CERN, live streaming and the LHC
Relayed live of the LHC and their first beam which travelled at 20 KM/h
The tapeless workflow is a term used to describe video production without the use of tapes. That is to say that from the point the material is recorded in camera to the point it is distributed it never changes from being data. In other words television production has become a profession of data managment as some would say.
A few production companies came to give demonstrations of their tapeless workflow system, at least in broad terms. Red Bee and Virgin Media showed how they have collaboratively brought the post production process to being a tapeless one. In order to do this good networking capability is needed and so is storage. They had to digitise over 40,000 tapes as well as face many more challenges.
Some of these challenges have to do with meta data. Everyone is used to dealing with tapes. you shoot your material, you label it for post production and then store them for later use. When dealing with data though the mentality is different. Some productions have shot straight to P2 cards, backed up the day’s shoots to external P2 hard drives before sending them from China to London for example. Of course when doing this everyhting must be planned ahead.
Part of this planning has to do with the compatibility between recording format and editing. If you get this wrong then you either don’t get the quality you were looking for or you slow down the process. That was part of a case study between Panasonic and two of it’s camera’s during a shoot in China.
The second example was between Red Bee Media and Virgin Media in relation to the creative Village. The idea is that when the material is ingested by Red Bee media it’s saved to a central server from which it can be accessed by a number of workstations, from transcribing to tapelogging, editing and producer’s work stations. it also has to be available in two buildings.
There are a number of advantages to this workflow. The first is that the work is available to the producers when they have the time to check the material rather than when everyone has ten free minutes. As a result the editor can edit a rough cut and a number of producers at up to two hundred workstations may check the edit and say whether they like it. If they don’t then it’s quick to make any changes that are required. It also means that there’s far less mess and expensive equipment is not tied up.
When you’re working on post production dubbing to tape used to take a lot of time, real time and with DVD it’s quickly a messy affair. Files in an edit folder are far easier to deal with.
I really like the idea o the tapeless workflow and i’m going to work on that for my own work, first with affordable equipment and then work my way towards more fun alternatives. It’s what we expect. No more ingestion time, no more dubbing time, just straight editing, agreement and finally output to a number of formats. Of course that’s not as easy as it sounds but post production companies are working on making this a smoother process.
With a user like me it takes a year or two for a mobile phone to become depleted. After this period of time I am stuck with the weight of an external battery that I have to plug in half way through the day to recharge the device. This is, in part, due to how many apps are installed and running, on my phone, but also due to how I use my phone for audio books, and news reading. Back in the day I would have said social media, but social media is dead.
With wearable tech the situation is different. With wearable tech when the battery degrades you’re stuck. With a Casio watch, or plenty of other brands, you simply go to a jeweler or watch shop and get them to swap the battery and you’re good for another 2-10 years. With an Apple watch, when the battery is at 67 percent health you’re stuck with a dilemma.
Do I spend 90 CHF to get the battery replaced despite knowing that my device is five years old and near the software update end of life or do I buy a new device and if I get a new device do I get it with, or without 4g?
With a mobile phone, if the battery degrades you can plug it in, as you walk around and use it. With wearable tech you have to take it off to charge it. If you’re in the middle of a walk and the battery dies you’re stuck. Either you carry the charger and leave some of the activity untracked, or you wait until you get to your destination and charge it then.
A few years ago whenever a new iphone, or a new mac book air or mac book pro would come out I would fight the urge to upgrade on a yearly basis, and when I did people were always happy to get my old iPhones. Since the 4S that urge vanished because new products were iterative, rather than revolutionary. Even the Ultra is iterative, offering nothing that proper fitness watches or dive computers did not offer. My only reason for thinking about upgrading the Apple watch is a dying battery.
The other option is to charge the watch before you sleep, to track sleep, and to charge it as you work, eat, or do something static, so that the battery is at one hundred percent for when you’re doing something sporty. When you know that a battery has degraded after five years of daily use you adapt to the new battery capacity. In my case I’m working with 67 percent of normal capacity.
The paradox is that I love to hate the Apple Watch. I hate that it tracks standing, and counts a day as failed if you don’t stand enough, despite beating the activity goal. I dislike that if I track something with one device or two it will get confused and count my activity as zero, when it was up to the goal, at the very least.
What I do like, and criticise is the Apple Health screen. I like that I can see my walking instability, my step length, the number of floors I run up and more. I like that I can see how my average running speed is changing over time and that my vo2max is going up. Plenty of watches track this.
Since the 20th of September the Health app added MET measurements to measure physical activity.
The main difference between MET and PAI is that MET is a measure of the intensity of an activity, while PAI is a measure of the overall physical activity level. MET is useful for comparing the intensity of different activities, while PAI is more useful for tracking your overall progress over time.
I have spent months thinking about whether to upgrade to a newer Apple watch and I have tried various lower cost option and I like each, but I really like how complete the health data set is with the Apple watch. They also added the cycling computer option when using an iphone and an Apple Watch. It’s still buggy as shell but it has potential.
I am not upgrading because I want the latest tech. I am upgrading because to replace the battery would cost 90 CHF for a device that will be obsolete within a few months. According to research I did an apple watch is considered end of life after four years and this watch is at five years and counting, so over a year beyond the usual life expectancy.
If you’re wondering why one of the tags in my post is “Day 388” it’s because I shifted from WordPress to ClassicPress once again. In so doing I lost access to Akismet and Jetpack. By losing Akismet I lose comment spam filtering. I also lost access to the Jetpack app so I lost access to my streak info. That’s why I included it as a task.
