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Sharing Videos With Facebook

Byrichard
Reading Time: 2 minutes

Through technology such as that available on Facebook, video sharing has become quite a bit easier. Whereas on a website like youtube where you share video footage with the world on Facebook you select who you share your videos with.

There are three settings, share with everyone on your network, including all friends, share with everyone who is tagged in the videos and their friends, or simply restrict it to your friends. I particularly like the option to share between your friends and the friends of tagged friends because it’s so flexible. we don’t have the same friends so it’s a good method by which to distribute videos, best of all it’s free.

Another feature that’s interesting is key frames. You can cycle through up to ten screenshots of your video and find the frame you feel is best suited to illustrate the video. It’s as easy to select a frame as to when you’re sharing a website with your network.

I have run into a number of limitations. The video must be under ten minutes in duration and 200 megabytes in size. Keep in mind that the video will be converted to the FLV format which can be read on almost all browsers.

I’ve uploaded seven videos already and so far the interface has behaved well. I managed to upload a 50+ megabyte video but due to its length being too long the software complained. I also tried to upload an iPod format video and it complained as well so that’s something I think they should work on.

It’s not going to replace the broadcast machine interface I’ve installed on my website but it’s a good method by which to share amateur videos between friends and for those who would like to do it professionally to showcase some of their better work.

Two additional video options are uploading by mobile phone and recording from your webcam. The recording from webcam is a feature that’s interesting if you’re in a public place with your laptop and you’re uploading video of specific events. I’ll try uploading video from the mobile phone at a future date.

As I see it this is yet another strong feature that has been added to Facebook and unlike the fortune cookies, I like software and others this is something that helps promote the imagined and real communities I discussed in a recent essay. (That essay will be uploaded once it’s been moderated properly).

I’m going to take some time to convert and upload quite a few more videos to Facebook over the coming weeks and months.

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Jumping On and Off Twitter

Jumping On and Off Twitter

Byrichard

There are two types of Twitter users. Those that are still using it daily, and angry with what Musk is doing, and those that quit weeks ago, and come back every now and then to see how things have changed, or stayed the same. I am surprised that to some degree the site feels the same and yet, of course, it isn’t.

I am surprised to see who stayed around, who is still using the site, and whether the community feels lively, or dead. It’s both alive and dead. It is Schrodinger’s cat. It is still alive and filled with news about how the COVID pandemic is not over. People who know the pandemic is not over have stuck around on Twitter.

Disengaged

When I go to Twitter now I do so as a tourist, rather than a local. I gave up on Twitter weeks ago. Now whether it goes down or not, will not change my daily routine. If it goes down tomorrow I will already have a replacement in place. I don’t know what it is, but I am less invested in Twitter. I know that its days are numbered.

Disliking the Fediverse

One of the biggest strengths of the Fediverse is that it’s distributed and we can integrate our blogs straight into peoples feeds if we feel like doing that. The drawback to the Fediverse is that it is a young community of strangers trying to impose their views of the world on others, rather than just having conversations. People are fighting for human rights, but I don’t mean in a positive way. They’re trying to convert and indoctrinate people into thinking their way, rather than reasoning, and building empathy. This turns me off of using the Fediverse.

The Unfamiliar

As I said yesterday, Twitter is a network where we have been friends with certain users for over a decade, and met them in person multiple times. On the Fediverse we have yet to spend years getting to know each other and building strong links. WE’re strangers, and we’re still looking for a community to become part of.

It is paradoxical that whilst social media is huge, communities are scattered and hard to find, so it’s hard to find a group that we want to commit too.

The Slow Timeline

Although this could sound like an empty problem, one of the issues with the fediverse is that I am following people, but I can often refresh the timeline for minutes or hours at a time, without seeing new posts. The Fediverse is still quiet, if you don’t find active people to follow. You can’t doom scroll, for the simple reason that the timeline doesn’t refresh permanently, like it does on Twitter.

