Thingomy.co.uk

… when you are taking a walk in a park, look up and notice the jpeg artifacts in the clouds

Well, it’s been a while since I did a proper update. since the christmas holidays I have had the awesomeness/annoyance of Beltane — again.

some of my results are here:

http://www.thingomy.co.uk/gallery/main.php/v/BFS/Beltane09/

others can be found on gallery.beltane.org

I had a more sucsessfull shoot that i’ve ever had at an event, and am really pleased.

On other matters, I have moved to Liverpool. 2 very good friends of mine (Engel and Rochelle) were moving down, and had spare space, at the same time as my flat lease was running out, so it seemed just as sensible as moving locally. Coupled with better employment prospects, and a fresh start, it’s all good.

there are some pics of the house here

In hind sight, even after a couple of weeks, Edinburgh didn’t really seem to have a lot going for it.

If anyone want’s to come visit, we have a spare bed, give me a buzz — I’m in L25 — Hunts Cross.

There appears to be a bloke in america with the same name as me who has started up a fairly active blog. He seems to have only one topic, and our views differ substantially on it:

http://jrpeterson.vox.com/library/post/right-church-right-time-right-message.html?_c=feed-atom

It’s odd the kind of things you find lingering around on the intermitenets at times.

Small rant about environmental issues — please disregard if you so desire.

I have thought long and hard on the question of why boats and trains are better than plains and cars, and I have come up with the following.

Currently we have only 2 forms of energy that are even remotely sustainable, neither of which is perfect:

Wind/tide/wave/solar/river renewable stuff — these are perfectly decent secondary sources, but aren’t really suitable as a main power source for the worlds energy needs, there needs to be another energy source that acts as a primary when the weather isn’t right etc. So it’s awesome, but only solves part of the problem.

Nuclear — if managed properly it can be clean, reasonably safe, and only has one real issue: waist — it’s a bugger to get rid of safely, and is dangerous for hundreds of years.

I’m confident that at some point in the future another form of energy is going to be discovered, and it’s going to be clean, cheap, and usable, with no real side effects — I’m holding out for fusion, but it could be anything.

There is one thing that is very likely — this new clean form of energy is going to be big, clumsy, not very portable and produce bulk power from a static site. The most efficient forms of power currently have these characteristics also gas and oil power stations can be cleaner that mobile counterparts as they have nothing outside economics to stop them installing filters to remove soot and CO2. It’s much simpler to build an efficient machine if you don’t also have to worry about making it small, light, and portable.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that power stations *do* produce less pollution per unit than a car engine — I’m saying they *could* produce less pollution.

The upshot of all this is that I believe the bast way to organise power production and usage is to centralise it and transport the power to where it’s used. This allows of efficient inclusion of secondary sources like renewables; it allows use of power from efficient power stations; it also allows any newly developed bulk power production systems to be included easily.

There are many modes of transport in use today, I would like to draw comparisons between 4 of them: car; train; plane and boat.

Cars can currently be powered by hydrogen or battery, neither of these solutions as of yet have reached critical mass, and so are not yes usable by the general public, but tey will be good once they get there, they should be used whereever posible. Otherwise cars are very ineffiecient — they haul large amounts of metal and around and have high inefficient drag, regularly to transport only 1 person. Cars are the only reasonable way to move around in certain situations, like in rural areas and when moving goods etc, so should not be made extinct but were possible their use should be reduced dramatically.

Trains on the other hand have been shown to be feasible to directly electrify — the UK east coast mainline of over 600km in length was electrified in 1990, this proves that electrification works, at least on high traffic lines (where it’s most important). They also shift huge numbers of people with much less energy than cars (not to mention the safety improvements introduced by only using properly trained drivers)

Planes (at least short haul planes) are ridicules articles of excess and illustrate the impatience of modern culture, there is simply no way (at least until some huge leaps in technology come round) to make them efficient and clean. Due to their critical issues with weight and size, they are very tricky things to build power sources for, especially given that virtually all modern aircraft are powered by jet engines, which directly turn petroleum products into forward thrust; running it off hydrogen (assuming that someone manages to find a way to store the stuff) may be doable, but I can’t see it happening soon; regardless it’s a huge redesign. If someone tries to run a jet engine off something that produces electricity, they will become unstuck very quickly.

Boats, are exceedingly dirty at the moment, a cargo ship is said to produce about as much pollution as a whole city’s power stations even while idling in port. This may well be, but if designing a ship, adding a few hundred tons, and adding more space for a new propulsion system is a slight inconvenience, but little more. This is of little help in the short term, but it may be in the long term. Planes are much nicer things than ships for long haul, it’s no longer worth sitting around on a boat for sever weeks to get somewhere, the concept would be laughed at, so planes are here to stay for anything intercontinental.

