Trying to organise some of my old video footage recently, I came across a little demo I recorded of the AT&T Broadband Phone, a project we started in 1999 but which, sadly, died, along with the research lab that had created it, in 2002.
Looking back at it now, I notice how slow-paced it is compared to the typical YouTube video of today! So if you watch it, you might need a little patience! Nonetheless, it’s quite fun to see some of the ideas we were considering back then, five or six years before the launch of the iPhone… things like the suggestion that streamed music “might be a service offered by a record company, where you pay a small amount for each track”, for example…
(P.S. I had an idea I had written about this here before… and indeed discovered that I had… but not since 2008, about eighteen months after the iPhone was launched.)
I hadn’t come across the singer ‘Madelline’ before, but I’ve been somewhat entranced by her track ‘Dopamine’, not just because it’s a pleasant song, but because of this particular version.
To the same backing track, you hear her singing it in both French and English at the same time.
If you listen through a single phone speaker, it just sounds like a bit of a jumble, but if you have headphones or anything else with decent stereo separation, then the effect of hearing the same person, singing the same song, at the same time, to the same backing, but in your left ear in French and your right ear in English, is quite bizarre, especially if you have reasonable fluency in both.
It does slightly weird things to my brain, but it’s also interesting to see the flexibility in translation needed to get roughly the same concepts into the same lines.
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I’ve just come back from bobbing about in a small boat on the crystal blue waters of the Greek bit of the Mediterranean – a marvellous excerience!
I’m sitting in the tender here because, as anyone who has tried it will confirm, it’s much easier to land a drone on a boat that doesn’t have any rigging!
But just before I set off in the wake of Odysseus et al, I decided to spend a day in Athens visiting the Parthenon. Should you wish to spend a few minutes in my company doing the same, you can find a short video here.
YouTube, at its best, can be a wonderful way to discover real talent. A little while ago, I came across some songs by the Cotton Pickin Kids – a very talented family from Alabama – and I shared one or two favourites, like this one, with friends and family.
Well, after that, the YouTube algorithm decided I must like groups of talented siblings, and offered me so many of them that I expected I would suddenly be presented with the Von Trapp family’s previously undiscovered channel…
Just as I was thinking that all of this might be a bit too much of a good thing, today I spotted a girl and her two brothers who call themselves ‘Life in 3D‘… for the simple reason that their names are Devon, Daylon and Daura.
Oh well, I thought, let’s give them a try.. and I’ve since been browsing through their songs, and been seriously impressed. To inject a little positivity into your day, I offer, somewhat at random, the one I discovered first:
The story they tell on their website is that they used to sing while doing the dishes and other household chores, and when they finished, their parents said, “Hey, don’t stop!”. So a couple of years ago, they bought a proper microphone, recorded themselves, and posted their first video to YouTube.
Not only can they sing, but there are some pretty impressive production values here. It was listening to them with the volume turned up that made my realise how good the speakers are on my MacBook Pro. Treat yourself, and don’t just listen to this on a tinny little phone speaker.
For a long time, it has both bugged and bemused me that, though the first webcam ran for 10 years taking photos of our departmental coffee pot, there are almost no original images saved from the millions it served up to viewers around the world! I had one or two.
Then, suddenly, in a recent conversation, it occurred to me to check the Internet Archive’s ‘Wayback Machine’, and, sure enough, in the second half of the coffeepot camera’s life — from 1996-2001 — they had captured 28 of its images. I wrote a script to index and download these, and turned them into a slideshow, which you can find in my new and very exciting three-minute video:
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At the end of November, I popped up to the Derbyshire Peak District for a weekend, and posted some photos here. At the time, I mentioned that I had taken some video footage too, and I finally got around to editing it into something watchable, at least by those who enjoy amateur travelogues. 🙂
Almost all of our lights are now ‘smart’: controllable by software, timers, motion sensors etc as well as switches.
If you’ve done this, though, you’ll know there’s a problem: how do you stop people turning things off at the wall, at which point your smart lights become remarkably dumb?
Like many people, I’m familiar with the vast River Thames that flows under the big bridge at Dartford, and the grubbily majestic Thames that passes the Houses of Parliament. I’ve even been fortunate enough to enjoy the rather spiffing Thames that flowed past us when we visited the Stewards’ Enclosure at Henley Regatta.
But until a couple of weekends ago, I hadn’t experienced the delightfully bucolic upper Thames, which winds past herds of cows, under weeping willows, and passes through locks manned by lock-keepers who still live in cottages on the waterside, surrounded by their beautiful gardens.
That, I think, is my favourite Thames. And I would have made a better video of it if I hadn’t been so taken up with enjoying and navigating it!
When I installed my home solar system, I also replaced my perfectly-functional car charger with a new one: a Myenergi Zappi. Why?
The Zappi is a popular charger, designed in the UK, and rapidly finding favour in other parts of the world. Here, I talk about what it can do, things you might need to take into account if connecting to a car like the Tesla, and a little bit of magic geekery I set up to make it fit my needs even better.
I’ve just started playing with one of those ‘trail cams’ or ‘camera traps’. You attach it to a tree or similar and it captures movement using an infrared camera sensor, and illuminates the scene with a number of IR LEDs on the front. These cameras are not particularly expensive, and I think it’ll be quite fun.
My first attempt in the wood next to our driveway didn’t quite have my subject facing in the direction I’d hoped! I also spotted several rabbits and a muntjac, but mostly I got clues as to where I should put the camera next to capture more of the nocturnal social life. Coming soon, I hope…
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