The Clear Benefit

Although Twitter and the Fediverse being less engaging might sound like a bad thing, it isn’t. When social media is a constant distraction it becomes easy to spend hours a day being distracted. Now that social media is less sticky, we can get back into the habit of completing things, even without a fast approaching deadline. We have time to blog, to read, to watch tv, and more. Social media, as a personal life, is a thing of the past, for now, until new communities form.

And Finally

One of the strongest features of the Fediverse is that writing blog posts has become akin to social media, because blog posts can either be shared as blog posts that people have to click through to read, or they can be posted natively, within the Fediverse. Although I am writing this blog post now, it is fully integrated to the Fediverse, and thus, part of the conversation. Now if we want to be visible, we have to integrate ourselves within the Fediverse. We don’t need to wait for search engines and so on to index our site. We wait for people to repost, and comment.

Experimenting With Traccar

Experimenting With Traccar

Byrichard

Traccar is an open source fleet management solution that allows you to track vehicles and devices via a self-hosted server without using Google, Apple, Garmin, Suunto or other brands. If you setup your own server you can track as many vehicles as you like, and even track their live movements.

Options

I did not use it as a vehicle tracker. I used it as a personal GPS tracker, as I went for my daily walk yesterday afternoon. The tracker allows you to set how often it refreshes based on time in seconds, distance travelled in meters, or course changes in degrees.

Granular tracking

If you’re tracking a drive from Switzerland to Spain or from Lausanne to Geneva you might set it to refresh every 5 minutes or every 5 kilometres. If you’re going for a bike ride you might set it to note every 100 meters, and if you’re walking then you might set it for every two hundred metres. It will then track your walk, bike ride or other using your mobile phone.

The Server

The server is light. It uses OpenStreetMap and other mapping solutions. As you add mobile phones or other devices they are displayed on this map and can update whenever the device sends a new location. In my case I installed the traccer client apps on an android phone and an iPhone. I use a local machine for a server via homeassistant.local:8082 to connect. It should be available via TailScale if I activate the TailScale VPN on my mobile devices but I haven’t bothered because they will time out and I will lose the link eventually.

Mobile Buffering

With the mobile Traccar client there is the option to buffer data, to be uploaded once a connection is re-established. If you shut down the app will persist. It only shows the most recent updates so if you go for a one and a half hour walk but see a few minutes of data this is normal. When the buffer is sent to the server once you are on the home wifi network the data is available.

The Daily Walk

The walk or route you just travelled will be displayed as a set of beads connected together by a string. Occasionally you will see the GPS leap as you pass under a bridge or as the signal to telecom towers is lost but on the whole you get a comprehensive track of your journey.

Fine Tuning

As I mentioned earlier tracking is granular. With Suunto, Garmin and other solutions you can choose between fine, battery saver and other options. With this app you can choose to be precise down to the meter, the degree, or the minute. Usually my devices tend to be within three meters so that’s as precise as you really need to get.

Reports

The Web interface has reports where you can see route, events, trips, stops, summary, chart and replay, as well as scheduled reports and statistics. The most interesting option for me was replay because it shows you a map based representation of the trip.

Contrast to Google Maps

According to traccar I traveled six and a half kilometres but according to Google Maps – Timeline I walked 8.2 kilometres. Map traces are similar. Google Maps is more accurate.

A Google Latitude Replacement

Traccar is designed as a fleet management tool. It is useful for the post office, deicing crews and more. It is not designed to be used as a walking app. If you are worried about Google or Apple having access to your location data this is an interesting alternative. Your data goes straight from your phone to your server, once you’re home, and not before. You keep control of it.

Some people want Google to delete map data, and I want them to stop threatening to destroy it. Map data is useful. Quite a few years ago I receieved a speeding fine, but thanks to Google Maps I could see that it wasn’t me driving the car. I paid the fine, with a clear conscience that my own driving was not the problem.

In this scenario Traccar is great. Any time you drive you have a track of where you were at a specific time. It’s easy to clear your conscience.

