Bee-ing Gromit Hunting and .... a video

More Gromit hunting happened ! Oh and I also reopened that video editing thing ...

This was from Friday last week and it completed the tour. Pics ?

That's from the app and the Light as a Feather was the last one to visit. This was a harder trail than the ones before, there is a lot more gradient involved on that side of town. (Or it was a factor of not feeling that great when starting off).

It started off at Clifton Downs, with George Wallace before heading back into the area by Park Street. There are lots of pretty buildings there (and a Forbidden Planet for peeking at the geeky stuff).

If you looks real close, there's a Gromit in the sightline to the door.

Gromit of the day. A very bright Thermogromit. More sights of the day involved the Clifton Suspension Bridge :

Bridge ... and Bristol Hound Gromit.

More Bridge. From a considerably higher up position than the other picture. The bridge took 33 years to actually build in all (with a pause) and was completed after the death of the original designer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Here's more info (click for bigger as per usual).

I wrote after posting the picture for the last one : "What a long strange trip it's been." It's taken me to parts of Bristol I'd never have considered going to but enjoyed visiting, some parts I'll never go to again (bit rough) and some bits I will definitely look to check out more thoroughly in the future. Worth it. Would I do it again ? Probably not. I still have unfinished business with a couple of them where the shop they were in was closed when I got there.

That's the big comment that I've said before about this turn of Gromit Unleashed, a few too many were locked up behind doors after certain times of the day. Previously, access by the public was pretty much guaranteed.

You want the big pic ... There is a big pic ! Here we go :

Click for bigger again. At thumbnail size, it's pretty much just a jumble of random colour. Apologies for the slightly odd resolution, I was aiming for 1080p but for some reason, couldn't remember the other dimension. Oops !

Talking of 1080p ...

I've been in the video game video game again. This time it was a Warcraft video about one of the achievements. I actually quite enjoyed making it and I've been having the thoughts of doing more. The issues with that are varied but first ... the video :

I hope that doesn't autoplay. The last thing I want is that someone visits a website I'm responsible for and suddenly something starts blaring out with the sound.

Hope you like it ! Not sure if I'll make many more videos and definitely won't be giving up the day job as would be required for making one or two daily videos. Why is that ?

Ideas - the one above is pretty much a one-off. I wouldn't want to subject people to levelling videos. I started watching a much better video person than I (Tradechat !) and I couldn't stick with it. Let's play type series are good though, where you talk around the gameplay of a series like Battletech or XCom 1/2. The creativity comes from how you play the game and how you react to what's going on.

Time - this is the big one. For each video, there is a necessary production and set up time. For the 11.5 minute video above, it needed :
10 minutes or so of time around the recording time to get the character in the right place and to manage the recording software.
Multiple bits of software working together. This isn't actually an issue. I use nVidia's Shadowplay to record gameplay video and audio and Audacity to capture audio from my headset mic. I then use Magix Vegas to stitch them all together. I do it this way because it allows me to mute the voice audio when I sniffle or sneeze (v important) and it allows me to tweak the levels for betterness.
(words are being hard tonight)
Editing time - this needs at least the run time of the video, preferably at least double.
Rendering time. This is where Vegas takes what you produced and turns it into something suitable for uploading to Youtube. The 11.5 minute above took 46 minutes to render on my desktop or would have taken 29 minutes on my laptop. So I'd be doing rendering for further videos on the laptop. It's a very heavy cpu activity, so you wouldn't be able to capture more video while a first is rendering.
Upload time. It felt like this took a couple of hours on my 5Mbit/s line. The actual video was 1.45GB for 11.5 minutes.

I hope you like the video ! One person watched it and the feedback was "You need to make more videos". And that came from the person who got me caught on watching Twitch streams. Coming from the lovely HeyChrissa (link on the right), that comment gave me a huge happy feel.

Maybe more videos again at some point. I quite enjoyed making a video again and was looking for excuses to make more.

I've been buried in Stellaris for the long bank holiday weekend though (outside of a couple of Photoshop/Gimp projects!) and Stellaris was objecting to the Shadowplay capture software ... just pics from that.

But that's for another post ... First :

Building with pointy roof !

Gromit Hunting Laptop Taming Lego Jetting

Back at work now !

