Month: September 2017

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Perfect Timing

Sometime last week I noticed that the number of tweets I had sent was nearing 10,000. I’m not a massive user of Twitter and a lot of those would be to do with the automatic tweets generated by this website. Every communication I write creates three tweets to catch most time-zones around the world. I’ve just over one thousand communications and so that’s around three thousand tweets.

The automatic tweets look similar to this:

Here’s what I wrote when I noticed 10,000 was coming:

While keeping an eye on the count I had a few twitter conversations and was pretty sure I had got through the 104 barrier. I can’t see where in the iOS app there is a count so I had to wait to get to a PC to see how many I had done and count back if necessary. This morning I did that and the count was 10,011. The number on the website said 10k but you can hover and see the real number. So, I counted back and I am so very proud. My ten thousandth tweet was:

When I wrote this I was aware it could be the barrier breaking tweet and my next tweet was:

I am so chuffed. What a brilliant comment to have as a power of ten tweet. In case some of you aren’t sure why I think that, then read this about his comments on gay sex and abortion. You could also read this for his views on foodbanks.

There is a slight controversy here though. I recently requested my twitter archive as I keep a copy for your interest here. Within this there is a csv file which I have looked at and counted the number of rows. It only comes to 9975. So, there’s a discrepancy between my archive and what the twitter website says. I’ll use the website as I don’t think I could have planned my breakthrough tweet much better.

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Genesis 1:3

And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

Well, given how fictional god is this is more about me asking for there to be light in my house and the lights turning on. Nothing particularly supernatural there. Just fucking science, baby.

My sister has an Amazon Alexa/Echo tower thing and it was actually quite fun to ask it questions and get answers [most of the time]. So, I bought a Google Home. It is a nifty little piece of kit. I don’t think it looks as good as Echo, the home is more organic whereas Echo is quite futuristic looking and flashy lights.

The voice control works really well. It’ll be better when Google becomes better at interpreting questions and answering them. The “tell me a joke” feature is amusing.

Google Home
Google Home

When I was in the south west I met with a friend and he has an LED light made by Phillips. I am not really one for lights in the house, I lived for years without any lampshades on my ceiling lights, but I like the tech involved in the Philips device. They don’t make the actual model my friend had but they make a similar one. I have a table lamp in the corner of the dining room that I use a lot. It provides just the right amount of light to the centre of the house. I thought I could replace this with a colour lamp. So, I investigated Hue lighting by Philips.

I initially bought a starter pack with E27 connectors on the two bulbs. The expensive bit is the bridge to the home network. There is no need for it to be as expensive as advertised so Philips have added a premium to that device. The individual Hue lights are a reasonable price as long as you want white. The colour devices are expensive, I think.

Philips Hue Bridge
Philips Hue Bridge

So, it turns out that most of my ceiling lights are bayonet connectors, not E27. I wasn’t sure where to put the new bulbs! I ended up putting them in the kitchen. So, I had to get some bayonet fixing LED bulbs for other areas of the house.

Now, the main lights in my house are voice or app controlled. The lights up the stairs and by the backdoor along with the bathroom light are still manual. There’s a fan attached to the bathroom light so that one probably can’t go wireless control and the others aren’t used much. I did get the colour lamp for the dining room.

Corner Lamp
Corner Lamp

The lamp can be any of the 16 million colours you can get with a 256 graduation of each LED. You can use the app to load a photograph and match the colours from that picture. It’s a good piece of kit. I also believe it can be used to match colours on a television to add mood lighting, but I don’t have a Philips TV and won’t be getting one.

The lights don’t have to be light controlled. The switches still work. If you turn the lights off [at the switch] and then on again the default position is On-100%. This means other people can still use your house if you need them to. They might feel silly talking to Google to get the lights on.

Oh, it did take over an hour to get Google Home to register the Hue Bridge. That was largely because the iOS app has a problem and it only really works via an Android device [this is forgivable given Android is Google]. I was using an online chat help window to figure out how to connect the two systems. The person on the other end of the line was helpful and patient. Especially as I had to download a new app on the Android tablet which, in normal circumstances is easy, but my Play Store had been not been working correctly for a few months. I had to roll back the Play Store software to then be able to download the Home app. This is what took the hour. Google Help were really good and everything is now connected.

It’s still odd asking someone to turn the lights on. I still forget now and then, espeically when leaving a room and I automatically physically turn the light off. Then I wonder why it’s not connected to the network when I get home!

