I’ve been out cycling a little bit recently and I have been enjoying it. As a calorie burner it’s not as efficient as running/jogging but it is a different activity and fun. Also, as I can cycle three to four times faster than I can run and because of the increased time needed to burn fat I now have somewhere between 9 and 25 times the area to investigate – it depends on a number of factors but is essentially the length scale factor squared.
When I’ve been out I’ve been changing gear but I have been wondering what the actual ratios are and understanding these would make things a little more efficient and help me know when it’s best to change from big to small etc. The bike is an 18 speed machine which I find surprising but then I’m slightly old and can remember 5 speed derailleurs being impressive technology. I looked up the number of teeth on each gear and created a spreadsheet.
Bike Gearings
This now means that I understand the numbers more and can change into a more correct gear given the upcoming terrain. All the above are in the form 1 : n, where it is turns of pedal : turns of wheel. On a more fundamental level I think I am surprised at how efficient we are at cycling and it should be done more, if you can get a bike.
This past weekend would have been the M’era Luna festival in Hildesheim, Germany. But it was not to be. SARS-Cov-2 put paid to any plans of a weekend of music and honigwein. So, instead of driving five hundred miles to get to a soggy campsite the M’era Luna chaps put on a day of a virtual festival with a live stream of some of the bands from last year. The most important thing was that Smith and I saw ourselves in a few of the concert videos and also, in one of the interstitials – we have been recognised for our efforts. If you aren’t sure what you missed then have a look at this video of Corvus Corax.
When reviewing the film Proxima I mentioned there were two films from my youth that made a big impression. One I found on a listicle site of the greatest sci-fi films you haven’t seen – that was called The Quiet Earth. The other was some bizarre French time travel animation with small round animals that I had occasionally searched for. This week I think I found it “Les Maîtres du temps” and a quick search on Amazon showed it going to around £40 for a DVD. I couldn’t find it streaming anywhere and wondered what to do until I then remembered that this sort of thing is all over YouTube.
I started watching a French language version with English subtitles on YouTube but the subtitles were out of synchronisation, being quite early, and it looked as though it was getting worse so after about twenty minutes I had another look and found an English language dubbed version of the film on YouTube.
Feel free to watch this movie. I don’t know how long this iframe will stay there. I guess there’s a chance that this film will get removed from YouTube but given that it has been there since 2013 I guess maybe that’s not so much of a problem.
This was the film from my youth that has often come back into my thoughts. It follows the adventures of a space ship and its inhabitants who all have different issues and problems. It’s a lovely film from a simpler time. To be honest I joke about the time being simpler. We were living in the early eighties with the constant threat of nuclear war and only four television channels. It seems that kids were safer on the streets but I guess that’s not really true. There were race riots in London, the IRA were blowing up shit and we went to war [technically not a war] to save two shitty islands in the South Atlantic because a few hundred people lived there. The house where I grew up had just upgraded to a colour television and for heat we burnt coal in two open fires in the house.
The theme of time travel in this film freaked me out and I know it made me think an awful lot about time travel and paradoxes. In reality, we literally have no idea what happens if these things are possible. There’s lots of fictional writing but we can’t know what really happens. It’s like wormholes you see, as much as they are fixed within the collective consciousness we don’t even know if they exist.
This film is a good film. It was co-produced within Hungary and the eastern-European production values shine through. Any animations coming out of that part of the world in the 80s were horrifically strange and messed up. It was a bit of a thing to look for when I was growing up. I reckon everyone should watch this movie and begin to understand just how lucky you all are these days with your CGI and computer graphics. If a film can take you to its world but be low cost and production values then it is a good film. If you are engrossed and don’t notice the cheapness then it is a good film. It’s all very well these modern films being bursting with effects and good looking stuff but if your story just comes down to who has the biggest fists then it’s a touch pathetic.
One of the things I do everyday is check whether any apps on my phone need updating. I probably should turn the automatic feature on but I kinda like knowing which apps have updated. It gives me a feel for what is going on with the software on the phone. The other day I saw this on the app store front page:
Social Pressure Is Bad
Everything is awful at the moment and then I see something like this app store front page.
Hey, aren’t you doing what everyone else is and learning a fantastic new hobby? You are a loser if you’ve not got anything new. What a waste of space you are and a shame to the whole human race.
I Parish
I reckon that if you are just about managing to stay sane at the moment then you are doing very well. I know the last four years have taken a huge toll on me. The Brexit vote, Trump, Johnson, SARS-Cov-2, Black Lives Matter. The whole world seems insane and while there are definitely baddies out there so many people seem to really like what they are doing. The only way to stay sane at the moment is to limit the amount of information going into my head and make sure that I do the best I can for me and my family and friends. I take joy in the simple things. And I’m one of the lucky ones. I have a job, a house, a family. Imagine if your world has started to fall out from under your feet? How must all those people be feeling? We are going to have a massive mental health problem.
This advert / article or whatever the fuck it is just adds more pressure to everyone. It’s stupid. I understand what they are trying to say they are just saying it in a bad way. I’ve taken to looking at phone stuff that tries to avoid most of the news. I will peruse the headlines in the morning and then try to stay away from the rest of it. Nothing really surprises me anymore about the world.
