Videosurf, still in beta is an interesting way to search videos. I got my invite this morning and so far there are a number of features I find interesting but I’ll learn more about it before going into detail.
When it’s ready it will be an interesting to site to use to sort through many videos at once and will allow you to see what’s within the video, at least visually so far.
For a while I had been thinking of getting a device to play audible books that was not an iphone. The reason for this is simple. A portable MP3 player costs the same, or less than an iphone battery, and can play audio books, or music for 17-19hrs in a row, if you want to listen for that many hours in a row.
With podcasts you want a device that can sync while you’re walking and listening. With books the experience is different. At most you may need to sync 12 times a year, or 24 times a year, depending on which Audible contract you have.
The first step is to download the files. I copied the aax files to the device but it complained that I had to authorise the device first. I tried to use audible manager but it said “sorry, you need to use windows. I booted up my windows machine for the first time in years and it then said, sorry, we don’t have the device you are trying to authorise. I then considered using iTunes but Apple have destroyed iTunes so it no longer exists.
After an hour or two of trial and error I came across OpenAudible. It plays nicely on mac, linux and windows. It allows you to connect the app to Audible.com and access your book library. You can then convert your books to mp3 or m4b. Once the files are converted you can transfer them to your mp3 player and listen to audible books with ease.
I noticed that you can only download books that you own, not books that you have via the Audible membership plans. I don’t mind not having access to strip the DRM from books I didn’t pay for directly.
The beauty of OpenAudible is that it provides you with a list of all your books. You can see the title, duration, purchase date, release date, rating and genre, and you can use these columns to sort books. You can also select books by whether they are downloaded or not.
With this app you can tell it to download your entire library before converting the files either to mp3 or m4b. Once this is done you can transfer the books you want to an mp3 player, listen to them, and then swap out read books for unread books, and repeat.
I have now been audible for years, and I had the platinum plan for several years. With the platinum plan your collection grows by two books a month. I have over 500 books. If for any reason Audible is abandoned and the DRMed books stop being accessible I will lose at least a thousand francs of books. To keep the “investment” safe it makes sense for me to download and backup these books for my own personal, and private use.
I am not a pirate. The files that I will generate in the coming days will be as a backup library in case Audible and Amazon, for some reason, go bankrupt, or are discontinued. It is also so that I can listen to audiobooks without killing iphone batteries.
My original aim was to transfer my audible books to the sandisk device with the DRM intact. it’s because iTunes was discontinued, and that the Audible Manager App didn’t allow me to do what I wanted to do that I had to go for a third party solution. If Apple and Audible made it easier to use the content that we buy on devices that are not within their ecosystem then I would have needed minutes, rather than hours, to find an elegant solution.It is their ecosystem that encouraged me to remove the DRM.
As I said before, this is for my own private use.
Flying over Oeschinensee with an FPV drone looks nice. I went there as a child and the lake is distinct with its lake, green slopes, hills and that wall of rock on the other side. It’s above Kandersteg and there are a number of walks to be enjoyed in the area.
Flying a drone in such a place is great because it gives you a way of exploring the landscape either before you’ve been on a hike or afterwards. It also allows you to find new locations from which to take pictures or even to find a new climbing route. I haven’t looked at what climbs there are around there.
I know that there is a Via Ferrata that I have been tempted to do in summer. With a drone, it would be fun to get some shots from a different perspective than usual.
Instead of people on a boat, he could have found people exploring the Via Ferrata. There are some nice shots going down waterfalls, through the valley, along the river bed, through the forest and more. It’s a great location for flying a drone.
I like blogging with Hugo. I like writing my daily article in VIM and then exporting it to WordPress, before publishing it both with Hugo and WordPress. The build time for this build was 14 seconds but it can take up to 20 seconds. Although this i slow this isn’t the bottle neck.
Every time you create a blog post, and every time you use a keyword that’s tag page has to be regenerated. If you use two, three or more tags then three or four pages need to be updated. As well as these pages needing to be regenerated so does the site’s index page, and others. If you include related pages at the bottom of the page, then every article with the tag also needs to be updated. The result is that tens, or even hundreds of pages need to updated at a time.
