Picked up a bargain – listed as a “faulty bass guitar” so I didn’t pay very much for it at all (not that its worth a lot anyway as apparently this bass is a Hofner clone made in Japan, Silver Star were a sub brand of Tokai)
The faulty part didn’t amount to much – the 1/4″ socket was loose and making the connection intermittent, I didn’t even need to resolder it – just tighten it up…
shot out over the reef by Plimmerton Fire Station
shot out from Plimmerton Boat Club
Captured using DJI Phantom 3 Pro drone and DronePan software, stitched in AutoPano Giga and made into a little planet in Photoshop using Flexify plugin
Shot these during lunch break today – Plimmerton Boat Club on a perfect still morning… will post the panoramas I shot later on, after I’ve stitched them
▶ Konono #1 meets Batida new album is released, get it here
▶ beautiful new album by Moderat – III, completes an excellent trilogy, get it here
▶ great new album from Fourcolour – Ballet, released on 12k
▶ new vid for great Go Go Penguin track off their new album MAN MADE OBJECT
(this track should get the Porter Ricks treatment!)
▶ new video for Death Cab for Cutie – Good Help (Is So Hard To Find)
▶ new podcast/mix by Cio D’Or, download at XLR8
The ocean breathes… exhale… inhale…
I recorded this beach mostly as I love the sound of the stones & pebbles being dragged with the outgoing wave eg at 01.55 or the big wave that appears on the horizon at 3.00 and then crashes in arriving at 3.55…
These sounds will be released in a new HISSandaROAR ambience library sooner or later, but in the meantime I thought I would try out UFB by uploading a larger high resolution file. This was shot on my Canon 5dmkIII with a Zeiss Distagon 21mm lens, recording sound via stereo ORTF Sennheiser MKH8040 mics and my Sound Devices 788T recorder (I also recorded with pair of MKH70s but haven’t used them for this video.) The resulting 1080p PROREZ video was 18GB, I converted it to MP4 with quality set to 75% which created an MP4 file 8GB in size. And it then uploaded to VIMEO in about 20 minutes via UFB! Fantastic
So if you need to zone out for 15 minutes, watch this full screen with the sound cranked up….
Or if you’re having trouble sleeping and prefer audio only:
Well the day has finally arrived!
After repeatedly goading the company assigned the installation of fibre to my house, last week they finally got their act together and came & did the external install – running fibre up to my house via the same poles used for power & phone. So after eight weeks of waiting since my property was scoped, they completed 3 hours of work, and this innocuous plastic box was attached to the side of my house.
Today a different tech came & did the interior install, and here I am. So where is that exactly?
Up until now, I have been using ADSL via copper wires… and while the download speed is bearable, the upload speed is appalling.
I tried upgrading to VDSL at one point, and I am too far from the nearest exchange for that technology to work. So after (im)patiently waiting until January 2016 when they finished the local infrastructure installation, and then two months of waiting for work to be done, my UFB is delivering these speeds:
Downloads: 179.92/7.58 = 23.7 times faster than ADSL
Uploads: 172.24/0.84 = 205 times faster than ADSL!
So the obvious immediate benefit is that consuming the internet (receiving data) is a LOT faster, but the more profound benefit is the upload speed. In the past, with that dreadful limited upload speed of ADSL, when I wanted to do a large upload (eg a 10GB+ HISSandaROAR library) I would have to drive into town & visit a friend with fibre, uploading it in an hour… Any number of times I attempted to upload via my ADSL and overnight it would fail, while also making my download speed close to unusable. But for video I would have to limit my uploads to medium rez 720p mp4.
The issue of the internet connection being assymetrical (fast down/slow up) is primarily based on market research – most people use the internet to consume or receive data, whether its watching/streaming Youtube or Vimeo or Netflix or Spotify or the web or whatever. So most ISPs set up their/your bandwidth for fast download and slow(er) upload. With ADSL there was no other option, but with UFB the deals on offer are based on your use. For example my ISP, Orcon offers:
option 1: FIBRE 100Mbps down/20Mbps up (unlimited data = NZ$100/month)
option 2: FIBRE 200Mbps down/20Mbps up (unlimited data = NZ$125/month)
option 3: FIBRE 200Mbps down/200Mbps up (unlimited data = NZ$145/month)
No prizes for guessing which option I went for… 200/200!
