Status-Q

November 18th, 2020

No, sorry, you can’t Zoom in that far

November 18th, 2020

Having been a big fan of Zoom and extolled its virtues in the past, I thought it only fair to share a current criticism. (I’m talking about the videoconferencing app, of course. I’m an even bigger fan of the other Zoom and have relied on their products for years… definitely recommended!)

Anyway, back to video calls. I was playing recently with virtual cameras in OBS so I could do fun things like adding lower-thirds titles to my video stream…

or blending multiple video streams into one….

and my friend Nicholas commented that it was very clever, but any text was not actually that readable. At which point we delved into the Preferences > Statistics menu on the Zoom app and discovered that the video resolution was only 640×360; definitely lower than it used to be.

Now, this is perfectly fine for having a conversation with somebody, so for the vast majority of Zoom use, it’s not an issue. And if you turn on screen-sharing, your screen image is sent at a much higher resolution, so that’s fine too.

But it is an issue for some of my colleagues who like using pointing cameras at whiteboards or documents while giving remote lectures, or even if you’re just trying to hold something up to your camera for the person at the other end to read.

If you search online, you can find various references to ‘Enabling HD’, or to different resolutions being possible for Business or Education accounts, but as far as I can gather, these are all currently disabled or have no effect. I think Zoom may be restricting things to manage the load on their servers, which makes me wonder how much actually goes through their servers? At least for a 2-person call, like the one Nicholas and I were in, it really ought to be peer-to-peer. (Like Skype used to be in the early days before Microsoft bought and ruined it.) Still, to be fair, even the otherwise-abominable Teams does do a much better job at the moment when it comes to resolution.

Well, this may resolve itself in Zoom, but bizarrely, in the meantime, if you care about resolution of your camera more than you care about framerate or latency, the solution is probably to show it on your local display in high resolution, and then share your screen.

November 7th, 2020

Coasting

November 7th, 2020

Taken near Achiltibuie, just after Christmas last year

October 26th, 2020

No, wait, I have a cunning plan…

October 26th, 2020

I’ve always been an advocate of getting rid of the ridiculous Daylight Savings Time. If some people prefer more light in the morning instead of the evening, or vice versa, why don’t they just change their personal habits and get up at a different time?

If the majority of people in a company, or school, or even a whole town, felt the same way, they could simply have different winter opening hours, instead of imposing on the entire country a periodic change in how we actually calculate something as fundamental as the time! Anyone who has tried writing calendar software will know what I mean.

This has always seemed so obvious to me that I assume whoever would actually be responsible for implementing a return to normal timekeeping has had it on their to-do list for years, but it’s never quite been as important as the 15 things above it, so it just hasn’t happened. Sigh.

However, having enjoyed a marginally more relaxed Sunday morning this weekend, I have a cunning plan, of the “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” variety. I admit that it, too, has some minor inconveniences when it comes to time management, but, unlike the current system, it is brilliantly simple, predictable, and offers inestimable rewards. Are you ready?…

Let’s put the clocks back every single night! Then we could have a lie-in every single morning!

October 24th, 2020

Pondering the length of the Tube

October 24th, 2020

I do enjoy YouTube. I’m conscious that more and more of my time is spent consuming content from there, and creating content which is uploaded there.

Some of the material I’ve created appears on my channel, for general consumption, and those videos are usually linked from here, but quite a lot of it is not publicly listed, and is family, university, business stuff you can only find if you have the right links. At the time of writing, I have about 160 videos uploaded. Some have had just a couple of views. Some have had a couple of hundred thousand.

Hovering in the back of my mind, though, is the long-term danger of being so dependent on a platform I don’t control. I’m not too worried that YouTube will go away any time soon, though Google do have a tendency to cancel products on a pretty regular basis. This blog used to contain quite a few links to content on Google Video, for example. Remember that?

No, YouTube is too big just to vanish now. But it’s very possible that, at some point, there will be a significant change in the way it works: in the licensing, the amount of advertising, or, more worryingly, in how long they are willing to keep archiving material. We’ve seen other sites, like Flickr, decide that they can’t keep holding on to all your stuff forever. Or they may decide to start charging, and perhaps charging too much, to hang on to it for you.

So I have to assume that, at some point, everything I’ve done on YouTube will need to be shifted somewhere else. I used to ensure that anything I uploaded there was also on Vimeo, but I haven’t been quite that diligent recently. Nor could I easily lay my hands on the original masters of all the videos I’ve created.

No, a big item for my to-do list – perhaps a New Year’s resolution for 2021 – is to catalog all my videos and make sure that, for every YouTube video ID, I can create a URL to an equivalent hosted somewhere else. (Remember the golden ‘3-2-1’ rule of backups: You should have at least 3 copies of everything, using at least 2 different methods, and at least 1 should be off-site. Off-site may mean “off somebody else’s site” if they have the primary copy!)