Every day I write a blog post and every day I use Hugo to rebuild the website. All the files that have been updated need to be uploaded to the server. I don’t want to overwrite every page, when it makes more sense just to overwrite the updated pages. This usually takes time. I experimented with Filezilla and Cyberduck. Both take at least an hour or two every single day, to work through and upload the new pages. This is time consuming and inefficient. With WordPress, Drupal and other solutions, you write the post, publish and you’re done. The same is true of Hugo with smaller websites.
When a website has thousands of articles and tags Hugo becomes slow, at the upload stage. It’s at this point that the switch to a faster solution makes sense.
I will continue to experiment with Hugo and my blog but I will not publish on a regular basis, since uploading takes time. I will upload once a week to save time and resources. I have come up with a workflow and it works. I have learned at least the basics of Hugo and now I can move on to carry out more experimentation.
World Community Grids OpenPandemic work units are now ready. With your laptop or desktop, you can help find a cure for COVID-19.
As a World Community Grid volunteer, you download a secure software program to your computer. And when your computer is not using its full computing power, it will automatically run a simulated experiment in the background which will help predict the effectiveness of a particular chemical compound as a possible treatment for COVID-19.
Research:
OpenPandemics – COVID-19: Project Overview
Downloading and installing the software and creating an account is quick and easy. Once you have done this, and once the application is running your laptop or desktop will help in the effort. It costs us little effort and we can still use the computer as usual.
The idea is not a new one. My laptops and desktops have been contributing to such efforts for decades now. I was introduced to this concept back in the late 90s to early 20th century. My first glimpse of this was the Seti@Home research project back in 2002.
With Grid computing, you don’t need to purchase or develop supercomputers. Instead, you rely on a networked cluster of computers to work together to process data. Instead of requesting and waiting for slots to become available on supercomputers scientists have access to thousands of machines to help them work through the data. Every work unit is worked on by at least two or more computers and verified.
World Community Grid has 650,000 individual contributers and 460 organisations helping in the effort. They have contributed to 31 research projects to date. This has resulted in 35 peer reviewed papers.
Over the years my computers have contributed 356 days of computing power. They have generated over a million points for mapping cancer markers. They have contributed to the Microbiome Immunity Project, FightAIDS@Home Phase 2, OpenZika, Outsmart Ebola Together, Genome Comparison, Help Defeat Cancer, Fight Aids@Home, and Smash Childhood Cancer.
Although Folding@Home gave people the power to help in the search to beat COVID-19 sooner I prefer the World Community Grid application because it runs in the background without me hearing the fans running. When you’re using a laptop that you want to keep using for years this is important.
I will leave you with this short video.
See you tomorrow.
Having just noticed that the new gmail application for S60 is out I have noticed some interesting new features, the most interesting of which for some of you may be the accounts tab so that you may use more than one gmail account at once. Other features include Chats, outbox, mobile drafts, Chat, contacts and more.
One of the more interesting options now is that you can search through your e-mails straight from the application on the phone rather than using the website. As a result it’s far easier to find that particular e-mail with flight information or the route you were planning on taking.
So far this year I have been cycling for 680 km in 33hrs with a height gain of 6800 meters. In this time I have used my narrative clip 2 device to document the ride with a picture every 10-30 seconds as I want to focus on riding rather than other things. I like to have as high a moving time as possible so I usually stop once I get back to my starting point.
By cycling I see the landscape at a slower, more interesting speed. I see the roads, I smell the vegetation, I feel the heat and I feel the cold. I also discover small paths that I would not take in a car or on a scooter. In practicing this sport I get to know the landscape. I also get to see seasonal changes.
This year I have cycled in the rain, in the snow, in the wind and on days like today. Today it was sunny and there was no wind to fight against. It made the ride more pleasant.
The technology I took on today’s ride was my narrative clip 2 to take pictures of the bike ride, my Crosscall Odyssey+ phone, the Cateye Evo+ and finally the Suunto Ambit 3. I also took the Ricoh Theta S but never stopped to take pictures. For future rides I should fix it to the handle bars. I could bring you with me on my next bike ride. Of course I would keep just the interesting bits of the ride. I can throw away the rest.