Using threatening words or behaviour? That’s £250 quid please.

In a way I’m happy that justice has been served to an agressive road user (BBC News article). I have mixed opinions about the £250 fine, I’m not sure if it properly represents the distress that “threatening words or behaviour” causes.
The other reason why I’m posting this, is to justify why I use a head camera when I’m biking.

Getting the Christmas geek on.

Firstly, I wish all readers a very happy Christmas. Or you can call it Saturnalia if you prefer.
Recently I saw this video, and I was struck by the creativity and level of effort invested by the creator. I could talk in great detail about how stepper motors can be driven at different rates to give different sounds. I could talk talk about how the simplicity of the harmonies of the sinusoidal waves give a pleasing and elegant sound – to my ears at least.
Over-riding all that is the idea that House of the Rising Sun is (for me) a classic song, from the days when musicians actually worked for a living, and wrote good music. Your mileage and musical tastes may vary.
Since I first saw that last week, I had an idea rolling around my head. There is a point in the video where that charming old oscilloscope is showing a sum of two waveforms, and the faster wave seems to be being modulated by a much slower wave. It’s at the 4 minute 20 mark from the start.
For me, this seems to be an ideal source to make an animated GIF.
I downloaded the entire video from youtube, and used the open source video editor PiTiVi to cut out the frames I wanted to re-use.
So I have a short mp4 file, and to convert it to individual frames I used mplayer:
mplayer -vo png oscope.mp4
In this command I specify that the Video Output should be in the PNG format, and to use the “oscope.mp4″ file as in the input.
This gives a bunch of PNG files, all of the form “f00000001.png” where the number part increments.
The next step is to convert them to an animated GIF. I’d have liked to have used Peter Hartley’s InterGIF, but I couldn’t find find it in the standard Ubuntu repositories, and I couldn’t get it to compile on my Ubuntu box. That’s a problem for another day (or I can move the GIF files to my RISC OS box and use the RISC OS version of InterGIF).
I used ImageMagick which I installed on my Ubuntu box a long time ago:
convert -delay 3 -loop 0 f*.png OscopeLarge.gif
What this does is to take all the files which begin with “f” and are type PNG, and convert them in to a GIF file with a delay of 3 hundredths of a second between them, and that they should loop forever.
That gives a 13Mb GIF file. It’s very nice, but it’s a bit big for folk who like an ‘old skool’ animated GIF.
Going back to ImageMagick, and using the resize option:
convert -delay 3 -loop 0 -resize 640x360 f*.png OscopeMed.gif
convert -delay 3 -loop 0 -resize 320x180 f*.png OscopeSml.gif
These commands give the Medium and Small versions, which have sensible sizes of 3.5Mb and 997Kb respectively.

Update:
I’ve run the animated GIFs through Peter Hartley’s InterGIF. The medium version was reduced from 3.5Mb to 2.7Mb, and the small version was reduced from 997kb to 692kb. That’s about three-quarters in both cases. I’ve substituted the files on the server, as it will ease the load for my provider.

Barrow driver fails to stop after collision with a cyclist.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G8qYF3POiU

Being realistic, the cyclist was coming down the hill a bit too quickly.
The driver did not indicate left, sadly this is far too common.
Go back and watch the video again. After the collision, follow the driver. He (or she) turns right, stops immediately, reverses back out again in to Rawlinson Street, then turns right again. This series of manoeuvres seems to suggest the driver knows a collision has occurred. After the reverse-turn, the driver sees that is a cyclist, and decides to leave the scene.

There are things I do as a cyclist to avoid this type of accident:
Approach the junction expecting to need to stop, no matter if the traffic lights are red or green.
I do not undertake the cars, I do try and make eye contact with the drivers.
If I’m turning left, I take a slow, wide line.
If I’m going straight ahead, I occupy the centre-line of the lane.
(In both cases I am fully aware that traffic is behind me. Tough. Take your turn like everyone else.)

The Ford Focus Mk2 has a little problem.

The problem is that the washer jets (on the bonnet) can allow water to drip down on top of the cylinder head.
This is a quite a common problem.
Eventually water can get inside the sparkplug lead, and allow the spark voltage to leak to earth, causing a misfire.
Having had this problem this week, I would like to share with you what my local garage have done. I think this is quite neat. They have a template to make a simple protective cover like this.
If you inspect your engine (and you should), you probably won’t see the water, as it accumulates underneath that black plastic cover on top of the cylinder head.
You can buy replacement washer jets, official parts from Ford dealers. These have rubber seals, where the original parts don’t.

