Dan Q

Tag: video

Geohashing expedition 2020-02-22 53 -1

This checkin to geohash 2020-02-22 53 -1 reflects a geohashing expedition. See more of Dan's hash logs.

Location

Northern slopes of Haven Hill, near Bradbourne. (South end of the Peak District, North of Ashbourne.)

Participants

Plans

I’ll be travelling North through England all day on 2020-02-22 and it’s not a huge diversion to go and climb a hill as a break, so long as I set off early enough in the morning. We’ll see…

Expedition

It’s a beautiful part of the world, the Peak District, although I could have picked a day when I’d be less-hampered by floods and wind. Nonetheless, I was able to climb a short way up Haven Hill, divert around an impromptu lake, and scramble into a thicket in order to reach the hashpoint at around 13:40. And to leave a “the Internet was here” sign at the nearest footpath

Tracklog

  • Taken by GPSr, but I seem to have lost the charging/data cable for it. Will find at some point.

Video

You can also watch it at:

Photos

Dan grinning holding a GPSr showing that he's at the hashpoint
Proof and a silly grin together!
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Geohashing expedition 2020-02-21 51 -1

This checkin to geohash 2020-02-21 51 -1 reflects a geohashing expedition. See more of Dan's hash logs.

Location

North end of the village of Curbridge in Oxfordshire. Street View and satellite photography shows it as being alongside a nondescript road, but I’m aware that there’s a housing estate under construction nearby and there’s a new roundabout which appears on maps but not on satellite views which was constructed nearby last year: I’m hoping that the location is still accessible.

Participants

Plans

I don’t know whether I’ll be able to make it to this hashpoint; it depends on how work goes as well as the weather (while I’m not directly in the path of Storm Dennis I’m still in an area that’s getting lots of wind and rain). I’m not committed yet to whether I’d drive or cycle: it depends on how long I can spare, whether the car’s available for my use, and – again – the weather (I’d prefer to cycle, but I’m not going to do it if it means I get completely soaked on my lunch break).

Okay: I need to vacate my house anyway because some estate agents are bring some potential buyers around, so I’m setting out to the hashpoint now (12:20) after which I’ll aim to work in a coworking space for the afternoon. Wish me luck!

Expedition

I drove out to the village of Curbridge and parked in a lane, then walked to the hashpoint, arriving about 13:05. Conveniently there’s a pole (holding a speed detecting sign) within a metre of the hashpoint so I was able to attach a “The Internet Was Here” sign in accordance with the tradition. Then I made my way to a coworking space half a mile to the North to carry on with my day’s work.

Tracklog

My GPSr keeps a tracklog:

  • Obtained, but I didn’t bring the right cable to the coworking space so I can’t get it yet. [to follow]

Video

You can also watch it at:

Photos

Honk More, Wait More

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Horn not okay, please!
Find out how the @MumbaiPolice hit the mute button on #Mumbai’s reckless honkers.
#HonkResponsibly

Indian horn culture is weird to begin with. But I just learned that apparently it’s a thing to honk your in horn in displeasure at the stationary traffic ahead of you… even when that traffic is queueing at traffic lights! In order to try to combat the cacophony, Mumbai police hooked up a decibel-meter to the traffic lights at a junction such that if the noise levels went over a certain threshold during the red light phase, the red light phase would be extended by resetting the timer.

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This equation will change how you see the world

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Normally I find Veritasium’s videos to be… less mindblowing than their titles would aim to have me believe. But I found this one pretty inspiring; the first Feigenbaum constant is a proper headtrip. And I feel like I’ve got new insights into the Mandelbrot set too.

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Going for a roll on a lake in Maine

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A frisbee, propelled by the wind and balanced upright by some kind of black magic, makes an elegant and hypnotic dance across a frozen pond.

Which would be beautiful and weird enough as it is, and is sufficient reason alone to watch this video. But for the full experience you absolutely have to turn on the subtitles.

