Craig Mod:

It’s no longer just the edges of a life, a general amassed physicality. It’s the millimeter precision of runs, the numbers of times “Hey Jude” was played, the minutes spent reading Harry Potter, the version-controlled genesis of an essay.

A great article on the Fitbit in particular, and the way we’re now measuring stuff so much in general.

Last week I took an hour or so out on the way back from lunch (at the rather lovely Soukitchen in Bedminster) to wander to Mshed’s chocolate exhibition.

I suppose I had some vague grasp of Bristol’s links to the chocolate trade, but the little show (£5 entrance) pulled together what few facts I knew and added an extra-thick topping of fact sauce, with a lot of props and photography thrown in.

I liked: the pictures of the big chocolate factories of central Bristol; the early history of chocolate, from being made by apothecaries (who had the necessary gear on hand) to the first chocolate easter egg (made by Fry’s in 1873); the cute little chocolate production line, including the “spinners” used to make aforementioned eggs; and the little “branding” room where you could see the evolution of packaging of various popular chocolate bars.

I also had one long-standing misapprehension corrected. I’d always assumed that Bath chairs got their name because they looked a bit like a bath. I didn’t know they were actually invented in Bath! In my defence, I’d mostly only seen them drawn in cartoons in the pages of the Beano and Whizzer and Chips when I were a lad…

The intended audience for the exhibition is definitely families with children — there are some nice little touches for kids, like the little “Oompa Loompas Only” entrance to the branding section, and the little white factory coats laid on for the production line section, along with a proper “punching in” machine. I’m not sure I got as much out of my fiver as a family would have got from their tickets, but it was a diverting little artist date, nonetheless!

I am over my man-flu. Hurrah! Last week I took advantage of the sudden sunshine to take a pleasant walk to the Royal West of England Academy. I enjoy the RWA. It’s a lovely old building and has a variety of shows on throughout the year. They run the gamut from the grand to the playful, sometimes doing both at once, like sticking Damien Hirst’s 22-foot Charity on the balcony.

The current exhibition is Drawn, about drawing in all its many forms. There was way too much to see in one visit, which is why I’m glad I’m a member of the RWA’s Friends, which is basically an annual season ticket to the place. (Though I’m not quite sure which of the two warring factions who claim to be the Friends I’m actually a member of at the moment. Internecine warfare in the art-supporters’ world can be a bit complex and grisly, it seems.)

I always enjoy art that breaks its boundaries a bit, so it was good to see some art drawn straight onto the walls, and in one case the floor. I also like a bit of technology, of course. The first bit I saw was Ross Wallis’s iPad of life drawings bolted to the wall, but things got even more hands-on in one corner of the gallery, where Debbie Locke was letting a robot run around doing its own doodling, and encouraging a couple of small girls to interact by means of batting the little penbot around in a friendly way. You can see some of the output on the Tumblr of Karen Wallis’s Drawing Lab, which was the adjacent artist’s residency.

Anyway. I won’t go on. If you’re in Bristol, go and check it out. It’s open until 2nd June. My favourites from my first viewing were Anna Falcini’s Veil of Fog, Ros Ford’s The Vetch, and Lorraine Robbins and Daniel Sparkes’ collaborations Stoaties Iron Yard and 40 Milligrams Memento Magnus, which were pleasingly surreal.

I’m ill. I’m also behind on my artist dates. And it’s only March.

Today I struggled out of my sickbed to go to the Post Office, as I had to send off a couple of eBay parcels — I’m selling off some of my old camera gear, as there were a few things just lying around gathering dust since I upgraded to the 60D. Since it was a nice day, I decided to turn my trip into a longer walk, and I figured I’d call it an artist date, too.

I walk a lot — since I started working from home, I’ve tried to get out of the house for at least an hour’s walking every day. (Having a fitbit is a nice way of keeping me honest on that score, by the way. If you’re also a fitbit user, feel free to pop me on the old friends list.) So what’s the difference between a normal walk and an artist date walk?

Well, I often listen to podcasts while I walk. I subscribe to a fair few tech/developer podcasts, keeping up to date with the latest in trends and geek gossip. Since I went freelance I’ve also started listening to the occasional business podcast, too. But that’s not very artist datey. So no headphones today.

The other main difference was the lack of a destination. Rather than heading for lunch, or going shopping, today, once I’d finished in the Post Office, I just walked. If a little side-road looked interesting, I took it, and had a poke about in some of the Clifton back ways I rarely see. This is how I found what looked like some kind of iron-age hill fort, but turned out to be a grass-covered reservoir. It’s only a little way off the beaten track — around the back of St. Paul’s Road, running just behind the Territorial Army HQ on Whiteladies Road — but I’ve never noticed it before.

