The Dakar has me all dual sport fixated at the moment. To pass the never ending Canadian winter I’ve been looking up hard to find bikes and then seeing what it would take to go get ’em.
For $3000US there is a Yamaha Ténéré for sale at the Power Brokers of the Black Hills out in South Dakota. That’s a capable dual sport named after part of the original Paris to Dakar race.
The cunning plan would be arrange to pick up the bike in the spring. It’s a few hundred bucks to fly out to Rapid City. It happens to be right by the Black Hills and Sturgis where the big Harley thing happens. I’ve got no interest in that, but the Hills are supposed to be lovely riding, and only four hundred miles west is Yellowstone. I’ve always wanted to see the mega-volcano that will eventually wipe out most of the human race.
After hitting Yellowstone it’s a long arc back to the east. That isn’t what the Ténéré is about, but if I did it focusing on back roads and trails, it’d be an interesting way to find my way home.
It’s over 700 miles east before I get to Deluth on the west end of Lake Superior. From there it’s still a long way home. In previous dream rides Deluth has been the apogee of around the Great Lakes rides. This time it would be the half way point on a long ride east.
The legendary Austin Vince put out the video below about this year’s orienteering trail rides in the Pyrenees in northern Spain:
Come map reading and trail-riding with me this summer. Watch this film with the sound up and note that the early bird offer ends in a week. This one is for Tim Kent and Del!
Posted by Austin Vince on Friday, January 12, 2018
If there was ever an excuse to load up a shipping container with old enduro bikes and send it to Europe, this is it. The Twinshock Trailfinder is a two day event that focuses on older bikes (with twin rear shocks). I’d dig up four old XT500s, clean them up and have them ready to go, in team colours. Some soft luggage would make them as touring ready as they are going to get while keeping everything as light as possible. The Trailfinder event starts on June 6th in Tremp, Catalunya, Spain and runs until June 8th. An option is to container the bikes over to Antwerp, Belgium. It’s a two thousand kilometre ride if you go the pretty way around through the Alps down to Spain. Two thousand kilometers on thirty-five year old enduro bikes is pretty hard core, but that would kind of be the point. If the container got into Antwerp mid-May, we could get them sorted out and on the road by May 21st. We could then wind down through Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland and France before reaching Spain. At 300kms a day that’s a seven day trip. With a couple of days off in there to explore, we could roll into Barcelona at the beginning of June and get the bikes sorted at the Yamaha Motor Centre before heading up to Tremp the next week.
Rather than get all GPSy with the ride down, we could do it all with survey maps like the ones used in the Twinshock Trailride. By the time we found our way to Spain we’d be very familiar with how European survey maps work and would be able to find our way around without looking like lost North Americans. After three days of trail riding with THE VINCE in the mountains, we could then spend an extra week getting better at it now that we’ve had a pro show us the ropes, maybe with some Jo Sinnott style wild camping in there. When we’re all done we could find some storage for the bikes and park them up, waiting for the next time someone needs to go trail riding in Spain. Digging up old, twin shock enduro bikes is tricky, especially in the icy wastes of Canada where old machinery quietly rusts away under the snow and salt. Ten years in Canada is like thirty anywhere else. Looking country wide, the only XT500 I could find was in Victoria BC, over four thousand kilometres away. Expanding the search into The States means I might be able to find non-rust belt bikes that have had easier lives. Unrestored but road worthy bikes look to be about two grand. Restored bikes go for over three thousand. There is one in North Carolina, and one in Mesa, Arizona. With some some searching and a US broker I think I could collect together four road worthy or thereabouts XT500s for under ten grand, and then spend some more prepping them. If I started now I could probably have the bikes at hand by the end of February and then spend March sorting them out. April could be spent breaking them in and shaking them down for any last minute issues. They’d be shipped the end of April to show up in Antwerp when we needed them. I’d be dangerous if I had money and time on my hands…
October 24th, 2014 there was a partial solar eclipse at sunset up our way. I was on the rear deck with the Olympus PEN EPL3 watching it go down. All shots with the long 300mm zoom lens.
Typical shot data looks like this: f/22 1/4000150 mm ISO1000 for the lower light shots and similar settings with wider aperture for the brighter shots – I’d rather everything stay sharp with as big an F stop as I can manage. No filter, believe it or not.
Taken on two consecutive summers in 2010 and 2011 using old cameras I can’t remember. The first two are from 2011 and happened right after sunset with some lingering light in the sky. The second set are from 2010 and happened several hours after sunset.
Long shutter shots (15-30 seconds) with preset focus and relatively low ISO settings. All done from a tripod, obviously.
