For years now I have been tracking my sports activities with sports tracker on a variety of mobile phones, dive computers and sports tracking watches. I have gone canyoning, hiking, swimming, skiing, snowboarding, climbing, to do via ferrata, explored caves and trained indoors. In that time I have not had too many injuries and I have taken hundreds, if not thousands of photographs.
These activities have been in France, Spain, Switzerland, Italy, England, Poland and maybe in or two countries that I have forgotten about.
Sports tracking has progressed enormously since I started tracking activities. In the beginning I was using the N95 8gb and the battery lasted for about an hour. I then switched to various iphones and android devices before deciding that mobile phones were crap. That’s when I moved over to the Suunto Ambit 2 and later Suunto Ambit 3 devices. Since then I have been very happy tracking my physical activities.
One key step was when Suunto and Sports tracker decided to share data between their services. At this moment I could track with the Suunto Ambit 3 and share to Sports tracker without four or six steps per activity. Since then the service has been reliable.
Time-lapse videos are fun because we can see something happen faster or slower than real time. By watching this content we gain a better understanding of the world and how it works. For years I have been filming time-lapses and the results can be fun. In some cases we record time-lapses with video cameras and at other times we set an interval timer to take pictures every so many seconds. In this post you will be watching clouds form as a 360 timelapse.
I have chosen to share both the flat image and the spherical image. The reason for sharing both versions is to give you an overview of how objects move in both.
Spherical Version
With this version look to your right and you will be able to watch the clouds move through space. As they move you will see them grow thicker and then cover the sun. At this point everything gets darker. If you watch this video a few times you can watch the landscape change.
The next step would be to get a 360 camera somewhere high during a total eclipse of the sun by the moon. During such events you will see a grey mask cross over the landscape, you will see birds fly away and then everything will be dark. You can then turn around and watch totality, the corona and then the reverse process. The time is right for eclipse chasers to be at the right place to capture such an event as a 360 video.
Flat Version
With the flat version you can imagine where you would aim a standard camera. Would you try to get the clouds that are forming over the mast or would you prefer to look out towards La Dôle and watch as the large clouds form and float to block off the sun? In this image you can see from Villeneuve and Lausanne to Geneva and the Salève.
Having such a wide angle of view allows you to see everything that is going on in front of and behind the camera. The timelapse is a sequence of pictures rather than video so in future I hope to export the video in a higher resolution.
If you follow chatGPT and AI courses you will often come across the term “Prompt Engineering”. Prompt Engineering is the art and science of writing instructions so that AI understands what you would like to do. With time and practice you can be as specific as you like. You can fine tune your request until you get precisely what you are looking for.
The Limit of chatGPT.
The limit of chatGPT is that it goes up to September 2021. This means that code solutions for specific apps, like a css style sheet for calckey.social won’t work. You need to ask questions about CSS and adapt the resulting code to work with Calckey or other newer code.
Writing Tic Tac Toe and Hangman
Last night I asked chatGPT to write Tic Tac Toe, Hangman and a ToDo app in C++, php and java. The results were variably successful but this shows the power of chatGPT. In theory you could browse to github or other website and just cut and paste the code. The result is similar, but with one key difference.
With chatGPT you can ask “create a simple nav bar that changes colour on mouse over using UL and LI tags and it will generate that code for you.
“please create a simple nav menu using html ul and li elements and style it with css so that text is highlighted on mouseover”.
The point is that chatGPT can write entire apps, if you engineer the right prompt, but it can also generate snippets of code for you with a specific result in mind, as in the example above.
Show something in a table
Show something in an HTML table
As you see chatGPT understands the instruction, provides me with a result which I can then tweak to match my desired outcome. Instead of spending ten to fifteen minutes writing and formatting the table with this data, I can get chatGPT to do it for me.
In What is Generative AI Pinar Seyhan Demirdag said of AI that “AI does the work and humans focuses on the vision, the idea and the purpose.” In other words AI is an assistant. The more you study prompt engineeering, and the better you get at getting the desired outcome, the more useful and valuable AI, and your skills in using AI become.
And Finally, For Now
AI behaves like a person. The more clearly and concisely your instructions are, the more the output will reflect your desired outcome. AI is constantly learning from Big Data. Our task is to learn how to give instuctions, prompt engineering, as it’s called within the industry, so that AI provides the results we require, saving both time, and to some degree, learning. I have just scraped the surface. I want to learn more.
Twitter is not a social network, rather it’s a way of life. The more you use Twitter the further it gets into your way of life. It allows you to follow current affairs, geek out about social media and keep in touch with friends that uses the social network. What’s more it’s a network that does not require any specific device.
At first it’s a confusing place. Look at the public timeline and it’s a torrent of junk and sifting through it will take hours a day. As you spend more time on twitter though you find people of interest to follow. In some cases it’s friends from the physical world, in other cases friends from other websites on the web and then more.
In reality what makes twitter interesting, and part of what makes people use it is how efficient it is at getting a message across. You’ve got 140 characters to express yourself. In Paris I was told I speak in 140 characters or less. That’s not a bad thing. In fact it’s good. It’s about the continual flow of information.
Imagine you’re swimming down a river but everytime you move to stay afloat you have to close your eyes. That’s what article and blog reading is. As you focus on one task so your ability to focus on anything else dissapears. That’s fine in the old media where pages are static and where airwaves are limited.
