My 40th Birthday pacemaker mix

Its been a while but I put together a mix of quite a few of my favourite tunes for my 40th birthday. You will recognise some of the mixes from previous ones. Its a short mix and done while travelling between locations on the train.

Enjoy!

  1. Empty Cities, Dead Ghosts – Fictitious Riceboy
  2. Shnorkel – Miki Litvak & ido Ophir
  3. Night in Motion – Cubic 22
  4. Opium – Jerome Isma-Ae & Alastor
  5. Labyrinth (Paul Keyen remix) – Lee Cassells
  6. Opulence – Simon Patterson
  7. Brush Strokes – Simon Patterson
  8. We are one – Dave 202
  9. Surveillance – Jordan Suckley and Kutski
  10. Seven Cities (V-Ones living cities remix) – Solar Stone
  11. Seven Days and One Week (Club Mix) – Tomcraft
  12. Whites of her eyes – Simon Patterson
  13. Humming the lights – Armin van Buuren presents Gaia
  14. The Dark Knight – Khomha
  15. Tears (Protoculture remix) – Markus Schulz presents Dakota
  16. Orbion (Max Graham vs Protoculture remix) – Armin Van Buuren
  17. Anahera (Extended Mix) – Ferry Corsten

32 times for the love of Shambhala

Shambhala is a steel roller coaster located at PortAventura World, in Salou Spain. The ride opened to the public as Europe’s tallest roller coaster, taking guests up 76m (249ft) high before allowing them to plummet back towards the ground below. In this video we’ll explore the type of ride experience Shambhala offers, as well as its many statistics and developed theme.

Its certainly one of my favourite rides. With 32 rides in one day.

Climate disaster is just around the corner

I have nothing but respect for the people who are taking part in the Extinction Rebellion, its about time! I had hoped Al Gore’s inconvenient truth would be the start of this? But it wasn’t. You can blame the media, trump, etc but the fact is we are running out of time.

Extinction Rebellion - Rebel for life
Its unbelievable and downright scary to hear mainly older peoples views on “kids” truanting from school and blocking London. I understand the worry about legal and illegal protest, however each and everyone of them understand how much of a knife edge humanity is on.

I was listening to Episode 127 of TeamHuman “All Hands On Deck” Extinction Rebellion with Gail Bradbrook and Clare Farrell. Although I thought they were interesting its their pulling people together which is most important. Always reminded of Eric Nehrlich’s find the others post.

I found this cartoon quite powerful by the way.

 

Node volume 01 ebook

NODE VOL 01 is a new, independently created zine for the NODE community. It contains many of the subjects we talk about here; decentralization and P2P technologies, open source, do it yourself tutorials and hardware design, cutting edge technology and more.

This first volume is 150 pages long, and, it’s packed with features on P2P projects, such as Dat, Beaker Browser, Ricochet IM, Aether, and more. There are many tutorials showing projects like the new NODE Mini Server, how to 3D print long range wifi antennas, how to chat via packet radio, and how to do things like Libreboot the Thinkpad X200. There’s also a handy open source directory at the back, along with lots more.

I do like watching N-O-D-E, and its great to see all the episodes in one place to read through at our leisure, in the form of a freely downloadable ebook. If you don’t use DAT, theres a copy here. You can also get it in paper from the shop.

Savouring chocolate?

Attention do not eat chocolate but savour it
Attention do not eat chocolate but savour it. If you would like to be a chocolate connoisseur, you should not munch the chocolate, savour it by letting it melt

Little reminder of how to really eat chocolate.

Place the chocolate on your tongue and press it to the roof of your mouth. Within thirty seconds, the chocolate should slowly begin to melt around your tongue. Take a deep breath, aerating your palate as you stimulate your sense of smell through the back of your throat.

Try doing this with bog standard mass produced chocolate and you will get a very different taste.

The Quantified Self archive all in one place

Get inspiration and ideas from hundreds of self-tracking projects documented in our community archive, searchable by tools and topics.

Its great to see all of the quantified self videos, presentations and show and tells in one place. Its quite an archive of media and worth browsing through. I had the joy of seeing some of these live at the Quantified Self conference’s.

Here’s some of my favourite ones.

Three Years of Logging my Inbox

Mark Wislon notices that his inbox correlates directly with his stress level. After passively tracking this for three years, he decides to actively shift how he sees his inbox account and learns how he’s controlled (and been controlled by) this stream of angst. He also discovers a very important life lesson: he’s addicted to email.

