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 !

Making .... better movies ?

Video number 2 is uploading as I type ... (addon - upload complete ! Here's the link)

I didn't link my first effort because, to be honest, I don't think it's anywhere near the standard that I'd want to see from anyone on Youtube. And way below the standards I expect from myself. But that was a lot of the point of making the video, to learn, to test, to figure out what I'd need to do and what facilities I should have in order to make videos.

You can hear people talking about stuff .... but you never really fully understand until you're in the same position or doing the same things.

Tonight's is showing off some of the more beautiful sights I've seen so far in Elite ... and the most dangerous too.

Neutron star pulsar - yesterday. I talk about this one a bit in the video but typing is always more coherent with me. A neutron star is a stellar object that's gone through the lifecycle of being a star, exploded and left behind a fragment that condenses and compresses into the smallest possible object short of a black hole. It is a mass of protons and electrons all mashed up into a quantum soup of neutrons.

They're not so dense that they collapse further into black holes, instead they stay as these highly luminous micro-stars throwing off particle streamers as they rotate. I found a couple that rotated quite slowly, producing gorgeous effects like the one above.

I read an excellent short story covering these Neutron Stars too, by Larry Niven as part of his Known Space universe of novels and stories. I'd recommend trying that short story if you can find a copy.

There are some black holes in the upcoming video as well (it's still uploading as I type but a link will arrive later). They are definitely more terrifying as a moving image as you see the distortion of spacetime around the object of ultimate doom.

It has got me learning though, what would go into making these videos if I were to do them more.

Wot dat ?

Space and storage seems to be the big thing.

You need hard disc space for the games but the video capture, footage and ultimate output take up a lot of space. Tonight's video is about 25 minutes but the captured footage (not using all of it) takes up 15GB. The final video takes up 3.5GB.

I'll run out of hard disc space soon if I keep all the videos !

Processor is another thing that takes a hit. My i5-2500k processor renders the videos at about 4x the run time of the video. So an hour of video will take 4 hours to render. Newer processors are faster, more cores help with Magix Vegas studio.

And a big factor is the capture of sound. You can hugely tell the difference in quality between a headset quality mic and a broadcast quality mic. The sound is hugely different. I wonder how many people recognise my voice from the videos ? I don't recognise it but that's partly because you hear your voice through the direct connection between mouth and ear (the sound travels through your skull). You don't hear your voice how other people hear it.

Graphics .... will depend heavily on the game. To show off a new first person shooter type game, you'd want the super powerful £300+ and better graphics cards. But to capture Elite, my £200 nVidia 1060 seems to be good enough.

I'd want to build a new PC and get a decent microphone set up if I was to do the videos more. At the moment, it'll be occasional videos when I find something I think will amuse people. Perhaps Kerbal Space Program ... that's always good for sudden and hilarious failure leading to massive explosions.

I'm hyped at the moment and I hope people enjoy the video when it goes live ... soon ! (I am looking at the Youtube upload window in another tab and it's taking aaaaages ....) I ain't giving up the dayjob any time soon though. Youtube has turned hostile to its content creators and it wouldn't pay its way now.

Besides, I get to be involved with some very cool kit via work and I work with some great people. Not looking to change that just yet !

Worst ... films ... Ever !

Lol

One thing people won't tell you about Skyfall is the truly excessive amount of advertising (and trailers) that we were subjected to before the film started. During those ... Bionicdwarf, Cyberkitten and I were talking Worst Films Ever. Not quite sure which trailer or advert started us off on that to be honest but we knew a good idea for a blog post when we saw it.

So here goes ... Films that were so Bad they should never have been made. But seeing as they were, all copies need to be gathered up and cremated for the good of humanity.

Firstly - Anything. ANYTHING that Uwe Boll had a hand in.

He's a German film individual that goes from game to game, turning good games into incredibly bad films. They truly have to be seen to believe how bad they are. Although I wouldn't wish seeing an Uwe Boll film on anyone. That said, Bloodrayne wasn't too bad although Bloodrayne 2 was a horrible mess without the any of attributes that made the first watchable.