I’ve been messing around with 360° immersive video at work. One of the best ways to quickly get familiar with the technology is to use it in a difficult circumstance so you can find its limitations. At work we’re building immersive video to show a virtual walk-through of our school. If the gimbal and camera we have will work on a motorbike, it’ll work stuck to a kid’s head as they walk through the school.
There are a number of barriers to admission with 4k video and image stabilization. Fortunately, the 360Fly4k windshield mount I have is so over engineered that it easily handles the weight and motion of the gimbal and camera rig.
I’ve previously done 4k video with the 360Fly4k, but it has a big blind spot on it, so this would be my first true 360 4k video. The Fly is a tough thing that takes great footage, but I’d describe it more as a 300° camera than a true 360 one.
This 4k 360 camera is the Samsung Gear 360. I’m running it off the camera because the app won’t run on my Android non-Samsung phone because I guess Samsung don’t want to sell many of these cameras – it’s kind of a jerk move on their part so if these things don’t sell (because you have to have a Samsung phone to access it remotely), then they’re getting what they deserve.
The Gear 360 has a small screen so you can see settings and using the buttons is fairly straightforward, though you’ll find yourself constantly accidentally pressing buttons while you’re handling it. The Ricoh Theta 360 is still my ergonomic favourite in terms of control and handling, and they just came out with a 4k version of the Theta – perhaps they’ll lend me one to test.
The gimbal is a Moza Guru 360°Camera stabilizer. The typical gimbal design has weights to the left or right of the camera to keep things balanced, but on a 360 camera that means you’re blocking all sorts of sight lines. The Moza gimbal is vertically stacked with the weights hanging below, mostly out of sight. It has a power button and a push button joystick that lets you set shooting modes and centre your camera so it’s looking where you’re going rather that looking down the ‘seams’ between the two cameras.
Most 360 cameras are actually two or more cameras working together. The resulting footage is then stitched together in software to make an every direction video. The raw footage from the Samsung looks like this (on left). A front and back facing fish-eye camera capturing separate footage.
Because both cameras are capturing different scenes, you can often see where they are stitched together because of a difference in ISO which shows up as a clear line of brightness difference (on the right). They all tend to be identical, fixed-lens cameras, so the aperture and shutter speed tend to be identical.
The first test video has the Samsung camera set at highest resolution (4096×2048 pixels in video) and 24FPS. The gimbal is in locked mode, so it’s always looking in the same direction even if I go around the corner. The gimbal provides smooth video by taking the bike’s motion out of the video (it’s always looking in the same direction as the bike and I rotate around the shot), but a bike’s motion is one of the best parts of riding, so for the second shot I set it in tracking mode so it followed the bike’s motions.
Uploading it to YouTube out of the Gear 360 Action Director resulted in a flattened video that doesn’t allow you to pan. In order to produce that kind of video in the G360-AD (what a ridiculous name), you need to PRODUCE the video in the software and then share it to YouTube from within the program. My issue with this is that when you bring the program in it takes an Intel i7 VR ready laptop the better part of twenty minutes (for less than ten minutes of footage) to process it before you can do anything with it. When you produce it (again) for YouTube you end up waiting another twenty minutes. The Ricoh Theta saves the video (albeit 1080p equivalent) in a fraction of the time and the resulting saved version is 360 ready for YouTube; the 360Fly software is likewise efficient at 4k. I’m not sure why I have to wait forty minutes to produce less than ten minutes of footage on the Samsung. I know it’s a lot of data to work through, but it isn’t a very streamlined process.
So, after a lot of post processing, the 4096×2048 360° video out of the camera shows up on YouTube at 1440s (s stands for spherical rather than p – pixels – spherical footage is stretched across a wider area and tends to look less sharp). I’m not sure where my 2048s footage went – I imagine part of that big post processing was to shrink the footage to fit on YouTube more easily?
If you click on the YouTube logo you can watch it in YouTube and adjust the resolution (bottom right) to see how it looks (make sure to do it full screen to use all your pixels). If you’re lucky enough to be watching it on a 4k display, this will come close to filling it.
The quality is excellent, the microphone remarkably good (they get beaten up pretty badly on motorcycles), but the awkwardness of post processing and the ergonomics of the thing don’t make it my first choice. Trying to manage it with gloves on would be even more frustrating. What you’ve got here is a good piece of hardware let down by some weak product design and software.
The software does offer some interesting post processing options in terms of wacky arts filters, but if you’re shooting at 4k all this does is drastically reduce the quality of your video. If you’re going to use those filters film at way lower resolution so you don’t have to wait for hours while they process.
