A ⅓ scale, working model of an original Mac…based on a Raspberry Pi board running a 68K Mac emulator.

This was the first movie I took with my new bike camera – my cycle to Lifescycle on Wednesday evening.

I recommend downloading it to your local device: it’s 1·83 GB of AVI format – and will take about 14 minutes to download, because the upload speed from my web server is limited to domestic DSL upload speed (under 1Mb/s)

Still tired after the travel from hell:

I’ve just received a bike camera, which I attached to Lev Davidovich Bikestein’s top tube. There are some issues with the movies:

• the wind noise is very loud.
• For both journeys, the camera hung after 18:27, then started a new file dead on 20:00.

The movies are in .avi format. It’s probably best to right-click (PC) or control-click (mac) to download the movies to your own device.

*The fast bit down Cramond Road starts around 17:15.

In general, I’m not afraid of flying. I usually enjoy turbulence, and I almost always want to feel more acceleration during take-off. I enjoy watching the flaps working during landing and I award very notional points for landing smoothness and reduced time from landing to disembarking. Here endeth the enjoyable parts.

Last weekend (Friday 23rd – Sunday 25th), I was due to visit my parents – mostly to hand over my dad’s new iPad mini and coach him in using it. My flight was at 10:40, so I could arrive in Worcester in the early afternoon. This didn’t happen because I left the iPad in my cabin baggage, rather than putting it in the tray. My bag was taken out of the conveyor and fully searched, and then run over with a detector swab. It indicated that the iPad may have been in contact with materials potentially related to explosives. (I don’t trust this swabbing technique – a fresh swab cloth was not used for each bag that was checked, and the swab was allowed to sit on the counter.) The police then wanted a quiet word with me. All this delayed me so much that I missed my flight and ended up taking a much later one, so that I arrived in Worcester 6 hours late and down by £140. I didn’t sleep that night and so was in no good state to coach my dad the next day, and wasn’t in the best of conditions for meeting my brother’s partner’s son and his girlfriend for the first time on Saturday evening.

The return flight was little better. My 17:15 flight was cancelled. After a long time queuing, I was offered a choice between an 18:30 flight to Glasgow, with a free coach transfer to Edinburgh or a 20:30 flight to Edinburgh. I chose the Glasgow flight because that would have get me home sooner. But it didn’t. Firstly my bag was searched again. Them, when I’d escaped security, I saw that my Glasgow flight was delayed until 19:15. We eventually boarded around 19:30, then sat on the tarmac for another hour. I overheard that there had been an issue with the cargo hold. (The toilet seat was broken too.)

When we arrived at Glasgow, there was no-one staffing the airline’s desk, and there were about 20 people needing transferred to Edinburgh. I badly needed the toilet, so I asked a fellow victim to ensure they didn’t run off without me. But when I returned from the toilet, all the Edinburgh-bound people had gone. Fortunately, staff at the next desk told me where to go and I got to the coach just as it was preparing to leave. I got home well after 11pm, instead of around 7pm.

So in this instance, flying took far longer than travelling by train and turned out to be much more expensive. Adding this to the travails of taking bikes on aeroplanes makes me believe that flying has no advantages for travel to the Midlands. Even when it works, I have to travel much further to get to Edinburgh Airport (Haymarket station is 15 minutes’ walk away), spend an hour being searched and waiting, sit in a cramped seat, get charged extra for taking for more than a small bag, run the risk of someone else taking my bag from the carousel, then travel by train to Birmingham New Street, wait another hour, then finally travel another hour to Worcester. From now on, to visit Worcester I’ll go by train: 4 hours in relatively comfortable seating direct to New Street, and then another train to Worcester – or a pleasant 30-mile cycle.

Well I was in a much better mood before this evening’s spin – I’d got some stuff done for a change*. So I was ready to take on whatever Andy threw at us. And he threw true!

The first half was very similar to recent sessions but there was just a wee snippet of AD/DC (possibly Have a drink on me) to bounce it all up. It just few by – lots of jumps to Love will tear us apart***, runs and sprints to Personal Jesus, lots of time out of the saddle bouncing away. The bike worked well – easy to fine-tune and I think I got the resistance just about right.

A couple of minutes to recover and the second half started. I can’t remember most of the songs but the finale involved a climb and some sprints to ‘take this baby home!’ We came out dripping and pounds lighter. I know I was not all there – I was floating around Edinburgh’s roofs, taking in the sights and sounds. Elly, bless her, was wibbling in the basket-chair even though she wasn’t a basket-case. (She’d had a rotten day – I blame the government.) Even when I got home, I was spacy-drained and had difficulty co-ordinating a banana**** and my mouth.

Ah well, washing and dishes are done*****, tomorrow is planned, the high is tapering and my shoulder is still held together by sealing-wax and string. No more spinning until Tuesday or Wednesday (I’m going to visit my parents) unless I go here. It’ll give me something else to wibble about, if nothing else.