Using Relationship Data to Navigate a Chaotic Life

Fabio Ricardo dos Santos is gregarious and likes to be around people. A lot of people. But he had a nagging sense that something was out of balance. To better understand why, he began to track his relationships and interactions. He soon found that out of the people that he knows, only about 14% are what he considered to be important relationships and that they made up 34% of his interactions. He felt that this number was too low and it spurred him to spend more time with that important 14%. But he didn’t just track his time with people and the number of interactions. He expanded his system to include the quality of his relationships and interactions. He found that this made him focus on face-to-face interactions and video chats over emails and texts.

Leaning into Grief

Dana Greenfield’s mom was a surgeon, professor, researcher, entrepreneur, blogger, tennis player, and a mentor to many medical students. Unexpectedly, she passed away in February, 2014. To help her process her mother’s death, Dana began tracking every time she thought of her mother by writing down what triggered the memory, the mood it inspired, etc. Watch Dana’s talk as she shares her experiences of using self-tracking to better understand her own grief and the role her mother continues to play in her life.

What I Learned By Building

Dawn Nafus, an anthropologist, reflects on some observations of what self-trackers actually do when they make sense of data. Dawn’s observations led her to ask: what tools might support more diverse ways of working with data? This short talk describes what she’s learned while engaging and building tools for the QS community.

Tracking Punctuality

Sebastien Le Tuan is a recovering “late-oholic.” He is typically always late to friends and family events. One day he had a conversation with his dad that made him realize what effects his tardiness has on his personal and professional life. In this talk, Sebastien describes how he started tracking his punctuality and what he has learned from the process.

Sleep Patterns

Laurie Frick is a visual artist that make work, objects, and installations that relate to brain rhythm. In the video, she presents her amazing work on daily activity charts and sleep charts translated to art. She measured her nightly sleep for over 3 years using a ZEO eeg headband and has almost 1000 nights of sleep data.

Can’t You See I Was Falling In Love

Shelly Jang used GMvault to look through 5 years of Google Chat logs to hunt for signals that she loves only her husband. She looked at whom she messages, the time of a day, and the words she uses. She was able to extract meanings from innocuous metrics like “delay in response” to show whether her or her future husband were “playing games” at the beginning of the relationship. In the talk, she shares what she learned from her project.

Grandma Was A Lifelogger

When Kitty stumbled upon her grandmother’s diaries and started to explore the daily entries, she was struck by similarities with her own life and habits. Kitty is a modern-day lifelogger. She tracks places, events, mood – a variety of different personal data streams. Reading the diaries, Kitty saw that her grandmother used her daily entries as logs – tracking the details of where she went, what she ate, even the boys she kissed. In this talk, Kitty shares what she discovered, and the lessons she learned.

A Photo Every Minute: One Year Later

Rob Shields has been wearing a camera phone around his neck that takes photos every minute. He has been doing this since August of last year. In this video, one year later, he talks about what has changed, what’s new, the things that have been working, and some of the stuff that haven’t been working. He also shares some data from his experiment.

Tracking Street Harassment

Valarie moved to San Francisco when she was 29 and she was not prepared for the city life. She was really freaked out by the trash on the streets, by the way the taxi drivers drove, and how expensive everything was. But the thing that freaked her out the most was street harassment. Street harassment is any action or comment between strangers in public places that is disrespectful, unwelcome, threatening, or harassing and is motivated by gender or sexual orientation. She was surprised with how many times she was harassed while walking around. To better understand what was going on she started tracking these instance.

We Are All Going To Die: How Is Our Digital Life Preserved

Mark Krynsky started a blog about six years ago. On his blog, he wrote about live streaming and impetus and how he was trying to aggregate social data into a single timeline. The blog evolved over time, and it wasn’t just about social data–it was also about life blogging. Since then, he learned about Quantified Self and started thinking about the future of his data, what’s going to happen after he dies? In this talk, Mark discusses digital preservation and how he created an action plan for his digital data after his death.

Tracking and Improving My Sleep

Quantified Self organizer and cognitive science researcher, Daniel Gartenberg, is interested in sleep and his passion is this idea of not just tracking sleep but actually being able to improve sleep. He also makes sleep apps. He started tracking his sleep after his business partner contacted him on a recent scientific finding, where basically one could enhance deep sleep auditory stimulation that replicates the frequency of one’s own brainwaves when in deep sleep. In this talk, he shares his tips on tracking and improving his sleep.

Owning My Quantified Self Data

After years of collecting Quantified Self data, Aaron Parecki began moving more of his data onto his personal website rather than letting it sit in someone else’s cloud. This insures that his data will stick around even after apps and devices go away.

Bitten by a dog in a hotel!

