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Strolling From Picadilly To Bermondsey On Foot

Byrichard
Reading Time: 2 minutes

My latest trip of the day has been a walk from Picadilly Circus after dropping by the bank before going along the bank and getting to Bermondsey. It’s a nice walk and luckily I didn’t have too many people to avoid. As I walked by Greenpark it started to drizzle a little but it didn’t do much so I continued my root. I got towards the Parliament Tesco, bought two cokes, and continued on my journey. The usual sights were there but the street performers lacked an audience. The classical musicians under one arch had no audience. Practice I suppose.

The interesting part of the walk is between Tower bridge and Bermondsey because you pass by the Thames walk and it feels less public. You see a small bridge which I think can be raised and upon this bridge a group of friends being photographed by a self-timed camera. I waited for the picture was taken before continuing on my journey. It’s not a bad part of London from what I glimpsed briefly.

The sardine express tube carriages were full due to a security alert encouraging delays on the line. I was in no rush so I sat down and watched as train after train filled with people passed. After a while, I got tired of waiting and caught the tube to Green Park and walked a little further. I passed by Covent Garden where Charlie Chaplin the second was performing, getting a child to throw him coloured plastic bricks. I didn’t stay for the rest of the trick.

The time I took was useful because by the time I went back down to the tube it was empty once more and I could return home in relative comfort.

I’m tired now, and my laptop is apparently in Eindhoven in Holland waiting to be transferred to Switzerland. On the 6th I should have another status report. I really want it now, want to play with DVD studio pro and make a good quality DVD.

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Connected Watches and Psychological Profiles

Connected Watches and Psychological Profiles

Byrichard

Connected watches know everything about us. In theory they listen to us 24 hours a day for years in a row. My Apple watch has been on my wrist for over four years, every single day. It has been for swims, runs, rock climbing, via ferrata, office work and more. 


The watch knows how much I walk, when I get up, when I go to sleep, how well I wash my hands, how exposed I am to noise and much more. It also knows whether I am moving energetically or lazily. It knows if I am walking faster or slower. It also knows how rested or stressed I am, by looking at heart rate variability. 


Some people will look at the two paragraphs above and think “I don’t want this”. 


The Suunto, Garmin, Casio and other brands I have used measure walking, sleeping, and more but not in the way that Apple does. Apple theoretically knows a lot more for two key reasons. The first is that the Apple universe includes your laptop, your phone, your watch, your tablet and your keys and other possessions. Apple has access to almost every aspect of our lives. 


I bring this up, not because of a sense of paranoia, but simply because there is an article about this on the RTS website after some uni students wanted to know more. They asked people hundreds of questions to get a profile. They then tried to correlate that data with watch data to see if the watch could help establish mental health via a watch. They don’t say anything about brand. 


What makes this report especially interesting is that these are conclusions from fitness trackers, rather than high end smart watches. 


Some things are obvious. People who go out on a friday night are considered extroverted, people who sleep little and move more regularly are considered nervous and more. This is nothing that we wouldn’t expect to hear. 


If we look at the bigger picture, at big data, then this could be interesting. By tracking enough people over time it could be determined whether people are becoming happier, sadder, more nervous, less nervous, about to commit suicide and more. There are reports of how connected devices showed signs that someone was beginning to fall sick, with COVID, or other diseases. 


Steps, sleep and heart rate are just the tip of the iceberg. Most watches collect more than this so they know more. 

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It’s Vacation Time

Byrichard

it’s vacation time are words that were uttered at the end of a long night in crete back in 2000. They were uttered by an older guy who was with a group of us as we watched the sun rise. Those words always stuck in my mind.

On Wednesday I’m flying back to Switzerland although it’s a one way ticket. During that time I could work on re-editing some old footage and uploading it since people are finally welcoming it with open browser windows.

I don’t think I’ll do that though. I need to buy myself another hard drive first to store all the footage I’d need to capture first.

On a related topic there is a documentary in production that is going to air for Arte, a Franco/German documentary channel. They want some footage from the Paddington station silent disco event I went to a few months ago. It’s great to get something that could look good on my CV and showreel.

https://youtu.be/WTl1ZLgoepo
The footage that Lobster Films would use in their Walkman documentary

X-Istential – Podcasts and Where We Find People
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X-Istential – Podcasts and Where We Find People

Byrichard

Yesterday Twitter decided to re-brand as X. X.com redirects to Twitter.com. Within the next few days, weeks, months twitter will change its name and brand, and the URLs will be wrong. All twitter links, all embedded tweets, everything will become dead links. When we look for something on Twitter, we will be redirected to X.


The Podcast Legacy


Every single website, every single CMS, every Static Website, everything, will have to be re-written to point to the new domain name. Plenty of content will not be updated and will be a reminder of the past.


I’m thinking of all the podcast episodes and conversations that speak about Twitter, all the guests that mention their Twitter accounts. All of those “where can we find you?”, “where can we follow you” will turn to nothing. Suddenly mentioning Twitter accounts will be a reminder of the past.


Happy to Have Broken From Twitter


I am happy that I already broke my ties with Twitter, because this change would make me really sad. It’s the end of a culture, it’s the end of an era. It’s the end of an important part of web history. Musk has destroyed an important cultural symbol. “Pour des Prunes”, as the french would say. “For nothing, as the English would say.