None of this says anything very interesting until we look at were we are going next — in a hypothetical world (which could well turn out to be this one) where we discover usable clean fusion power in the next few years, but it turns out to be a colossal warehouse sized article covered in lead, and borderline financially infeasible, we need to get as much of our energy usage connected to it as possible to make it financially feasible. If a high proportion of our intercity transport is electric train, we are already there on the transport front — trams would help inside cities where there is enough individuals to justify it. in this scenario, if we don’t move to electric trains wholesale now, we would fail to move over to fusion power.

As for boats, they still aren’t very useful, until fusion is miniaturised to the point that it will fit on a ship, in which case we are good to go. This concept has already been proven by the implementation of nuclear warships. I don’t see a fusion reactor fitting inside a plane any time soon however.

Sustainable energy is a jigsaw puzzle, the whole jigsaw has to be built in order to be fully sustainable, currently we don’t have all the pieces, but we can’t wait until we have all the pieces, we need put real effort into building now. If we don’t show a willingness to build, we may never find all of the peices as there may not be enough demand for them until the rest of the puzzle is finished. A part finished puzzle is better than none at all, we already have wind farms providing some of the worlds power, the more of this we get the better.

using a car instead of a train (all else being equal) with the excuse “it’s oil that’s being burned anyway” is wrong on every level.

How I believe people should act, and how I personally try to act, is to walk or use trains where possible, falling back on buses otherwise, with cars being a last resort. I try to use ferries instead of planes, and only use planes where no real alternative exists.

What I believe governments should do:

Implement charges on routes where there are good alternatives (congestion charges on commuter roads, taxes on flights); this money should be channeled into improvements to alternative transport: like park and ride systems, train infrastructure, sensible tram systems, fare subsidies etc. The congestion charges should be set at a level where it is genuinely more effective for commuters or holiday makers etc to use a train/bus/walk etc than it is to use a car.

Otherwise incentivize and encourage people to do the right thing where possible. This should include improving the reliability of public transport.

Never should we get into a situation where we are incentivizing the government to slow down development because they are making money off taxes or disincentive schemes (as they have done with smoking taxes) — all revenue made should be immediately ring-fenced, and carefully directed to ensure there are no disincentives to development. This should include immediate ring-fencing of all fuel duty.

Reduce influence of stakeholders other than those with good intent — this would include very carefully and radical treatment of oil companies etc to ensure that they will not benefit from the hold up of any development of clean energy they have any influence over (including through political presure).

Do as much as is feasible to develop good energy production, close down dirty coal stations and move toward renewables where possible, backed up by the cleanest non renewable sources available, like nuclear or well managed oil.

Genuinely cooperate with each other to make sure that the entire planet is doing what it can on these fronts

I arrived. The trip out to the middle of nowhere to visit my aunt was good, I enjoyed it. The travel was not really a problem either.

I was lying down in my bunk in a 4 person shared cabin on the boat, thinking about putting down my sudoku and going to sleep; every 5 seconds everything was going mostly weightless for a couple of seconds.

One of the other blokes from the cabin came in and rummaged about with his stuff for a minute or so, I siad hi, then he went to the bathroom. There was a short delay, then some unpleasant gurgly sloshing sounds. “oh here we go” I say to my self. I was pleased to find I’d just solved all the 5s.

There was another sequence of gurgles, then he oaged out and muttered something about seasickness, not using the bathroom for a bit and getting something form somewhere; he wandered out. By now I was having a great deal of trouble with a 7 and a 9 in the top right block, owing at least in part to the distractions.

5 minutes later a bloke in a uniform wanders in and takes a look in the bathroom; wanders out an comes back with an empty bucket. I was as bemused by his antics as the 7s and 4s in the bottom row. There was some clacking and fidgeting for a bit, and another bloke in a uniform joined him. “If we take that bit off, we may be able to get at it from there” one said to the other, followed by “nah, that’ll have to be done by the engineers in the morning”. I found a 3 in the bottom corner.

In the end it was announced that the guy had thrown up in the sink, and managed to block it, I fail to understand how, anyway, we were moved to another cabin with functional sink. The soduku was finished the next day.

Walking around a boat like that is really fun, as the environment drops to nearly zeroG, and then moves sideways, traction is really quite tricky to maintain let alone balance.

I’m going to be travelling down to Edinburgh this week, and will be stopping by Aberdeen on the way for a couple of days.

I will have no access to anything internet in the meantime. my mobile should work just fine, but it wouldn’t rely on it. It should be good to get away from everything for 2 days.

Packing is done and took about a couple of hours — i’m getting good at that. However packing my data took significantly longer. it seems that they just don’t write software to be portable, even well designed software seems to have considerable issues with you trying to move data from one machine to another.

As for the ferry tonight, it lasts 14 hours, and it’s going to be rather rough, although it should not bee horrific.

The project to map Lerwick in the Shetland Isles off Scotland for OSM continues.

A few months ago, a company called Cloudmade provided me with the use of a gps receiver for the purposes of this project.