In the modern world though it is necessary to absorb many sources of information at once. How many of you have your ipod, laptop and mobile phone with you at the time you’re reading this post? I’m sure most. How many of you have more podcasts than you can view or listen to? How many of you have more programs recorded on PVR than you can watch?
That’s why twitter is a lifestyle. It’s about constantly looking for information and building an understanding of current affairs through constantly taking in little bits of information. Stop talking about the social media on twitter, rather start talking about the good old fashioned time efficient soundbyte. Want to be heard. Don’t take people’s time. Encourage interest instead.
Many people are complaining about the decentralised conversation, the notion that blogs are no longer the center of attention, that twitter, friendfeed, facebook and others are killing the conversation. In fact quite the opposite is true. If you’re in New York you’ve got one set of people, if you’re in London you’ve got another. if you’re in Geneva you don’t have much… To have a decentralised conversation means that many ideas can be explored at once and as pillars of the online community meet at various events so the conversations can once more converge.
Don’t worry about comments on a blog, think about the conversations and the people you’re having them with. That’s where the fun is to be had.
While in Spain for three weeks I was playing with the Xtorm solar Charger. I found that it worked well for the charging of tablets and e-book readers but not mobile phones.
For years I have wanted to play with solar power. I have wanted to buy a solar panel that I could fix to my bag or that I could use to charge devices. I often looked at the price and weight and changed my mind. I don’t want something that adds kilos to my load, especially if I am climbing.
With a small device like the one pictured above you can carry it with you and use it to charge devices. When you drive to the hike or climb, or when you stop for lunch or a drink you can take out this device and start charging your phone, gps, led lights or other devices.
if you want to charge devices to 100 percent then I would recommend charging ipads, ebooks, gps watches and other devices with this device. I found that it’s great for providing a phone with a top up charge but that because of my mobile use patterns it will only provide one full charge per day.
When we hear people speak about solar power we always hear about “How do we store the power we generate so that we can use it when we need it?” and I found a way. When I woke up in the morning I would put the solar charger near a window or outside if there was no chance of rain to charge up to over 75 percent. When it reached this charge I connected the solar charger to a 10,000mah external battery.
It is by using this technique that I have been able to keep my external battery fully charged with no need to plug it in to mains power. In effect it means that I can charge the ipad, the phone or the e-book reader without using mains power.
Strengths
It has a 6000mah battery and can charge two devices at once.
Weaknesses
If I was designing such a device I would ensure that the battery could charge within an 8-12hr window rather than 15. I found that to recharge the internal battery fully it would take two days.
This type of device needs to be rugged. It has to be rain resistant and transport resistant. I want to be able to leave it exposed to the sun without having to worry about the risk of rain. I would also like it to feel solid enough to be fixed to a bag when hiking or climbing. In it’s current configuration I would leave it near the bag when sitting for lunch or when at a climbing wall. I would not fix it to my bag during a via ferrata.
Conclusion
I’m happy with this solar charger. I have found the ideal use case for it and I look forward to experimenting with it over the summer. I think it would benefit from having a battery half the size that could be fully charged in half the time. It now tempts me to get a second larger solar panel to keep the laptop charged over the summer months.
If there was the option to downgrade from 200GB to 100 GB I would have taken it as I needed 51.6 gigabytes to backup my phone and other data. Since I couldn’t I went through and removed my photo backup as well as back ups of folders that don’t need to be backed up because they are cloud serice in the first place. Imagine the rational of backing up backups. It makes sense, but without exageration.
I am able to downgrade because I have Immich, Kdrive, Photoprism and Nextcloud backing up my photos as well as two to three hard drives. The beauty of this solution is that I go from spending 36 CHF per year for iCloud down to 10 CHF per year. I go from spending 100 CHF per year down to about 35 CHF per year, and I go from being obliged to be loyal to cloud providers because I had no local backup of everything, to being free to jump from service to service on a whim. By whim I mean that I can dump a service as soon as a cheaper option appears.
There are two reasons for me dumping iCloud. The first is that they’re more expensive than all other solutions so to use them is to throw away money. The second reason, and the more damning one is that if you store photos on iCloud once you reach a certain library size you’re trapped.
You’re trapped because although you can create several libraries on external drives you can only download photos from the cloud on the system drive, not others. This means that with a 500 GB laptop drive that is full with files you’re trapped within iCloud. Your data is locked in until you get a mac mini, add a two terabyte drive, and download all your files.
In the end I used Immich, Photoprism and Kdrive to backup the data that was trapped in the cloud before removing photo sync from the phone with iCloud, relying on Immich, Photoprism, Nextcloud and Kdrive. Why so many services you may ask. Experimentation, and redundancy. Immich is in very active development so they recommend not to rely on it. Photoprism seems stable. Nextcloud is good too, but it’s better for backing up files from computers and more. Kdrive is the offsite backup.
And Finally
Now that Nextcloud takes care of synching files between devices and Immich, Kdrive and other solutions take care of backing up photos and videos there is less pressure for me to use cloud services such as iCloud. I keep the 50GB plan because I can still backup my phone in the cloud as well as various app data. If it was not for these constraints I could dump iCloud entirely. The biggest storage hog on iCloud is the phone’s backup.
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