Branko's Weblog

This is going to be the lamest howto ever. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

The HEMA department store sells these pairs of red and white LED lights in the Netherlands. When it gets dark you see them everywhere, on dogs, joggers, police horses (whole bunches of them), and of course on bicycles. At 2.50 euro they are a steal (two leds, four batteries, buttons and straps).

I own a pair of these lights too, and they have one problem. They may be advertised to run 70 hours on the same pair of batteries, but in practice they run out much quicker than that, because it is extremely easy to turn them on accidentally. So you leave work, come home, stuff your lights in your coat pockets—and often even that is enough—put your gloves on top, accidentally turn on your LED lights and they will burn all night. Mine tend to run out after three week or so even though they should last me about three months.

HEMA doesn’t seem to sell containers to keep your HEMA lights in, and in lieu of retrofitting something else I took to simply adapting the largish packaging they arrive in. Although the end-result doesn’t stop the lights from switching on if you press hard on them, accidentally turning on the lights by just putting them in a coat pocket is now history. (I have had it happen that they switched on in their containers when I stuffed a hat in the same pocket, so my solution is not perfect.)

Look after the break for a short photo essay on how to do this.
Read the rest of this entry »

I wish you…

‘Nuff said.

A long time ago in a land far, far away I had a game called Caesar III installed on Windows 98 (or XP). Actually it wasn’t that long time ago, and it definitely was not far away. But I digress.

And lo, I bought a new PC which ran on Windows 7, and forgot all about Caesar III. Until I cleaned out a cupboard and the found the game again. Long story short, Caesar III refused to install. It would prepare for running Installshield, and then do nothing.

I scoured the internet for solutions, but nothing gave. Most people apparently happily installed their third Caesars on Vista and 7.

So here’s the trick I used: I just waited a long time. Apparently Installshield needed that. After a minute of five or ten, out of the blue Installshield started running.

(Note that you need to run set-up in compatibility mode.)

This is cool: a company called Lytro is taking orders for its plenoptic (or ‘light field’) consumer photo camera, which it expects to ship in 2012.

A plenoptic camera swaps spatial (2D) information for distance information. See it as a grid of thousands of miniscule-resolution cameras all pointing straight ahead, with software combining the miniature photos back into a single exposure. (You used to have something similar in analog called a Lomo camera, but since that lacked the sophisticated software required to make something of the extra information it recorded, it was basically something only used for the cool effects.)

The extra information can be used to focus on a specific plane or object, to remove objects or visual artefacts, to create stereo images and many, many things more.

As they say, a grainy, shaky Youtube video with an idiot acting the straight man can say more than a thousand words:

(See also this for a demonstration of more applications.)

But because you’re swapping different types of information, you also lose a lot of information. I read somewhere for instance that the Lytro uses a 20 megapixel light sensitive chip to get to a 1 megapixel image. The result is that this type of camera will be mostly useful for photography where you cannot or will not control the setting. The Lytro will be used for snap shots, where otherwise you would use a regular (read: slow) pocket camera and miss the funny face your toddler pulls. Other uses of similar cameras would be surveillance (where beforehand you don’t know which details are important), or medical imaging where you want to separate planes of say tissues or cells.

All other types of photography have great use for the extra information plenoptic photography has to offer, but cannot afford to give up all that spatial information (i.e. resolution).

So I was thinking: what if you put both a regular sensor and a micro lens array with a dedicated sensor in the same camera? Now, you would not want them to occupy the same space, but as it happens the ‘camera’ (Latin for room) has plenty of space, and many professional cameras use a mirror to reflect the incoming light to a viewfinder. If you’re building a mirror camera using an electronic finder, you could put the micro lens array in front of the viewfinder’s light sensitive chip.

This method does of course also have its draw backs in the form of trade-offs. You could not use this for video for instance, or anything else involving most forms of motion. What my idea solves is mostly an engineering problem. It transforms a problem of unknown variables to one of mostly known variables, which means throwing a lot less cash at the designing the camera and allowing a manufacturer to be early to market.

Now and then somebody mentions on bicycle activism blogs that there is no speed limit in the Netherlands for cyclists.

That struck me as a bit odd, so I decided to find out if this is true.

And yes it is, by and large.

The Dutch rules of the road (RVV 1990) only mention speed limits a couple of times, notably in articles 20 through 22, which regulate the maximum speed for motorized vehicles.

There are a bunch of snags and exceptions though.