Star Trek Nemesis. Star Trek was still going before this film came out. Voyager was still running and Enterprise was just starting to look promising. However. Nemesis came out, with an awful script that had all humour removed. The humour was there (it was in the book) but all trace of it was surgically removed from the theatrical presentation. Nemesis killed Trek so bady that they had to start up the franchise in an alternate reality.

Anything "mockbuster". You know what these are ... It's where they take a successful film and remake it with a subtly different name. Battle Of Los Angeles (i.e. not Battle: Los Angeles) is one of these but there's been others made, including the Terminators, Transmorphers, Transformers and a few others. Watch for them, avoid them. FOR THE SAKE OF YOUR SANITY !!!!!

Lol

What's next ? Starship Troopers 2. The first and third Starship Troopers films are fairly ok. They're very watchable, although they take the original Heinlein book into an extremely right wing direction. Must watch the animated series again, shame they didn't get the chance to finish it. However, I shall definitely not watch Starship Troopers 2 again.

Twilight. Ok, this wasn't actually too bad but as a vampire movie fan, I should have been wanting to watch the rest. Must be something about Kristen Stewart. I don't think I've ever seen someone as good looking be so unwatchable.

Snow White & The Huntsman. Not too bad a film, just not nearly as entertaining as Mirror Mirror and it suffers from the Kristen Stewart effect.

Total Recall (the new one). Another in a long line of films that are very well made but ... WHY ? Why remake a B-movie, with the only script inspiration being to take away the Mars aspect ? The original made more sense. There was no real need to redo this one.

Limitless. Again, well made movie, I just really didn't like the Drugs Make Winners message.

I think that's enough for now. Last one - Mars Attacks. However, this one while it was bad, was so hilarious with it that I feel I need to watch it again soon :-)

PS Healthcheck. Think I'm improving. Ear's not so bad and I think I'm steadily getting my arms back. Skin feels good too :-) Fingers crossed - I'll be able to wear long sleeves again by the end of this week.

Techie matters - when speed matters not

I've felt a whinge coming on for a little while now.

I've been with the same ISP since I moved into my current house. That's like almost 11 years now. (Yep. Long time!). It started out as Telewest Blueyonder before they got hit by mergers, joining NTL to become part of the Branson Virgin Media empire.

To be fair, the service isn't bad. I started with a 512kbit/s connection way back. That's been steadily upgraded over the years and is now up at a genuine 20Mbits per second of download. And it gives that speed too on downloads. The upload has improved too and is now double that original 512Kbits/s download (original upload 128Kbit/s, it's now 1Mbit/s).

Techie talk aside - that's quicker than my first laptop could send information across wires to the computer next door to it. It's quick enough to download the latest Bat For Lashes album in about a minute (it's 120MB on iTunes).

But.

It's evidently not fast enough to play Youtube videos in high definition. That's deeply MEH, especially as seeing off buffering was one of the themes of recent Virgin Media advertising. What happens is that when you try to play a fairly recent (as in made in the last day or so), you'll be able to see a few minutes of video and then you get Whirly Wheel silence as you are forced to wait for the next chunk of video to load.

I tried to keep up with watching the Felix Baumgartner highskydive. Just one problem - whirly wheel silence just took over totally and it was a total waste of time and effort.

It's not the hardware here. I can play BBC iPlayer just fine. The old hardware was happily handling 3 concurrent streams of BBC iPlayer Olympics in HD. I picked up a new freebie modem/router which will hopefully see that 20MBits/s get upgraded to 30MBits/s soon. That's not sorted the problem.

What apparently is causing the problem is a local proxy server in the Virgin Media network. What happens there is that you're not playing the video back from a Youtube server, it's playing from a Virgin Media server which is intercepting the calls to play the video. And it can't keep up.

Again - deeply, truly - Meh.

It's great to have a massive pipe to get the data through. The problem comes in because of something in the way (which shouldn't be there) taking the data supply back to a trickle. I'd much rather have, say, 5Mbits/s and HD playback than rarely used 20Mbit/s and no HD playback.