And feeling like I could do with another holiday. Let's see :

Thursday - I'd given up on getting the laptop working with my old Airport Express so I went out Gromit Hunting, with an objective of acquiring a Bluetooth based widget after finishing up the Gromit Hunting.

Success !

Champion indeed.

I'm up to 55 out of 67 Gromits, Feathers and Wallaces now and I'm hoping for cool, clear skies on Friday to finish them off. I've enjoyed hunting them down, although some are in odd places this time. Definitely places I won't be interested in going anywhere near if this event happens for a 4th time. Bristol has some very rough places. Not so rough obviously ... but places that you suspect could turn very rough if you visited at the wrong time. (I live in a good area).

More Gromits !

Or Feathers even.

There we go. That's the Marshal, keeping an eye on an idyllic setting at Chew Magna lake.

Yep. Not many more Gromits to go before I see them all. That's Friday afternoon's plan. Did I mention music ?

I'd previously used an Apple Airport Express to stream music from laptop to hifi across the network. A good bit of kit, it worked pretty well although it needed the network gear resetting occasionally because it would lose the connection.

Things got a lot worse with it last week, where it would drop the connection and the audio stream after a few hours play. Efforts to fix it (updated firmware and moving it to a socket where it had more air for cooling - it runs warm) were in vain and I started looking for an alternate solution. I actually had that solution in mind already and acquired a Logitech Bluetooth audio adaptor. (Disclosure note - I paid for it, it was not a freebie). I'd thoroughly recommend it. Sounds good, so easy to set up that they barely give you a manual (if you've set up anything on Bluetooth, you don't need a manual for this) and it's been rock solid. Ok, there have been one or two minor glitches in the audio but these are very infrequent and last less than a fraction of a second.

Yep. Recommended. It is a standalone bit of kit that picks up the audio from Bluetooth and routes it to any sound device via headphones or RCA phono cables.

A while ago, I read a hifi mag report on wireless speakers and I was very disappointed at the time. It didn't have anything that could turn your existing hifi into a wireless receiver. It just covered stuff that was massively overpriced and was pretty much a second hifi. They didn't cover the Bluetooth adaptors ... and didn't cover that Apple Airport Express. Hifi mag very interested in having you buy the kit that comes from the people who advertise with them and Logitech and Apple don't advertise with them much.

Be wary of the motives of people who tell you to buy certain things ... have they given that proper disclosure note to show their motives. I add short ones because a disclosure note is an FCA required thing ... at least I think it's FCA. It's required in any case. I might even need to add "#ad" somewhere.

Anyway. Laptop is mostly tamed. I just need to :

Acquire a decent email client as the standard Microsoft one is utter garbage. I would rather pay for a new one than use that for much longer. The big issue with it is that I can't see where to set up a series of archive folders. I'd routinely pop invoice emails into a "Business" folder and new account set up things into a "Computing" folder. And similar. There doesn't seem to be a clean way of archiving stuff you want to actually keep.

More picture !

Gosh this build turned into a bit of a marathon. Can you tell what it's going to be from that ? The undercarriage set up may give it away.

Lots of moving parts in this one, including an undercarriage that goes up and down plus an F35-like lift fan with doors above and below that open up. The canopy also lifts up and the twin tails go left and right.

It took a while (maybe 10 hours) and here it is :

A comment : "Wow it's huge !". Yep. It's a big unit. Sadly back up to full price now too ! (I got it for £30 off).

And I now have the craving for more lego. Haha !

Statue hunting leads to statuesque feelings

Week off for me !

I suspect with what my legs feel like after Friday, I'm going to need it to recover. Lots of Gromit hunting ....

Many, many Gromits.

I started on 16 when knocking off work on Friday and was up to 47 by the time I was ready to drag my weary body home. Oh and the phone desperately wanted charge too, I doubt whether it would have lasted to do the ones at the top of Park Street !

I especially liked the Oh Bollards in the middle, the Lego Gromit and the Gromitronic with the lights.

There's the Oh Bollards,

Lego Gromit and ...

Gromitronic with lots of flashing lights. The Feathertron 3000 was good too but was behind a very reflective piece of glass which I was having trouble getting a good angle on.

Too sunny ! It was a good day for Gromit Hunting on Friday. Despite skies threatening early (and a heavy rain shower while I was in work), it was dry throughout and more than a little warm. Forgot my water bottle again ! Oops.

