Tuesday 12 March 2024

A visit to Magdalen and Elias

We are uneasily aware that Miranda's time at Magdalen grows short. Here are some pictures from a visit for Friday Evening Prayers, Formal Hall, and a visit to the Ashmolean.

The cloisters, by the Old Library stair. I quite like "light in the cloisters" too, but I can't inline every one.

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And above the archway, just visible in the picture above:

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Addiscombe's walk. Alas I didn't find fritillaries, but Miriam did. Don't miss Lewis's poem.

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Nearly at the end of the Walk:

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Funeral pall of Henry VII (Cloth of Gold):

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Dutch tiles; note Noah's ark.

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St Catherine.

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Refs

* Ashmolean: Egypt (2023/12)

Cezanne: a trip to London (2023/03)

Book review: The Load of Unicorn

PXL_20240312_200052445~3The Load of Unicorn is a children's historical novel written and illustrated by Cynthia Harnett. It was first published in 1959, as wiki will tell you.

My interest is in remembering it from childhood; the title, but not the story. And not with this cover; perhaps, the Puffin version shown here. Recently I bought it from Oxfam, and "gave" it to Miranda as a Christmas-present-loan, but have it back now.

The story is of Caxton, and printing-vs-scriveners, and of the Morte d'Arthur. It is, as it appears, a children's book, but pleasant enough for an adult to read.

Tuesday 5 March 2024

Film review: Princess Mononoke

Christ's BCD Princess Mononoke is an animated Studio Ghibli thingy. It is quite good; the animation is mostly quite interesting with nice effects, the storyline carries you along. There is no great depth to it I think but that's not a problem.

The demons and gods are Shinto-ish: spirits-of-place, powerful but not all-powerful, mostly unburdened by speech. They can be defeated by Heroes but normal mortals turn away in fear.

There is no clear moral. Gunz-are-bad starts off looking like the moral but that kinda fades. Possibly respect-nature. And possibly, "Shinto", though I don't know enough about it to be sure.

The wriggly-eels around the demons is genuinely disturbing, so well done for that. Some of the isn't-the-forest-beautiful stuff was a little cloying though.

Sunday 25 February 2024

Book review: The Thousand Emperors

PXL_20240211_174428960~2 Wham bam but ultimately forgettable sci-fi space opera; indeed, I have largely forgotten it in the week or two since I read it. And in a way I wasn't paying that much attention when I did read it; it is lightweight stuff and doesn't really repay your attention, you start to notice all the faults and just the lack of umm I'm not sure; detail, perhaps.

Having said that, I did enjoy reading it in a lightweight fluffy kind of way.

Tuesday 13 February 2024

New watch: Garmin Forerunner 55

My poor old 620 - new some time in 2018, though as far as I can see I didn't blog it - is fading. The battery now struggles to last four hours, and the strap is going (yes I know that at least could be replaced). But darling daughter has a Forerunner 55 which seems quite good, and is "only" £150, about £100 less than the 620. So I bought one.

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It has no touchscreen. This slightly jars, because I've gotten used to the button-screeen combo of the 620. But meh, I'll get used to the new thing. As my pic shows, the 55 (top) is marginally thinner than the 620. It has built-in heart rate, and when I trial that against the heartrate strap of the 620 I'll update this for how they compare. The new has a slightly elastic softer strap which I think I will like.

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The new screen looks OK, but isn't fancy like the Fenix stuff. I'm planning, per this summer's experience, to use my phone for trekking from now on.

Example trace here. HR 151 seems dubious with a simple cycle to work. Now I have an hour's comparison on the erg:

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That's mostly good, but the blue (55) fails to pick up the start of the piece that the orange (620) does. And that's me starting up at 1:55 for a few hundred meters before settling to 2:00; and I recall seeing the 55 fail to leap up. About five minutes later it does, and once up it is accurate enough. Note that the 620 was set to "smart recording" so since there is no distance, only puts in a point if my HR changes.

