From Mobile to train station display live.
If this isn’t a hoax then this is pretty fun. A guy claims to have hacked into the video display at a train station and is streaming live.
On Saturday I drove for twelve and a half hours and felt exhausted by the time I got home. I didn’t write a blog post so I lost my 480 day blogging streak, and I didn’t read using the Kindle app so I lost my Kindle reading streak. In the end losing such streaks is healthy.
The problem with the Kindle reading streak is that it encourages us to read a page or two every single day, but that may result in us reading just a page or two, rather than a chapter or two. The other issue is that my reading streak is intact, in that I read an entire book while driving. I read Nowhere for Very Long, as an audiobook. It’s a shame that the book isn’t more focused on travel and adventure. I still read it in a day. I think it could have explored the pleasure, rather than the trauma that led to having that life.
With the blogging streak I think that it’s healthy to take a break from writing daily, because life isn’t that interesting. it doesn’t require a post every single day. It’s easy for posts to become spam, or boring, if we write every day. It also encourages us to be more negative, eventually. By taking a break we recharge, and we return to writing about positive things.
By breaking streaks I often feel a sense of freedom. A streak requires something to be done consistently and the further you get into a streak, the more difficult it is to reach a new record if you break it. I need to blog for 481 days to break my previous streak and read from a kindle for 281 days in a row.
The thing is that I don’t want to read books exclusively on my kindle. I want to read Kobo, Google Books, Kindle and Audible and have all of them count towards the streak, without it being propietary. There are several reading apps that keep track of streaks. With these the important thing is to read and log daily.
I have plenty of physical books. Now that I have broken my kindle streak I can read them. I can revert to reading a book in bed and lying down, and dropping the book onto my face as I try to turn the page. I collected so many books in physical form that I ran out of space on my shelves and now I need to read them, and place them in reading libraries once more.
Breaking streaks is a good thing. Streaks are a sign of being in a rut. If we break a walking streak, or a blogging streak, or a reading streak it shows that our lives vary from day to day, or week to week. It shows that we have other things to do than keep routines. Years ago said that diving was a break from routine. That person has dived almost every week for a decade or more. That break from the routine is in and of itself a routine. My reading routine is intact. I just broke the shackles of having a Kindle centric reading routine.
Yahoo live is an interesting live video conferencing tool still in it’s early days. It allows you to stream video live from your webcam and watch up to four other streams at the same time. There’s a chatroom and you can see all the participants at once and select which ones you want in vision and which you’d prefer out of vision.
There are a few bugs at the moment. I haven’t found sound that easy to deal with, especially since there’s a five to ten second delay. Chatting with Msiou he told me that what he had done is use skype conference calls to keep the conversation going. Of course this is a makeshift solution and some better interaction should come.
Last night I decided to play with Nextcloud more ambitiously. I set up four synchronisations, one for documents, one for photos, one for downloads and one for desktop. I did it this way because if I went to my root user account and backed everything up I would backup files that are not critical.
It makes sense to backup the documents, downloads and desktop folders because that’s where the most useful things are. In theory I should backup photos too, and I did set that with one Pi but not the other. The reason is simple. Photos are already backed up by Immich, PhotoPrism and Kdrive, so to backup that folder makes little sense, especially since photos are usually taken with the phone, so that’s where the backup should take place.
On the topic of Immich I do have Immich and Nextcloud running on a Pi4 and on a Pi5. The Pi4 has either crashed, or slowed down to a crawl due to overheating several times, wheras the Pi5 seems to be coping with my backing up of files from the laptop I am using to Nextcloud.
My goal of running the Pi4 with Immich and Nextcloud was mainly to see if Immich worked faster than Photoprism but so far that is not the case. Immich appears to be crashing or slowing down the Pi4 to a crawl consistently. Photoprism on the Pi5 is stable but slow. For weeks, or even months I have been waiting for Photoprism to finish indexing all of the photos that are on that system.
On the positive side at least new files that are uploaded to Immich show up, so even if it takes a while for the back catalogue to be archived the current images and videos do show up and are playable, in the brief windows when the system has not crashed. I am of the impression that these crashes are due to using the desktop version on a Pi4, rather than because of Nextcloud and Immich.
