people generate for a Casio watch, or other products.


Content should be written by humans for humans. The more noise we generate by fake AI, the more difficult it will be to find human content, by humans, for humans. That fake AI will also create formulaic answers to specific questions, rather than original content.


I love technology when it replaces the need for humans to do boring and repetitive tasks that can be automated, but something creative, such as writing we should keep humans. One tech mag recently allowed AI to write articles and those articles then had to be proofread and corrected by human editors.


ChatGPT is Hype


Recently I was reading a book about AI and deep learning and it wrote about how there is a cyclical habit of people to say “this is a great step forward in AI” only for interest to flare up, and then die down again as the miracle solution is understood and interest wanes again. chatGPT might seem exciting to some, but to me this looks like a human language search engine, rather than proper AI. Give it random words and it doesn’t do anything. I asked chatGPT “how fast does a squirrel run and it crashed, twice. It isn’t intelligent.

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