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A chevreuil in 4K
Yesterday I went for a walk around the foot of the Jura and there is an enclosure where deer are kept waiting to be slaughtered for meat. As the Chasse season is coming up this park might not be as busy.
This video was shot using the Sony Xperia Z3 compact. The image is a little blue for my liking.
I look forward to testing the Xperia Z5 compact with it’s improved sensor and new image stabilisation technology.
I have no 4K monitors on which to assess image quality at the moment.
Blueapple.Mobi – Video to mobile devices
As Yael Naim’s live performance of Toxic plays from my phone so I’m playing with Blueapple.mobi which “brings internet video and pictures directly to mobile users”. It’s an interesting service that allows you to view videos from a number of sources. You can see some of the recommended videos which are already converted from sources such as CBS or you can search for others. When you find a video that is not converted yet the site will convert the video on the fly and within a very short amount of time you will be able to download it straight to the phone.
This is more interesting than other services where you need to download applications in order for the files to be available. Of particular interest is the feature that you don’t need anything extra on the phone. Just download the video, watch it and then discard it. No waste, no clutter.
Take a look, it could be of interest as mobile broadband prices go down and free wifi become ubiquitous.
Battery Powered Transportation And Fitness
Every time you go for a walk, bike ride or run you encounter people being moved along by something using electricity. The most common of these forms of transport are the electric car, the electric bike and the electric foot scooter. People want to be more environmentally friendly in their way of getting around but they use something that has to be recharged.
Quick to Adopt
Electric bikes, foot scooters and cars are a shortcut used by plenty of people. The beauty of the three methods of transportation listed above is that they’re relatively easy to use. Charge them, and then go for a ride.
A break From Driving
A few years ago I lost my driving licence for a month so I replaced the car with a foot scooter that I had to propel myself and public transport. At the time I was happy because I was bored of driving. I was happy to be lazy for one month. That’s not the point.
The Less Strenuous Solution
The point is that we see plenty of people use electric foot scooters because manual ones require a good level of fitness. Using a scooter requires strong leg and back muscles, as well as endurance. Going downhill is easy, you just stand on the scooter and gravity does the work for you. Go the opposite way and that unpowered foot scooter becomes so tiring that you ever walk, to save energy, or work on your fitness, to get up the hill.
As Fast as an Electric Bike
Yesterday I went for a bike ride at an average of 25.9 kilometres per hour. This is a foot powered bike and I was going as fast as an electric bike, without any assistance. Electric bikes are wonderful. They are a short cut. With an electric bike you are as fast as someone who has spent years training to be fast. It provides people with a short cut to getting around on a bike, without the need for physical training.
The Need to Replace All Cars
In theory electric cars are fantastic because they pollute less, and they’re better for the air we breath. As a person who walks and cycles between villages electric cars are as threatening and dangerous as petrol powered cars. I feel that instead of electric cars, especially for short hops, with single occupancy we should think of skate boards, rollerblades, foot scooters and more.
And Finally
Now that I have sold the petrol driven scooter I am thinking of alternative solutions. In theory the most practical is the bike, but the problem with bikes is that they’re easy to steal, and in theory it’s expected. The alternative, the electric foot scooter is tempting but I worry about balance, when carrying shopping. The second concern is that by getting an electric scooter I might walk less, due to the convenience and lazy enticement of letting a machine do the work.
Electric seated scooters would be fun to drive but with a range of just 37km I’d be stuck locally. I’d like the range to get to Geneva and back, without recharging. It makes the electric scooter absurd, for my use case. A pedal bike is fine, with my level of fitness. I have demonstrated to myself several times that I can go back and forth with ease, without adding the day of work in the middle.
Conclusion
Although I was tempted by an electric bike for a long time my level of fitness increased to the point where I saw the electric bike as a luxury, rather than necessity. I could be tempted by an electric scooter, but to get to the train station in a quarter of the time that it would take to walk. It’s a twenty minute walk to the train. I don’t need an electric scooter to take me in five minutes or so.
May-21st for a twit-out, boycott of twitter
I’m not the only person that’s annoyed with the vast amount of downtime suffered by twitter and there is a call for an international boycott of twitter on may 21st. During that day we’ll be using other more reliable services to show that twitter is nothing without the community that makes it what it is.
Twitter has been having some serious issues over the last few weeks. It seems that the service is down almost as much as it’s active. Exaggeration or not, it’s a problem, and it seems to be worsening rather than improving. As a result, a bunch of us Twitter power users were using FriendFeed to discuss a way to hit Twitter where it hurts in order to send a message to the powers that be.
The Demise of Google reader
Google Reader was a great tool because it made gathering and sharing content from specific sources intuitive and easy. It provided us with one place from which to do most things. Today Google have announced that they are pulling the plug on Google reader.
In my eyes Google reader had become obsolete four years ago. That’s when I moved to services like Feedly, zite and others. Each of these services was more interesting because it took our feeds but used algorithms to make relevant content discovery faster and more intuitive.
Feedly was fun for a while but eventually I stopped using it in favour of zite. Zite was excellent until they decided to downgrade the user experience to a pinterest like interface. I don’t want the kindergarten treatment when searching for information. I want headers, I want a line or two of content and I want to have a lot of information displayed in a small space. Zite fell out of the useful apps category and was deleted from the ipad and iphone as a result.
The next project I’m looking at is Scoopinion. They have a plugin which tracks which news sources you visit and which articles you read. Based on your browising habits it recommends future articles. So far it estimates that I have spent 22hrs reading news over the past month or two with over 980 articles. By this logic it should be good at recommending stories that I would enjoy but it is too tabloid at the moment. This is probably due to the relatively small user base as this is a new project by developers in Finland.
I love content aggregators that study my habits and give recommendations based on this. It makes the surfing experience more enjoyable. You also don’t suffer from RSS burn out.