Having done some post-walk research, I remember having passed the Bristol Water buildings on Oakfield Road that I suppose must be the main entrance the reservoir. It’s certainly been there a while; one place it turns up is a list of known Luftwaffe targets in Bristol! It’s called Victoria Reservoir, apparently, which I’m guessing is also a clue to its vintage.

Returning to the beaten track I also spotted yet another awesome Bristol door, this time the side-entrance to St Paul’s Church. This another door I may have to revisit armed with the big camera.

Those were the particular things I remember. There was also a lot of generally agreeable Clifton walking — birdsong, leafy avenues, big houses. I particularly like the rather organically-grown houses, with odd little extensions and glass conservatories bolted on with varying regard for the existing architecture.

And that will have to do for my artist date this week. Back to the sofa, the Lemsip, and Ben Aaronovitch’s Peter Grant series…

On my way to the short fiction course I’m doing at the Folk House, I pass the end of York Place. I’ve been wondering whether it might be a better short cut from St George’s Road to Park Street than the one I was using, but never had the time to investigate, in case it wasn’t and I was late for class.

Heading for lunch at the Folk House last week, I decided to explore. As it turned out, it isn’t a better short cut. You can get to Park Street, but it means cutting across the corner of Brandon Hill, so it’s pretty steep and a kind of up-and-down-again way that’s no shorter than the flatter route I’d been taking.

It was pretty, though, Especially Brandon Steep, which is one of those lovely little Bristol backstreets that you can pass by a thousand times without noticing. I was particularly taken by an old door set into the stone wall, long-neglected and clearly rarely, if ever, opened.

So, that gave me my artist date for the week. I came back a couple of days later, at the same time of day, when the sun was at a good angle for giving contrast, and brought my big camera and tripod.

I spent about a half hour hanging out, snapping the door, waiting for clouds to cover the sun for a while so I could experiment with different lighting on the door and wall. It was a nice little moment of peace in my day, backgrounded by birdsong from Brandon Hill trees.

The few passing people were very accepting of my door-photography, and every single one of them stopped just out of frame for reassurance from me that they weren’t going to ruin a shot before they walked between me and the door. Thanks, folks!

And that was my artist date. I’m still not too sure about the results — I went to the Bristol Beer Festival last night, so it’s possible the after-effects of that are numbing some of my photo-processing braincells. But the important thing about an artist date is getting out and doing it. Any concrete results are just a bonus.

Until recently, I’d never given it a full workout. Mostly I was just recording the screen and throwing the barely-edited results up on YouTube to show people how to do some geeky thing or other. I knew I wasn’t using more than about 10% of Screenflow’s features.

A few weeks ago, though, I was thrown in at Screenflow’s deep end, when I wanted to record a Play Store promo video for Get Running for Android. A promo video had to look and sound a lot better than anything I’d done before. It would also need some trickery so that the portrait-orientation Get Running didn’t look terrible as a landscape-orientation Play Store video feature.

And how on earth was I going to make gestures look nice? I didn’t want to just record the Android Emulator with a mouse pointer clicking on stuff. And my experiments with green-screening my own hands together with recorded Android footage were looking pretty duff.

Then a happy coincidence came along. I was upgrading Screenflow before I started work, and Telestream’s web site mentioned that I could buy Simplifilm’s Flowtility library at the same time.

Flowtility is basically a big collection of nice little video effects, all with an alpha channel so you can easily compose them in front of your own video. There’s transitions, lower thirds, various effects, countdown timers, and lots of other stuff. Crucially for me, there are also touch gestures. Digital hands that tap and swipe and flick.

So, I bought that at the same time as I bought the Screenflow upgrade, and dived in.

Making the promo video was a fair bit of work, but Screenflow made it as easy as could be. Its screen capture is excellent — it records the whole screen, and you can decide later which chunks you actually want in your video, and whether you want to see the mouse pointer, etc.

It’s the editing facility I was under-using, though. The timeline-style editor is a dream to use. It allows very easy composition of multiple layers.

For example, I created an image in Acorn with the nice background and the picture of a phone, with the phone’s screen area left transparent. Export as PNG, drag into Screenflow, and I had a “video” layer i could throw over the top of my screen recording, punching the Android Emulator’s screen through into the phone’s window.