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Maps that Talk

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A former colleague talks about some of the artefacts from the Bodleian’s collections that didn’t make it into the Talking Maps exhibition (one of the last exhibitions I got to work on during my time there; indeed, you’ll see plenty of pictures from it in my post about making digital interactives). I was particularly pleased by the Soviet map of Oxford, but everything Nick presents in this video is pretty awesome: it’s a great reminder that for every fantastic exhibition you see at a good museum, there’s always at least as much material “behind the scenes” that you’re missing out on!

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When you’re in the club and you’re hungry… (Misheard Lyrics… Round Two!)

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My mother has long argued that a large category of popular music, second only to those on the subjects of sex and drugs, are about food. This so-called corpus of food songs is, I’m pretty confident, mostly based on mishearing lyrics, but I think she’d have a friend in the fabulous Bec Hill who’s this month made a follow-up to her video When You Listen to the Radio When You’re Hungry. And it’s even better (and to my delight, paella still manages to make a cameo appearance).

Unfortunately Warner Music Group don’t seem to have a sense of humour and you might find that you can’t watch her new video on YouTube. But thankfully that’s not how the Internet works (somebody should tell them!) and if proxying isn’t the best solution for you then you can just watch her new video on the BBC’s Facebook page instead.

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Making It Boring

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“Why make the web more boring? Because boring is fast, resilient, fault tolerant, and accessible. Boring is the essence of unobtrusive designs that facilitate interactions rather than hinder them.” says Jeremy.

He’s right. I’ve become increasingly concerned in recent years in the trend towards overuse of heavyweight frameworks. These frameworks impose limitations on device/network capabilities, browser features, caching, accessibility, stability, and more. It’s possible to work around many of those limitations, but doing so often takes additional work, and so most developers, especially junior developers raised on a heavyweight framework who haven’t yet been exposed to the benefits of working around them. Plus, such mitigations tend to make already-bloated web applications – full of unnecessary cruft – larger still; the network demands of the application grow ever larger.

What are these frameworks for? They often provide valuable components and polyfills, certainly, but they also have a tendency to reimplement what the browser already gives you: e.g. routing and caching come free with HTTP, buttons and links from HTML, design from CSS, (progressive) interactivity from JS. Every developer should feel free to use a framework if it suits them and the project they’re working on… but adoption of a framework should only come after consideration and understanding of what it provides, and at what cost.

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Men. Abuse. Trauma. | Philosophy Tube

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I discovered Philosophy Tube earlier this year but because I’ve mostly been working my way through the back catalogue it took until very recently before I got around to watching the video Men. Abuse. Trauma. And about 95% of everything he says in it so-closely parallels my own experience of an abusive relationship that I was periodically alarmed by his specificity. I’ve written before about the long tail an abusive relationship can have and that this video triggered in me such a strong reaction of recognition (and minor distress) is a testament to that.

I escaped from my abusive relationship seventeen years ago this month. It took me around seven years to acknowledge that the relationship had been abusive and to see the full picture of the damage it had done me. It took at least another four or five before I reached a point that I suspect I’m “recovered”: by which I mean “as recovered as I think is feasible.” And the fact that this video – on the first two viewings, anyway – was still able to give me a moment of panic (albeit one well-short of flashbacks) is a reminder that no, I’m not yet 100% okay.

Regardless – I’ve wanted to plug the channel for a while now, and this was the vehicle I had to hand. Go watch.

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30 Years in the making | The All-New Renault CLIO

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Last week I happened to be at an unveiling/premiere event for the new Renault Clio. That’s a coincidence: I was actually there to see the new Zoe, because we’re hoping to be among the first people to get the right-hand-drive version of the new model when it starts rolling off the production line in 2020.

But I’ll tell you what, if they’d have shown me this video instead of showing me the advertising stuff they did, last week, I’d have been all: sure thing, Clio it is, SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY! I’ve watched this ad four times now and seen more things in it every single time. (I even managed to not-cry at it on the fourth watch-through, too; hurrah!).

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