They are always practising. If you want people to do their jobs in extreme stress then they must always practice. That’s what this RAF A400 Atlas was doing at Biggin Hill yesterday. I was looking at 360 Radar because something interesting flew over or I heard something interesting fly over. I then noticed this A400 practising approaches at Biggin Hill. To get home from there the Atlas would have to either fly low over the Cities of London and Westminster or head out over me keeping a low level to avoid the approaches for City Airport. It headed out to me.
Atlas Fly By
I rushed to get my camera and headed outside performing a lens change while walking. I got out just in time and saw the A400 pretty much fly over my house and head north to go home. These guys tend to practise approaches to unfamiliar airports but normally at other military airfield where the noise and sight isn’t that bothersome. This year they have been doing plenty at civilian airports such as Edinburgh, London City, and Biggin Hill. This means the pilots and crew are used to going new places. This is so that when there’s a massive need for moving people to decent hospitals they can fly them for Covid treatment. Either that or they’ve been told to look good by the government. I’m quite convinced that the weekly Chinook flight through London is a “show of force”, a reassurance to the population that the boys in blue are there and ready.
This communication follows Odd in a view of what’s going on with my website. This isn’t an interesting place, as I wrote on the home page nine years ago it is just a place for my ego and my thoughts which mostly aren’t pretty! I have found that trying to construct arguments for this site has helped me elucidate my reasoning where my “in head” arguments tend to be more: well, that seems the right thing to do. Why someone would try to login to my website is beyond me, maybe they want control to direct all my readers to spam or to be able to inject some ransomware? Who knows.
139.5.242.87
This IP address has tried to enter the control area of this website 21 times in the last week. It’s interesting, but I don’t know why. Maybe I’m in the wrong business? This is all I know about them using my limited resources. No doubt there’s much more out there somewhere and if I could be bothered.
City: Delhi Region name: Delhi Country name: India ◉ Latitude: 28.650406 ◎ Longitude: 77.23721 org: Excitel isp: Excitel
87.119.178.66
I wonder where this one comes from? City: Tallinn Region name: Harjumaa Country name: Estonia ◉ Latitude: 59.433 ◎ Longitude: 24.7323 org: Elisa Eesti isp: Elisa Eesti
47.75.186.204
This one tried to login 19 times in a two minute window sometime last week.
IP address: 47.75.186.204 City: Ningbo Region name: Zhejiang Country name: China ◉ Latitude: 29.878204 ◎ Longitude: 121.5495 org: Alibaba isp: Alibaba
It would appear that these bots try to login using common login names a few times and when they get refused they move on to another poor soul who runs WordPress. I do wonder if I’ll get properly hacked soon. Time to run some back up software.
I recently had to upload a photograph to a website for a photographic ID pass thing. I had already cropped the digital image to upload and then I noticed the website’s insistence that the photograph be <=40kB. Now, that’s not very big at all, especially when you consider that my cropped photo was about 150kB. So I resized the picture until it was just below 40kB. Then I uploaded it.
But.
Nope. The dimensions were incorrect! The photo had to be between 3.5 and 4.5 cm tall. Now, I ask you what does this mean? I’d already got the photograph to be within the correct size with respect to data but now I had to make sure it was the correct size in terms of cm. But, it depends how many dots per inch you are using. There was no information about the dpi the photocard people were using. It just had to be guessed!
Who does that these days? Who specifies a “paper size” for an image when you upload it? This was a classically terrible piece of web design made for bureaucrats who don’t understand what your average person understands about images and sizes. It was crazy. Do they not have an algorithm to just print the image to a particular size depending on the largest dimension? It was a frustrating ten minutes messing around with uploading files and cropping images along with resizing the image. What started off as a good detail photograph ended up almost pixelated.
Here’s a strange thing: this website has been hacked twice. Once in 2016 and once in 2020. Someone managed to insert some code into the php that meant whenever I looked at the site it looked and behaved normal but to everyone else it took you off to a bad place. I’m not sure why they would target me, there are only about three people who regularly read these pages, I don’t have a massive audience. I would imagine that I wasn’t deliberately targeted but these people just keep trying with any website they find using automated processes. Every now and then they get this site and attempt to login or use a WordPress vulnerability.
Login Attempts
In the last week there have been 33 attempts to login to the admin area of this website. I honestly don’t know why. I don’t have any financial details of anyone in this site. It’s quite strange, why would they target little ol’ me?
Cuntries Blocked
These are the places that the attacks have come from recently. Turkey is a new one on me, mostly it seems to be Russia and China whenever I look. No real surprise there as both countries are engaged in massive online media attacks and pushing fake news to empower themselves. Both those countries see the long term. Just look at Brexit and Trump.
Fortunately this website has survived on the recent server and I have become quite good at knowing what to look for. I’m also better at backing up this website. I have, in the past, considered leaving this place and consigning Fooyah to the death-eather but I think I actually enjoy this place and it gives me a focus and a particular way to think about things. Thanks all for reading.