Having had someone I know driving around the area for months with the GPS set, virtually all of which would have happened anyway regardless of the presence of the GPS set.

(you may have to link through to the main post page to view the images properly)

There is a lot of data, about 300MB in total, and filtering it was not simple, (I spent a good 3 days up to the oxters in batch files, and even cygwin, thanks to Heliomass for help on that bit) but now most of the gibberish bits are gone, and the data is mostly clean and good. You can see some fully edited data here (please view full size, it really is awesome):

I’ve done a load of work tracing out the roads from the data, there is still some small bits missing, but nothing major. I’m about half way through the process of classifying and labelling everything, below shows just how bad it was before and my progress about half way through:

The town centre — notice that there are roads in entirely the wrong place in the old version:

Wider view of the town, notice a load of new housing on the periphery:

Unfortunately the system takes a while to update, so my last day’s work or so is missing, to follow the updates as they happen, view these links:
narrow
wide

Merry Christmas to everyone.

I’m not really sure what the above statement really means anymore, I’m sure you all have your own interpretations; and to anyone that does actually hold it as a significant religious festival, you have my utmost respect.

Anyway, my computer is now back up, thanks to exceedingly fast delivery of a new PSU, I’m not even sure what courier was responsible, but it was ordered on the evening of the 21st of December from OCUK, and it arrived today (24th). I don’t think I even paid for any special delivery options (except for the mysterious £15 “you live on an island, so we’re going to screw you” charge that all these places give).

Anyway, after it’s encounter with an unfortunate lightning strike, a new PSU, and it’s as happy as it ever was. I’m extremely lucky that the old PSU took the shock of the strike, and did it’s job, it could have been a very different story, it was not a cheap machine in the first place.

So useful tip for the day: don’t skrimp on the PSU.

Eye start aff wi gud gear; decent ledders, an’ heal underwear.

I’m lack in the land of the midday moon.

I advanced the boat trip was advanced by a day at the last minute because of the weather forcast, and was quite sensible, the day before I went and the day after I went were both canceled. As it happens I got a pretty good trip.

My computer has been fried by lightning up here, so if anyone is emailing you will get a very slow response. I’m using my mother’s somewhat elderly laptop, it has a duff E key, so typing is intermitently a problem. There are bits on order, with any kind of luck, I should be back up by new yearish.

Don’t even think about texting me, the coverage is patchy up here to the point that they frequently fail to get here: if you don’t get a reply within a day, send another one, keep going until you get somthing back. Oh and there are only 2 rooms in the house that I get any reception at all, so I won’t even have the thing on me.

Other than that, all good here.

This weekend was very interesting, I managed to get a ticket to the London Strobist Seminar myself and a mate went down to see what we could learn.

For those unaware, stobism is the idea of creating studio quality lighting using portable camera strobes; it’s about learning their strengths and weaknesses and working with them.

The results were spectacular, I have a lot of information, I don’t fully know how to use it until I’ve practice a great deal though… If anyone is willing to stand in front of a camera while a I blind them for couple of hours taking pics, I would be really grateful of the practice.

There were some really interesting conversations going on about photographers working for free. It turns out there are a great deal of pitfalls to this, some of which I’ve already fallen into, mainly in 3 camps:
taking work away from professional photographers that are already struggling (this can be debated, and I’m still not sure about it);
becoming known as a free photographer, to the point that no one is willing to pay money for anything you do;
issues to do with self confidence and self worth.

I’m in the process of rethinking my stance on this area of photography (money, copyright, terms and conditions etc) to produce a policy that’s workable and sustainable, it’s all really heavy stuff that I wish wasn’t necessary, but sadly it is.

One thing is quite clear though, it’s much better to work for non-monetary value: goods or even better, favours. So if anyone wants a photographer and is willing to repay me in the form of money or anything else that’s useful to me, I’m interested.

The trains on the way down were a bit of a joke, our train was scheduled for 1700, but due to an overhead lines fault was canceled, we only got to bed at 3am (with a 7am start…). I won’t go into details, but it was not fun, I’m just glad we weren’t the poor buggers that had to stand all the way to London.

I have just signed up for a 1 day seminar in London next month on photographic lighting — more details after the event.

I have also solved (i think) my geotagging problems for once and for all — unless some small details stops me.

(If you don’t know what a geotag is, you can stop reading now btw)

The tool that does it is found here: http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/

It’s a lightroom plugin, stores the data with the images as they are being developed, and without undue stress adds the data to all jpeg exports. it’s not fully polished yet, but it has few enough wrinkles that it seems to be up to the job.

The same bloke that does it also does a flickr upload plugin that seems to work really well. There are other goodies in there too.

Unfortunatly I have yet to find a solution that I can get working that will export to ftp, the irony being that the functionality is already in lightroom only I can get it to not upload a bunch of html stuff with the images.