Anyway, I don’t think this will happen soon, but I’m pretty sure it will happen eventually. What will you do with YourTube then?

Sledging through the 5th

October 24th, 2020

This is, I think, wonderful.

When I first saw it, someone had appended a Spanish title, so I presumed that it was created by an artist with whom I didn’t share a language. No textual language, anyway, because this is a testament to how art can capture emotions that we all share!

It was created by Doodle Chaos.

September 29th, 2020

Connecting external microphones to your Mac

September 29th, 2020

If you have a USB microphone, it’s easy to plug it into your computer. But if you have an analog one, intended to be used with anything other than a computer — say, a camera, sound system or voice recorder — the chances are that it may not work, unless your computer has a dedicated microphone socket.

My Macs have a headset socket, into which you can plug combined earbud/microphone combinations such as you might get with your phone. But it tends to think that anything else you plug in there is just a pair of headphones, and that you probably want to keep using the built-in mic on the machine.

I did some experiments to work out how to persuade it to use an external microphone. It’s not one of my slickest videos, but it should serve its purpose!

Update, a few days later:

Even though the above solution works, it’s almost certainly easier, if you don’t have a microphone socket on your computer, to use a USB audio adapter, like this one.

I was hesitant about this, because I wasn’t sure of the likely quality of the analog-to-digital converters in a cheap USB peripheral, but it turns out to work very well for normal use. That would be my recommendation now, if you have a spare USB socket!

September 28th, 2020

Academia ain’t what it used to be

September 28th, 2020

Malcolm Gaskill has a poignant, observant and very nicely-written piece in the London Review of Books, entitled “On Leaving Academia”.

In May, I gave up my academic career after 27 years. A voluntary severance scheme had been announced in December, and I dithered about it until the pandemic enforced focus on a fuzzy dilemma. Already far from the sunlit uplands, universities would now, it seemed, descend into a dark tunnel. I swallowed hard, expressed an interest, hesitated, and then declared my intention to leave…

There are many parts of this that resonate with my experience, though my involvement with academia in recent years has been much shallower than his. I am also intrigued about the ways in which Covid is suddenly shaking up the methods of teaching that have been the norm for decades, if not centuries. Some good things will come out of this, I’m sure. But I also share much of his yearning for the past.

Three responses went through my brain in quick succession:

The first was that the ongoing success of universities now will depend chiefly on hiring lots of young, eager academics, primarily because they don’t know how good things used to be.

The second was that the bureaucrats who oversee universities should note one important thing here: this is not the dusty nostalgia of an old gent in his seventies coming to the end of his career. Gaskill is 53.

But my final thought was of a little phrase in a book of poetry and trivia from my childhood. It simply had the title “The Good Old Days”:

These ARE the Good Old Days. Just wait and see.

Thanks to John for the link.

Grant me the wisdom

September 28th, 2020

I like this tweet from Elizabeth Ayer this morning. Definitely a good recipe for preserving your sanity in the modern world.

God give me the strength to ignore the news that won’t change anyone’s mind, the energy to engage with the news that might, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Mid-life Covid crisis?

September 28th, 2020

I’m a middle-aged computer geek, but my iPhone is too old to run the NHS Track & Trace app. I think this is a limitation of the Bluetooth hardware, but my phone also can’t run a recent-enough version of the operating system.

This isn’t a criticism of the app; you need the right hardware to do something like this. But it makes me wonder about the proportion of the population that will actually be able to run it. Perhaps middle-aged computer geeks like me are actually the most likely to have elderly phones? I wonder whether anyone has done a graphic, plotting the age of users against the age of their smartphones? Probably a kind of 3D histogram?

On the one hand, younger users are probably more likely to be swayed by a desire for the latest gadget and by competition with their peers. But older users are, I guess, more likely to have the disposable income to upgrade. Mmm.

And now, of course, we have some interesting extra dimensions. The effectiveness of the app is highly dependent on its market penetration, and that penetration in different age-groups is going to be constrained by this distribution.

Is it particularly important that older people, who are more vulnerable to Covid, have this app? Well, probably not directly, because the app doesn’t protect you; it protects those who may come into contact with you in the future. On the other hand, perhaps older people are more likely to be in contact with other older people in the future, so it is important that they know when they shouldn’t be socialising.

There are lots of lovely opportunities for research, here, and for inventive data visualisation. Anyone got any funding available?

One thing is clear, though. The more of a social animal you are, of whatever age group, the more important it is that you run this. (That’s a serious point, so no snarky comments, please, about whether middle-aged computer geeks often fall into that category.)

Now, here’s a last thought. I have been considering that it may finally be approaching the time when I do upgrade my phone. But I’m likely to wait until Apple announces their next models, presumably sometime between now and Christmas. (This isn’t because I want the latest one, necessarily, but because the current top model will probably be demoted to a cheaper price bracket when its position is usurped.) I imagine many others may be in the same position, and large numbers of us will become track-and-traceable only after that point.