So, here we are. It’s nearly August and the world is still in a state of pandemic. In the UK you finally have to wear masks in shops and the USA is slowly burning down as they struggle with the racism of the last four hundred years. Not that the UK is in the clear on that, hopefully there will be recognition over the next few years of how this country is built on the misery and murder and enslavement of the many.
I think I need to get out and use my camera. I shall do so this week at some point. I feel I could do with a change of scenery, something nice to see or at least somewhere else to be. I am not going to go anywhere special and I am convinced that the opening up of the country is going to cause massive health issues – while at the same time I am aware that this is about trying to reduce the overall risk to health from lockdown – or at least I would like to think that the government are intelligent enough to think that way but I don’t think they are.
Flight Sim Set Up
This is my current flight sim set up. I’ve got a Saitek HOTAS system and an Android tablet for displaying instruments along with using the phone as a moving map display. On screen is a Grumman Goose with turboshaft engines.
Rochester Castle
I went for a bike ride and decided to see Rochester Castle. The ride involved a national cycle route and was actually quite enjoyable. On the way to Rochester I followed the course of the valley of the river but the return journey was completed by heading over the top of the Downs.
“circa”
I met Penguin for a meal at The Bell. This is our usual meeting place and we both decided that the precautions put in place would be ok. The pub had set itself up really well and we ate outside. It appears that the manager now knows us and is happy to order the food for us which means there’s more time to catch up. I took this photograph, not because I was “out”, but because the sign says “circa” 1393. The circa part of that amused me immensely. Hopefully by the end of next week I will have some better tales to tell. I could always get some more album reviews completed!
Sometime last year I managed to run home from work and then the following day run in to work. This I did once. Mostly because I lost the fitness bug and also because I became mentally unable to do much. I might have written about it somewhere within these pages but I can’t remember and I’m not going to search. I wanted to get more exercise and try to lose some mass but I wasn’t in the right frame of mind. Earlier this calendar year I was feeling bad about the environment and how much we have messed up the future of this world for my children’s generation. I think the Extinction Rebellion demonstrations really got me thinking. So, I decided maybe I should ride a bike to work. I’d save a little on petrol, use less fossil fuel and keep fit. I decided I would investigate a bike.
Then. The world blew up. I was working from home and there didn’t seem to be a reason to suddenly investigate a bike. Once my routine had settled I started looking at bikes online and getting advice from friends. Would you believe it? Every fucker was buying a bike for something to do. It would appear that walking or running was too hard work for them and loads of people got the biking bug. I couldn’t buy a bike. I still planned to though. Mind you, this also meant getting a shed that would fit the bike as I don’t have a garage or anything like that to store the machine.
A few weeks ago I checked a local bike shop’s website and THEY HAD STOCK. Well, I was browsing really, not that bothered about buying at that point, but if I didn’t order something then I would be waiting another few months so I pressed “add to basket”, added some accessories and then waited for my delivery date. It took about 8 days for the bike to be in shop. I guess that’s not so bad. It’s very easy to forget that in this world some things you have to wait for, we are so used to everything being there right now. The next issue was a bike carrier for the car. In case I wanted to take the bike to the other end of the country and to move small bikes around. My car, Bora Horza Gobuchul, is a stupid shape and so I had to spend quite a bit on a bike carrier. Having now used it, I’m not sure I would take bikes on a long journey but it functioned well.
On delivery day I was persuaded to buy a year’s maintenance plan for the bike. I have no idea if that was good value for money but it seemed sensible. I haven’t maintained a bike, ever. Even when I was young all I did was make sure the tyres were at the correct pressure. I never really cleaned a bike or did any other type of maintenance. Pretty similar to my motorcycle history too, washing bikes was something other people did. The bike now rests in my dining room and will eventually live in the shed, but as you probably know, there is a seven week delivery time for a shed!
Commute Vehicle
My observations on the first ride I had in over twenty years was that it was not a smooth ride. I did a little tarmac but mostly footpaths across fields which are fine to run on but cycling caused arse issues. I was being bumped all over the place and I did wonder if rear suspension would have been sensible, then I realised that the front suspension didn’t seem to be doing much. A even cycled down the North Downs on a footpath that I normally run and I found that a little scary as I had to keep the brakes on the whole time and was convinced I was going to hit the gate at the bottom of the track. I’ll have to try again soon.
On another ride with other people it turned out that the level of comfort was much better because we weren’t travelling so fast. The bumps in the footpaths seemed levelled out with a lower speed and perhaps there’s a lesson for me. I will have to try another ride soon across some tracks and see if I can go slower. I’m not convinced I will be able to, we all have our natural riding speed I reckon.
I’ve completed a practice commute, to see how sweaty I get and to check out the route. I got very sweaty. I’ll have to plan cooling down time and somehow work on the logistics of shirts and clothes which will be ferried in the car on days that I can’t use the bike. I’m also slightly worried about being able to see in the darker months but will figure that out when it happens. I’ve got a good head torch I use when running so maybe I can fit that to the bike helmet? Who knows? Plenty of time to think about it.
I actually have quite enjoyed discovering new stuff. More paths further from home. There’s plenty to explore and further to travel. I’m looking forward to it all. Except the cars.