The most obvious one is the speed limit on woonerfs. Woonerfs are a type of proto-Shared Space, an area where all road users mix. To protect the weakest of these—children playing—the maximum speed for all road users on woonerfs is defined in article 45 as stapvoets, the speed of a walking horse. Since this is technically too slow for both car drivers (the engine would stall) and bicyclists (they would keel over), the Dutch supreme court has decided that stapvoets should be interpreted as 15 kph.

According to article 63, traffic signs overrule traffic rules (that makes sense, as signs can be used to indicate exceptions to the rules). Article 62 says that all road users are required to obey signs that either prohibit or command something. That means that signs regulating the maximum speed also apply to bicyclists.

Generally bicyclists will not encounter speed limit signs, with one exception. The signs that indicate the start of a built-up area are often accompanied by a speed limit sign. As article 22 of the Dutch rules of the road already orders operators of motor vehicles to limit their speed to 50 kph in built-up areas, this is an extraneous sign. My guess is they are put there to remind motorists to lower their speed. But since signs apply to all road users, they also apply to cyclists. Signs only apply for the wegvakken (road segments) immediately following them, that is until the very first side-road or crossing.

Finally, there are two catch-all articles in both the Dutch rules of the road and the traffic code, one regulating reckless speeding, and the other regulating all reckless behaviour. Article 19 of the RVV (the rules) says that “bestuurders ['operators of vehicles'] must be capable of bringing the vehicle to a stop within the distance of which they are capable of seeing the road, and of which it is free”.

And article 5 of the Dutch traffic code states that all road users are prohibited from behaving in such a way that this causes danger or hinders other road users.

By the way, if you want to read the rules for yourself, the following definitions may be useful:

• Weggebruiker: road user
• Bestuurder (’operator of a vehicle’): all road users except pedestrians
• Wegvak (’road segment’): the stretch of road from one (side)road to another

(I am not a lawyer. The above is not legal advice.)

Here are six greyer than grey photos for your perusal casu quo amusement, and as a “memo to self”.

Other than that they are less remarkable than a timid question on weekdays and more commonplace than a question.

Tv-mode, 1/50, F10:

Tv-mode, 1/125, F7.1:

Tv-mode, 1/320, F4.0:

100 % crops of the previous series:

As you can see (and as I should try to remember), shutter speed matters—use the M or Tv setting to go below 1/200 for that stripey effect.

Apparently there is more to say about the subject. And more. Here’s one I prepared earlier.

I know that Wikipedia’s walls are generally only scribbled on by Anglotard religionist Asperger’s drenched loons, but this is taking the cake. The article on atheism starts out with a surprisingly lucid and short definition, which makes it so much easier to spot all the levels of wrong:

“Atheism is, in a broad sense, the rejection of belief in the existence of deities.”

Lots of sniggering on the web lately, emanating from the lesser tech journos. The much touted iPad2 camera is hardly being used at all if Flickr statistics are to believed. The photo web site reports it has only 24 active iPad2 users a day.

One of the photos below was made with my el cheapo, 100 euro, smartphone wannabe phone, the other with the 500 euro pinnacle of Apple’s engineering and marketing prowess. (Click for 100% crops, saved at the 85% JPEG quality level.)

Can you guess which is which? Should you have to?

(Sculptures from the upcoming open air Art Zuid exhibition 2011 in Amsterdam Zuid, which I will blog about shortly at 24 Oranges. Shortly is a week from now or so.)

This is a tintinologist essay I wrote in Dutch in 1996. Upon rereading it I noticed that I didn’t feel too ashamed about it, so here it is again in English. Enjoy.

The role of Captain Haddock in Destination Moon

Those who follow the adventures of the young reporter Tintin and his dog Snowy will soon notice a certain development in the series. The main character starts out as a lone warrior in the battle against evil. Then slowly new characters enter the series, first as comedic obstacles, later as friends. Tintin’s own role changes through these acquisitions, as he becomes the clean cut foil to the other characters’ cheeky antics.

The most important representative of these new characters is Captain Haddock. He is Tintin’s closest friend, and the two become almost inseparable. Indeed, many of the stories start with the pair following each other into danger. After his introduction in The Crab with the Golden Claws the captain plays an important role in all of Tintin’s adventures—the stories up to and including The Secret of the Unicorn acting as a sort of warm-up period.

Haddock has undoubtedly become the most popular character of the series. Tintin himself is drab. As the hero of the stories his behaviour must be impeccable, and acceptable to most readers. With such a cardboard character, the introduction of colourful extras to keep the series lively was almost inevitable. Captain Haddock, an old sailor, turned out to be the character that author Hergé could relate to the best.