So…

Given that this same technology is being used around the world, how many lives might be dependent on the timing of the next Apple and Samsung product announcements?

September 16th, 2020

I promise to pay the car park attendant on demand…

September 16th, 2020

Do you remember how, in the old days, before you went on holiday, one of the important tasks you had to do before departure was to get some cash in the local currency? Well, even in this modern era, there are still some places where you need to do that. Cornwall, for example.

We’ve been taken by surprise, as visitors here, by the number of car parks which require payment, and where that payment can only be made with cash. Usually in coins, with no change given, so you really want the exact amount. Now, as someone who hasn’t really used cash for years, this was a minor inconvenience the first two or three times. But I’ve now realised that it’s basically the same everywhere: the Queen’s currency is still vital here; it’s a complex kind of car-parking token. Every single car park has required cash; I think we’ve been to four or five here, and one in Devon on the way down. Today, as a gesture to the 21st century, the car park had two machines. One took cards! Hurrah! It was out of order.

Now this isn’t because we’re in some remote backwater where they’ve never heard of digital transactions. Pretty much everything else, since we’ve left home, has been paid for sans contact using my Apple Watch (which is how I’ve paid for most things in the last five years). And, in fact, in Covid-world, most shops are not taking cash at all, so it’s even harder to go and buy a Kit-Kat to get some change. That’s assuming you can find an ATM from which to get some notes in the first place; they’re not exactly plentiful here.

Since there are a lot of visitors to this part of the world, car park attendants have to spend a lot of their time explaining to people that, no, I know it’s astonishing, but you do actually need cash if you want to park here. No, sorry, there isn’t an ATM here, but there’s one in the next town… Yes, that one you drove past 20 minutes ago on the narrow winding road with occasional passing places.

To be fair, twice in recent days they have come up with alternative solutions for me. “Which is your car? OK, well, give me the change you’ve got now, and if you manage to get any more in the village, you can pay me the rest when you get back.” or “If you call this number, that’s our central office, and they can take a card payment.” Very good of them, but it’s daft that they have to do it.

Today, at Porthcurno, I did call the central office. “No, I’m sorry, we can’t actually take payments over the phone. And we can’t install card machines because they need a phone connection, and there’s no phone coverage there.”

“But you can hear me OK?”

The same excuse was given me in Mousehole. (Yes, that’s a real place name, and a charming place, too, if you can find anywhere to park.) “The phone coverage is too patchy”, said the man by the machine, “so they can’t install machines that take cards.” This is clearly ridiculous; all of the cafes nearby offered free wifi. Is it really the case that card-payment car-park machines can only be connected over mobile networks? And besides, is a live connection back to base really required for a £2 contactless purchase? Or is this, I wondered, just a scheme to provide employment for locals as they go around emptying the cash from the machines?

Anyway, today, I eventually managed to get some cash at the Post Office, and then buy some stamps (another blast from the past) so that I had some coins to pay the patiently-waiting car-park man. Not sure what I’ll do with the remainder: I won’t have any use for them at home.

And then it struck me. Of course! That’s the reason! It’s a ploy to make people get coins which they won’t use at home, so they have to spend them in the local area before they go, thus boosting the local economy. Brilliant!

I expect there’s a Duty Free on the A30 somewhere near Exeter where I can buy some cider before departure. Now it all makes sense.

September 12th, 2020

Excuse me… were you invited to this party?

September 12th, 2020

Today we’re heading for Cornwall. Normally, that would be a major undertaking, but fortunately, we can see it from where we’re staying.

It’s just over there:

Looks nice, doesn’t it?

September 11th, 2020

Air Power

September 11th, 2020

We’re staying in a throughly delightful B&B in Devon, on a working farm. This is the view from the front door:

Rose was greeted by the welcoming committee in the car park.

We drove down here in our little electric car. We’ve had it now for nearly five years, and have clocked up 30,000 miles, which I realise means we’ve put about eight megawatt-hours through its battery! That sounds like quite a lot, so I should point out that it represents total fuel costs to us of about £20 per month, and in our case that fuel was almost entirely from renewable sources; mostly hydroelectric, with a bit of solar and wind. So for the last five years, we’ve been driving around powered by sun, wind and rain.

One thing that helps with the efficiency is keeping your tyres pumped up to the correct pressure. I carefully did that a couple of days ago before setting off. But I couldn’t help noticing this morning that our very genial host, Rob, was doing the same, but he has a rather more powerful tyre pump than I have!

Quentin Stafford-Fraser's blog

No, sorry, you can’t Zoom in that far

Coasting

No, wait, I have a cunning plan…

Pondering the length of the Tube

Sledging through the 5th

Connecting external microphones to your Mac

Academia ain’t what it used to be

Grant me the wisdom

Mid-life Covid crisis?

I promise to pay the car park attendant on demand…

Excuse me… were you invited to this party?

Air Power

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