I don't want to know how many miles I walked though. My legs haven't forgotten yet. I started feeling the effects of a calf strain halfway round .... which is where you ask if you've passed the point of no return (i.e. it's less distance to go forward than go back) and keep on going if you've gone past it. Which I had !

Bristol was putting its good side forward on Friday.

I could be living on one of those at some point in the future. Not one of those, my own barge !

The harbourside was being especially shiny.

Some lovely looking big ships out there today too.

The river, swollen by the earlier rain, was looking like chocolate. Hmmmm chocolate. The wind up there was also wanting to eat my hat. I didn't let it although I did have one hat chasing incident earlier in the day.

By the ending stages though, I was starting to question :

STAIRS ! Why did it have to be stairs ! I might have had maybe 10 miles in my legs at this point with a diversion to an off-trail Feathers and a little more diverting around.

I'm looking forward to a quiet week now with lots of music listening. The new laptop is arriving tomorrow, although I'm definitely not thanking the credit card company who I won't be advertising. They put a caution on my card due to me buying laptop. I don't make a habit of buying laptops ... It's odd that they flagged that and not the washing machine. Silly people. They should really check the IP address that a transaction is coming from and use that as their check if they don't have anything better to go on. In the event, it delayed another laptop related purchase and the card was declined at a coffee shop on Friday. Makes you think about switching to another card.

But ... Gromits ! How many so far ? Here's the map :

The green ones are the ones I've ticked off so far. Not yet for the red ones. Oh and there's a couple off the map to the SW as well.

I've quite enjoyed the Gromit Hunting this time around. It's getting me to see some things I never realised were around. It seems a little more commercial though. Last time with the Shauns, I think they were all outside and accessible 24/7. Most of them. This time though, more than a few are behind doors that get locked in off hours and Bristol centre still tends to run 9 to 5 for the shops. With the 2 at M Shed, I was lucky to get there when I did because I took those with only 2 minutes to go before they closed up.

Others were tucked away deep in shops. It seems a bit more commercially affected this time around which is a shame. They're in different places too, which is great. Means we get to see more.

Anyway, that's it from me for tonight. As always for these pictures, click for bigger. Except for the map and the montage, they're all full resolution from the camera. Camera has lots of pixels.

Status check - still not recovered from it yet, my legs still haven't forgiven me but at least I escaped the potentially more serious damage that was threatening from the calf strain midway around.

More later in the week perhaps !

PS Techie note on the montage ... Gimp crashed with the first attempt where I tried stitching them all together at native resolution. I had a feeling it would have trouble because the image was starting out at 4608x3456 pixels ... times by 30. So to make it work and make it easy, the working file was at the native picture resolution (4608x3456) and each picture was imported into its own layer. Layers make things very easy with the picture editing. Then ... divide each layer by 10x10 to make them 1/100th the size and memory requirement and use the grid align tools to arrange them in a 6x5 grid. Job done in 30 minutes perhaps. Oh and when crop the arrangement down to remove the extra unused space around the outside.

Shenanigans .... and a Cunning Plan

More Gromits !

This one is a very endearing Dearest Gromit out by the UWE Bower Ashton campus. Friday saw me enjoying a day off work and hoping for less traffic than usual to head around some more of the outlying Gromits ... with an ulterior motive.

It's still pretty hot and dry too, as demonstrated by the condition of the fields overlooking the Bristol skyline. This was quite close to the last Gromit, just up the hill in fact.

Gromit number 13 was Wild At Heart with Ashton Court providing the venue for an iced tea lunch.

A quick hop over to Ashton Gate football stadium saw me finding Rockin' Robin. Traffic wasn't too bad up to this point, outside of the usual idiots on the roads. We have a lot of those ....

The motorway was clogged up by something unmentionable so I ventured into the backroads to get to the next Gromit over by Puxton Place. This one is the Merry Go Gromit, with the venue offering a charming farm shop and an activities park I'm curious about. Traffic was nasty though, was very happy that I had the air con, especially after emerging into a blast of heated air.

It wasn't quite so bad on the way to Weston Super Mare, which was where the ulterior motive was located ... I'm going to be buying another laptop very soon. It'll be an Asus (not-sponsored) and the PC World offering was the favourite, courtesy of another discount. But ....