Amy Scott Webb, of Walney Island: Known troll and time waster.

After an entertaining 25 minutes on Facebook, Amy Scott Webb of Walney Island has made defamatory comments about myself and my family, and then hidden her profile because she has not got the maturity to defend her comments.
Edit 14/11/2011 15:43
Here is the full, unedited, conversation thread.

All publicity is good publicity.

Shakespeare’s name is being removed from signs in Warwickshire in a campaign against a new film which questions whether he wrote his plays.

Says a news article on the BBC News site. I’m sure Columbia could not have hoped for better advertising.

Trusted computing – there’s a place for it. Somewhere.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about “Trusted Computing” and UEFI secure booting.
I share the concern of most of the critics, on the grounds that when I buy my desktop PC then it is only me who decides what software runs on it.
On the other side of the discussion, will be the many companies and other organisations who (rightly) want to control what happens with their computing hardware.
There’s no need to fear UEFI.
If I’m considering buying a UEFI-enabled computer system, the first question I will ask the seller is does it allow Secure Boot to be disabled, under the user’s control? If the answer is any thing other than “Yes” then there’s no sale. Easy peasy.

 

I’m quite flexible on the subject of computer operating systems. I recognise that the idea of Microsoft’s next consumer OS having a secure boot process is (in principle) great[1]. At the same time I also give equal merit to the idea that I can (and do) use some flavour of Linux on my personal computer.

I’m not going to sit here all smug and say Linux is bullet-proof[2], but my experience has been overwhelmingly positive. Perhaps I’m biased, but I have lost count of the number of times I’ve had to clean-up Microsoft boxes due to malware infections[3].

[1] It would help the average non-technical user a lot.
[2] There are Linux viruses and malware. Thankfully they are very rare (like their hosts), and patches and new kernels are available very quickly to limit their spread.
[3] I have done this many times (gladly) for family and friends, to the point where I recommend Linux over anything else for a simple web-browsing machine for a beginner or non-technical user.

Secret indicator on the Camsports HD-S 720p

I noticed something about my “bullet cam” recently. There is a indicator LED within, which can only be viewed from the back of the unit. You have to point the lens almost vertically down, and look in the left mystery hole on the back.
Like this http://www.flickr.com/photos/7398484@N02/6171520587/
I am not sure if it means the camera is on, or means the internal battery is charging. I’ll try to remember to check it after it has charged fully. The manual makes no reference to this “undocumented feature”. You can download the manual from the manufacturer’s own site.
Actually there are number of ways the camera’s behaviour differs from the instructions:

• The LED next to the lens does not flash blue when recording starts. The manual says it does.
• Quote “When recharging, the LED record indicator will be red. At full charge, the LED will turn green.” When re-charging (with the mains adapter) the record indicator does not light. At full charge, there is no indication at all that charging is complete. When the camera is full of data, the record indicator alternates red/green. It also beeps about eleven times before shutting down.

It won’t be first time I’ve encountered a gadget whose behaviour differs from what the manual claims, not that it detracts from the results I’ve had from the camera. With so many embedded systems around these days, I think we should be more aware of the fact that the behaviour depends on the internal software. As a consequence we should not assume that the behaviour will always be consistent because there may still be bugs in the software.

Edit: The secret indicator LED is definitely a “charging” rather than “on” indicator.

Missing screws from the Maverick DUC 32 forks.

I returned from a bike ride recently and noticed a screw was missing from one the fork leg guards. This was obvious because the leg guard was at the two o’clock position, not pointing straight up to 12 o’clock. The service manual can be downloaded here. Item 22 on page three of the manual says "Screw Phillips Panhead 3 x 6". That’s in metric, apparently.
It is an M3 screw you need, no longer than 6mm. Commonly used in computer cases to hold DVD drives in 5.25" bays. Chances are the last DVD drive you bought had a bag of four of these screws, and you used two of them.
This photo compares the original screw, and the replacement:

A top tip for you.

In the style of Viz Magazine’s "Top Tips":

Avoid being ripped off by ebay sellers when buying film soundtrack CDs, by checking the prices on amazon too.

Example 1: The sound track CD for "Hanna" ranges in price from £8.79 to £11.95 on ebay (including postage). The price of the same on amazon is £7.99 with free postage. The time the item takes to arrive will be about the same anyway.

Example 2: The sound track CD for "Rango" ranges in price from £7.72 to £11.99 on ebay (including postage, ignoring international shippers). The price of the same on amazon is £7.93 with free postage.

Ebay is great for many things, particularly elsewhere-hard-to-find items but it pays to shop around.