I am looking forward to the some lights turning on automatically when I get home. I’m also looking forward to my parents being in my house and then lights turning on when I come back from the shop or wherever!

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Not Splatted For A While

I am currently working on the Raspberry Pi I have installed in the loft as a web server and aircraft spotter. It’s been a while since I mentioned it here. I thought I’d just chuck up some images.

Aircraft Tracked
Aircraft Tracked

This picture gives an idea of how many aircraft can be tracked at once. Be aware this was early on a Sunday morning.

Radar Splat
Radar Splat

This splat shows how far away aircraft are detected. Please note I am not where the blue dot is, that would be quite weird. The smallest locus is up to 9,999 ft, the green is 10,000 to 19,999 ft, the purple is the 20,000s and the red is above FL300.

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American Assassin

So, I went to the cinema to watch American Assassin. It was that or Mother and I plumped for stupid action. I rated this film on IMDB, as usual, and there’s a communication that deals with my rating system here.

This movie was a piece of fucking shit american macho bullshit.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I love the way all physicists can put a nuke together and that Turkish bad people drive landrovers. It was shit.

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Recent Running Routes

Sometime back I started using the Strava app on my phone as some friends were using it and they weren’t on Map My Run. The Strava app has the ability to use a photo taken as the main picture in the saved area rather than a map. I think it looks quite good and I have been trying to take a photograph whenever I am out running.

Here’s what it looks like shared to twitter:

So, here’s a collection of photographs taken while out exercising.

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Bradford Impressions

Having spent a weekend in Bradford for the Infest music festival I also got time to wander around the city and soak up some of its heritage.

While driving from Keswick to Bradford via Kendal I passed a road direction sign saying:

Bradford
Bingley

This amused me no end as most of you will know the Bradford & Bingley was a building society that was taken over by a bank [I think]. I had not realised they were the names of places. This maybe due to their advertising being based on two bowler hatted characters called Bradford and Bingley.

This area of the UK is lesser explored by me. I spent a week near York but didn’t actually go into York so this was a chance to find out about a northern industrial town.

On Saturday morning we needed some liquid latex and so used Google maps to find a shop that would hopefully sell some. It was in a shopping centre. On the way we passed the town hall.

Town Hall
Town Hall

This was actually quite pretty and built using local stone as a lot of the city was. The drive into the university the day before had highlighted that this city, while once great, wasn’t that great and had suffered a lot of economic depression. There were many boarded up buildings and run down areas. The overall tide is turning though as new shopping centres pop up in the centre, but the long term economic benefit of these doesn’t seem useful to a town. They might make the locals think the centre is nice and it looks good but the vast majority of money spent there will leave the town and head to corporations elsewhere in the world. A thriving shopping centre is not the economic boon to a town I suspect locals think it is.

The Kirkgate Shopping centre looked like a 60s build. While walking there I think we went past five Greggs shops. I get it that they are quite cheap but I’m not sure that’s a good sign. The Joke Shop in the market area of the Kirkgate sold liquid latex along with cheap sex toys and bongs. A funny little shop with an odd clientele.

Just What You Need
Just What You Need

I had, in the previous week, been discussing “seaside” joke shops with Penguin and we wondered if there’re still places that sell joke fingers and snappy chewing gum. I was glad to have found this little shop.

Centenary Square
Centenary Square

After a nice breakfast we wandered back the University and music and escape.

The Sunday morning meant that I wanted to have breakfast and also see the Science and Media museum. It’s possibly even a “national” museum. Just Googled that and yes, it’s a “national” museum.

Firstly we went to the Cathedral to have a look and it was “churchy”. There were some historical aspects that were interesting but I wasn’t that bothered. Little Germany was close by and we wandered that and saw the mural dedicated to a band of socialists.

Power To The People
Power To The People

The Waterstones in Bradford is in the old exchange building and very grand. A lovely space and ideal for selling books where those hushed tones of a library abound.

Waterstones, Bradford
Waterstones, Bradford

Then the science and media museum. It was free and we wandered the history of photography which was pretty good and had a very lot of cameras. A lot of the older exhibits were reproductions, which I don’t like so much but, I understand why they are like that. We didn’t go into any of the temporary exhibitions and maybe that is where the value is in this museum but most of it was a bit boring and shit. As I explained previously that could be because all the museums I’ve been to before this are in this nation’s capital and large and big. I’ve also seen museums in Washington DC, maybe they aren’t representative. Overall I was disappointing by the museum there wasn’t a lot of science [none] and media was underwhelming.