Don't get me wrong - this is not a matter of keeping up with something being streamed live, it's that poxy proxy server being unable to chuck the video data out fast enough. I suspect with the Baumgartner jump (streamed from Youtube), it was a matter of not being able to send the video data to many viewers.

Hopefully it's something that will get sorted out soon. But I have my doubts because it appears to be bad hardware and bad decisions in the Virginmedia network itself. Proxy servers are Bad News.

Ok - time to end the whinge ...

I've stuck with Virginmedia this long because the service has given near 100% availability. It's almost unheard of for the connection to go down. Sure, bandwidth throttling is annoying but even when that kicks in the connection is faster than the typical ADSL line.

And it was nice to get a shiny new wifi modem router (most capable piece of kit in my network right now), all for free. But it would be even nicer if I didn't have to click the Youtube videos back to 480p (which works ok) within a minute or five of starting to watch every single video.

Holidays almost done

Back to work for me on Wednesday. I'll have had a longer than usual break, with it lasting 12 working days in total spanning 3 weeks. It usually takes me less than a week to get horribly bored when I'm away from work but there's been enough going on to stop that happening this time :-)

There's been the excitement mentioned in the post below but I'm going to park that for now. I've not seen anything back from the Eve people yet to tell me if they take honest customers seriously. (Early days still)

Technology has been the key thing over this break :-) Starting with my old laptop choosing the first Sunday of the holiday to finally decide it also wanted time off. So that's money spending thing No 1 :-) The Acer is quite a decent laptop to be honest. I've seen 3 of them so far and the build quality is pretty good. Much better than my old HP, which felt a lot lighter (weaker) in its construction to the point of fit lines not matching up properly. I'd heavily criticise the touchpad on the Acer though, it's not nearly as good as the HP's touchpad.

I think it was the start of the break when I had to hide my wireless network's identifier. The sound on the streaming music would break up and after 10-15 minutes (or shorter) the sound would stop entirely. I suspect someone around here has the virus that takes over a PC's wifi, creating a "Free Public Wi-Fi" network which it then uses to spread. I've seen that a few times. What I think it was also doing was a brute force attempt to crack the encryption security on my own network. Hiding the identifier has made the problem go away.

Come to think of it - the "Free Public Wi-Fi" thing could be where the Nastie that stole my Eve account's info came from. The techie stuff says that laptops will try and connect to this if they don't have any better ideas, so it could be where the Nastie got in.

Hey ! Thought I'd parked that account stealing thing :-)

Xmas was up at the parents with the family there. I got me an Ipod upgrade, with the Ipod having a few interesting toys attached ... I now need an iPod sock to keep it unscratched. Had a few more bits of music appear in the library too - I'm now up to 3655 songs that would take 10.2 days to listen to. Of those, I've managed to listen to 1478 of them over the past 4 weeks. Will probably crack 1500 and maybe get close to 1600 by the time I go back to werk :-)

While up there, I put up my nan's new TV bracket, which has it attached to the wall. Not an experience I'm planning to repeat any time soon ! I don't think I need to in my current room anyway, although I do still need to move things around in here.

28th was the Crazies Xmas Part-ay, with Secret Santa. Was good to see the gang all there :-) I managed to recruit the help of our BionicDwarf to get my old telly shifted off its stand. I put the telly there myself a few years ago but I reckon in the process I busted something in my side which has killed my bowling action. Was well appreciated having the assist :-) Crazie Party - we watched Ice Age, Moon and Dogma, all 3 of those being excellent films. Must watch Ice Age again soon, not got Dogma yet.

New telly ! This arrived on the Tuesday 29th. It's a Samsung 32" LCD with the 1080p extra pixel and detail goodness. With my old telly being on the floor, I had the added incentive of needing to kick myself out of bed early in order to have a telly to watch the cricket on. I also picked up a Blu-ray disc player from Sony (going cheap at £100).

The blu-ray player is a prime example of how I sometimes lose out by not following my instincts. The little Instinct Voices were telling me on Boxing Day that I should pick one up when we were in the retail places in Lincoln. I thought I'd better leave it for when I was back down south - the result ? None left in the retail places in Bristol's Cribbs Causeway ! Cue a trip to Tesco Extra, which still had a few left. I reckon people scoured the Cribbs Mall and didn't think of checking the Tesco Extra nearer to where I live.