Dog

My partner was bitten by a dog in a hotel (the dark horse pub) when we rented a room in Bristol.

It sounds nuts or like there more to the story but its pretty much that.

Here’s my review on Googlemaps and here’s my partners review on tripadvisor

We stayed in the hotel part of the pub, which is upstairs overnight. While climbing the stairs trying to get into the hotel part with a member of staff. A white dog aggressively barked at us from a fenced area. The fencing wasn’t strong enough and on exiting the hotel room chased us out of the pub on the first night. We came back later that night with no problem except dog poo everywhere! Really hard to see in the midnight light.

In the morning the dog went straight for my partners ankle, when she woke up early and decided to get some fresh air. It was not tentative and both fangs went in. I seen the bite mark and shes got multiple photos.

I personally didn’t feel safe before and when I found out wanted out straight away. My partner knowing I was terrified of dogs, choose not to tell me till we were clear of the whole place.

The response from the hotel/pub owner was a joke and its been horrible trying to get hold of them, They took the full money and only offering 25% off our next stay! Thats it for being bitten!

Next stay?!

I say never and they are bloody lucky I wasn’t bitten because I would have called the police and the dog would be put down. The dog poo irresponsible, being chased by a dog is irresponsible but being bitten is totally unacceptable and dangerous!

The thing you have to remember is this was a hotel, we paid money for and we were guests. I don’t care if the pub is dog friendly, you can’t have dangerous dogs running around lose biting guests. I say guests because although my partner was first to be bitten, the same dog a few weeks before had attempted to bite someone else. Here’s a review from Susan from bookings.com

Very noisy, steep stairs to sleeping areas, ear plugs supplied by Pub because of noise. Noisy main road. Small dog tried to bite my Husband on the leg when we went to leave. Dog poo on wooden veranda.

Its a matter of time. Avoid the dark horse pub hotel!

Going to Indieweb Camp Berlin 2019?

Ian Forrester
Ian Forrester
:
RSVP yes
to Indieweb Camp Berlin

 

I am!

Just RSVP’ed (did it via this post and via a webform) to IndieWebCamp Berlin. Its the first one I’ve been to and I have massive professional and personal interest in Indieweb technologies. Its such a big thing I added it to my new years resolutions.

Explore the future of decentralised and distributed systems
This one is a combination of 2 of my  previous resolutions. Exploring the future of online dating with decentralise more. So more mastodon and more exploring Indie web technologies like Bridgy and Kinds. I’ve been really interested in these things for a long while.

Theres a whole bunch of interesting technologies I’ve been keeping an eye on, but never really had the time to spend really looking in-depth.

3 parties in a week, and all for 40

40th Birthday

My parents asked me what I want to do for my birthday late last year. They were thinking I could do a big party in Bristol. But I suggested why not have three of them instead?

Each party/bash representing a section of my life so far.

  • Bristol (0-19)
  • London (19-28)
  • Manchester (28-40)

40 years of opioninated conversation and living life to the maximum

Of course my parents thought it was too much, but I was certain it was a good idea and I could do it.

Happy to say I was right. I had planned to put in sometime at the theme parks of England (Alton Towers, Thorpe Park, Blackpool) but due to half-term decided I’d better not because I would end up in queues (Love the European theme parks for this). Plus I decided I could fit everything around work (or work around everything). I won’t lie, I would have been absolutely exhausted if I did!

Manchester party

So it happened and I was blown away by the friends and family who attended but also helped make the whole thing happen. Couldn’t have done it all without them! Thanks to everyone who came, gave their time, cards (I got so many cards I had to shift them around the flat) and even gifts. Also thanks for all the people who wanted to be there but couldn’t make it for different reasons.

Thank you to everyone again! 40 started with a bang, look out for 50 – ha!

The s*** storm which is Brexit

There is a really good opinion piece I read recently in open democracy from a leave voter. Who although holds on to her believes why she voted to leave but can’t bear to see the massive s*** storm which is about to tear the United Kingdom (ha!) apart.

The economic arguments for Brexit have been destroyed by a series of shattering blows

Take the deal, or maybe its pride which stops the UK from doing so?

So I argue, as a Brexiteer, that we need to take a long deep breath. We need to swallow our pride, and think again. Maybe it means rethinking the Brexit decision altogether.

Certainly it means a delay when we can think about it all in a period of calm. Europe is offering us this opportunity. President Tusk is ready to offer a year’s extension. I say: grab it with both hands.

I’ve been thinking for a long while its time to stop this craziness with a 2nd vote but those who voted leave will cry fowl or say we have undermined democracy. However deep down I think there are some critical reasons why this must happen…

The author pretty much writes the reasons in her post.