Bristol - none available
Weston - wasn't honouring the discount.

If the shop isn't being cooperative, walk away. Don't be in a rush to spend more money than you need to ! (As it happens, the offering at Scan has got its discount back and is a superior laptop).

Oh I ended up parking at completely the wrong end of the sea front. I believed the signs ! They said "Grand Pier, park there". And there was a mile between car park and Grand Pier. They were asking for money at the Pier so I didn't check it out (most of the seafront prices were inflated) but waiting outside was :

I thought a slightly sad looking Giggles. Now up to Number 16 of 67 ! And starting to tick off some of the trails which are collections of Gromits.

The next set will happen on Friday, which is a possible Cunning Plan time. It's expected to get cooler as the week progresses, which means the conditions will be well suited to the 7.5 mile walk which is the Gromit circle in town.

But ... there is that possible Cunning Plan. It's also the Bristol Balloon Fiesta this next weekend and the timings could be convenient to do part of the circle and then head to Fiesta. Or even do the whole circle and head there. I'll have to see the timings and how things work out. (Nightglow is at 6pm so I would want to aim to be there around 5pm to sample what's at the Fiesta.)

Oh and then there's also laptop ordering ... And a week off coming very soon ! I've been at the counting down the days stage for a little while now. Definitely looking forward to it.

Last word for today - it looks like Microsoft have broken something again in an update. The antimalware service was taking up a whole cpu core's worth of processing. I.e. the cpu % load was continuously between 25 and 30%, even after letting it do its business overnight. That heats the room up and makes other stuff perform badly.

I've now disabled it and put Avast antivirus on. Things like this shouldn't happen. It's a shame we're locked into the slavery to Microsoft products, they really don't know what they're doing any more and just unleash bad software on us. I'd describe that antimalware service now as .... malware.

Impossible Mission of Gromit Hunting Adventures

More Gromits have been found !

That's Cupid, the latest one from tonight. Very pink. Extremely pink. I actually drove past this one the other day but ... no pic, no claim ! And I don't use the phone when I'm driving :-). (There are exceptions).

Except for some downpours over the weekend and scattered downpours since, it's been very hot over here. Not as hot as a lot of places ... but a bit too hot for British buildings designed more to keep the heat in. So I've been holding off on the big Gromit Hunt that'll involve walks of around 7.5 miles in Bristol centre.

However ... I did have an excuse to do some driving (read - hiding in the car with the air con) to visit some of the outlying Gromits.

There's Pickles McPrickles over in Southmead. I just noticed that the poses of the Gromits are different. Bit tricky to find this one.

A quick hop over to the big open space of Blaise Castle :

I think there was more Castle too somewhere but I was parked in an awkward spot and needed to hustle !

Peek A Boo ! And a need to hide the little girl who was in shot. Gotta hide that from the internet due to the weird people.

(Bums of people retreating from shot are fine !)

A hop over to Thornbury where I found a book shop ... I didn't see much of my favoured scifi in there so I moved swiftly on. I had some time ... but not that much. And the rumbly belly was telling me to go eat too.

A very green Honeysuckle Rose keeping an eye on Thornbury's High Street.

Last one ! This one is an extremely colourful Toto residing for now in Winterbourne.

I'm at 11 now out of 67, with most of them in the city centre. More to come !

After Toto, the plan was to head back into almost the centre to what's become my favoured cinema over at Avonmeads. It's a pretty dead cinema (was just me plus 3 stranger people) which means minimal interruptions.

The film ? The latest Mission Impossible. These films just keep getting better and better. They are silly action movies but pull it off with great style. I thoroughly enjoyed this one. Recommended !

Book 23 Between Planets, between ..... taps ...

Short one tonight cos I'm behind on these book posts again !

Book 23 was Between Planets by Robert Heinlein, not one of his best. Not quite as bad as what Farnham's Freehold turned out to be (a great premise but went in a really bad and highly racist direction). But nowhere near the standard of some of his other books like Starship Troopers, Time Enough For Love and The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. Oh and Friday too. Friday is an exceptional roller coaster of a book, may have to read that one again.

This one follows young Don Harvey as he escapes Earth just at the .... spoilers redacted ... Ok. Less spoilers. The story is about attempting to get between Earth and Mars, to reach his parents .... while ending up in other areas of the solar system.

