Unseen
Unseen is a documentary divided in to two parts. The first part is about five individuals who provide tours of various parts of London which they inhabited as homeless person and the second part is feedback and advice.
There’s a studio, three cameras, four female dancers, one male. It’s a cabaret show yet no one is in costume. That’s because it’s a practice session for those who will be using the studio in two weeks.
I don’t like having a prompter on the front of the camera because it makes smooth movements harder to achieve. It doesn’t matter. I’ll get it right for the proper costumed event.
Last night I had the good fortune of attending the social media dinner at the Coach and horse in London. It was yet another opportunity to meet people like Lloyd, Sizemore, Phil Campbell, Deek, Rupert Howe, Jess and many other seesmic participants. It was also my opportunity to meet some new people.
I met Vinvin and Johann from Seesmic for example. They’re part of the Seesmic team in San Francisco. Loic Lemeur arrived a little later so it was great to meet him to. It’s not everyday (well actually it’s almost everyday) that you meet CEOs of startups.
It was also Phil Campbell’s birthday so that added a little something to the party. He presented a new method by which to use eesmic which looks interesting although at this moment in time it is more proof of concept and I’ll wait until it’s developed further before discussing it in depth.
I was able to try out the Nokia N95 layout and user interface for seesmic on that night. Loic lent me his phone and I was able to record and post one seesmic post. So far I still think it’s a little slow so i prefer to use the web interface.
I got to meet the charming Kittenfluff (unless it’s an imposter as is alleged in a seesmic video from the early hours of this morning;-)) and had a nice time chatting with her and playing around with two laptops, two seesmic accounts and a little seesmic camera ping–pong. I also got an exclusive interview about some mysterious january flies and why the London light is the paper of choice to use as a fly swatter
There’s a great picture of me taken by Thayer
Take note that There’s seesmicAIR and Seesmic being used in this shot.
Two speeches were made, one by Loic Lemeur and the other by Gapingvoid (Pardon the poor sound quality.)
There’s one of Sizemore’s videos too.
Fooz, Giagia, Jason Jarrett and two or three others were present but I did not get to interact with them as personally for this event.
This is a fun group of people are fun to interact with and I’m happy I went to the event. i hope to have many more to look forward to.
This morning when I should have been working on the daily blog post I decided to install Ubuntu on an external hard drive to see if it still worked as I remembered it working. It does, sort of.
There are two approaches. You could install Linux straight onto the internal HD of a mac device but if you do, and you encounter problems then it could take hours to fix your mistake. With an exteranl disk in target drive mode you can experiment to your heart’s content with an SSD that you can wipe, and reformat, and start again, if something messes up badly.
It also gives you a chance to check that wifi, the keyboard, and other things are still working well. In my case I found that wifi is not working with my mac book pro so I need to trouble shoot this. The advantage is that once I finish experimenting I can switch back to the internal HD via the option key, at boot, and I’m back in Mac land. There is the advantage that if you boot into Linux it will keep booting into linux until you tell it not to, and then your Linux box becomes a Mac once again.
With Windows you have WSL to play with, if you want to practice with using the command line. It offers a good oppportunity but it’s limited in that you can’t experiment as easily with a GUI.
I find that Pi are great for experimenting. What makes them great is that they’re cheap, especially if you want to use them with Ubuntu Server rather than various GUIs. The advantage of using Pi is that you can experiment with single app setups like PhotoPrismPi, NextCloudPi, HomeAssistantPi and more
You can also experiment with installing ubuntu server, snap installing Nextcloud, adding docker, and then adding Immich, PhotoPrism and Audiobookshelf.
If you come from the windows or Mac world you think “but that’s easy, just install app one, then app two and then app three and you’re done. You’re not. When you install apps they install what they require. If you install nextcloud via snap it becomes the default localhost site, and photoprism sticks to :2342, audiobookshelf to :13378, pi-hole to /admin and so on.
The advantage of having Nextcloud on the locahost route is that you can then add “external websites” that point to the other services that are running in paralel. This allows people to navigate, without having to remember port numbers.
The key difference between Linux and MacOS and Windows is that Linux requires you to install the OS, rather than buying it pre-installed in most cases. This is the barrier to entry. If Linux machines were as common as Macs and Windows machines people would use them more often. Linux is stable. Once it is configured correctly it runs for weeks, months or even years without crashing, and without needing to reboot.
The point of using WSL, Pi devices and target drives is that it gives you great flexibility to experiment and fix things, if they break, and restart from scratch if you can’t fix them. If approach A doesn’t work, you try approach B, and then C, until you get something that works.