So I pick up two of the parts of my future Telly & Movie set up :-) The 3rd and 4th will be new speakers and amp, looks like I'll have to get those due to Trust Issues with the Blu-Ray player.

After enjoying the end of the 4th day in the cricket, it's time to test out the new stuff :-) Star Trek was the dvd chosen. It wasn't at its best at this point, as I had to wait until the next day for the better leads to arrive. Still looked pretty darn impressive though :-) The telly does a good job of filling in the gaps to turn standard definition into sharp higher definition.

Doh - there's actually far more about this on my Techie blog, so I probably shouldn't repeat it here. The first post (linked) is about the early bit of setup and introduces the PC stuff ... The second post (linked) covers what happens with better leads. It doesn't quite have the end of the story :

My MSN Messenger login uses the little status messages. I don't change this too often (inspiration failure) but the latest is "Technology 1 Sleepypete 3". Heh heh heh - the score at the moment is probably a tie ...

I have everything hooked up to the telly :-) But I'm having to use 5 leads instead of 1 for the cable TV box. Sound isn't as good as I'd like, I only get a stereo output on my current speakers. This is the Trust Issue with the Blu-Ray player, it can't get the info from my speakers that would assure it there's no copying going on so it just outputs in stereo. With my PC, stereo is an unexpected deficiency in the capability it offers. Still sounds very good and I don't currently have the room set up for surround sound anyway.

Let's say I'm not excited/disappointed about the sound enough to make me rush to Richer Sounds to get new amp & speakers :-)

I've watched one movie off Blu-Ray so far, Outlander. My good friend Cyberkitten has written a little bit about this one, spookily on the morning before I watched it again :-) Was as impressive off blu-ray at home as it was in the cinema. I'm still waiting for Watchmen, Amazon said they dispatched this at the same time as they sent Outlander but it's now 2 days later and it's not arrived yet. I've been losing faith lately with Amazon's ability to timely deliver. Ordered on Tuesday 29th with First Class postage, not seen it arrive yet. I'm possibly being a little optimistic seeing as it's holiday season but Novatech managed a next morning delivery on 2 leads also ordered on the 29th. I think I'll be checking out the competition when I next go dvd/music/blu-ray hunting.

We watched Avatar as well this week, that's a cracking movie well recommended.

Had one short session of gaming on the telly - that first link above to the Techie blog has what I needed to do to achieve this :-) Mass Effect looked spectacular on the big screen. Not sure how much I'll actually use the big screen for gaming though, as mouse & keyboard on lap on sofa doesn't strike me as a comfy gaming position !

I'm settling down in front of the cricket at the moment. England have a fight on their hands in this game, South Africa have runs on the board and the pitch has become a lot more bowler friendly ... Will be an intriguing game, looking forward to watching it over today and tomorrow :-)

Ipaq TV on the air :-)

Firstly, please wish Dawn's Mom well, see here for more info.

No Thursday Thirteen this week, although I have one planned ... Not got my 13 myths to put in my 13 myths just yet, working on it :-)

Ipaq TV is on the air, which means I've been successful in :

Hooking up webcam to laptop - trivial :-)
Getting the streaming video thing going - almost trivial
(issues with getting the software from Microsoft)
Ipaq connected to network - hassle ... grr ... wifi ... grr
Ipaq looking at video stream - sorted :-)

I probably won't go for the 100% solution, which would be to make it available via the internet, I don't have a use for that plus I'd have to hook it up via my desktop, which isn't exactly reliable ...

Just one slight problem, which might put a downer on using IpaqTV to fix the Skydish ... I was testing it while watching a Dresden Files episode. The image came up ok but when I waved at the camera, nothing happened. And then I start hearing voices ... I'm not going nuts, it was Dresden Files voices. I listened a little harder and realised - "they said that a minute ago !"

And you've probably just realised what the problem might be ;-) (need to tinker with da buffers)