Battery Use

On an iPhone with a battery health of 80 percent Traccar used about 8 percent of battery despite running for 19hr24 in the background. The app is battery friendly

And Finally

I thought that Traccar could potentially replace fitness trackers but it can’t. It doesn’t give enough control for that to be possible. It’s a fleet and mobile phone tracker. It makes it easy to see where a car or phone is in close to real time, but not much more.

The Replay is a nice feature, to see where you have been on a specific day. The chart functions are nice but they would be more useful if we could say “show data from time A to Time B, rather than for the entire day. it’s hard to reach these charts when they show an entire day of data.

This could be a Google Latitude replacement, rather than a GPS watch replacement. I use the term Google Latitude, as a legacy name.

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Dziga Vertov, the Kino Glaz and Web 2.0

Byrichard

How many of you have a digital photo camera and how many of you have uploaded pictures you’ve taken to the web? How many of you have browsed through thousand of stranger’s photographs?

I was in a lecture a few days ago and we were discussing jennycam and how it was something new, something that would lead to BigBrother. Apparently she was creating something new, something that had never thought of before.

That is only partially true and here’s the reason why.

Dziga Vertov lived in Russia at the beginning of the last century and at the time he worked in radio. His name, Dziga Vertov translated means spinning top. He began his work as a revolutionary when Lenin was still around. He was known for the programs he created. Within a short of time, he progressed onto the Agit trains and into film. The Agit trains were developed to carry information around the Soviet Union, in order to make sure that people all around this vast country would have a sense of belonging.

He developed a theory which was based around the Kino Glaz, the all-seeing eye, Kino is cinema, glaz, is glass. In other words the cinema glass. The idea which he developed, the vision he had was to get the video cameras everywhere and capture life unawares as he called them. In other words, he wanted to film ordinary people going about their ordinary lives without them acting for the camera.

This was a revolutionary concept that got him labeled by Sergei Eisenstein as a”film hooligan”. Keep in time Eisenstein’s famous sequences. Massive shadows on walls, vast skies, and highly staged video sequences. He created the theorie du montage(theory of construction – my translation) after all. In other words, he believed everything was staged.

If you’ve heard of “The Man With the Movie Camera” then you have seen “an experiment in six reels”. What Dziga Vertov did pre 1929 was do what Jean Rouch would do with André Coutant’s handheld cameras almost half a decade later.

What Dziga Vertov did first showed the theatre room, the seats animated to go down, the arc light to be set to produce a bright spark, and for the film to begin. He then proceeded to show the city waking up and continued from there. He juxtaposed the shots of the eyelids fluttering and the shutters, he got a person waking up from a bench and the city to start it’ daily activities. He was in effect not using narration in any strict sense of the term. It was nothing more than a collection of shots.

Aside from the shots, he showed his wife editing frame. It begins with nothing more than one frame, then a strip, then a person looking at one shot, another and we see it being assembled into a sequence. We see the camera move into a glass, move of its own accord, and more.

He was playing and he was setting the stage for something that would become increasingly important over time. Leni Riefenstahl in Triumph of the Will uses hundreds of cameras given to the audience to document the events (and spent three years editing the material) whilst the European Broadcasting Union had the first International broadcast in 1956. It was a moment in life seen from various capital cities in Europe. Each national audience could see that of many other countries. Vertov’s vision has just expanded.

As the technology evolved so people began to film everyday life, 16mm, VHS, Hi8, DV, and digital. They’re all mediums that allow for the capturing of life unawares. It’s the all-seeing eye. In the past five years, there’s been an explosion. Everyone has a digital camera, whether a crappy phone camera or a 12megapixel single-lens reflex. People are uploading these images to Flickr, to Zoomr, to Facebook. Everywhere. As a result of The kino glaz, all-seeing eye Vertov talked about is now mature.

The most recent event though has to be justin.tv, a San Franciscan who has decided to document his everyday life with a camera strapped to his head. No longer is the apartment enough. Now the world is seeing the daily life of a San Franciscan. Remember timecode? It’s like that but one person and live. There is no editing, no staging. I must admit there are some pranksters.