The books dates somewhat, as a book written in 1951 is missing much of the innovation that followed. That rarely matters in a Heinlein book though, he writes exceptional scifi about characters, political systems and the somewhat shady arms of enforcement (not necessary legal enforcement) that back up what the political systems are attempting to achieve.

One consistent factor in Heinlein books is that his characters have to survive by either application of force or they have to evade force being applied to them. And often his characters are on the wrong end of Who Has The Bigger Stick.

That's definitely the case in this one where our Don has to escape Earth mostly on his own resources and across the solar system definitely by his own initiative.

A bit of a slog this one, even for a 170 page story. I wouldn't recommend it but do check out the books above, plus a few more in the Lazarus Long sequences and the multiverse sequence. The Cat Who Walked Through Walls may well find itself in my reading list soon.

Oh ... the reason why I'm somewhat squeezing out this post is because I've already read Book 24. But that's one for another day.

Taps ?

Not that kind of tap.

I've been doing the plumbing again ... I think the mains water pressure has gone up over the weekend as a consequence to them fixing something and I believe that's too much for one of my old taps. It has been dripping ...

I have the replacement tap and know how to fix it but. The new pipes are the wrong size ! And I can't use the old pipes because they're brazed into the old tap !

Grr.

It has defeated me tonight but I shall return anew. With different pipes. I've left things in a state where there are no drips so the old taps will be good for a few more days. Water pressure is a bit low though.

And it's still too warm ! Also humid. Hopefully it'll cool down soon but after doing a little walk to Arnos Vale cemetary on Friday for another Gromit viewing :

That's number 6 for me, Dias De Las Perros. Oh ... after realising that my jeans are a little too heavy a material to go walking long distance in. Will have to investigate options before embarking on the very long walks.

Film was good too. I saw Skyscraper as the only person in the showing (Avonmeads is like that and it's why I keep going back there). I'd sum it up as enjoyable garbage. Dwayne Johnson does have a habit of making highly enjoyable films to watch. Sure, the plotline and background is complete garbage ... but they're fun to sit through and they cheer you up.

Mindless fun if you will and it set me up well for the weekend.

Gromit is Coming

I've been remembering 3 years ago today.

Not 2nd July 2015 but a more generalised period around that time. It was the time of the Great Shaun Hunt :

I managed to get around 37 of the various Shauns dotted around Bristol, I'd have liked to do more but I hadn't quite recovered enough at that point.

It's curious to remember back though. I was comparing Shaun Counts to a few people. Can't remember how I did compared to their Shaun Counts. I know that the treasure that is Snow Queen managed to see the lot. I ran into the Snow Queen again today and she's still a little wonder.

LTK saw a few more than me I think, as did the Eve fanatic that is Luth. I mentioned the game Empyrion to Luth today. Maybe tempted him. It's in my Steam sale shopping cart now, haven't quite bought it. It's been amusing to watch the FuzzyFreak (see link to the right) stream Empyrion for the last week or so. It was a shaky start until she got into the spaceships but it's a game that's all about the space ships.

And it's given me a few ideas and thoughts for ships that I'd build. A few of them would resemble the scifi spaceships like the Babylon 5 Starfury, BSG Viper is a bit boring, the Star Wars ships are definitely candidates. Oh and a couple of capital ship ideas that would look suspiciously like a Death Star (call it the Dragon Ball) or the Galactica (call it the Dragon Star).

We shall see. I happen to have a template for what could become the Dragon Ball :

Oh ! There was another person who couldn't take part in the Shaun Hunt when it was on because she had suffered a badly broken ankle and wasn't mobile. So it became a mission to do the walks myself and get pictures across.

At least as far as I could get around the trails.

This was 2015 when I was starting to get into the recovery phase for my battered arms and legs. I think my legs had returned to their normal sizes instead of being swollen and my arms were starting to repair too. And it's taken another 3 years for repairs to continue ... and the repairs aren't quite finished yet.

Part of that is my fault again due to redamaging the bits that are struggling to heal. Part of it is down to just how extensive the damage I got ended up being.

Almost healed now. There are a few hold out bits on my knees and toes but ... almost there.

I'm holding off on doing the trails just yet though. It's still freakishly warm in a very uncomfortable kind of way. Felt perhaps a little better today wearing my light coloured jacket while outside though.