I’m aiming to go for a ride tomorrow to look at the fall colours after our first frost. I’ll bring the Samsung along and see how well it photographs. It’s promising 15 megapixel 360 images and high dynamic range landscapes, so I’m optimistic. Photography is timeless and my preferred visual medium anyway, I find video too trapped by the continuity of time. Maybe the Samsung will be a good photography tool. Of course, I won’t be able to fire the thing remotely because I don’t have a Samsung phone…
Follow up:
The next morning I set up the camera on the gimbal for the ride to work. The camera epically failed to catch any of the magic of the morning mist. The video I got was starting and stopping every minute and the footage was a mess, full or artifacts and unusable.
Compared to the robust Ricoh Theta (which I’ve had out in light rain with no problems) or the bullet proof 360Fly4k, which I’ve left filming through full on storms, the Samsung gave up the ghost at a bit of fog on an otherwise sunny morning.
This is not a tough camera by any stretch. Dainty might be a better way to describe it. For something that’s supposed to catch the world around you, it’s best used indoors. Yes, I’m bitter that I couldn’t catch anything of that glorious morning ground fog.
Simulated image indeed – this camera wouldn’t work that close to an ocean! If you’re looking for a resilient, tough, outdoor camera, this ain’t it.
It was a cool, clear night when we had 2017’s December super moon, so photos and video ensued. The longest lens I’ve got is a fixed Nikon Coolpix P610. It’s a whole camera that costs a fraction of the equivalent SLR zoom. Since it’s build to use that lens, even though it doesn’t let a lot of light in, it does a lot better than you think it might. The photo and video below were taken with the P610 on a tripod at about 8pm once the moon had cleared the horizon.
A last double digit day before the snows fell meant one last ride at the end of November. Photos all on the Ricoh Theta 360 camera.
It’s hard to stay ahead of the dark this late in the year, so some pretty heavy photoshopping happened on these images (the Theta has a fixed lens so only so much light gets in)…
These are the big 3 that are somehow branding entire school boards, but the education software sector is a 10+ billion dollar industry beyond even them. Happy to make money from education, not so happy to pay taxes to provide that education in the first place.
I attended a panel discussion yesterday a #BIT17 between educators and education IT support that jumped up and down on a number of hot button issues. One thing that’s always struck me about attending a conference like ECOO is the point of view of the support people in education; they don’t seem to get the support piece. Our function is to educate. Not provide PD for teachers, or build an IT network. Those things are there only to support the main function of what we do: educate children.
In the course of this discussion it was suggested by curriculum support people and board IT professionals that teachers should be spending an inordinate amount of their time closely reviewing the legal documentation around software applications and vetting software. I thought we had people for that. Having a teacher do that is akin to pulling all your commandos off the front line in a war and having them do paperwork.
Once I got past everyone who doesn’t work in a classroom earnestly telling me I should be doing their job for them (odd that teachers never suggest that of other education employees), we continued to pursue the topic of heightened responsibility – the term that was used to shut down my suggestion of using your online PD community to source new technology ideas for your classroom. From my point of view, if a number of educators I know personally suggest trying a new app or other piece of educational technology, that’s a fantastic resource. I was told by a panel member that this stifles innovation. I always thought it was a source of innovation. Perhaps this was a misunderstanding in terminology. I used the term crowdsource to describe my process of vetting a new piece of software. To the CIO and curriculum experts on the panel, this meant trusting strangers on the internet. That isn’t my experience with online learning communities at all, it’s anything but dealing with unsubstantiated strangers. Maybe that’s how they tentatively work online though. Let’s call that one lost in translation.
Michelle Solomon from the Association of Media Literacy was on the panel and created an awkward moment when she suggested that using even board/ministry sanctioned software like Turnitin.com (a private, for profit company that uses student data to make its money) was morally ambivalent. The CIOs and curriculum experts were quickly able to compartmentalize that truth and function again within their fiction, but it knocked the floor out of what we were talking about for me.
When describing themselves and their school boards, the IT people in the room said, “we’re a Google board” and “we’re a Microsoft board” as a means of stating their, what, affiliation? Their purpose? You’re public school boards here to promote and deliver public education; what you aren’t is a multi-national media company that undermines democracy and avoids paying taxes anything.
The ‘stop loading malware onto our networks/teachers should be happy with less choice and spend more time pouring over software legalize‘ angle was designed to create a locked down, heavy drag system where innovation and moving with trends in data management would be years behind what everyone else is doing. I have to wonder just how bad the teachers-installing-malware issue is, because I haven’t heard anything about it. This invented and absurdly low threshold for software access (watch out, everything might be infected!) then had the blanket of heightened responsibility thrown over it all. Of course, you know what the answer to all these technically incompetent teachers installing malware is? Get a corporate system! Become a Gooplesoft board!