  1. Independence is it really worth the battle?

I respect those who say yes, all this is worth it to pursue a dream of independence. It is a noble dream. I share it. It is founded on Britain’s historic role as a proud nation that has repeatedly fought for freedom and liberty. I, too, am conscious of our magnificent history. In the 18th century we stood against the Bourbon dream of European hegemony. We liberated Europe from the Napoleonic domination of continental Europe at the start of the 19th century. And faced up to Nazi Germany in 1940.

But this is not 1939 or the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. History gets made and remade all the time. The European Union is not a dictatorship, as contemptuous of national identity as Napoleonic France. Nor can it be compared to Nazi Germany – a foolish analogy which has become an ugly cliché and displays an unforgivable failure to understand the true horror of recent European history. Nor is it any longer a socialist project as envisaged by Jacques Delors, let alone an evil empire, as some have characterised it.

Of course our looming privations and national isolation would be thoroughly worthwhile if we were confronting such a continental menace. Let others call us ridiculous: we would have a duty to stand alone. But is such language appropriate in a century when all our EU partners are democracies, and none poses the remotest threat of taking up arms against us? Donald Tusk, who will lead the EU heads of government when they meet next week to decide Britain’s future inside the union, is not Hindenberg. Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, is a genial, shrewd elderly man who (like me) enjoys the occasional drink.

I readily accept that the European Union is a dysfunctional body beset by all manner of problems. But the lesson of the last two years is that we are much better off working inside the EU (where we are greatly respected; it was British civil servants, remember, who wrote the rules of the single market) for reform and not as a hostile neighbour.

2. Will there be a United Kingdom left?

Moreover, there is a second reason for why I have changed my mind. The threat to the United Kingdom. This hits me like a massive punch in the stomach. When I cast my vote in 2016 I believed that the European Union was, if anything, a threat to our own union…

Like almost everybody else I underestimated the importance of the Good Friday Agreement

But I did not foresee that Brexit would threaten the continued existence of our kingdom as a union. I reckoned without the separatists within our nation who would push us apart, and seize on Brexit (as the Scottish nationalists are doing) as a reason to break up.

3. The vote was illegally and heavily manipulated – FACT

My third unhappiness concerns the integrity of some leading Brexiteers. We are learning more and more about the deceit and illegal tactics which accompanied the Leave campaign. Late last month, on a busy news day, Vote Leave dropped its appeal against a £61,000 fine for electoral offences committed during the referendum.

Allegations of illegal overspending are deeply worrying. Britain’s data protection watchdog, the Information Commissioner’s Office, fined Leave. EU and Eldon Insurance, an insurance company run by Leave’s Arron Banks, a total of £120,000 for breaking electoral marketing laws. The National Crime Agency is still investigating suspicions of criminal offences committed by the unofficial Brexit campaign during the referendum. Banks’ alleged links to Russian money are even more worrying. There have not yet been serious enough attempts to answer these questions.

Everyday I can’t watch the news to see the s*** storm getting darker and darker. I’m sure in many years things will get better but I currently estimate it will be 15-20 years.

How many black UK podcasts hosts are there?

The Black Detour

I was having a chat with someone (don’t have his card to hand) during a event in Salford University. We were talking about the perceptive podcasts application and podcasting industry in general. I was talking about how podcasting is/should/could be a different medium. There is still the opportunity to do new and interesting things with the format which suit/challenge the audience.

This lead into a discussion about diversity and how the established people are never going to be that interested. We zeroed in on ethic diversity

What we need is more diversity and new voices; not just in front of the microphone but as producers.“I power-phrase him saying.

This headed to towards a long discussion about how many black podcasts we have heard? I instantly talked about…

Then he dropped the bombshell, “what about the UK?

I found it very difficult to name any off the top of my head, so decided to asked the twit/fed-verse

A few people got back to me and I thought I’d share…

Then I found, podcasts in color which lists podcasts from people of colour (because actually its not about just one race). Its hard to work out which ones are UK but I found these.

There are many more but they don’t seem to be updated recently.

So the short answer is yes there are UK black podcasts but not as many as I would have liked. I’m planning to go back through this list and resources to find new podcasts to subscribe to.

podcasts in color

Interestingly James from podcast news pointed me at a piece of news about diversity in podcasts.

Dane Cardiel from Simplecast is “working closely with Dan and Jared on an initiative collecting input from podcasters of colour for the 2nd Annual Podcasters of Colour Networking Event at Podcast Movement 2019.” If you’re a podcaster of colour interested in participating in discussions later this month, here’s a form to fill in.