——————————————
*I’d ordered my mum’s birthday present, arranged for our printer to be repaired, chased up some stuff for my dad, done some over-due shopping, blogged about my regular cycle, had a massage and got my shoulder taped into control, made contact with our neighbour’s lawyer because the neighbour isn’t responding to emails or letters, arranged for a big photo to be framed, set up my macs to be visible from Napier’s 27″ iMacs in the Incubator** – and I’d done some possibly worthwhile work on my dissertation.

**Why aren’t these running Mountain Lion, I wonder? The software that supposedly reverts them to a pristine state doesn’t work properly, but that works in my favour, hurrah.

***Can you say Let’s dance to Joy Division?

****a fruit, not what you were thinking, you foul-minded person.

*****huge thanks to Elly for cooking!

A day earlier than usual this week:

I was photographed by two lads in a white van while we were waiting at the junction outside Craigleith retail park. I think they liked my baked beans jacket. (Unsubtle hint – I’d rather like an I pay road tax jacket too.)

I’m quite pleased to have just broken 30 mph down Cramond Road South, and I’m also pleased to have stayed above 8mph up that hill. It must have been the rain and the tape applied by the sports masseuse I see in Cramond. She’s the reason for this regular cycle.

For over a year I’ve had issues with my left shoulder – cycling and spinning were the only times I was conscious and free of pain but a steroid injection released the immediate tension, allowing Carole to begin to coax it back to normal ranges of movement. But since we’ve returned from holiday, my right shoulder has been extremely restricted – and intensely painful if I push it past these restrictions. The tape is helping me hold the shoulder in the right place – it’s slumped quite far forward to ward off the pain.

Anyway, Carole tells me she followed a cyclist who was doing around 20 mph up that hill. Sigh – I’ve a long way to go!

I’ve been slightly obsessed about groups of humans who believe they’re so special that it’s right to obliterate others. This has happened all through history – nothing I can do will change it. Nevertheless, the name-change is my tiny marker that I reject this.

There are factors that make certain people special to me – I’ll change behaviour (grudgingly) and would stop bullets for them. There are people who have more power than others – that’s unavoidable.

There are of course cases where we can say ‘I’m better at <something> than you – if you want to do <something>, here’s how it should be done’. I am highly opinionated about certain things – in those cases I strongly believe I’m right. That doesn’t make me a better person all round, nor does it give me the right to blast anyone else out of my way. At the worst, I should agree to disagree, while being ready to listen to new information and ideas.

Overall, nothing gives anyone the right to say ‘I/we are better than you, so drop dead’, ever. We are just whatever we are, wherever we are.

Andy’s session hit the spot tonight! Old and new favourites including

• warming up to a long, bouncy remix of Personal Jesus
• an inspiring but laid-back* cover of Route 66
• an inspiring mix of Joy Division’s Love will tear us apart (Whoever remixed this is a pure genius, I think.)
• Dave Edmund’s Queen of hearts
• the pre-finale of a full-on climb (Andy, what is that track called?)
• the William Tell overture to cap it all, and leave you gasping (for more, in many cases).

​All of this had me happy and pushing as hard as I could** all the way through the hour. I think the bike helped too – it had about 2 turns from no resistance to can’t-move-the-pedals.

I have to congratulate : she’s in ‘Sir’ Hugh McInnes‘ intense road-training class just now. The intensity was booming out of the studio just now – fast, hard sprints to inspiring techno that would pull out superb efforts from anyone! I’d hoped to do this but for reasons I won’t make entirely public I’m not up to two back-to-back spinning sessions today. (I recognise there’s a contradiction between these two sentences but I’m following the  wisdom of ‘your body, your bike – listen to them!’)

I won’t be spinning next Monday (I’m taking minutes for Leith Central Community Council that evening) but I intend to be back the following Monday, pushing on through both Andy and Hugh’s classes into the stratosphere.

*I know what I mean. If you don’t you’ll just have to come to Lifescycle and try it for yourself.

** not as hard as I’d have liked

A comment on LiveJournal prompted me to try a different VNC solution on my iPhones and my dad’s iPad mini.

BTMM/VNC and Mocha VNC
Until today I’ve been using Mocha VNC on my iPhones when I’ve needed to take over my main mac (Iggy) from afar. Every now and then I find I’ve not got a needed file. VNC allows me to to take over my main mac’s screen and slowly, clumsily make Iggy email the file to me.

(If I have my MacBookAir (MIA) and I can connect it to a network, I can use the built-in VNC to take over Iggy much more conveniently:

1. MIA controlling Iggy

This works very well. Thanks to BackToMyMack, I don’t need to remember Servants’ Quarters’ public-facing IP address. If the connection is fast enough, I can work roughly as if I was sat at Iggy, although MIA’s reduced screen area is a limitation. Even if the connection is slow and patchy, whatever I do stays on Iggy and is backed up via TimeMachine, CarbonCopyCloner and CrashPlan. Alternatively, I can put whatever I wish to work on in a Cubby so that it synchronises to MIA. Then I can do the work locally, knowing that as soon as I save it and MIA is online, the work will be synchronised back to Iggy.BTMM and VNC have also allowed me to take over my dad’s mac with ease, so I can sort whatever has troubled him.)