I left this talk with my head spinning. I feel like we were talking in circles about a fiction that
doesn’t exist. We could have a self-built, non-corporate technology foundation for Ontario Education, but it would be hard work and would require technical talent to achieve. Why do that when we can give in to the hype and Vegas-like allure of the educational technology juggernaut? Pick your poison, but if you’re going to use educational technology none of it is blameless, it’s all built on shifting grounds undermined by hidden revenue streams.
At one point it was suggested that we need to build media literacy in order to battle this situation. It needs to start with the educators and technologist working in the industry. If we’re too busy drinking the koolaid to recognize just how twisted this all is, then there is little hope of graduating students who anything more than consumers.
The other day I was driving my better half’s car. I don’t usually drive it and it’s still relatively new so each time is an adventure. It was a busy day on the main street of our village, so I was parallel parking into a spot with a row of traffic lined up behind me. It’s a smallish vehicle so this is pretty straightforward, or it would be. Shifting into reverse I backed in to the spot only to have the emergency warning systems start bleeping at me frantically whenever a car passed by. This system is supposed to be there to make the car safer, but in interrupting my parking process repeatedly it actually kept stopping me because I thought we were about to have an impending impact. I’d have been better off without the frantic bleeping and would have parked the car more efficiently, quickly and safely without it.
It’s a pretty thing and very efficient for what it is, but this Buick likes to get in the way of my driving process.
Pulling out after our stop I backed up to clear the car in front and the mirrors aimed down – I presume to make sure I’m not running over any small animals, but when I started driving forward all I could see out of the wing mirror was the ground, which isn’t very helpful when I’m trying to pull out. I’d have been better off without the squirrel saving rear view mirrors. I can always actually move my head if I want to see down through the mirror, it doesn’t need to move at all. The worst part about all of these interrupting technologies is that in addition to actually making driving more difficult, they are also another thing to break over the life of a car.
I’m all about technology assisting a process, I’m happy to use the rear view camera to make centimeter perfect parking, but there is a big difference between interfering and assisting. When you’re backing a car up and it starts bleeping at you about impending impacts that aren’t happening it isn’t helping, it’s introducing false and interrupting signal to your process. When your car aims its mirrors at the ground and then leaves them there thus preventing you from using them to assess incoming threats, they are a hazard rather than a help.
This ‘we’ll do it for you‘ technology sets all sorts of dangerous precedents:
This ad doesn’t make me think, gee, I need a Kia so when I’m operating a two ton vehicle like a clueless git it’ll save me from myself! It does suggest that there should be far fewer people with valid licenses on the road. Driver intervention tools like this muddy the line between expectations of driver competence and technology’s ability to take care of things. How often do educational technologies do the same thing in the classroom?
But what about technology like anti-lock brakes that actually outperform most people in emergency situations? I pride myself on my ability to modulate brakes very effectively, but modern anti-lock systems are so capable that I can’t keep up, and I consider them a requirement on a modern car. This isn’t an anti-technology rant, technology should be able to help us do things better, but when it doesn’t it drives me around the bend, and it doesn’t whenever it tries to do too much for us, and especially when it starts to assume responsibility for the very human parts of driving (like paying attention), or the very human parts of learning, like demonstrating skills.
Self driving cars are on the horizon. For many people this will be a great relief. Those who hate driving and do it poorly will all be better off for it, and so will the rest of us when they are no longer operating a vehicle. I have no doubt that for the vast majority self-driving cars will drastically reduce accidents, but they also mean those of us who are willing and capable lose the chance to learn how to do something well. The fact that I can toss pretty much anything into a parallel parking spot (I did in in a van… in Japan… with the steering on the wrong side) is a point of pride and a skill I took years to develop. If machines end up doing all the difficult things for us, what’s left for us to do well? If machines end up demonstrating our learning for us, what’s left for us to learn?
Based on what I’ve seen recently, I’m more worried that machines will unbalance and panic us while they are taking care of us. I don’t look forward to that future at all. Perhaps clueless, bad drivers won’t notice any of this and will do what they’re doing now, minus the actually controlling the car part. Perhaps poor learners will happily let AI write their papers and answer their math quizzes, and never have an idea if what they’re doing for them is right or not.
I often frustrate people by second guessing GPS. Mainly it’s because I know how hokey the software is that runs it, so I doubt what it’s telling me. When GPS steers me up a dead end road I’m not surprised. Maybe I’ll feel better about it when an advanced AI is writing the software and it isn’t full of human programming errors. When that happens maybe it won’t matter how useless the people are. There’s a thought.
I’m a big fan of technology support in human action, but it should be used to improve performance, not reduce effort and expectation. It should especially not damage my ability to operate a vehicle effectively. The same might be said for educational technology. If it’s assisting me in becoming a better learner, then I’m all for it, but if it’s replacing me as a learner, or worse, interfering with my ability to learn, then the future is bleak indeed.