They're around for a couple of months. If I could find a downloadable map, I'd post it (sadly no map online although it's in the app). I'll hold off a little until it gets cooler, plus I'm planning to take some leave in August which should be a good opportunity.

Some of them are spread around a bit in car trip kind of range. Possible coffee shop crawl ?

Maybe.

PS In other news - XWing Wraith Squadron Mercy Kill - finished. Excellent read, must post review soon. Robert Heinlein Between Planets is next.
PPS I had another PS but my brain melted before I could post it.
PPPS That was it ! Golden Globe round the world yacht race started yesterday. Definitely following that one and cheering on Brit lady Susie Goodall. She's in the middle of the fleet at the moment, early days.

Great Shaun Hunt Part 2

Thursday saw me go out hunting for Sheep again.

And it's taken until now for me to write the scribbles up about it ! Yep. Took a fair bit out of me, I don't think I want to know how far I walked in apparently only an hour and a half according to the timestamps on the pictures. I'm still stiff now from it !

Getting old, although to be honest, I always needed this kind of amount of recovery time after hitting the cricket pitches for the first couple of games in a season.

That's the final tally after finally sitting down for a little rest before heading back to the car (via a place selling cold drinks !), making 23 Shauns on the day. Which of course, is far too many to post all the pictures here. Or is it ...

Click for bigger !

That's sadly the 1/64th size version, reduced for the thumbnail. Gimp didn't want to export the full whopper of an 18432x20736 pixel image (coming in at 1GB!) to Gif and then Google refused to upload the 1/4 size picture. Boo hiss. You wouldn't have wanted to Click For Bigger on that 1/4 size pic, it was still 42MB as a GIF :-). Happy techie got to play with techie toys.

That's the 24 pics of Shauns I grabbed on Thursday. The first is Lily, who I first spotted on Friday last week but I needed a better picture of that one. I got away with it as far as the weather goes, we had some of the damp stuff in the morning and it was threatening rain again as the evening got closer. But in between, sunshine burnt off the humidity in the air and ... you may be able to discern crisp shadows in those pictures ...

Yep. Sun in Bristol. It's rare but it does happen sometimes.

See ? Blue skies there with only occasional cloud. And a boat. Two of the trails I did heavily involved Bristol's waterside.

Click for bigger again. The trails I did were :

Temple Trail off to the East in yellow. This one is 2.5km, although I did join at the middle at 66 and 67 and nearly ended up walking to Bath due to a wrong turn after the station.
Harbourside Trail in the middle in orange. This trail is 5km, also on the flat. Looks like I managed to pound out that 5kms walking in 1 hour 20 according to the timestamps. I'm pretty proud of that, it's good to be back to fairly unfettered walking close to the pace I used to be able to do.

And I picked up a couple of "I'm in the neighbourhood" randoms with a peek at another grand building :

That's Bristol cathedral, heading via the Hippodrome, before having a rest at

St Michael's Church which was hosting Honey Shaun.

All the photos are on Facebook so I won't repeat them here (apart from the montage monster!) but here's a couple more with some of Bristol's heritage :

Building of worship of POINTY THINGS ! Could there be a better thing to worship than Pointy Hats ? Hmm. I seem to be missing a pointy hat from my hat collection.

That's On The Waterfront Shaun, the other side of the river from SS Great Britain. I need to visit that ship sometime, 15 years in Bristol and it's another of the local attractions I've not visited.

If you're looking to visit the Shauns, there isn't much time left ... They disappear on 31 August when they go to auction to raise funds for The Grand Appeal, the Bristol Children's Hospital Charity. More info at the Shaun In The City link.

I may go hunting for some more on Friday, it'll be a great excuse to visit Forbidden Planet (it's near 27 and 28 on the map), which I've not been to for ages now.

I'm sore now (still!) but I'm glad I took the trip out to see the Shaun's. I'm getting older but it's a good reminder that I'm still pretty well able physically, even if the reactions are degrading to the level that cricket isn't an option any more. And having two achievements pop up without really trying were great for that "I'm not ancient yet" confidence :

Spring to the Finish - run the last 20 metres to an undiscovered Shaun. I was just walking (quick) ! Honest !
Bleating the Competition - complete any Shaun trail in half the suggested time duration.

Yep. Happy. If still tired and sore.