One of the most important adventures that included the captain—or rather, one of the most important adventures for the captain—is Destination Moon (part one of a two-parter). Destination Moon started out as a straight-forward action adventure, the first to be written by somebody other than Hergé, but in the end Hergé decided against this approach and made the book a rocket building manual.

Everybody is of course familiar with the scene in which the captain accuses Professor Calculus of “acting the goat”. This leads the furiously indignant professor to drag the captain from rocket factory installation to rocket factory installation, dragging the reader along on what otherwise would have ended up a chapter sized info dump. Through the captain’s experiences the reader gains an excellent insight into the complexities of space travel.

From the moment Hergé decided to make the rocket building process the focus of an adventure, he had to figure out how to turn a boring technical description into the sort of thing his readers expected of him. Captain Haddock was the ideal vehicle for this. The man does not want to go to the moon. He wants to sit at home (a castle no less), smoke his pipe, drink his favourite Scotch, and at best worry about things like how magicians turn wine into water.

But Captain Haddock is also loyal to his friends Professor Calculus and especially to Tintin, and if said cabin boy wants to go to the moon, he, Archibald Haddock, can hardly let him go alone, can he? And thus Hergé uses Tintin to take the captain along in an impossible and otherwise boring adventure. And in the same way the captain is loyal to Tintin, so are the readers to the captain. The audience for a technical documentary was created.

The choice for Captain Haddock as the eyes and ears of the reader is an obvious one. Tintin is like a robot. Not only is it to be expected that he requires a lot less explanation (Captain Haddock on the other hand simply isn’t interested in space travel), but he also wouldn’t refuse a trip to the moon if his creator ordered him to.

The price Hergé (and Tintin) had to pay was a surprising one. A hero has to take the back-seat in his own series! Captain Haddock takes centre stage. Hergé even goes as far as forcing Tintin out of the main story. Tintin leaves the rocket plant for a hike through the mountains, supposedly to get some fresh air. He will take care of the espionage story that despite being important, and tailor-made for Tintin’s heroic bent, plays in the background. This way Captain Haddock temporarily ascends the throne in a believable manner—he has Tintin’s permission.

The captain is of vital importance to Destination Moon. His cynical, distant humour captures the attention of the reader, and transforms a serious subject into something light and airy.

I wondered if the importance of Captain Haddock could be measured in some way. I came up with the following methods:

• Divide the book into scenes. Take stock of who does what in these scenes. Measure the importance of those actions.
• Count the number of times somebody appears in the book.

The first method has the disadvantage that you just postpone the moment where you make the judgement call of what is important and what not.

The second method at least comes with a (implicit) definition of importance, but that definition is not necessarily correct. The spy story in the background for instance is terribly important to the story. If the spies had succeeded in bringing the rocket down, there would have been no part two—or more likely, part two would have looked completely different. And yet the spies hardly appear at all in the book.

In the end I cowardly decided to let you, the reader, choose whether you want to draw any conclusions from the quantitative part of this essay.

The following table was created by counting the number of panels a character appears in.

Captain Haddock appears on almost as many pages as Tintin (55 and 54 respectively). The number of panels sporting the sailor however is nearly 25% more. This phenomenon occurs, as far as I am aware, in no other Tintin book.

As an aside, during my counting exercise I noticed that one time Snowy appears in two different places at once. The week before the final launch, the astronauts are gathered for a wrapping-things-up meeting. Snowy is present. When the plant’s general manager, mister Baxter, asks how things are going, Professor Calculus replies that almost everything is done, except Snowy’s space suit. The ‘camera’ then cuts to another scene in another location, in which we see Snowy act in a five panel joke involving his space suit.

Such cutaway scenes are perfectly valid in comics (or any other type of story) though, so perhaps this is not a mistake by Hergé, who otherwise was always the perfectionist.

References:

• Hergé (pseudonym of Georges Remi), all Tintin books in Dutch translation.
• W.A. Wagenaar, in: De taal van het beeldverhaal (a publication of Het
  Stripschap), whose excellent essays were a inspiration for this, my attempt.
• Harry Thompson, whose weak biography (Kuifje/Hergé, Een dubbelbiografie, Uitg. Balans/Kritak, 1991; a translation of Tintin: Hergé & his creation, Hodder & Stoughton) were also an inspiration, albeit a negative one.