Swiss Kettlebell advert
I find this swiss kettlebell advert amusing. It shows a cow peacefully grazing in a field until a woman starts ringing a cow bell.
Rain and the Gear 360 are well suited to the weather we are currently subjected to in Switzerland. For the past month and a half we have had rain almost every single day. As a result of this it has limited the number of opportunities to go out and get 360 footage.
360 camera rigs are not designed for rain. Most 360 rigs involve at least six non weatherproof cameras and rigs that are designed for dry rather than wet conditions. To go out in this rain would drown the equipment. With additional funds you could film in these conditions with weatherproof gear but the cost increases. Add to this that camera systems like the Ricoh Theta S prefer clear skies and nice weather for taking video and you see that it is not really worth the effort.
By the end of September the Samsung Gear 360 should provide us with a simple to carry, weatherproof 360 camera which could be fun to take canyoning (if they make a specialist housing) or hiking for doing other sports activities where weather proofing is a useful feature. The trend to make devices at least splash proof is good.
Another nice feature of this camera is the ability to use 200 gigabyte SDHC cards. with these cards you can record for hours. When the card is full or when you’re changing location you can change cards in seconds and continue working on a project. With the Ricoh Theta S you can record for 45 minutes before you need to transfer the footage, clear the memory and start recording again.
With 200 gigabytes of storage one concept that I would love to test is 360° time lapse videos. You could fix the camera to your bike, to a canoe or to some other object and set it to take a picture at regular intervals. So far I have not seen a mention of an interval recording mode but with 200 gigabytes you can record for hours without worrying about storage. You could change the speed in post production.
This camera records in UHD rather than HD quality. Video recording is at a resolution of 3840×1920. 360 videos taken with this camera should be more pleasant to view as a result.
The 360° video eco-system is still in it’s infancy and most 360 video solutions require people to use a number of cameras. Both Samsung and Ricoh provide all in one solutions along with software to stitch the images ready for post production. They are helping to democratise the medium both by making production cheaper but also by enabling people to produce content. This increase in content will encourage more people to get VR goggles which in turn will justify increasing the budget of 360 video production budgets. It will go from being a niche product to being mainstream.
When you have lengths of pipe, a welder, a water container and a big enough garden you can get up to some mischief. Colin Furze and the 360 Swing are an interesting demonstration of this. In the first two videos you see him build the structure and in the next two videos you see him do some 360 swings with the structure.
He is a plumber by profession but makes some fun and entertaining videos for youtube in his free time. In these videos he has built a flame throwing guitar, magnetic shoes, built a bunker, created eccentric door bells and more. He also made a firework shooting bazooka and put a motor bike engine in a tuktuk.
The video above is a behind the scenes look at part of the discussions and includes some drone footage of the swing being used to successfully complete a few 360 rotations on the swing with and without the motor.
When you see him add the paramotor to the swing you see that he has taken the idea too far. By the end of the video he feels a little weaker as you’d expect. I don’t know how many Gs he put himself through. It was enough to make him feel unwell by the end of the clip.
I enjoy watching the building process of these eccentric contraptions because we see that safety is taken in to consideration. In either the first or the second video he says that he usually does two things. The first one is built off camera to make sure that he knows what he is doing and when he is confident he builds a component for the second time on camera. In this project we see that there is a reasonable amount of testing to make sure that everything behaves properly before moving on to the next step.
There are a number of videos like this on youtube that teach you about engineering and building eccentric machines. Colin Furze is just one of many youtube video makers to build things and then use them.
I knew that it would rain heavy yesterday (at the time when you read this) so I considered running so that I would spend less time in the weather. The issue, at this time of year, is that if you run you need to do so before the sun sets but you also want to wear lighter clothes, for running to be easier.
For these reasons I went for a walk instead. I rolled up the trousers to avoid contact between the socks and trousers. I wore waterproof trousers, and a good rain coat. I walked for an hour and a half in the rain and crossed almost no one. In this weather even the dog walkers stay home. That is what I want. I like when the paths are empty of people, when I can enjoy my solitary walks in solitude, without being reminded of my isolation.
I wore barefoot shoes for this walk. They get wet almost immediately as they are not waterproof. Within 200 meters my feet were drenched. That’s what I expected. That’s what I planned for. That’s why my trousers were rolled up. I didn’t want the humidity to creep up my socks, and then my trousers, and into my t-shirt and fleece.
It worked. I stayed dry.
There is one challenge in such rain. When you get to the end of one podcast you need to find an underpass, or a lending library, or some other shelter. You need to dry the phone screen and your hands enough to use the phone to select the next podcast. After that you can keep walking.
For many it would seem to walk in the rain, but that’s because they don’t walk the same path every single day, for weeks or months, or even years in a row. Changes in weather are like changes in crops, changes in seasons and more. When it rains I see a different landscape. I see where the land is low, and where it is higher. I see where the water flows heavily, and where your feet remain dry.
The greatest paradox is that despite the heavy rain, and the uncomfortable conditions you can still notice golden hour. As I walked today I saw that the light became more yellow, despite being under the rain. Despite the bad weather there was a discernable golden hour.
As I walked through one village I saw people burning wood in a barbecue. I don’t know whether it was to actually have a barbecue, or just to burn wood. If they were going to cook with it then it shows that the English are not the only people to barbecue in the rain.
As if that wasn’t surreal enough I also saw two children walking with someone dressed in a Santa costume. They all carried umbrellas to protect themselves from the rain. It’s not every day you see Santa walking in the rain with an umbrella.
In the end I wasn’t the only strange person out this afternoon, walking in the rain, as the heavy rain fell. If I was that type of person I would say that this walk was magical. Today was surreal, like Godard’s 1967 film, Weekend, where we see strange things as a car drives through a traffic jam.
