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Archive: September 2024
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Hi all Happy September! Wow how did that happen? One minute it's winter, then suddenly it's Spring, Summer whips by, and now Sept - Fall - Halloween - Thanksgiving - Christmas - New Year. The Earth's orbit around the Sun is definitely speeding up.
Yesterday I drove my bike up to Arroyo Grande and took a nice out-and-back ride to Avila Beach. Here's a composite video from the ride:
This is a test, there are several things going on here. First the video itself is a GoPro time-lapse combined with a Strava GPS flyby, with embedded iPhone pics. Experimental, and I like it. Composed with Adobe Premier. LMK what you think.
Next, this video is in my Dropbox, bypassing YouTube which I've historically used to host videos. I don't like YouTube (don't like Google); they stick in ads and generally cruftify* everything, and who knows when they'll delete my videos forever. Dropbox is more direct (but does it work?)
* yes of course cruftify is a word
And LBNL, this is my first time posting a video with my new spiffy (shaved-yak) email-to-blog mechanism. I love it by the way; this is being composed on my iPad, sitting in my den, miles away from my laptop and office.
{Update: it all worked, yay. Only thing is it isn't obvious that the pic above is a link to a video. I added "(click to watch)" but I need some kind of "video frame". (Huh)}
{Another Update: modified the API to support embedding videos, as opposed to merely linking them. This takes advantage of modern browsers' support for video; in the bad old days I used to embed various video plugins, and in the worse older days used Flash. But now even mobile browsers can play video directly ...}
Well enough of the navel gazing; it was a fun ride watching the masses at the beach, and traversing through Shell Beach which is a beautiful little residential neighborhood tucked in between Pismo and Avila.
Pismo Beach is a real slice of Americana; except for the size of the people and their tattoos, could have been any time in the 1980s; the kids and dogs playing in the surf were just the same.
Speaking of dogs, this has to be the best way to tour around with them, and is my favorite pic from the trip. Woof.
And onward...
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a Labor Day spent sailing w your granddaughter is pretty perfect
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Tonight I watched stage 16 of La Vuelta (the Tour of Spain cycling race), which finished atop the legendary Lagos da Covadonga climb in Asturias, the Northernmost province of Spain. It was a fantastic race on an amazing track.
I rode this very climb myself, way back in 2007; I was in Spain for business and detoured up to Asturias to ride the stage and then watch the pros do it too. After an improbable series of barriers surmounted I made it, probably the hardest climb I've ever done then or since. Watching the race today was doubly enjoyable remembering being there which seems like yesterday, 17 years ago...
Rereading my report on the day, I remember feeling a weird sense of inevitability; with each obstacle it felt like something good was going to happen, and then it did. "How did I get here (!)" indeed ... Quite a day.
My report does not go on to mention the incredible spicy Spanish dinner I had that night in Cangas des Onis nor the Rioja wine which accompanied it, but I remember them too. I do not remember finally sleeping but I'm sure I did so, like a stone.
Watching pro cycling in Europe is the best - in addition to another Vuelta stage I've been privileged to watch two stages of the Tour de France, and to ride and then watch the Ronde van Vlaanderen (Tour of Flanders). I still have to see a Giro d'Italia stage (Tour of Italy), and would love to see the Strade Bianca (which tours Tuscany and finishes in La Plaza in Siena). It's nice to have goals :)
Onward !
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Today's rant: passkeys considered bad. I knew this instinctively, based on their complexity, but David Hansson explains it in detail. Whew.
 Passwords are a problem, for sure, for me as a user as well as for me as an applications developer. Good passwords are hard to remember, every site has different rules, sometimes you have to change them, sometimes you can't reuse them, and everybody writes them down insecurely. (Yep, you do too, admit it.)
So when passkeys were invented, everyone said yay. But they don't solve all the problems and create many new ones. The difficulty of having them across multiple devices, the difficulty of creating them in the first place, and the difficulty of implementing them. And the reliance on central authorities.
Whenever there's a new thing, I try to understand it. (Blockchains! LLMs! Etc!) If the thing escapes me, maybe that's on me - sometimes I'm slow and it has to soak before I get it. But mostly if I don't get it, it's on the thing - it's too complicated to be good. (W=UH!) And so it seems with passkeys.