I listened to an interview he did for television where he spoke of people calling in a bust on his apartment, ordering pizza for him, and more. Quite amusing, far better than big brother.

To conclude I think that we’ve come to the All-seeing eye that Dziga Vertov was talking about almost a century ago and I find that it’s great. I love the idea that every aspect of life is being documented extensively.

FIFAD Day 2 – a day of introspection about exploration.
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FIFAD Day 2 – a day of introspection about exploration.

Byrichard

FIFAD Day 2

FIFAD’s second day’s documentaries were introspective. They looked at mining in Bolivia, Jean Troillet’s life of adventure and the film Sherpa.

[caption id="attachment_3257" align="aligncenter" width="660"]The peaks we see from the Festival The peaks we see from the Festival[/caption]

Tous Les Jours La Nuit

Tous Les Jours La Nuit is a documentary by Jean-Claude Wicky who passed away recently. The documentary looked at the lives of Bolivian miners who have to work for up to 20 hours a day in mines where the air temperature can reach up to 50°c, where the life expectancy is between 40-45 years and where they barely earn enough to live. In this documentary he looks at some of the pictures he took when down in the mines. He tells us stories about the people who are photographed and tells us about their culture. At the end of the film he comes back to the country once again and meets with some of the miners and their communities. He donates copies of the books to individual miners as well as their community. The aim is to document the hardships faced by these workers.

Sherpa

Sherpa is a beautiful and powerful film because it teaches us about the Sherpa people, the Everest climbing industry and explores the social challenges posed by professions that can lead to accidental death. The documentary looks at the subject from the perspective of tour operators who are responsible for their clients as well as Sherpa. We also see how Sherpa families see the opportunities but also dangers that come from the industry around summiting everest.

The strength of this film lies in that it provides us with the discussions, sights and concerns of people on site at the time of the tragedy. In the documentary they say that as tourists want an increasing level of comfort when climbing Everest the Sherpas have to climb through the Khumbu ice fall from 20-30 times per season to take up supplies and equipment. The clients, tourists or adventurers, whichever name you prefer face the crossing just twice.

The Khumbu ice fall is a snow waterfall “cascade de glace”. On the day of the tragedy a 14,000 ton bloc of ice came lose causing an avalanche that crossed the entirety of the ice fall.

This film highlights the need for adequate social cover for the Sherpa and their families so that, because they do a dangerous job, that their families are cared for. One of the Sherpa, the leader had been approaching 22 climbs of Everest. I will write no more. Enjoy the film when you get the opportunity.

Jean Troillet

Jean Troillet is a Swiss explorer with 50 years of experience of the mountains and fourty of those on expeditions. He holds the record for the fastest climb of Everest and has climbed ten summits over 8000 metres. In the main film projected at FIFAD we see him spend a week in a tent and receiving guests to speak about previous adventures and experiences. Some time was also devoted to him providing his home crowd, people from this region of Switzerland with the opportunity to listen to personal accounts and more.

Experimenting with the Ocean Drive Street E-Scooter
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Experimenting with the Ocean Drive Street E-Scooter

Byrichard

Over a year ago I sold my petrol scooter because the service was expected to cost more than five hundred Swiss Francs. As a result of this I was without a scooter for a year or two. In that time I missed the convenience of having a small vehicle to take me from A to B with ease, and that I could park with ease.

Sitting Scooters Cost Too Much For Their Range

I considered getting an electric sit down scooter but when I saw the range and the price I decided that this was not a viable solution. I want a scooter that has the range to take me to Geneva and back on a single charge, to go to places like Mediamarkt, Decathlon and the centre of the city. With a 60km range I can barely accomplish that wish.

