"Nothing but the rain"
IT’s been a troubling time for my car, Bora Horza Gobuchul. About a month ago the catalytic converter was stolen but this isn’t about the trials and tribulations of that incident. This communication is about a cool, but random, occurrence when I happened to check the mileage on the car after my eldest son asked how far it had travelled.
There we are. I thought it was pretty cool. Although I didn’t even notice it at first, it was my child who got excited.
I was looking at my Netflix account details the other day, pondering a cancellation, and I saw this in my “recently accessed locations”:
It’s nice to get these strange little reminders of a brilliant weekend in Los Angeles.
I have been using CopyTrans for over ten years to manage the music on my iPhone. I found in the distant past that iTunes mostly hated me and it would crash/hang/takeforever to do anything and was a complete pain to use when synchronising with my phone. So I move to a free piece of software that did exactly what I wanted CopyTrans. I could upload songs to my phone and edit their details. This worked well because some music I have been buying from Bandcamp rather than through iTunes because the artists get more money. I was still using iTunes to collate all my music on the NAS drive and for the Sonos system. It made sense as it organises the music nicely into directories and allows the creation of playlists. The thing I couldn’t do was synchronise my phone.
All of that changed when I got a better computer. But it has still taken around two years to actually take the plunge and delete the music from my phone and allow iTunes to do its job. There were a couple of things that made me do this. There were two albums which CopyTrans consistently – or maybe my phone – had the wrong artwork even though it was correct in the iTunes library. I really couldn’t figure out how to correct this. I also wanted to synchronise a playlist onto the Sonos system, one I had created on my phone. I took the plunge yesterday and for the first time in over ten years I plugged my phone into the computer and opened iTunes at the same time. I clicked synchronise and left it to do its job.
Three hours later, after transferring around seven thousand songs, it was done and I opened the music app to see what had happened. It had worked! After deleting some albums a second time around I synchronised again and it took a couple of minutes. Well, that is a timeframe I can live with. This makes it a lot easier to buy music and keep all the content nicely aligned over time. I’m quite happy and it feels like a decent achievement. Sad really, but I do feel smug sometimes over music.
It isn’t. Decent people is the answer. Don’t think I’ve ever listened to this.
I spent some time racing around the gorgeous circuit of Spa-Francorchamps. I was slightly bothered about the challenge being made in a Porsche but it turns out this particular car was very well behaved. This will be a 4k video [when processed] which I recorded and uploaded. My god, it looks amazing.
While I was watching the replay I noticed the amazing graphics of the brakes getting hot and decided to take a photograph. This was taken at the end of the long straight after Eau Rouge.
When I played this session it was far more satisfying than some recent gameplay. I’ve been attempting some races that I’ve actually struggled in! I also really love the dynamic weather but it’s a bit irritating to not know at the start of a thirty minute race what weather might be affecting you about fifteen minutes in! I will persist and get better.
Here is my music library as screen captured from iTunes. I think you can head over to this actual page and see a word list of all the song.
I just thought this would make a good visual representation of what sort of stuff I’ve got.
I took a small car journey to the Cineworld cinema at Rochester – not in Rochester – to see the film The Northman. As I arrive on the esplanade I check the state of the river to see how high the water is. This gives me an indication of the level of tide in this area of our watery world. The tide was low. I think it’s about time I started plotting the relative positions of the Sun and Moon to Earth in these communications to lend more of a visual representation of what a high or low tide means for this section of our Solar System. I will have a search for some software that gives me what I need, or, I could just figure it out somehow.
After the film, I pondered for quite a while before settling on a score to rate this movie on IMBD. There is a whole communication covering the rating system and it is here. I then tweeted the result.
I rated The Northman (2022) 4/10 #IMDb https://t.co/2x49btsZoz
— Ian Parish (@iparish) April 24, 2022
As you can see from my score I didn’t really like this film. I keep thinking about it and what I didn’t like. I’ve even read some reviews of the film online to try and understand what it was that made this considered a good film. I have also been questioning my own taste in films and what do I expect from them. What does a film have to have for me to think it is good and has that changed over the (many) years of my life?
I didn’t like this film. I didn’t enjoy the story and I didn’t like all the mystical bullshit that was put into the story [that’s probably more my problem than anyone else]. I can admire the colour schemes and general cinematography but that’s only worth being excellent when the story is also excellent and I hated the story. I might have to include spoilers ahead because I’m not sure I can review the film and put over my objections without mentioning particular aspects of the story. So be warned.
There are spoilers ahead in this paragraph. Apart from the weird mother son part which I just shrugged at I was most annoyed by the fact that the whole story was for nothing. The Northman’s journey and needing vengeance was partly to make amends for his father’s killing but also the taking of his mother. Who, as it just so happens, had planned the whole thing. When our anti-hero discovers this I don’t think he questions his role in life and on this planet. He almost does the right thing which is to head off into the sunset with his pregnant lover but he doesn’t he goes back to make sure we get an excellently cinematic final fight off. There was always going to be one ending.
I know the film is based on folklore and most of that stuff is fucked up but I just don’t think it worked. The film felt like a 300 for this age. Vikings done stylistically. I hated the story.
This has been playing while I take a flight in X-Plane.
I need your love – well constructed but bland!
Surrender to me – starts really well. Decent riff. Pretty much maintained this until the end.
Livin’ For You – slow and boring. probably a good song.
Walkin’ At Night – somehow missed this when it was playing or it was a short song.
Walk On – Amazing guitars after a slow start, very rock ‘n’ roll.
Get Organ-Ized – Decent organ solo instrumental. Very operatic.
Walk On (Some More) – Decent reprise of Walk On to make the last twenty minutes one song.
What’s Your Name – Another pretty decent song that’s written really well.
Magdalene – Look, this is a good song, but it’s boring.
We Can Make It – It’s an ok song.
Here’s the thing I’ve said before about Boston. It’s absolutely really well written music and it’s great for the car. I would imagine that if you know the songs then they would be brilliant for singing along to.
Up in the dim warm loft of my house is a Raspberry Pi connected to an aerial. I’ve written about this a lot before, the thing tracks specific aircraft signals and then send those data off to a website for them to use to send to the world. I spent a little time yesterday adding the Virtual Radar Server software to the Pi so now I can see what my Pi sees in a useful format. I also have enabled this to be seen anywhere around the world using the brilliantness of the internet and such technologies. This picture shows you the UI and a long range view:
I think the aerial was picking up about 90 aircraft when I grabbed this screenshot. I still think that’s pretty impressive. Here’s a more local view:
I know I have some issues with range detection aligned with how my terraces rooves are arranged along with a bit of a block to the north of the North Downs, but still, I think it’s impressive.
It has been years since I wrote a communication about my aircraft tracker that’s installed in the loft. I have an aerial connected to a by-pass filter and amplifier connected to a Raspberry Pi which decodes the semi-automatic radio signals sent by aircraft and plots them into a map for me. I also upload the data to a website which anyone can access for a small annual fee. I used to regularly put a “splat” on this site which shows a map of aircraft coverage over a period of time. I have stopped using that part of the software – although I might reinstall it, will have to think about that. Without the virtual radar server all I can do is get a map output of which aircraft are currently being tracked. This was the map I got a few moments ago:
It still impresses me how far the aerial can “see”. It would be cool if I could raise the height a little more and have the aerial outside but that would require professional installation so maybe sometime in the future.