The best solution to passwords is not to have them at all. Just send the user a limited time link in text or email. This is simple to explain, simple to use, simple to implement. And no less secure than passwords; most of the time you can change or recover a password with a link in text or email anyway. Oh, and it supports multiple devices easily.
I get the appeal and value of two-factor authentication. Simple and better. After you remember your password and enter it, we'll send you a text or email too, just to make sure. But maybe we skip the "remember your password and enter it" part? Simpler and betterer.
 So long passkeys, we hardly knew ya...
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Where were you?
23 years ago...
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Among all the amazing capabilities of Perplexity* and honestly, c'mon, it is amazing, right? one of the biggest for me is that it has completely replaced online help. For some time now we were sure that Google was always better than a product's own online help, but now Perplexity is amazingly better.
* if you're not using Perplexity instead of Google as your default search engine, you're missing out
 I'm editing a video with Adobe Premiere - a timelapse of the Lighthouse Century I rode yesterday, since you ask :) - and wanted to know how to change a video segment from 29.97fps as recorded by my GoPro to 1fps as I want it added into my video. So I asked Perplexity*: "Adobe Premier how do I change the frame rate of a segment" and it tells me to use "Interpret Footage". Well that's a good answer but not the one I want, because it changes the segment's duration, so I next type** "without changing the duration" (leveraging context) and it tells me "use the Posterize Time Video Effect" which is exactly the right answer. Saved me many many minutes, and essentially makes Premiere itself more powerful, since it opens up many more of its capabilities for me.
* by "ask" I mean, "typed into my browser's search line"
** by "next type" I mean, "typed into the Perplexity chat below the search result"
And you know what Perplexity costs? $0... What a time to be alive!
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I'm still riding Centuries, and yesterday rode a nice one: the Lighthouse Century from Morro Bay up PCH to the Piedras Blancas lighthouse, through San Simeon, and by the Elephant Seal overlook. To get to 100 miles the organizers start with a nice little jaunt into the hills of Paso Robles; beautiful wine country, if you can take a minute from climbing to take in the views.
Yes, it was a great ride, and yes, I am quite proud of myself for being able to ride a Century in under six hours; "only" 5,200' of climbing... but still!
I've been playing with the various ways to record video of a ride from my GoPro, and this little clip contains several of them: straight video, speeded up, time lapse pictures, turned into a video, and "posterized" video to turn it into effectively a timelapse sequence. Not sure yet of the best way. I do like taking pictures during the ride and embedding them; for all that the GoPro is amazing, the iPhone pictures are better yet, and you can really see the difference on a cold and cloudy day. And with my phone I can shoot "sideways", whereas the GoPro is always pointed "down the road".
Onward!
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EOQ! Wow, can't even believe we are at the end of another third quarter. And you know what that means: Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years', bam bam bam bam. And poof another year in the books. Happens faster and faster every year.
 I've been ruminating on the "dwell time" of an online post. When you post something to a blog, on X, on Facebook, wherever your friends / followers / whomever see it for as long as it is your "current" post. As soon as you post something else, it gets pushed down the stack a bit, and people are less likely to see it. This is independent of the relative value or importance or length of the post. I could post a lengthy diatribe with incredible analysis, and then immediately post something trivial, and that diatribe will become history while the trivia might live on a long time.
Frequent readers will know, I like my blog's "flight" feature, in which it displays what I've posted on this day each year past. If there's no post for this day, it backs up into recent days to show the most recently posted thing from that year. So items that had a big time gap after they were posted "last longer" in the daily flights, a most evocative illustration of dwell time in action.
Some blogs (and some social media) have a "keep at top" feature, which artificially boosts dwell time. I used to do this myself, every once in a while, but haven't for a while. I have mentally played with the idea of recording inbound traffic (hits) for each post, and sorting archived posts by "max hits". That would make reader interest a part of dwell time, which would be good. Presumably if something was of interest to many or externally linked it likely would be of interest to the next reader.
Or I could just keep posting whatever whenever and let the chips fall where they may. Heh.
{Update: added digression: whoever wanted Google's .webp images? Why do they exist? Someone spent all that time inventing a new image format just so we all have to convert them back to JPEGs. What an incredible waste of time.}
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