While I do not agree with much of what the current government in New Zealand is doing, UFB is one area where they have done the right thing. The tech who did my interior install is a kiwi who had moved to Australia ten years ago, but moved back recently to NZ due to the fraught infrastructure in Australia. And when I mentioned getting fibre on twitter, an American I.T. guy commented saying ‘it wont be fibre to your home, just to the node’. Again respect to NZ government as they have actually fully funded fibre to the home – that little glass wire snakes it way right into my studio, and only then translates to the gigabit ethernet I am accessing it via.
So for most people UFB means fast internet – no waiting for videos to buffer, or data heavy websites to load. And while thats also true for me, I see access to fast reliable upload speed as being far more profound. Lets face it, every one is a consumer but not everyone is a creator, producer, or maker. So for the consumers, upload is a minor advantage, whereas for creators it is empowering.
The obvious change is very welcome: I can achieve what I do more efficiently – uploading large resources is easy, uploading videos can now occur 1080p or even 4k and with far less compression. All of my work will look better, but the potential for new data-heavy high-resolution ideas to exist online is what intrigues me: the things I haven’t dreamed of yet!
For anyone who has been reading this blog since the early days might remember I went on a mental research trip, with the motive of attempting to work out why I had trouble finishing my own personal projects. For a reminder here are links to the articles:
How to Finish – intro
How to Finish – part 1: inspiration
How to Finish – part 2: development
How to Finish – part 3: completion
All of those articles were written back in 2009, well before I did the two Artist Residencies, so a lot of water has passed under the bridge since then and I would like to think I am better at finishing projects now. But better is a relative term, I still do not think I am actually good at it, or anywhere near fulfilling my potential at completing and releasing my own projects. But I have slowly been working towards achieving that goal and UFB plays an important part.
I heard Brian Eno use a quote that made me smile: “Fruit ripens slowly, but drops suddenly” – I love this idea, that while a project might be years in the making, the release occurs suddenly. But more so, projects that have been in development (or stasis) may one day suddenly be able to be completed & released through the occurrence of new ideas or a change in situation or access to a new medium.
So this being my 50th year on the planet also coincides with a very strong desire to banish procrastination and execute ideas that have been quietly fermenting in my psyche. And not just any ideas, but ideas that I want to see exist in the world. Not coincidentally I came across a great book I highly reccomend to anyone who is also striving to execute their own work:
SHOW YOUR WORK by Austin Kleon, Amazon link here – I’m reading it using the Kindle app on my iPad, but I also ordered five physical copies to give to friends who I think also need to read it.
Of course, there are other aspects of sharing your work that may not be immediately apparent, so my HOW TO FINISH series is going to get a part 4 soon, stay tuned!
The revolution may well not be televised, but some bits of it are sure going up my UFB!
viva le revolution!
▶ hmmmm…
▶ Huston, we have a problem: Hollywood Film Dialogue from 2,000 screenplays, broken down by Gender and Age
▶ On the pleasures of slow music
▶ love this: non-standard vinyl via DJ Food
▶ When asked how the instrument, known as a lur, is played, he said: “I’ve no idea. No one’s played it for 3,000 years.”
▶ “A vial containing a few droplets of water — and one million copies of an old movie – encoded into DNA – Oh no, I accidentally drank my archive!
“Attempting to play a British Birdsong 7” vinyl using a wood pigeon feather found near our house. Amplification courtesy of a discreetly placed contact microphone connected to a Marshall MS-4. The only minor modification to the feather was sharping the tip with a craft knife enabling easier and clearer playback.”
▶ Tim Hecker, musician and comment polariser
▶ “an international ring of fraudulent dealers was uncovered…” – drug dealers? stock market? nope, violins
▶ what to get your acid-head (TB303, not lysergic) girlfriend? this
Nice to get outside after a full on week of work, and the weather coordinated a sunny day for me… So I tried out some new beta software for my drone called DRONEPAN, basically you use the normal DJI app to fly the drone to wherever you want to shoot a panorama, switch to F mode and launch DRONEPAN app, and then initiate it shooting a pan. It takes 19 photos, rotating and tilting the camera between each photo: 6 positions x 3 photos, plus the 19th photo pointing straight down. Load the photos into PTGui or AutoPano Giga, auto stitch them together (which seems pretty easy if shooting in manual/fixed exposure) and then export as a panorama or a little planet….
I’ll try one at the beach, by the Boat Club sometime when its not busy & no people around – centred over my house in the bush means most of the planet is that dark green… Should look magic with the ocean dominating!
Good to see Google taking the pith out of the supposed next revolution
Director/Designer/Animator/VFX: Factory Fifteen
