Skiing for a change
Skiing images from last year.
[flickr-gallery mode=”photoset” photoset=”72157625574004661″]There are four phones on my desk that are well adapted to tracking hikes. There is the nexus one, the e51, n95 and n97. The reason I mention this is battery life. In my experience if you go on a long hike at least one of the phones will die.
You could buy an extra battery or two to make sure that this never happens but a more practical solution is to take all of your phones, install the tracking application on them and swap phone once the battery dies.
Of course this would involve taking three chargers with you but at least this way you could track the hike in terms of chapters and somehow aggregate the data for a true hike map.
Airpods are the most comfortable bluetooth headphones I have tried. Over the winter months I tried earphones by Sony and other brands. After months of experimenting I came back to the airpods.
With the Sony WHR 1000 earpods there are a number of issues. The first is that noise cancelling changes noticeably. Several times I felt as if I had changed altitude because it switched from one sound environment to the next.
With all brands I found that I don’t like earphones that are made from rubber in-ear. They feel uncomfortable almost immediately and I did not get used to this discomfort over time. With the airpods it’s easy to wear them for hours without worrying.
Seasonal considerations should be an important aspect of earphone design. Almost all earphones are designed with warm summer weather in mind. They stick out from the ear. This means that you can’t wear hats, rain hoods or other head covers without the chance of either ripping out the earpieces or having the rubber part pressed against your eardrum.
I use my airpods to listen to podcasts via the phone and watch video content on my laptop from Youtube and Netflix. I recently edited a 30 second video using airpods rather normal headphones and it was acceptable.
I need to the noise cancelling features of the Sony earphones on a longer train journey, a car journey where I am not driving or a flight if and when I fly next.
Mountain biking is a sport that is growing in popularity. We see that technology is keeping up with the riders. Between suspension, specialist tires and safety equipment the sport has had the freedom to become more adventurous. Bigger jumps, more travel, stronger components all allow the sport to become more extreme.
Usually there are three ways to get to the top of a mountain. The first option is to ride up but with a mountain bike that can be tiring. I have an area where I can mountain bike near home but it’s a 12.7km ride up with a 10 percent grade. It takes two hours to get to the base. I could of course take the car up and cycle around at the top but this requires removing the front wheel and putting the seats down. Another option is to head to specialist resorts where the remontée mécanique are equipped to take bikes to the top of the slope. The third option is to walk up and push the bike.
In this video we see a fourth option. An electric mountain bike. I like the idea of mountain biking this way. I like the notion that the mountain bike will assist with getting up the hill more efficiently. Several times I have cycled up a 10% gradiant for a distance of 12.7 kilometres. With the mountain bike I use it takes 2 hours of almost non stop pedalling. It leaves me with little energy to enjoy going off road at the top. With a flyer I’d let the bike get me to the fun part and then use my own power to play up there.
I won’t buy one of these bikes but the video is interesting to watch.
I always go to social media events and meet a lot of geeks who love to use new technology such as twitter, seesmic and more. For once it’s a little different. I’m in Fribourg where I’m surrounded by writers. There are a lot of PC rather than Mac computers. The hot chocolate is good and the city is nice.
At the time of writing there have been two word wars. The concept is simple. Write solidly for five minutes at a time and see who has the highest word count. So far I’ve written 313 and then 328 in two sessions, not bad.
Word count is now over 24,000 words.
Physical video gaming is coming of age thanks to the HTC Vive and related Games. Cosmic Trip is one of these games. You can use both controllers to prepare machines that will prepare robots for mining and defence. These two sets of robots are autonomous. The more resources you mine and the more robots you have. These robots are attacked on a regular basis so defence is important. The laser robots provide some assistance. You can attack the enemy bots by throwing disks at them as if you were throwing frisbees. Most people should find this instinctive.
In the last 17 hours more than half a million people watched the video on how to play this game. The game is still in development and building up hype for when it is released properly. The creator of the video above now has eleven million subscribers on youtube. When he produces a video eleven million people are notified that there is a new video to watch.
Out of those 11 million subscribers on youtube only 1.6 million follow on twitter and a quarter of a million on Facebook. Within the next year or two I would like to see social networks such as Youtube and others expand and become niche communities where people can find content of interest without using Facebook or Twitter. I found Jack Septiceye content when I was searching for VR demos. I use youtube rather than Twitter and Facebook because I don’t want content creators and sharers to tell me how to feel or why the content is of value. I want to make that decision for myself. Youtube and social networks that allow us to browse and discover content based on niche interests are going to become increasingly important.
The creators of the game have just two thousand eight hundred followers on Twitter and approaching one thousand on Facebook. When youtube personalities make videos about products they provide companies with a lot of extra visibility. You reach game players, people who want to see what new technology such as the HTC Vive can do and people who like to watch gameplay videos without necessarily being game players themselves.
Twitter and Facebook have focused on broadcasting rather than niche audiences. As a result of this strategy they have lost their stickiness. This leads to people spending less and less time on their social networks. This opens up opportunities for Youtube and other content aggregation sites. The more content you watch on Youtube the more recommendations you will get based on your taste. This cuts out the middle man, in this case Facebook and Twitter. We reduce the signal to noise ratio. We increase the user’s Return on Investment.