Status-Q

Just before Christmas, Tilly (my spaniel) and I went to the Dordogne and back in our campervan. I made a video about it, which, while it may be of interest only to travel vlog and 'van life' enthusiasts, does have a bit of novelty value, because I filmed it on a spherical (360-degree) camera.

This means that after you've watched it, you can go back and watch it again from a completely different angle and see what was happening behind you!

I'll put the link here, rather than embedding it, because this is something you want to watch on the YouTube site. Or, better still, in the YouTube app on your tablet, or phone, or VR headset...

You can find the video here.

If I had had more time, I would have made it shorter :-)

This was really just an experiment for me, and I learned a great deal about the challenges and opportunities of filming and editing this particular medium, which I may write about in due course.

Here's a little video selfie of me breathing. Pretty exciting stuff, eh? The reason I look so strange is that it's taken with a thermal camera: the white and yellow areas are warm, the blue and black ones colder. I haven't decided whether or not it's an improvement on my normal appearance.

One reason for our interest in this at the Lab is that you can clearly see my nostrils getting cooler as I breathe in, and warmer as I breathe out. So a thermal camera is a pretty straightforward way for a computer to measure my breathing rate.

But I had some fun playing with the camera at home, too. Pointing it at my hall floor showed glowing tracks where the hot pipes run under the tiles, allowing me to see how the radiators in different rooms are connected up.

When I was looking around upstairs, I noticed some light patches on the floor and wondered what they were. It took me a moment to realise that Tilly had trotted up behind me to see what I was doing, and had silently departed, leaving only warm paw-prints behind her as evidence.

Last night we went into London because the kind people at the Lovie Awards, the European branch of the (rather better-known) Webby Awards, had been good enough to give me an award, mostly for the work that friends and I had done in creating the first webcam.

I was a bit embarrassed about this, partly because I didn't think I deserved it, and partly because of the name, but I got over the latter, at least, when I discovered that it's in honour of Ada Lovelace.

Anyway, the tradition is that you have to give a little speech containing the word 'Love'. The other tradition, which nobody told me, is that the speech should be about 30 seconds, which is why I look a bit more flustered than usual here! I was trying, not very successfully, to edit my speech on the fly. But I got away with it because mine was the last award of the evening.

It was a great and responsive audience, which, sadly, you can't hear on this video.

Sean Riley creates the Computerphile YouTube channel, which has clocked up nearly a million subscribers, and produces some great stuff, especially for the geeks among us.

I had fun talking to him about the early days of the Trojan Room Coffee Pot.

I wrote about this a few years ago but it's still a handy and not-very-well-known hidden feature of the Mac's System Preferences.

NOTE that on some Macs, especially recent Mac Book Pros, this only works if you have external displays attached.

(Direct Youtube Link)

A quick recommendation of the dBpoweramp software, if, like me, you should find yourself ripping large numbers of CDs.

My latest little screencast shows some of the things you might not have discovered in the Preview app on the Mac.

Also available on Vimeo here.

This is brilliant...

My car now has a web page. Sadly, it's for my own use and not for public consumption, but I made a little video about it anyway!

Direct link to YouTube if preferred.

Thanks are due to Terence Eden for his work on documenting the API. Oh, and before anyone asks, no, I don't normally leave the cable draped across the pavement. :-)

Wow. She's still got it, hasn't she?

Thanks to Rory C-J for the link.