"Nothing but the rain"
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
It’s interesting, the level of science and technology we have and use daily without thought far far surpasses that of any previous generation and yet we take it all for granted and have little care for how that technology works.
Yesterday I went to make a morning coffee and noticed that the pressure from the tap was pretty low. This happens sometimes as I share a water main link with some other houses. Their water use can affect how well the water flows in my house!
I didn’t really pay much attention to this water drop as it doesn’t last long. Later on during the day, I had been for a run and needed to get clean.
Check out my run on Strava.https://t.co/ZHioVdEPvh pic.twitter.com/i0QN05U8x2
— Ian Parish (@iparish) December 29, 2017
I hadn’t really time the run that well as one mile into the exercise the rain started and fell quite heavily for about twenty minutes, that was slightly annoying. Once home I went to run some water for a drink and the flow was very poor. It took in excess of ten seconds to fill a small glass.
So, I went to my water supplier’s website and lo and behold there was a broken water main.
At least the website was updated regularly and the company were doing their best to keep everyone informed. I think that the British are ok with inconvenience as long as we know what is causing it and as long as it wasn’t due to some idiotic behaviour.
The water pressure is now restored. As for a post-run shower, please don’t ask!
I did a Gran Turismo Race Challenge. There were three laps around the Willow Springs Horse Thief Mile.
On the last corner I missed the tarmac and hit a bump, it was a big bump. The car launched into the sky. I managed to take some photos during the replay. They are below. A good thing is that I don’t know how the car landed. I launched and then passed the finish line in the air and so the race finished!
I was tracking a VW Group jet into Biggen Hill Airport in south east London and noticed that the waiting pattern was out over the North Sea.
I decided that the views out there can’t be that great. I’m also curious as to whether there is a beacon somewhere in the middle there. I don’t really know a great deal about the navigation of planes. VFR is easy, but other than that I need to read up about it all. Maybe I need another visit to Pooley’s?
Here’s a closer look at the waiting room:
This Embraer has left a beautiful track for us to see. This is the waiting area for London City and Biggen Hill.
I’ve got some Ordnance Survey maps of my local area and I’ve been to a few of the places that are mentioned locally. Just to see what they are. I regularly run past Kits Coty House and have got photos of it in this communication. The other day I was looking at Google Maps and I was slightly shocked that it mentioned a bunch of rocks I’d not seen. They aren’t on the OS map, but are mentioned here.
So, as it fits with one of my main routes for a run I went there and took some photos. Ladies and Gentlemen I give you, the Coffin Stone.
The coffin stone is one of the Medway Megaliths mentioned in this document.
I have become a vegetarian [nominally]. This decision took about a half a year from first thoughts about it to actually doing something about it. So first I’ll explain my reasons and then the process.
Firstly, I’m not that fussed about the conditions in which animals are kept or treated. If you want mass production to feed the human race then you have to accept that it’ll be done at the cheapest. While the conditions would probably affect me if I was to see them, it is poor regulation and market forces that has made all this possible. You don’t become vegetarian to stop poor treatment of animals, you become a politician or farmer.
I don’t have any issues with eating meat because animals might have souls or are sentient. Once it’s dead it’s dead and the remains may as well be eaten or used for the common good.
My reasons are split roughly between health reasons, feeding the world and environmental reasons. Cutting out mammal meat is a good thing to do for health reasons. Now, there’s no real reason to go in to details but at one point I had high cholesterol and although I thought my diet was largely healthy looking at advice certainly made me think about giving up meat. That was March time this year and giving up meat germinated in my mind.
It seems largely strange to me that I can go to the supermarket and buy pretty much any amount of food and whatever type of food that I want. I can even buy some to purposefully throw away. And yet, too many people in this world go without food, or are severely ill from not enough food. This is fucking disgusting. We can produce enough food to feed the current population of this planet but we don’t have a global distribution system. Except, we can globally move food around to get to my supermarket but we don’t care about those poor fuckers dying or malnourished.
If we transferred the food we grow to feed animals to feeding humans we could easily support everyone on this planet with plenty spare. We use field space for animal feed. That just seems crazy to me. Also, the field space used for tobacco is a disgrace.
The production of animals for food has a huge CO2 impact. We use / produce more CO2 for meat production than we do for just growing vegetables and corn. It would be very easy to argue that it’s immoral to continue to do this given the effect that CO2 has on our delicate planet. Now my argument is seeming a little vague because as I said earlier if I wanted to change the world I should become a politician or a farmer. I guess I like to think I’m doing my little bit. Anthropogenic Global Climate Change is going to fuck this planet over. I have zero confidence politicians will do anything about it until it is way too late.