Don’t Complain


More than once I have been told not to complain, to filter what I don’t like, and just to accept what I can’t change. Yesterday I was unhappy about a pop up that appeared twice, trying to teach me how to use Mastodon. I expressed my disgust, and was told not to complain. The thing is, I am a heavy social media user, so I am more sensitive to toxic changes, on social networks than most, because I live and breath these networks.


Hashtags


I complain about hashtags because I have seen them destroy conversations on twitter, and undermine communities. If people had listened, Twitter might not have become such a toxic place.


I am happy to see that you can go for toots, before seeing hashtags being used, and that’s great, because the moment hashtags saturate timelines is the moment the community will be dead, and the time to move on will have come.


Kbin


Yesterday I decided to take a break from the Fediverse and went to Kbin but all I saw in the threadiverse were people complaining about Spez and reddit. If those users could, I know that they would return to reddit, because that is their home. They’re expats, refugees. They moved because staying put was no longer possible.


I have been complaining about Twitter since Jaiku was around, but the critical mass were on Twitter so I had no choice. Google + was great, but it was destroyed by Google because they destroy anything that is niche, rather than mass appeal.


Slow to Adapt


It’s interesting that the Web is so slow to adopt to the new social networks. I don’t see that many sites that encourage people to add Mastodon, Kbin, Lemmy or Firefish accounts. They’re sticking with Twitter and Reddit, despite the clear shift by an active part of the social web, from one set of platforms to the next.


Frozen in Time


I was looking at one of my twitter accounts and it has been frozen in time. The last post that was sent from my Wordpress Blog marks the end of Jetpack talking with Twitter. That account is now frozen in history. Until I update a post.


Worth Returning?


I considered returning to Twitter yesterday, because it’s easy to use, smooth and fast compared to fediverse instances. The problem is that every little change Musk makes, to destroy Twitter, is heartbreaking, if you have good memories of the old Twitter.


I left Twitter because I didn’t want ads to be injected every four posts, into my stream. I left Twitter because I don’t want an algorithm to choose what I see, rather than me. I don’t want to be on a site that I consider, is run by a morally bankrupt individual.


And Finally


Twitter has been mentioned in blog posts and podcasts for more than a decade. It has been mentioned in almost every podcast too. By dumping Twitter as a name X is destroying its own legacy. How many people will type x.com rather than Twitter.com? X is not a good brand name. X is just a letter, nothing more. Will people be x-ing? If they’re exing are they crossing? “Are you going to X that later”? X is having an x-istential crisis.

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Playing Ingress and Pokemon Go in parallel

Byrichard

People are playing Ingress and Pokemon Go in Parallel. Both games use the same geo-located points and walk the same routes. They have the same places to farm and combat. I started playing Ingress again, but only a few minutes here and there. As I play I see new faces and new people at Ingress portals. They are no longer my age or older. They are much younger, in their teens.

Yesterday as the neighbours were having a party I decided to take advantage of the excuse to go out and play Ingress. I went to the four or five portals in my village. At the village church I saw a youth drive up to it on a scooter, farm via the Pokemon Go layer and then leave. Nothing changed on the Ingress layer. No damaged resonators, no upgrades.

I like that people can play two entirely different games at the same location. I see this as the future of geo-located games. I see this as the next wave. The physical world provides the location and then the layer (or game) provides the user interface, the virtual world we interact with. With imagination more and more layers can be added. This will provide people with choice.

The next step is smartwatches and augmented reality goggles. Those who have played Ingress intensively know where all the portals are so they can put their phone away when walking from point to point. The same is probably true of Pokemon Go players. One person wrote that he uses his smartwatch to farm when walking around. Imagine if Google Glass had come out now. If it had come out now, with the Pokemon Go craze people would buy them.

At the moment to play pokemon Go and Ingress you walk in a position, that given time, will turn us in to hunchbacks. Rather than being from manual work in a field or a coal mine it will be from walking staring at a phone. I write this with a certain sense of humour. The market for Augmented reality goggles is ripe. Device manufacturers should grab this opportunity while it lasts.

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How I played with Flixwagon at the Caribana.

Byrichard

Streaming video from mopile devices is the future and I burned through 90 megabytes of data in just two nights of music festival. As a result of this the third night required a different approach. I used Flixwagon.

Flixwagon is in the same family as Qik and Bambuser but with many additional features. You can select the category of content, add a title and keywords to the stream before recording. The advantage of this service in contrast to the two other examples is that this one buffers the data stream in such a way that if you lose the connection you can still continue streaming once you find the data stream.

In this particular situation I added the concert access point and went to film a number of concerts like Mademosielle K and Maroon 5. In both these cases I recorded the concert and during the break from one to the other I could let the software automatically push the content to the server.As a result I saved 2CHF per megabyte and uploaded about thirty megabytes within a short amount of time.

Arrivals to the Caribana

As people arrive

ONEFM presenters

Waiting for Mademoiselle K

Mademoiselle K, first two songs

Two more songs

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7000 youtube views

Byrichard

Over the past month I have seen an increase of 7000 views in relation to the videos I have posted on youtube. The two events that helped make this a reality are the Geneva Lake Parade and the Paleo Festival. For the Paleo Festival scantily clad girls were an attractive proposition.

As to the paleo it was taking video I had streamed live on qik and sharing it via a number of video sharing websites of which youtube was one.

To give an idea of the audience peaks we saw over 900 views for the Lake Parade footage and over 1300 views for Manu Chao. That’s a respectable audience.

The question is whether there are any events you would like me to cover (via live streaming from a mobile phone) and whether that would attract a big enough audience.

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