I could then drag Flowtility gestures on top and synchronise them with the emulator video to make it look like the hands were really tapping and dragging around on the app’s interface. Screenflow makes this synchronisation very easy by allowing simple drag-resize and reposition of video elements in its top window. In the timeline below, you can drag the video elements to the right place in the timeline, then nudge them precisely into the right place with keyboard shortcuts, one frame at a time.

It’s also simple to cut together various video and audio sections. “Nested” clips let me treat cut-together sections as a whole. “Locking” clips together let me link the voice over audio with the right bits of the screen recording.

My basic workflow was fairly simple: I scripted a first draft of the whole video, then recorded a “rough cut”, re-recording things a few times where I fluffed up. I just used the mic on my iMac to record the voice-over as I was getting the timings right.

Then I cut together the basic video composition, got it about right, then re-recorded the audio using a high-quality microphone, making final adjustments to the script as I realised what was and wasn’t working as I read things aloud and tried to get the timing to sound fairly natural.

Finally I dropped the Flowtility gestures on the top, and added a few overall effects, like fades at the start and end of the overall video. I also added some finishing touches in the way of “callouts”, to highlight different parts of the screen as I was talking about them.

One slightly painful bit was where I’d got the overall timing about five seconds wrong for lining up with the finish of the jangly backing track I’d chosen (thanks, Jewelbeat!) In the end, I used Audacity to re-time the audio track so it matched my video, rather than the other way around.

Screenflow handled audio “ducking” (where the background music automatically gets faded down when I talk) very well.

Screenflow managed all of this without a single crash or much in the way of glitches. There were a couple of times where to get something working I had to quit and restart the app (I think it was with video actions and callouts) but it never lost a single second of my work, and was overall very intuitive.

I think the Flowtility gestures really helped to make the promo feel a lot less like a screen recording done on an iMac, and a lot more like someone naturally using the app on a real device, though it doesn’t take much closer inspection to spot the hands as digital rather than physical. 

The final video came out looking like this:

…which I think is pretty good, for my first promo. On the whole, I was extremely impressed with Screenflow, and the Flowtility gestures really helped get a nice finished look to the demo. Hopefully I’ll be able to use a bunch of the other effects it provides in future projects. Together, Screenflow and Flowtility are a really handy combination.

Instead of going out, I stayed in, and watched a film that’s been sitting in my in-tray for quite a long time: David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. I’d never seen it before; I’m very slow at getting around to watching films, and people are frequently surprised about the things I’ve not seen. This is a bit self-perpetuating, in fact: on our weekly evenings in, my friend Emm and I often struggle to find something from my list that she’s not already seen. We’ve now settled for watching Borgen instead, most weeks.

I tried to make it as good an experience as I could manage, switching off my Mac and my phone, darkening the lights, putting a comfy chair front and centre, and watching in one unpaused, uninterrupted sitting.

It was surprisingly hard work. I’m glad I turned off the phone, especially, as I found myself reaching for it a few times, wanting to head for Wikipedia to find out such answers as “What’s Kyle MacLachlan been up to recently”, and so forth. I resisted.

I… think I liked it. It’s often a bit hard to tell with Lynch. It takes a while to decide. It probably doesn’t help that I’ve watched it so long after it was made, and many aspects seem quite dated, especially the original bits of soundtrack, which is that synth-pad stuff that he seemed to favour back then. Having re-read his Wikipedia entry, maybe the next Lynch I should try should be Lost Highway, which at least gets a fair bit of praise for its music…

Anyway. Basically, yes, I watched a film. I’ll try to do something a bit more out-and-about for this week’s date.

Infirmary

“It was on Thursday. Valentine’s Day.”

“Yes, sergeant. I remember reading about him in Friday’s Post. No one’s come forward?”

“No one useful.”

Inspector Hardwick looked down at the man lying in the Infirmary bed. Late forties, a big man, his mass apparent under white sheets that had seen a thousand boil washes. Short brown hair, whitening at the temples, partly covered by bandage. A lined face, a Roman nose below the closed eyes. Three or four days’ stubble meant he’d been clean-shaven at the time of the accident.

Hardwick picked up the man’s right hand and studied it, careful not to disturb the saline feed. Rough hands.

“Nobody else involved?”

“Nobody.”

“Drunk?”

“Not according to the tests, sir.”

Hardwick dropped the limp hand back to the bedsheets. “I’d better take a look.”

“Yes, sir.” Williams closed her notebook.