Giving up beef will reduce carbon footprint more than cars – The Guardian
Potential contributions of food consumption patterns to climate change – American Journal of Clinical Nutrition
Going vegetarian halves CO2 emissions from your food – New Scientist
The age-and-sex-adjusted mean GHG emissions in kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalents per day (kgCO2e/day) were 7.19 for high meat-eaters ( > = 100 g/d), 5.63 for medium meat-eaters (50-99 g/d), 4.67 for low meat-eaters ( < 50 g/d), 3.91 for fish-eaters, 3.81 for vegetarians and 2.89 for vegans. – Dietary greenhouse gas emissions
So, my reasons are colonic health and greenhouse gases. I have called this Nominally because while I have given up meat, if there is no other alternative I would eat some. I also had to eat all the meat in my freezer after I made the decision. That took about six weeks of occasional meals. My decision was made after returning from the M’era Luna festival in the middle of August.
I have had two moments where I just forgot! One day I went to the cinema after a run and my plan was to have a hot dog in the auditorium. I was queuing when it dawned on my I was vegetarian and I couldn’t have a hot dog. Well, my reader, bollocks to that. I ate two. The next “slip” was a week ago when a work friend brought in a pork pie to school and I just cut some and ate it. It took about five hours before I realised that I had eaten meat, when I kinda don’t. Oh well.
I don’t expect friends or people to make extra effort for me. If I go somewhere and there’s no alternative then I’ll eat meat. I’m not that fussed. It’s more a thing just for me.
One further, minor reason, would be that when going to music festivals it is best to spend as little time as possible in the portaloo. They tend to be smelly, dirty and quite horrific. A vegetarian diet over the course of the weekend contributes to reducing time spent in the cubicle. Eating meat extends the sitting time required.
I have noticed while looking through some of my older communications that the pictures aren’t loading. It took a little detective work to figure out that the pictures not showing were all embedded from my cloud storage.
I can’t see this from my computer as when I load the communications the picture still loads due to cloud storage cookies [I think]. When I use an incognito browser the pictures don’t load. They also don’t load on my phone and I haven’t signed in to my cloud storage in the browser application on that.
So, I have decided to upload all the pictures that were stored in the cloud to my web hosting company and then I can re-insert them into all the pages where they weren’t working properly. I suspect this will take around a month of playing a little at a time.
The existing photos need to be uploaded, which is easy. They I have to name them all, again quite easy, and then add them to each communication where they don’t show up from other browsers. I suspect that when I changed the file structure of my cloud storage the picture URLs somehow didn’t work the same way.
I’ll probably announce this update to great fanfare but it doesn’t matter a great deal. I doubt the people out there interested in the minutiae of my life really go searching for things I may have done over a year ago.
I have spent part of the last few days setting up my new mobile phone so that all the music is on it and that it works how I want it to work. Given that this is an Apple phone and most of my stuff is backed up to the cloud moving stuff to a new phone is remarkably simple.
In the old days you learnt how the new phone worked by entering all the contact details manually and playing around in the settings menu. Now all you do is enter your cloud details and wait. All the settings transfer over along with contacts and ringtones. While this is an improvement and people now have way too much data the requires transfer it is also a shame as it means most people don’t mess around in the settings menu.
When people ask me how to make a phone or device do a particular thing I often ask “Have you messed around in the settings menu?”. The reply is often “no”. People expect everything to work correctly out of the box and don’t understand how to tweak things or even that perhaps they should tweak things.
The main contents I needed to transfer to the new phone was music. Now, I suspect that within five years this won’t be necessary at all as I will stream all the music that I want. But that time is not yet so I keep “hard” versions of a lot of my music. I could use iTunes to transfer music. However, iTunes hates me. Or it hates my PC. Or it’s just shit. I’m not sure which it is but iTunes often freezes on the PC, fucks up the iPhone or just deletes the entire music content on the phone. I haven’t used iTunes to back up my phone for a few years now and I don’t use it to transfer music. I do use iTunes to import music onto the NAS and also create playlists and keep the folder contents organised to some degree. I have been frustrated with the way that iTunes hasn’t been consistent with the folder structure it uses and so I often delete the xml library file, move the folders around and then get iTunes to scan for new music.
A list of music that is contained within the iTunes folder is on this page: My Music. It isn’t a list of all music on the NAS because there’s also kids stuff, audiobooks, and stuff I rarely play.
I have used CopyTrans to move the music onto the new phone. It’s way more useful than iTunes and far more predictable.
Happily using @CopyTrans to put my music onto my new iPhone.
— Ian Parish (@iparish) September 29, 2017
I have used CopyTrans in the past to keep text messages and back those up but I rarely do that now, it’s not needed.
CopyTrans doesn’t hurt the PC in the same was iTunes does. It is a positive experience and well worth looking into if you find that iTunes is unpredictable and hard work on your PC. I have transferred around 7000 songs onto the new iPhone in a few hours. Job done. I’m a happy chap.
There have been communications within here about me changing broadband provider and how it went.
Anyway, this morning I did another bandwidth test to see how the connection was holding up. Google have their own within the search results page and I go this returned:
Then, just to check I used the top search result also:
I’m a happy bunny. Streaming to multiple devices becomes more important as I listen to radio via the internet and others might be watching stuff on the television and another using the PC.
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.
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.
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.
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!