For many rain is an excuse to stay in. I don’t see it that way. The familiar landscape becomes unfamiliar. The rivers that were barely a trickle are now full. The water that is transparent when the rain has just started has become brown. We can see rivers of muddy water flowing from the Gravière into the river. We can see where the road is low, and water flooded onto a road, and left mud and other detritus. In another location I saw apples strewn about. The rain had made the apples float, and transported them into nearby fields where other crops were growing.
Walking during the rain is unique, and worth doing, when equipped for the weather.
Yesterday the Theta+ Video app came out for Android. The Theta+ video app allows you to trim video clips and then share them to social networks. This means that you no longer need to wait until you get home to prepare content for sharing. You can do it while you sit and have a post activity hot chocolate or other drink.
[caption id="attachment_3325" align="aligncenter" width="169"] Video options[/caption]When you select the raw video it is converted to be a spherical video. When that process completes you can choose between creating a 360 degree video or a cropped one. A cropped one is a tinyworld video.
[caption id="attachment_3326" align="aligncenter" width="169"] Filters, Trim and music[/caption]The next menu gives you three choices, filters, trim or background music. I never bother with filters and the trim option is fiddly on the Sony Xperia Z5 compact with a 13 minute video. With a shorter video I would have found this process easier. Saving is not intuitive. First you trim the video and then you go back and save the changes. While saving you need to keep the app open.
The sharing options are to Facebook, youtube and other social networks. This varies according to which apps you have on your phone. I like that the two first options are facebook and youtube as these are the networks that I usually share to. When I tried to upload to youtube it failed twice. When I attempted to upload to Facebook it was stuck at 99 percent twice.
This is a great app to trim videos before sharing and add some music when required. What I would like to see in future versions is the ability to compile a number of 360 videos together to create edited sequences. They need to improve uploading so that it works better. At the moment of posting all attempts to share videos failed.
At the moment I am doing a favour that requires me to drive the electric car over a route that takes 25 percent of the car’s battery. This means that for every time I do the favour I have to charge the car for five hours.
The drive from where I charge the car to home takes eight to ten percent but the drive back to charge the car takes up to 15 percent due to traffic, but also due to the climb. This climb means that for every trip to charge I have three hours of waiting. In total I have five and a half hours of waiting around for the car to charge.
If I was charing the car once per week and waiting five hours it wouldn’t bother me, because it’s once per week. This time It’s three times. That’s fifteen hours of waiting around for the car to charge.
Of course there are plenty of things that I can do while waiting for the car to charge, like walking, running, cycling or writing this blog post. I can occupy myself and get things done whilst waiting
If I think waiting five hours for a car to recharge is long I should try waiting for petrol to be ready. It takes several million years for petroleum to become what it is, and we burn it within seconds in a car. If I take biomass and wait for it to become petrol then my wait will be several million years. In contrast waiting for a solar panel to charge a car is a number of hours.
Although it may sound as though I have fallen out of love with electric cars that is not the case. I don’t feel like waiting for another 10hrs for the car to charge, when the task that I need to do takes seconds. On Friday the favour will be over and then I can use the elctric car more economically, doing the 30 percent drive once per week, rather than three or four times per week. As I said, driving to the shops and back takes less than one percent per trip but it’s rounded up to one percent. This means that instead of burning petrol and polluting I am using a tiny amount of electric energy.
This energy could have come from solar panels, hydroelectric dams or wind power. It’s when you drive up a mountain three times per week, and on the motorway that you deplete the battery.
Petrol cars need to be run every so often and mine hasn’t been run for several weeks. It makes sense to run the engine, recharge the battery and ensure that it doesn’t get depleted before I need to jump start the car. By back and forth I wil refresh the battery and the likelihood of being stranded with a dead battery will be lessened. I still care for the environment. I was even toying with the idea of dropping off the petrol car at home, and cycling back for the electric car at another time. If I do that I will tire myself, and with winter coming I could easily regret it.
For a week or two in April the weather was nice but since then the weather has been bad. We had new snow, high winds and rain. Yesterday rain was announced yet again for parts of Switzerland but luckily only clouds were announced for Saillon where the Via Farinetta is. I expected it to be cold and grey but practicable.
We had moments of sunshine and the weather was even pleasant. As a result of all the rain and snow the waterfalls were full of water, to the point of growing with water and spraying the first part of the Via Ferrata.
As this Via Ferrata is in a gorge communicating with the people you are climbing with requires speaking loudly. Now is a good time to see the waterfalls and gorge when they are nicely filled with water.
As I have written about this via Ferrata before I will not go on. What is interesting is that there are now four or five Via Ferrata groups, of which three for those living between Switzerland and France. You have the Via Ferrata Suisse Romand Group, the Via Ferrata Geneve/Annemasse group, the Via Ferrata de France group and the Via Ferrata d’Europe group.
This is excellent because it means that we are now a community of hundreds of enthusiasts connected by Facebook groups and this can be extended to Whatsapp groups. It means that if you have a desire to climb you can suggest a time and place and people can say “yes” or stay silent. ;-). Sometimes they say “nope, some of us have jobs” but not to me as I haven’t asked to do things during the week.
What’s more, this community is not English speaking “expats”. It is made up of locals and migrants. For years social media was about having conversations online but not being able to meet in person unless one caught the train, plane or went on a road trip. Facebook and other social networks have now reached critical mass, at last. This means that we can say “I want to climb” and then you do.
It makes meeting people possible once again. So far I’ve met two new people via the Via Ferrata group and I want to meet many more. It’s nice to be part of a nice big, open community once again. This summer I expect to participate in a few activities with these groups, as soon as the mediocre weather gives way to nice weather.