Bradford seemed a little sad to me. A once majestic northern industrial town / city that has suffered and only now seems to be rejuvenating using shopping centres and little else. I hope it changes constructively, there’s a lot of glossing over the cracks when financial investment isn’t done correctly.

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It

This morning [just, it was an 11:50 showing] I went to the Rochester Cineworld Cinema down by the Medway’s edge. Earlier in the day I had run along a stretch of the tidal Medway and also the non-tidal part above Allington lock and then later I found myself parking alongside the river but on the western bank.

I went to see It and after the film I rated it on IMDB, you should see this communication as it deals with the ratings system.

Before the film started there were trailers for a weather disaster film called Geostorm. This looked absolutely terrible. The timing of the trailer with its gratuitous floods and storms was pretty poor given Harvey and Irma this month. Another trailer for a horror film was called Jigsaw and I couldn’t give less of a shit for watching it. I’m not a horror movie fan. Mostly because they don’t scare me, I just think they are stupid. Then there’s a film trailer with an interesting guilt start which I thought should be called “We should have gone to Vegas” but was really called The Ritual. That looked hilarious too. AND there was a trailer for a modern Flatliners!!!!!! Along with The Lost Boys, Flatliners is one of the seminal films of my teenage years, it scared me senseless! The new film looks just ok.

IT

I’ve read the book a long time ago. I’m not sure I could tell you a great deal about it. Certain things stick in the memory but who knows? I also watched the original TV series with Tim Curry as Pennywise and remember it being good. I remember the adult characters but not a lot else.

This film turned out to be chapter one. You can’t do a Stephen King film in two hours. Especially It. Mazza and I once watched all of The Stand on video back in 1994/5 and that was a whole evening job, six hours I think. Good but long.

I recall the book being about the adults remembering the summer previously but I could be wrong about that. The overall set up was good. The film was good. Jump scares are boring. For a truly terrifying experience there needs to be a film with little incidental music. As it was so long ago that I read this story I don’t know how faithful it was to the book. It served memory well. Apart from the child orgy.

In the book there is def a thing where Beverly Marsh has sex with all the survivors of the experience. I think it happens in the barrens. It’s written in a very sensible way. This film version avoided that. Maybe the 1990 version did too!

I would be tempted, if I had the time, to go back and read the book or watch the last version of the film. The book is significantly more detailed. But then it would be.

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KMFDM – O2 Academy Islington

I’ve seen KMFDM twice before although by the date of this gig I should have seen them thrice! They were due to tour in June or July but postponed until Sept. They were playing at the O2 Academy in Islington. I saw them here once before and also at M’era Luna this year.

The O2 Islington is a twenty minute walk from Kings Cross, which is handy as that’s where my train gets to after leaving Kent. Yep, that is the wrong side of London for most of Kent, but it’s perfect for me. Most of the venues I go to are up in the NE of the city. After a drink at The Angel Wetherspoons with #3 and we went to the venue to find Lord Of The Lost playing.

Lord Of The Lost
Lord Of The Lost

To me, this almost felt like being at home. They are a very “German” rock band. I say that as someone who has experienced a lot of German rock over the last three years with time at the M’era Luna festival. I had seen them before although I wrote very little about them in this communication. They were very good. They looked like they were having fun and the music was crafted well along with sounding good. I particularly liked two songs: La Bomba, which I’m pretty sure was a samba, and I.D.G.A.F. which is obvious. Their interaction with the crowd was very good.

Both of those songs are on the above EP. Next band up were Inertia, whom I don’t think I’ve seen before.

I’ve just searched my website and I saw them play when they supported Ayria. It turns out I didn’t much like them then and I wasn’t impressed last night. My notes for this time say: slow plodding songs and few audience interactions, odd. I did take a photograph but a picture here isn’t warranted.

Headliners were KMFDM. They started with D.I.Y. and continued with ninety minutes of excellent heavy music. It was a really good set and thoroughly enjoyable.

KMFDM
KMFDM

Their guitarists were the chaps from Lord Of The Lost, which makes sense really. If your normal pickers aren’t around use those travelling with you. There wasn’t a huge amount of crowd interaction by the main two but the guitarists made up for that. Having seen them at M’era Luna this year it was clear that all the chatting to the audience back then was them try to cover the technical issues that surrounded that gig.