And here, from an outing, is pace. I was wearing the 55 on my wrist, obvs, and I don't think that does the pace any favours, since my wrist is whizzing back and forward. Actually, if I look at a close-up, I do wonder if the 620 is over-smoothing. This may bear more examination.

pace

And again the HR differs, with the 620 being more likely. I'm coming to think that the 620 is more of a gold standard and the 55 just a convenience.

Having decided that I'll keep the old watch, at least for rowing, I decided to get a new strap. Pic. The one I got is: Fit-power Garmin Forerunner 235/235Lite Watch Band, Soft Silicone Replacement Watch Band for Garmin Forerunner 235/220 / 230/620 / 630/735 Smart Watch.

New HR belt

Soon after this, my 620 started giving wacky readings (see e.g. this erg). So I bought a new belt: Garmin 010-12883-00 HRM-Dual Heart Rate Monitor for £45.

Thursday 25 January 2024

Drone: DJI Mini 2 SE

PXL_20240126_132139601 So, I finally bought a drone. DJI Mini 2 SE: £269, plus £50 for a spare battery, direct from DJI. These are some notes.

The CAA's Registration requirements for drones and model aircraft tells me I don't need to get a flyer ID, but I do need an Operator ID: I am in the "below 250g - not a toy - with camera" class I think. Having done that, my operator GBR-OP-MD2CPWDBCK93.

First steps

Open the packaging. Rm tabs from device (propellor confinement, gimbal guard, battery etc). The battery tab says rm the battery to charge, but I don't have a separate charger, so just plug in a USB C cable. Read quick start guide. Guide semi-implies connecting control unit to drone to charge. But don't; I think it just means charge both. White lights count up on drone, 1 and 2 (of four). Green count up on control, 1 and 2 (of four) now after ~15 mins up to 3. It all gives the impression of being nicely solidly built. Control unit has two joystick controls to screw in, do that.

After about an hour: controller fully charged, lights have gone off. Press "power" briefly and all four light up.

After about two hours: drone counting up to 3 lights now. Note that I may have the drone on a low-power USB source.

DJI Fly App

For unclear reasons the Android (but not iPhone?) App isn't in the Play Store, it's a separate download. Do that, giving it permission to install.

Connect controller to phone

You need to connect the controller to the phone, via an USB-to-USB cable. But! Not just any cable; you need to use theirs, and watch out, because the one inserted in the well is I think for iPhone. The one I wanted - USBC-to-USBC - is supplied, but you need to swap it in. If you were to be so stupid as to for example take the thing home and forget that one cable and then use a "straight" USBC-to-USBC then it doesn't work; the phone thinks the controller is trying to charge it.

Anyway, having done that your phone connects to the controller, you turn the drone on. This is non-intuitive: since a brief press on the power button shows you the battery status, to turn on you do a brief press, then a long press. Same for the controller. It then beeps gently to itself and stretches its motors or something. The controller then connects to the drone, with which it is pre-paired.

Mine then wanted to do a firmware update, which took about a minute. Then the drone needs turning on again, and then I can see myself from the drone's camera. Woo.

Watch this space...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IspTbZSBmi8 looks like a nice tutorial.

OK, so it turns out that actually flying it is fairly easy, compared to setting it up :-).

I started out in our (small, enclosed) back garden. If you press the "take off" button it, err, takes off. Then you can press the landing button. Or, you can just press "down"; it will "stop" at about 1' off the ground then descend bleeping, and land. And so on to creeping about the garden. You get eight degrees of freedom: with the left joystick, up / down / rotate left or right; with the right, forward / back / translate left or right. Instead of the takeoff button you can just startup the motors and move up.

Then I went out by the river. Vid #1 is basics: take-off to head height, forward-backward, up-down, and so on. Vid #2 is Wesus, and shows the zoom, as well as some incompetent panning and adjusting. Vid #3 is almost interesting, our Chesterton 4x. I had the max-height set to 15m for all this.