I used the plugin to allow for external volumes to be used from within Nextcloud but they are not visible when using the desktop sync tool. I will setup a 1tb SD card to run Nextcloud from the Pi4 with a server version of Raspbian or Ubuntu and see how well that works. The desktop is nice to have, but not essential, especially if it is the source of crashes.
I am currently using two old drives as Time Machine backups. They need to be plugged in either every day, or on alternative days to backup the system. The issue is that when they are plugged in I cannot move the machine until I eject the disks. I use Nextcloud to sync files that change regularly. Time Machine then becomes a secondary backup tool.
For two or three months I have been playing with backing up photos and videos from the phone to photoprism and Kdrive and those systems work well. What I like about photoprism is that it backs up in the evening when I am sleeping. Kdrive backs up almost as soon as I take photos. Kdrive also has the advantage of allowing me to retrieve photos with ease. they’re organised by year and month so moving them around is very easy.
With Nextcloud backing up document files, desktop files and downloads I am synching/backing up files constantly.
Today I went down to the Nyon Lakeside to play with the camera to try it out. I watched the video playback and it looked fine. I saw some pixelation between a girl’s face and her hair when she was walking and some artefacts just around the people’s bodies as they move. That’s at 1440*1020, not full resolution. I’ll have to find time to do test at full HD quality during my days off.
Please note that for monitoring I was using a 40″ Sony Bravia and standing a few centimeters away. From a few meters back it looked fine.
I have worked with video cameras, from hi8 to MiniDV, Beta SP, SX, DVCAM, XDCAM, AVCHD and other formats. Cameras have grown and shrunk, controls have changed from manual to partially automated to fully automated. Television news and Studio camera productions have gone from three or four camera operators to needing a couple and then a single camera operator sitting in a side room with controls for all three cameras. Crane and jib moves are programmed so that the same action is performed at the start of each news program.
Virtual Reality technology and Virtual reality headsets are going down in price. Apps provide mobile phone users with 360° videos in normal vision and 3D. The technology we use to watch 360° content and immerse ourselves in the VR world could be adapted and made suitable for multi-camera production.
It would be nice for software to be written that moves the camera as we move our heads. This technology is already used by gunners flying in Apache helicopters. The point would be to adapt this technology to camera operating. I would manual controls for zoom and focus and a control  to lock off the camera once the desired shot is ready.
Imagine how much simpler controlling drone and crane cameras would be. Imagine also how much nicer it will be for conference attendees, concert goers and UN delegates if a smaller remote controlled camera could be used. Camera operators often obscure people’s view. This technology would be less intrusive. Camera operators could sit rather than stand for hours at a time, barely able to move.
VR goggles and the technology they contain should not be used just to consume a finished product but should instead be used as a creative/production tool. VR goggles and related tech could be used to simplify people’s work, to make it more intuitive. Multicamera production with VR goggles would reduce costs and make high-quality video coverage achievable even for modest budgets. The excuse for using a single webcam to Livestream an event will be gone making virtual attendance of events more enjoyable.
Back in 2000 I arrived in the South West of England as an 18 year old who was used to watching 24 minute documentaries on a range of subjects and I wanted to do the same thing. For the course I was doing when I was told that I had to do one minute pieces I was dissapointed because I thought I would never get through what I wanted to say in that amount of time.
It took a lot of effort and thought during those two years on that course but eventually I understood the importance of briefness. I understood that you can get the same idea in twenty words as you can in 2000.
As a result of this when I arrived in London to study for the BA in media and television studies I had the one sentence one point mentality and when i was told to make a ten minute documentary I saw this as more of a challenge than when I was told to make short documentaries.
The reason for this, precision.
There are a number of bloggers, used to the written word, who are moving over to video to deliver their message and as they do so their inefficiency with getting the point across gets in the way of the quality content they have to offer. On a number of occasions people tend to record ten to twenty minute interviews without cutting anything out. As a result the signal to noise ratio goes down.
As a video producer one of your most important tasks is to find the key points that someone makes in their argument and get them across to your viewer within the shortest amount of time possible. If you think that a news item is between one minute 30 to 2 minutes these are the timings you should work for. There is far too much content on the world wide web for me to waste a quarter of an hour listening to someone who cannot be conscice in the way he expresses himself.
It’s a shame because what is said may be of interest but I’m not ready to spend 15 minutes on one video clip unless it is a highly and well produced piece of documentary making with a range of interviews and analysis.