Years of Deciding Not To

For years I have been tempted by standing e-scooters but what stopped me was price. They cost 600-1200 CHF for years. At this price I considered them to be a waste of money. When I was in Spain I spotted that e-scooters had gone down in price by a considerable amount so I tested three or four scooters. I tried them in Carrefour and Décathlon and they felt fine.

I spent at least two or three days considering whether to get one while in Spain but chose not to. I decided that since they were around the same price in Switzerland I would wait until I was home. I waited longer than that.

Finally at a Reduced Price

I think I waited a further two or three months before committing to getting a scooter. What pushed me to get the scooter I got was that it was the cheapest scooter available at the time. It is currently being sold for 270 CHF but I bought it for 240 CHF. It has a range of 20km at 20km per hour and yesterday I finally got to ride it from the height of Nyon, up to the jura, and back down. In the process I think I used one or two bars of power.

Not as Lazy as I thought

The first thing that struck me as I rode the scooter is that you need to get used to it. You’re higher than on foot scooters so your centre of gravity is slightly higher than usual. This means that you need to familiarise yourself with the feel of this device.

The second thing to realise is that this is a motorised scooter. If you press the throttle and it reaches 20 km/h it will stick to that speed even if you put your foot down. You need to break for the scooter to start slowing down, unlike a human powered scooter.

This scooter has a “cruise control” as I will name it. If you press the accelerator for a few seconds at 20 km/h it will automatically throttle up or down to stick to that speed for when you’re driving at that speed for several minutes.

When you’re going uphill you feel that your primary leg is working to keep you standing upright. It’s not as lazy as I expected. I see plenty of people riding with both feet together but I ride it like a goofy snowboard. I want to be ready in case I hit something and fall.

The Use Cases

There are four use cases that I envision. The first is to go to the shops spontaneously, to get food. With the car I feel that I can go once, or twice per week, not more. With the e-scooter I could go daily. It’s just 2km anyway.

The second use case is to go to Geneva. I can take the scooter to Nyon, catch the train to Geneva, or Lausanne, do what I need to do, and then do the reverse trip.

The third use case is to have it in the car for when I go somewhere. With the scooter I can park where it’s free to park and then go into towns.

The fourth is recycling. The recycling centre for my area is bad to get into with a car due to the narrow roads. With a scooter I could go there and back with two or three days of recycling, without being part of the problem. By using the scooter I have plenty of space on that narrow road, and I can recycle within ten minutes every few days, rather than once per month as I do at the moment.

It has Lights but No Indicators

One of the most serious issues I see, at the moment, is that it lacks indicators. This means that you really need to keep looking behind you, and checking that you’re safe before manoeuvering. I wanted to go left at a roundabout so I went to the left, after checking behind me. I went extra early, as I saw a motorbike. I did the manoeuvre and tried, as far as possible, to stick to agricultural roads rather than main roads.

Situational Awareness

I feel that it’s very important to have good situational awareness at all times on the e-scooter. It’s important to know where cars are and how fast they’re approaching. It’s important to look at the road surface to avoid any holes that could catapult you forwards if you’re not careful.

Eco and Drive

It has two modes, eco, and drive. If you’re on flat terrain then eco mode will work well but as soon as you’re on a steep climb you need to shift to drive mode. I found that it was either going to be too slow or unable to do one steep climb. Luckily I could stop to change mode, before continuing on.

Balance

I see the same two or three people on their scooters on a regular basis and they’re so comfortable they can take both hands off of the steering column to do things. I am not that confident yet so I barely take my hands off of the handle bars. I want to get used to driving the scooter before I indicate that I want to go right or left, if cars are behind me. There is a learning curve, which we have to be attentive to.

And Finally

Although I loved the idea of getting an electric sitting scooter the lack of range and high price makes them uninteresting. The electric standing scooter has a theoretical range of 20km but after yesterday’s test I expect the range to be greater than that. The point of the electric scooter is that it can be used alongside trains and buses. You take the scooter to a train station, take the train, and then use the scooter on the other side. It shortens the commute time.

It could provide me with an interesting new way of getting around when the weather co-operates.

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