By taking notes, along the process you develop a work flow to install servers with services as you want them to run. Initially I needed one Pi per service. With trial and error I can get one Pi to do everything, so I should consolidate all the services onto one device.
The advantage of having the Mac Book Pro running Ubuntu is that I can then install KDEnlive and experiment with this open source video editor. As the Mac Book Pro is made obsolete so the opportunity to experiment with an open source version is all the more interesting. I wanted to build a video editing system on Linux and soon that is what I will have.
Originally I was using a one terabyte SSD as a Time machine backup drive. Recently as I spent time freeing space on disks and moving things around I decided in install Linux on that SSD. Now I have a mac that can run either macOS or Linux, depending on which option I choose at boot. The advantage of using an SSD, rather than a spinning drive, is that it can be moved, while on, whereas a spining disk should only be moved, once it stops spinning.
I have been using Ubuntu on a Pi5 and it works well for almost everything, but if I can use a Mac Book pro then I have more power and flexibility, and it becomes portable. I can then switch the Pi 5 to Ubuntu Server and it will be stable enough to run for weeks or months between crashes or reboots.
WSL is good for command line experience and practice. Pis are good for simple apps, but a mac book pro running KDendlive is a good opportunity to finally reach my desire of editing video on an open source solution.
I have logged 799 activities with my Suunto devices. This includes hikes, via ferrata, climbing, swimming and scuba diving. I like Suunto devices because their battery life is good enough to last through entire days of hiking and the battery lasts for weeks between charges when used as a simple watch.
I like to track my heart rate but I often feel self conscious about putting the heart rate monitor belt on. With the latest Spartan watch I no longer need to worry about the belt. At the same time as I start the activity I will be able to keep track of the heart rate. This is especially good for group activities when you do not want to keep people waiting and in winter when you’re wearing layers of clothing.
I like that devices like the Fitbit Charge 2 can be worn at almost all times and track heart rate effortlessly when at the climbing gym and during other activities. I look forward to the same simplicity with a Suunto device. I especially like that Suunto devices survive swims and showers.
I like that the Suunto Ambit 3 tracks how many steps I take during the day. It’s a shame that the step count is not logged and visible on Movescount. I like to see how energetic or lazy I have been on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis. It’s not unusual for me to go from a 21,000 step day to a 6000 step day. It depends on weather, work and other factors. If you go for a bike ride your step count will not be high.
I will wait to see whether they apply this technology to the Suunto Ambit watch collection. If they come out with the Suunto Ambit 4 Wrist HR then I will be tempted to upgrade. With 799 tracked activities I believe Suunto devices have demonstrated that they are reliable.
I am happy that youtube is being sued because out of the hundreds of video sharing websites out there it is the most devious. It has taken hundreds of hours of content produced at great expense by teams of professionals and offered them in poor quality for nothing on their site. To make it worse it’s made them billions of dollars.
How can the mega corporations, through the intermediary of the RIAA give so much trouble to those who share music let allow youtube to thrive. It doesn’t make sense.
What about all those video sharing websites that went about making content and distributing it the right way? What about those who decided that they would provide a service at no cost to themselves. I’m speaking of those guilty of unlawful distribution of video material.
It’s a website about deception, look at lonelygirl, look at the coke and mentos adverts. Look at the ball in groin laughter. It’s all a form of sadistic pleasure. Why would you want to be manipulated in such a way.
On the positive side it was fun to see the world cup celebrations and I uploaded some video of my own in response to other people’s content.
When it’s used as a video version of flickr it’s an excellent website because it’s an audiovisual window onto the world where a vast wealth of video content may be accessed. Good snowboarding, post it, good party, post it, personal work you’re proud of, post it.
Everyone of us is a content producer and distributor and everyone of us is challenging himself to create something that other people will enjoy. Geocities was about websies, the original sixdegrees was inspired by the film to show that everyone is related throough less than six people to everyone else. Blogging allowed people to reount their lives to anonymous audiences, flickr allowed the sharing of instants and video sharing websites allowed for the sharing of moments.
Is it voyeuristic to look at online videos and photographs made by friends and random strangers and is it exhibitionist of them to show that content? Is it wrong to look at it?
I would participate in this more actively were it not for the droit d’image. I don’t want others posting pictures of me without my consent and I won’t post pictures of others without their consent.
Doesn’t mean I won’t keep looking. It’s fun to constantly refresh the most recent pictures on flickr and see all the events that have been taking place around the world.