Taking off and landing on grass seems fine - some of the tutorial vidz show people with flat helipad type things.

Note for idiots like me: when recording video, "not recording but ready to start" is a large red dot. Whereas "currently recording" is a smaller red square. I'm glad I finally worked that out.

Another note for idiots: don't forget the SD card. It will still record, but lower quality, to your phone.

A bit more

I went out early-for-me on Thursday and got some more vidz. Sadly some of the best footage wasn't captured because I got out of phase with record on / off, duh. Here is Queens' women. I discover that it is possible to get flight info - height, location - as a subtitle, but it is difficult to burn those subtitles onto the video; unless I find an easier way I won't bother. The VLC media app displays the subtitles; here's an example.

qweens


Battery life


DJI claim 31 minutes and that seems broadly accurate. One battery did me a division. I think that might be "hover time"; I think I noticed that if I went off and chased people down, it would eat into the life.

Gimbal


Sometimes, before takeoff, I hear an odd noise and the drone decides the gimbal is stuck. Just picking it up and poking it gently seems to fix this. Ah, and this is because it is checking the gimbal is free to move; if you make it take off from the box, often there isn't enough space. Solution: just hold it while it is powering on.

Sport mode


It has three speed modes: cinematic, normal and sport. I quickly tired of cinematic, which is slow. Today I discovered that "normal" is rather slow for recording rowing, so switched to "sport". If you do this, it warns you that it may tilt a bit more, and something-something-gimbal.

Files not closing


I notice that if I turn the drone off without turning off "record", the file doesn't close properly, and won't play. The solution (per this forum) is just to put the card in the drone, and power it on and then off. Well it worked for me.

Sound / screen recording


I have yet to master this, but: one piece of the puzzle is that I have the Nova launcher installed, which changes some Android defaults. So to enable landscape mode recording, I need to go into the Nova launcher settings and say "auto rotate".

Right, I have made this work. Hurrah. Firstly, make sure screen rotate is setup unless you want veeery teensy video. Second, the screen capture files are big: about 3G for ~10 mins; and I think it would like some buffer space too; so I went back and cleared out 15G for it to move in. Even then it sometimes stops earlier than it should. Here for example is Lents W3 (silent) vs Lents W3 (sound).

The with-voiceover vidz are more popular than the without, by a factor of about 4 to 1 measured by Youtube watch-count, so from Thurs on to avoid duplicating the stream, the drone-stored video is unlisted, but linked from the screen capture version.

To be clear, if that isn't, the drone-stored stuff is saved to SD card in flight, and is at whatever resolution the camera provides. The screencapture-with-sound version is stored on my phone via the radiolink to the drone, and is at whatever resolution Android and the DJI app decides to interpolate it to. I think it may also be subject to occasional lag / catch-up.

TODO: get CamFM on there too.

Your questions answered


Q: Can't W(M)C follow the racing further down the course with his drone?
A: Tricky. RF contact tends to degrade past about 500 m and risks losing contact past that. Not only does that lose the video feed it risks losing overall contact with the drone; and flying it without its feed is much harder. The theoretical range is much larger but I think the trees (and, I suspect I'm going to discover today, rain) get in the way.

Q: Is drone or cycling-with-GoPro footage better?
A: I don't know. What do you think?

Samples


Saturday 20 January 2024

Book review: Peril at End House

PXL_20240120_131905926~2 Another Christie / Poirot. Like the others it is OK; I am after all still reading these things. But I always finish them thinking them somewhat formulaic.

I won't tell you the plot but now I'm finished, it isn't clear to me how the wasp / bullet in the first "attempt" was produced by... errm well I suppose I am going to tell you the plot so don't read on if you don't want to know... by Nick. And having said that much, I can say that mixing in the evil Australian gold-diggers into the plot does muddy the waters nicely, although possibly straining coincidence a bit. Continuing, it seems odd that if Maggie really was affinanced to M. Seton, she did not make rather more of his death.