L’aiguille du Midi seen with an Iphone 4S.

Weather is something I don’t really care to take note of because it doesn’t change much about my appearance. It does change what I drive though. In summer when the weather is nice and warm then I’d much rather drive the scooter than the car. That’s because if I see a mother distracted by children whilst pulling out onto the main road it’s easier to overtake her.

It’s also easier, when at traffic lights to get to the front of the queue rather than wait like an unambitious car driver, and before you object I’m very often trapped in traffic, so please remain polite in the comments (as if there were going to be any.

The interesting part.

Today and yesterday I was at an event in the lovely rain one day and sadistic rain the next. I call the rain sadistic because it resulted in many cycling injuries during a local race around the lake. One person at the event was playing with weather pro on the Iphone, and from the glimpse I caught I saw something useful. I’m home now and I downloaded the weather app on the Ipad, after all if you’re going to spend money on an app you might as well have a frame to display it.

I love how this app displays information. You have the weather graphic to show the main weather trends of the day. You have temperature information, rain information, wind direction, pressure, humidity and more. As an additional feature you have the ability to add your favourite cities, let’s say London, Geneva, Paris, South Africa (for the World Cup) and maybe one more. Click on the right side of the screen and you have information for each city.

There are three bonus buttons at the bottom of the screen, the weather button, whose features I have described. The radar tab shows you where the most recent precipitation has been. Satellite images show you what the clouds have been doing for a set time period.

We’ll see how often I use this app. I like that it has all these features.

A few months ago, before the winter months came I was
happilly flying the drone up to four times a day. At the time I was running their old app and it worked flawlessly. You turned on the remote, turned on the drone and then you connected to the wifi
hotpot and within 30 seconds you could be flying. 

At some point in
November the cheeky people designing the app decided to “simplify” everything with QR codes which is theoretically fantastic. In
practice this locks you out from your own device. The remote and the drone work fine and I can fly the drone without a video display or telemetry and I can connect the phone to the wifi hotspot of the remote. 

The problem occurs when I try to connect the DJI Go4 app with the remote. At this moment the app refuses to recognise the drone and I’m stuck. I’ve tried resetting the remote, resetting the drone. I’ve tried re-installing the app and I’ve tried Android and iOS devices without any communications between the app and the drone.

If I had had these issues during my previous 90 flights and with a previous version of the app I would assume responsibility. As things are I am not to blame, the app breakers are. 

Remember that this is the prime season for someone to buy a new drone and I would be tempted by the air. How can I justify buying a new drone when the old one has a faulty app that other DJI drones use as well? 

I would strongly advise people against buying a drone that relies on their
dji go 4
app. It has a design flaw whereby you get locked out of your device. 

Last weekend I watched hours worth of
slow motion videos because I enjoy them. I also watched them because I was fighting one of the worst colds I’ve had in years. Slow motion videos are great because what is invisible to the eye, and hard to see in normal speed videos becomes boringly long when watched in slow motion. 

An event that would have taken a few hundredths of a second now takes seconds or even minutes to occur. We’re familiar with the photos of bullets going through apples from our childhood and we’re familiar with the footage of
slow motion rocket launches but have you seen the
saturn five launch where just the ignition sequence takes sixteen minutes? 

The video above shows the action in such slow motion that you can see everything that happens in a way that a live broadcast never could. Eight minutes from ignition to the moment the rocket leaves the shot. 

In this
video you see a nuclear blast for the first milliseconds. You can see the shape of the charge and the imperfections. It provides you with a different understanding of how these reactions occur. 

In the video above you see paint being flung from a drill in slow motion. The paint is flung upwards and sideways. You also see the drill as it oscillates up and down as well as from side to side. In
realtime you would just see a spray of paint but you would miss the intricacies of the globules of paint and how they move.  

In another
video you see how syringes of ink look as they spread in an aquarium of water. In slow motion you see the ink take on a velvet quality as it spreads within the water. It’s great to watch the first time you see such fluid behaviours. 

In another video, you can watch what happens when a drop of water falls into a body of water, how it goes down into the water, bounces back out and then hits another drop. Such motion is really interesting to watch. In real-time, we’re speaking of hundredths of a second but in slow motion, we’re speaking about seconds of motion.

In the video above we see how surface tension and bubbles of water interact. You start from a single drop of water that falls from a surface, bounces on the top of water multiple times and as it bounces halves and then halves again several times before finally disappearing into the water. This is behaviour that you would never notice with the naked eye but thanks to slow motion cameras you see it. 

When you watch the first slow-motion videos you don’t know what to expect but as you watch dozens, or even hundreds of events so you begin to understand how the world works at the nanosecond timescale. They’re worth watching
because your understanding of science and events increases. 

In this video we see someone paragliding from Plan Praz to the Mont Blanc. To do this the individual finds ascending air at a number of points going from 2800 metres up to 5000 meters before finally landing on the summit of the Mont Blanc.

This video gives you a practical example of how a good paragliding flight should go. When I flew at Les Diablerets last week I was surprised that we don’t feel the wind as much as we would expect when on a parapente and I was surprised that you do not feel when you are going up or down. In this video you hear a beep that increases in frequency and intensity as you ascend. The faster it beeps the faster you are climbing. There is another beep that we hear just once in the video that indicates that the parapente is going down.

It’s a shame that in this video we do not find out how long the flight lasts. We hear him at one moment speak about the need for patience as he looks for pockets of rising air to raise him to the desired altitude. We hear him comment about how certain people seem to struggle and we hear that his breathing is more laboured as he gets higher.

It would be nice to see them take off from the summit and head back down in to the valley. It must be nice to ascend the Mont Blanc in such a way. We seldom hear of people ascending the Mont Blanc by parapente so this video is interesting.

In this second video we see people hike up the Mont Blanc and take off from the summit. The view from there must be spectacular and the feeling must be pleasant. Many of us have seen the vista from the Aiguille Du Midi but imagine seeing it from a place as calm and quiet as below a parapente.