But what if I only have my iPhone? So far, Mocha VNC has been acceptable. Over Servants’ Quarters’ wireless LAN, it can do the job, although there is a lot of screen-resizing and cursing as I make the dock visible, start up the relevant application, then do whatever I need to do. Over a good 3G connection, Mocha VNC works acceptably too. Over a lousy cellular connection, it’s painful. (Of course this is mostly due to the slow connection, and is not Mocha VNC’s fault.)

2. iPhone 4 controlling Iggy via wireless LAN	3. iPhone 4 controlling Iggy via 3G cellular

However, Mocha VNC has always crapped out whenever I’ve tried to use it to take over my dad’s mac, both via Servants’ Quarters’ LAN and via cellular. This occurred no matter whether I used an iPhone or the iPad I’m due to take to him at the end of next week.

Fantasy
I’d also been musing on my perfect portable device. I think that if I had a spare £5000, it would be a ModBook in a bespoke water- and shock-proof case. (£4000 for a high-spec ModBook and £1000 to get someone to make a one-off prophylactic, then an iPad emulator for doing iOS things, along with my existing iPhone for connectivity.) This is never going to happen. So my default single portable device would be an iPad mini (with cellular connection) in a Lifeproof case.

But what if I wanted to do remote stuff? suggested getting a VNC app. As I mentioned, Mocha VNC is acceptable for getting at Iggy but craps out if I try to control my dad’s mac. (I also wanted to give him the opportunity to control his mac from downstairs or wherever he happens to be. [The temporary caveat is that his iPad doesn’t have a SIM, because he’s not yet sure how much he would use the iPad away from home and he doesn’t want to take on another cellphone contract if he can help it.])

VNC Viewer works!
A quick Google found some advice: of the two recommended bits of software, I chose the cheaper, VNC Viewer. (It also just happens to be from VNC’s original developers.) And lo! And behold! I can VNC from both of my iPhones and from dad’s iPad into Iggy and my dad’s mac, via both both Servants’ Quarters’ LAN and via 3G cellular. (OK, that’s not quite true – I can’t yet use cellular connections on the iPad because it doesn’t have a SIM. But if it works via cellular on the iPhones, and works via LAN on the iPad then its seems reasonable to believe it will work via cellular on the iPad.)

The interface is intuitive, with a lot less stuff to enter. (Unlike Mocha VNC, it doesn’t offer more ‘mac-cy’ choices, such as logging using a registered username. Not a hassle, as far as I can see!)

Here’s some screenshots of it in use on the iPad:

4. iPad mini controlling Iggy via wireless LAN; Iggy is controlling MIA via wired LAN	5. The onscreen keyboard takes up a lot of space.
6. iPad mini controlling Iggy via wireless LAN	7. In portrait orientation, the keyboard takes up less space. But only half of Iggy’s screen is visible.
8. iPad mini controlling my dad’s mac via wireless LAN

So it’s not perfect, but it’s a lot less fiddly than the iPhones’ tiny screens.

iPhone 3GS versus iPhone 4
Finally, here are screenshots of my iPhones using VNC viewer to control my dad’s mac. Note the differences in screen resolution!

9. iPhone 3GS

10. iPhone 4

I’ve had iPad-mini-lust for a while, exacerbated by setting one up for my dad. I use my iPhone a lot but the screen is too small for real productivity. The prices for iPad minis aren’t too far into fantasy-land, and they’re about £100 cheaper than their full-size sistren.

Problem?
But for real productivity, I’d want the full-fat MacOS so I can run Adobe Creative Suite, QuankyAbcess, MS Office, Eclipse and similar. Remember I effectively swapped a full-size iPad 1 for a MacBook Air – it gave me the OS I want, and a real keyboard in a package roughly the same size and weight. I’m pretty sure I can find an iPad environment for MacOS if I really need to run iOS stuff.

The two things missing from this package are

• water- and shock-proofness. (Lifeproof make superb cases for iDevices, including the best iPhone handlebar-mount I’ve experienced.)
• lack of touch screen.

Solutions
I don’t know yet how to solve the former but I recalled this morning that if I ever had a spare £4000 or so, there’s a company that will happily swap it for a device based on the guts of a MacBook pro and a graphics tablet. You need to use a stylus with it, so it’s not quite a touch screen but it’s as near as I can find and I use a graphics tablet at home anyway. (It will also run Windows7 natively, thanks to BootCamp, so I guess there would be nothing to stop it also running Windows8. If BootCamp won’t enable Windows8, VirtualBox would.)

Obviously that price is well into fantasy-land. (When I think about road-bikes, I imagine spending around £1000. I guess this is because I believe I’ll never be a good or frequent enough roadent to justify spending more, but I spend a lot of time with my macs and I like to think I know what I’m doing with them.)

For much less money, it is of course possible to hack your own franken-tablet-mac or hack an existing tablet to run MacOS. Or you can make iOS look like MacOS