If, like me, you’re using the Astronomy Wallpaper on your mobile phones you will have noticed that the shadow over the Northern hemisphere has shifted. It has gone from being a south to North shadow to an East to West shadow from the top of Europe. You can see how parts of Norway, Sweden England and Finland are now in the dark for longer and longer parts of the day. It’s rational that we would see it, but it’s interesting that we can see an illustration of how seasons change the pattern of daylight on earth.
With the Astronomy app on the Apple Watch you can see the same thing, but you can also see cloud cover over the part of the world where you are. In my case it’s Europe.
The changes are so gradual that if you look at your watch or phone every single day you wouldn’t notice unless you’re looking at the right time of day. If we went up to Kiruna now we might see that we’re in constant darkness according to our phones and watches. If we had a Garmin or Suunto device that displays sunrise and sunset we would see that the day may just be a few minutes long, at this time of year. We see this wherever we are, but to be in the arctic circle would be an extreme demonstration of the seasonal change.
if you have an iphone play with the app and see what the pattern is like for your part of the world.
Yesterday I installed Nextcloud on two devices, a raspberry Pi and an HP Elite book and I could see a clear difference between the two machines. The HP is a laptop on which I installed a minimal version of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and I installed a similar version of Ubuntu on the Raspberry Pi.
I believe I used Snap to install Nextcloud and then went to the web interface to configure it automatically by simply creating a user. Within seconds the system was up and running and I was able to upload images, create directories and more. It worked well.
I then tried the same installation procedure on the Raspberry Pi and right from the start I noticed a difference. With the Pi simply opening Firefox was a slower experience. Downloading Nextcloud took several minutes on the Raspberry Pi and then several more minutes to create the first admin/user.
I setup the Raspberry Pi to provide me with SSH access before trying to upload an image from a third machine. It failed, giving me an error: “insufficient memory” message. I killed the Firefox process, tried again and it worked.
I believe that the error I was getting when uploading from the Nextcloud iOS app was due to a lack of resources but I am not sure. The Pi has sufficient RAM. I was playing with an 8GB model. It’s the CPU that couldn’t cope, which is why I killed the Firefox process.
By using the GUI with the PI yesterday I got to see error messages that I don’t usually get to see and I got to experiment. By seeing error messages we have a better idea of what to fix than when we just get an error in the iOS app.
The next step is to try the same experiment but with Ubuntu Server rather than the Desktop version. This should save CPU power and enable the same experiment, without the overhead. If configured correctly then you could plug it into the LAN network and use the device from anywhere where it can be wired in.
In practice you can use any old computer you have gathering dust, but in so doing you’re going to need a space for the laptop if you use a laptop or a tower if you’re using an old PC. A Bare bones PC or a thin client would be more interesting but the cost is around 200 CHF if you count 133 CHF for a NUC and 70 CHF or more for a hard drive. With the Raspberry PI you end up spending a similar amount.
I read that you could setup a NUC with two four terabyte drives. This is a great solution if you want to invest in a slightly higher spec solution.
The advantage of the Pi is that it doesn’t take much more space than a deck of playing cards. Your Nextcloud client could live directly plugged in to the router with a tiny footprint.
One of the great things about playing with Raspberry Pi is that we all have at least three or four microSD cards. This means that we can install one OS on one card, and another OS on another card. We can swap from one OS to another within seconds with the Pi.
When I was playing with Linux in the 90s I had to burn CDs and DVDs every time I wanted to experiment with a different OS. This was wasteful as each CD-ROM or DVD would be used once or twice at most, before being waste. When I installed Linux on the latest laptop I had to write the USB key, and then install from the USB key to the laptop.
With a Raspberry Pi SD card you write the OS to the microSD card and 30 seconds after you finish writing it you’re booting up the Pi. This means that experimentation can be very fast. To use an apt french expression “it’s not like drinking the sea”, “ce n’est pas la mer à boire”. It’s easy to experiment until you break something. It’s easy to reset.
If you want to keep your personal Nextcloud instance available 24 hours a day then a Raspberry Pi makes sense because you can use a 500 gigabyte MicroSD card and store twice as much data backups as you have on your phone. The other option is that you can plug in a box like this to your Nextcloud laptop every now and then and get terabytes of storage for much cheaper than if you use Synology or another brand. The other advantage is that if a Pi or laptop dies, you can plug in another device and recover access within seconds.
There are simpler solutions for sharing disks between computers, like Samba but sometimes it’s good to learn tools that can do more.
I am confused by Apple reading goals because they measure how many days you have reached your goal, as well as how much you read for the current day, but once today is yesterday it loses all of that information. It tells you that you have a. streak but you have no way of knowing anything else.
It would be nice to know how many hours you read per week, as well as how this has varied from one week to the next, from one month to the next, and from one season to the next. With this information you could see whether seasons and other factors affect how much you read. None of this matters, except that because it is tracked it is a shame not to keep that information available for users.
Apple Books has the same flaw as plenty of other Apple Apps. If you live in Switzerland it is assumed that you speak German, and because of this assumption it is hard to browse for English, and even French content. You are obliged to know what you want to find, instead of having the freedom to browse. Apple must lose a lot of business by forcing German language version of content, rather than looking at system settings and using the system default. We’re decades into regionalisation, and yet tech giants don’t cater to people who do not speak the majority language.
I thought I was going to go for a walk today but didn’t. I walked to breakfast and back and then spent time standing, so when I saw that it was 1400 I thought that I should go for a walk but didn’t. This is unusual for me. Today has been a crap day. I didn’t get to focus on my goals as I wish I could have. Days like today frustrate me.
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yep, because some people were having trouble when trying to view the stream so I relayed that one the simplest way I could think of.