CCTV

Hardwick looked out onto College Green from a second-floor window of New Colston police headquarters. Originally it had been Butcher’s Green, Hardwick remembered. Meat animals were herded to Bristol, stopping to feed on the grassy Downs before being led into town for slaughter and sale. He wondered how much blood had soaked into the grass, over the years.

“Here we go, sir.” Finally, Sergeant Williams had triumphed over the computer. 

A surprisingly sharp black and white picture of the Portway snapped into a window on the screen. The digital clock overlay read 22:38. The road was empty, as it normally would be, at that time of night.

A figure flared into view at the bottom of the screen, riding away from the camera on the cycle path at the edge of the road.

Hardwick frowned. “He’s not doing himself any favours, is he? A high-vis jacket?”

Williams agreed. “Lights, too. Didn’t seem to care much about being seen.”

Hardwick watched as the figure on the screen jerked his helmeted head upwards, seemingly struck by some sight in the distance, out of camera shot.

The man stopped pedalling, coasting downhill along the roadside cycle path. As Harwick winced in anticipation, the cyclist continued in a straight line. The cyclist held his body held strangely rigid, paying no heed as the path curved inward. Three long seconds later he smacked into the low brick wall that separated the cycle path from the drop to the muddy bank of the river.

Over he went.

“Nothing else?” asked Hardwick.

“Nothing until morning. An ammo truck driver spotted the bike.”

Evidence

Later, down in the evidence room, Williams hefted a cardboard box from the floor onto a table, and started pulling out clear plastic bags. One stuffed with clothes, the high-vis jacket mixed in with an old shirt and tracksuit bottoms. Others held trainers, an empty rucksack, a pair of safety goggles.

Hardwick resisted the urge to ask Williams about the goggles. She’d have done the legwork, checking the industrial works around Shirehampton, Sea Mills and Avonmouth.

The shoes were interesting, though. “Nikes?” He raised an eyebrow.

“Genuine, as far as we can tell. New.”

“A man with connections, then. Black market. He puts on a swanky pair of trainers, dolls himself up in high-vis, and starts cycling down main roads after curfew.”

He thought. “We’d best go have a look.”

“Sir?”

“Always acquaint yourself with the scene of the crime, Williams. Even if you’re not sure there’s been a crime.”

Portway

Hardwick thought about worth as he looked down at the brown trickle of the Avon at low tide. Three days, and nobody had come forward.

Most people had at least that measure of worth: someone who would miss them. Hardwick increased his grip on the cold metal railing as he realised that for him, it would be his sergeant, or his superintendent.

Not his family.

“It was here?”

Williams checked her notebook. “Right here, sir.”

Hardwick paced out thirty metres from the point of impact, back along the curve of the wall, to where the hooded CCTV camera perched on its post, pointing towards the junction with Bridge Valley Road.

There he turned and walked slowly back towards the city. To his left, the three quiet lanes of the A4 Portway, and the sheer rock face of the Avon Gorge. To his right, the wall, the river, and the green slopes of Leigh Woods.

Ahead, the only feature of note was the remains of the Suspension Bridge, rusting steel cables straggling down the far cliffside from the Leigh Tower. Below it, half-covered by the water, was the unnatural dam formed by the remains of the Clifton side. Fallen red bricks and broken sections of arch.

Harwick had a sudden memory of an August day from his childhood, walking over the bridge with his parents and his sister to the Balloon Fiesta. He shook his head to break the reverie.

The remains of the bridge were an affecting sight, certainly. But nothing to surprise anyone. Not these days.

I’m playing catchup on my artist dates, as I managed to miss one last week, having gone to Porstmouth for the weekend on fairly short notice. As you do.

Yesterday, therefore, I went for a bit of a walk, to visit a place that really says “Bristol” to me, but which I’ve not visited for years and years.

When I first moved to Bristol, Cabot Tower literally did say “Bristol” to me. From the hotel I stayed in when I was first working here — I had a room on the tenth floor of the Marriott, with a balcony overlooking the city — to the first flat I lived in, at Baltic Wharf, and at many points in between, you could see the splendid tower on the hill. On its top was a lamp, and that lamp flashed Morse code. “B-R-I-S-T-O-L”, it said.

It was later that I learned that Cabot Tower was built in memory of John Cabot, the locally-based Italian explorer who nipped off in the Matthew and tripped over Newfoundland in 1497.

It was much later than that when I first walked through Brandon Hill and climbed the tower. There’s not been much chance to do that recently, as the tower was closed for several years for repair. It reopened last summer, though, and I’ve been meaning to get along and climb up it again since then. An artist date seemed like a good opportunity.