After the first song the main man actually smiled and showed emotion. This was a little surprise! It was nice to see that one of the guitarists [the main singer from Lord Of The Lost] was wearing a Combichrist t-shirt, a good endorsement.

It was really enjoyable and a solid professional set, as you’d expect.

KMFDM
KMFDM

AS a side note I’ve decided I might start wearing some ear defence to gigs. It’s just a thought at the moment. I’ll have to ponder it over the next year or so.

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Hybrid Theory

The second half of my summer break was spent wandering the Lake District and attending the Infest music festival in Bradford. I had a very good time and did a lot of driving. I am quite convinced that my wheel balance is out very slightly for speeds above 70 miles per hour, there’s a fine vibration there but it’s not that often you can go faster than that here in the south east of this country.

I wasn’t deliberately keeping an eye on my fuel consumption as life is too short to worry about that. Life might be considerably shorter in future due to excessive fuel use but owning Bora Horza Gobuchul gives me a slight advantage in the smugness over non-hybrid drivers.

Consumption
Consumption

This image shows that over this trip I did just over a thousand miles and returned a fuel consumption of 59 miles per gallon. That’s not bad. It’s a shame Bora Horza Gobuchul doesn’t report in litres per 100km which I think I prefer, but goodness that won’t catch on, it’s waaaay too European.

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Summer Of Parking

This summer was not a good one for me attempting to park the car. It seems I’ve been a little unlucky or forgetful!

The first incident was caused by me largely not connecting the dots and being in a slight rush. I parked my car at work when I left for CCF Camp. When I did this the entire site was locked because it was being used by the Ramblin’ Man music festival in the park nearby. I managed to get into the car park and was going to park “out of the way” in my normal spot. I decided there and then that I really wanted some CCTV coverage of the car so I zoomed around and parked in the main part of the car park.

I thought little of this until the Tuesday. I was walking down to the Eden Project and I had a phone call asking if the spare keys were nearby. Could I get the car moved as it was blocking the route for a new water and electricity trench that the school needed to build. There was a few hours of consternation until I was eventually called and told that a car breakdown service had been instructed to move the car. I was relieved.

Not In The Way Anymore
Not In The Way Anymore

Bora Horza Gobuchul no longer blocked the path for the trench. I had been told about this work that was going to take place, but did not combine this fact with where I parked the car.

The next incident was parking at the M’era Luna festival. Along the journey we had received updates about the parking and rain situation and we arrived around midday to park. The queues into the car park were long and we wondered what the delay was. I followed the instructions given by the parking attendants and turned onto the field. Drive fast they said and don’t stop.

Well. That’s all very well for a manual non-hybrid car without and traction control electronics. I think we managed about 100 metres across the field before we became embedded in the mud. The car was not going anywhere.

Fucking Stuck
Fucking Stuck

We weren’t the only ones. There were many cars getting stuck including a BMW X5. Shortly after this the organisers closed the car park and managed to arrange alternative parking for the festival attendees. One of the attendants explained there would be a tractor when we wanted to leave. I was quite distressed because the car was beeping and flashing lights at me. There wasn’t anything I could do and so I turned the thing off. Andy did well to calm me, slowly my stress lowered and I managed to enjoy most of the weekend without panicking too much.

Before leaving the car park we found the emergency tow hook and I read the instructions about how to fit it and be towed. Mentally I prepared myself for the car to be broken and the steps we would have to go through to get home.

Sunrise Over Bora Horza Gobuchul
Sunrise Over Bora Horza Gobuchul – note the lack of surrounding cars

On the Monday morning, in quite a gorgeous setting, we flagged down the tractor man and he towed us out of the hole. I had to put the car into neutral which I rarely do but it all seemed to work well. As we neared the edge of the field the tractor chap unhooked us and said we had to drive the last three metres by ourselves. I’m not really sure why. I wanted a tow to the road so I had a proper surface to drive on.

Tow hook fitted and ready to go
Tow hook fitted and ready to go

I floored the accelerator and the car moved to the road. I shouted to Andy to get in and we left. A few miles up the road I removed the emergency tow hook. We headed to the UK. All seemed far better than I had expected!

The good news is that since I am now back at work the summer is officially over and I have had no more parking incidents. I even had quite a time in the Lake District and then Bradford and neither resulted in issues. My nerves have dissipated now.

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