I missed my chance but good to know others are thinking about similar things.

On turning 40…

40 years of opinionated conversation and living life to the maximum

Soon I will turn 40. Most people fear or can’t imagine ever getting to 40 but I’m much less worried about that. I kind of feel young and although there are noticeable changes like grey hair in my facial hair, creaky knees and a noticeable lack of excess energy.

Regardless I’m still playing Volleyball regularly and trying a few other things including trying Basketball again (that was hard work!). My eye sight is incredible and off the charts for my age, I have been told.

Its funny how the things you do when you are young persist into older age. For example I can still be found with my diabolo on warm days or during the Manchester firejam. Still riding my skateboard when going short distances and considered getting rollerblades again. Convinced this is the future of transport and feel lucky to learned this when young.

My routine is still organised chaos but…  I like it that way and to be fair an ordinary life doesn’t interest me but its tricky as unconventional life isn’t always easy. Especially with a partner, but we manage by sharing calendars.

The only strange thing for me is being at the BBC for coming up to 15 years! I joined just after my birthday. I still feel quite young even with all the younger people I work with.

The 40th is usually a big one and as usual I decided to do something different for it. I decided to do 3 party’s, each one representing the three different cities/eras of my life so far.

  • Bristol (0-19)
  • London (19-28)
  • Manchester (29-40)

I had planned to fit theme park trips to Thorpe Park, Alton Towers and Blackpool pleasure beach too. But frankly it was too much and with the Easter holidays it meant the parks would likely be packed with kids also trying to get on the rides.

Without a doubt, 40 is going to be fun!

IBM DIF project removes my flickr urls


Hopefully the final follow up from my post about facial recognitions dirty little secret millions of online photos scraped without consent. and the update.

Thank you for your prompt response. We confirm that we have deleted from the DiF dataset all the URLs linked to your Flickr ID and associated annotations. We have also deleted your Flickr ID from our records. IBM will require our research partners to comply with your deletion request and provide IBM with confirmation of compliance.

Best regards,

IBM Research DiF team

End of the matter, although part of me wants to contact everybody in the photos and tell them what happened. Not sure what that would achieve however?

Airbnb Has a Hidden-Camera Problem – You telling me?

Airbnb monitoring warning
You would never guess it was a listening device from the picture

I was reading a piece in the Atlantic about Airbnb and the camera problem.

Of course this has super relevance to me after my experience of a Airbnb in Barcelona last year.

Airbnb’s rules allow cameras outdoors and in living rooms and common areas, but never in bathrooms or anywhere guests plan to sleep, including rooms with foldout beds. Starting in early 2018, Airbnb added another layer of disclosure: If hosts indicate they have cameras anywhere on their property, guests receive a pop-up informing them where the cameras are located and where they are aimed. To book the property, the guests must click “agree,” indicating that they’re aware of the cameras and consent to being filmed.

I do find it really interesting because Airbnb class listening devices such as Amazon Alexa as cameras too. I did think this would be very difficult to police. The transparency is welcomed, as before you had to search pictures for anything which looked suspicious.

In January, Bigham discovered cameras in his rental that he says were never disclosed. After he reached out to the Trust & Safety team, representatives told him he and his family had in fact consented to the cameras because they were visibly displayed in photos on the listing. After Bigham’s blog post on the ordeal went viral, Airbnb apologized and refunded his money.

But Bigham says customer-service representatives for Airbnb twice sided against him before reversing their original decision, and only after his blog post was widely shared online.

“No one really seems to know what they’re doing,” Bigham said in an email. “And it seems like it’s only going to get worse.”

In a statement, Airbnb said: “We have apologized to Mr. Bigham and fully refunded him for his stay. We require hosts to clearly disclose any security cameras in writing on their listings and we have strict standards governing surveillance devices in listings. This host has been removed from our community.”

As usual the public stink causes Airbnb to actually do something. I wonder how many complaints get shoved under the carpet?

Google starts transcribing podcasts?

Android police podcats transcribed

Google is finally transcribing some podcasts… It made sense a long time ago and its happening for real. No april fools.

Google Podcasts is now automatically generating transcripts of episodes and is using them as metadata to help listeners search for shows, even if they don’t know the title or when it was published.

Its a shame its only for use in Google podcasts, but I guess nothing is free when it comes to tech corps.  I remember thinking Google was going to start doing this when Google talked about podcasts, and what a time to start doing it I guess?

But there are questions about which podcasts are transcribed, is there a waitlist, how do you opt out and of course horrible errors from an automated process.