Brandon Hill is a lovely open space in Bristol. It’s surprisingly easy to miss, given that it’s only a few minutes’ walk from Park Street. It’s a big hill, with lots of footpaths, a playground, little gardens, a nature park, a pretty pond area, and, from what I saw yesterday, some sports facilities under construction. There’s a list of stuff to see on the Council website.

It would be a fab place to visit without Cabot Tower, but Cabot Tower is its crowning glory. Free to visit now it’s reopened, it’s open most daylight hours.

Yesterday I walked from Hotwells to the bottom of Jacob’s Wells Road and then started climbing up steps and panting my way up steep inclines (did I mention Brandon Hill was a big hill?) Eventually I worked my way to the base of the tower, glad to find it was definitely open, and headed inside. There’s a narrow spiral staircase, with electric lighting slightly augmented by daylight from the tiny inset windows.

The staircase goes on for what seems like quite a long time if you’re overweight and have a slightly twingy knee. Then you pop out onto a viewing platform. But don’t stop there. Plenty of time for that one on the way down. Find the next door, and enter yet another spiral staircase, this one so narrow that if you meet someone coming down, you’ll have to decide who backtracks.

Finally you’ll pop out at the very top of Cabot Tower. It will be cold and windy, probably, and it will also be worth it. The views are amazing. Plus, you’re at the top of a really big, pretty tower. You can play being king or queen of Bristol for a while.

Photos can’t really do it justice. Being able to walk around the whole top of the tower, looking out from each of the four viewing spots, checking the little brass plaques to find out what’s in which direction, trying to spot all the places you’ve lived in Bristol… And it’s not often you get to look down on Wills Tower.

Being up there really gives you a sense of just how big Bristol is.

I couldn’t stay up there for too long — if my lunch breaks extend too much, I tend to be quite lazy about working in the afternoon — so I headed back down, squeezing past a couple and a toddler on the lower staircase, and walked a bit more around Brandon Hill before heading for the Folk House for some warming Irish Stew.

It was a good artist date. Fundamentally, it’s a good thing for any Bristolian (adopted or otherwise) to do, I’d say. If you can, I urge you to go climb Cabot Tower and spend five minutes taking your turn as monarch of Bristol.

But pzizz doesn’t seem to be supported any more, and I wanted something a bit more portable. Instead of buying an existing meditation timer app for Android, of which I was sure there were already about a thousand, I figured I’d quickly roll my own, mostly for practice.

All I wanted really was a timer that would chime when the time was up, and also chime at regular intervals during the meditation (this is useful sometimes for bringing you back to the meditation if you happen to have drifted off.)

It turned out the code I’d written for Get Running for Android was quite stealable for this purpose. Basically, my work mostly involved repurposing a few bits of the code and taking quite a lot of the rest out.

Although this was mostly to scratch my own itch, I wanted something pretty and fully useable. I took a photo of a little Buddha statue I own, and I borrowed a Tibetan singing bowl from my friend Tara to create some nice background images.

Then I spent far too long making a nice, simple, big clock display that would work well on all the different Android screen sizes there are, in portrait and landscape mode. I say “far too long” partly because I’m probably not going to be looking at the clock much — I’ll probably just lock the device and rely on the bongs — and also because it took bloody ages to find and fix a bug that only showed up on one particular device.

Android fragmentation can really be a curse, especially when it’s not so much the “lots of different versions” fragmentation as the “some devices are just plain broken in odd ways even when they’re on the same Android version as other devices” fragmentation.

Still, I figured it out in the end. Then I made a simple website for the app, using Bootstrap, and used Bohemian Coding’s excellent Sketch app (which has now completely replaced the late-lamented Lineform, sadly abandoned by Freeverse) to make a launcher icon, and some accompanying promo graphics for Google Play.

On the whole, it was a surprising amount of work for something that just goes “bong” (the chimes are professional effects I licensed from stock site AudioMicro, by the way.) But I do at last have something of my own in the Android app store. And I’ve also got a simple but personally-useful app to convert for the iPhone, which will be a nice little project for me as I start learning iOS development…

So. Yeah. If you happen to want something that goes “bong”, Meditation Chimer is available on Google Play for 83 pence, including VAT.

Given the proliferation of meditation timer apps on Play (I didn’t look before I started coding, as it would probably have put me off, but I’ve looked since…) you could be the very first person to buy it if you’re quick. Or even if you’re slow. But then I didn’t do this one for the money. It’ll be interesting to see if it makes any, though, and if it does, I’ll report back…