Archives

D-Day Film archives on Facebook

Yesterday D-Day Film Archives were shared on Facebook. These film archives were of landing crafts landing troops on the beaches, of battleships firing rocket salvos at the coast, of gliders being pulled by planes, of paratroopers getting and more. Over the years films have been preserved by transferring the footage from one film stock to another and then transferred from film to tapes. The problem with film and tape is that they are stored in a physical location that only archivists have access to.

The Insta360 Nano and Air - A climbing test

The Insta 360 Nano and Air are two affordable cameras. The first is designed to work with the new iPhone shape as well as a stand alone device. The Insta360 Air works only when it is plugged into an Android device. Both are good for specific uses. Insta360 Air The Insta360 Air requests a firmware update the first time you want to use it. This takes a few minutes and then the device uses the phone’s gyroscopes to keep the image stable.

A Plastic Ocean - Recycle more

A Plastic Ocean is an excellent documentary detailing the problems and threats caused by plastics entering water systems and eventually reaching the seas and oceans. This documentary starts with a team trying to film whales. When they finally do find the whales off the coast of Sri Lanka they notice that there is a film of oil and plastic build up miles from the shore. They say that this bit of ocean should be clean as the beaches had been unused for years.

Ecosia - Planting trees with a search engine

Ecosia is an environmental search engine for those who want to do social good through their web browsing habits. The principle is simple. You go to the Ecosia main page and type in your search engine query. For every search engine query that you do ad revenue is generated. This ad revenue is then invested into tree growing projects in a number of countries. [caption id=“attachment_3527” align=“aligncenter” width=“300”] At the time of writing, Ecosia earned enough to plant 8.

Unhappy facebook users - Marketers and Academics are looking in the wrong place.

Unhappy Facebook Users - Marketers and Academics are looking in the wrong place. Every single day they publish articles about why social media is bad for us. Every day they ignore that we meet people via social media rather than bars. Every day they ignore that those I meet through social media work on interesting projects. Every day they ignore that if it wasn’t for social websites I would not have taken up via Ferrata, rock climbing and other sports.

The age of Bloggers and Self installations

I come from the age of bloggers and self-installations. In fact, I come from the age of HTML pages and static websites. In those days we surfed the web looking for and finding content. We also found interesting bits of code and we added new features to our websites. We would install forums, guestbooks and more. In so doing our static websites became dynamic. At this point, our website could grow a community.

The Drapel Climbing wall near Aigle

The Drapel Climbing Wall near Aigle is a nice place to climb. When I was there yesterday we were in the shade of the trees unless we were climbing. The temperature for this week is at around 25-27°c daily which is nice. These are almost summer temperatures, at last. The parking for this climbing wall is Getting there The parking for this climbing wall is here. I’m giving a specific location because when I looked at maps I was not filled with confidence.

Mental Health and Social media

There is a lot of discussion about Mental Health and social media because most people are not social media natives. They are either Luddites who do not appreciate playing with technology. They see themselves as users rather than participants and then there are extroverts and other people who see Social Media as a threat to their way of life. We live in societies built for extroverts rather than textroverts. As a textroverts social media is a place for me to have full conversations without having to compete with extroverts who often hijack conversations through charisma and the superficiality of what they have to say.

The World VR Forum - Year 2 - The Conferences

I was a volunteer at the World VR Forum again this year. I was in the conference room providing speakers with microphones before they went up on stage. As a result of this I was able to listen to many interesting speakers. They spoke about a diversity of topics of interest to various groups. Google Earth and the HTC Vive Dominik Käser presented Google Earth VR. He spoke about how Google had spent time thinking about how the earth sounds in different locations, from different altitudes and more.

Shark Reporting.

In the age of drones this is how shark reporting should be done. The Coast guard or local surfing schools should fly a drone around and check to see whether there are any sharks present. If and when they spot a shark or groups of sharks they could temporarily close the beach until the threat is gone. It reduces the need for shark nets. It also reduces the need and desire to kill any shark that is spotted as people are informed ahead of this time.