An old monarch

It's been a week for long-lived Monarchs.  On Wednesday, Queen Elizabeth II became the longest reigning British Monarch. Also on Wednesday, only nine days into the official start of spring, I came across this beauty sunbathing amongst the blossoms.

Monarch butterflies usually live for only two to three months and it's far too early for this one to be from this year's crop.  Most likely it's an over-winterer - a late autumn butterfly that has hung out in a cluster waiting for spring. Because their metabolism slows in the cold winter months, they live for much longer than the summer butterflies, waking ready to mate and lay their eggs. It must be a good day for old Monarchs.

Irene's view

Yesterday, I showed Tillie (The Sony RX100) our mountain. Today, it was the turn of Irene, the Canon Infrared.

I liked Tillie's take on the mountain but Irene, as usual, came up with her own unique perspective on the same subject. I think it's more graphic, the mountain more present. It's a good reminder that how something appears, depends as much on how we look at it, as it does on the thing its self.

Perhaps, when life begins to look a bit flat, we need an Irene who can look at the same thing and say, "Yes, but ..."

God, I love this place ...

Sometimes it all gets too much. As serious as the world's issues are, I just need to walk away. How many heart-wrenching refugee stories, TPPA shenanigans, Claytons flag choices and unending newsreels of human misery is too much? I don't know. What I do know is that there are times when I need to turn my back on it all and experience something else - something that doesn't need me to cry over it or give it a good smack around the head.

Fortunately, we live on this street and we have our own mountain. It isn't a big mountain - it's of the sturdy, stumpy, variety; not exactly Kilimanjaro, but it does have presence. As you drive across the plains, you can see it sticking up like a knuckle on a clenched fist; no one is going to push this mountain or its town around. Like any self-respecting mountain, it can get moody - some days it pulls the clouds tight about it and pretends it's not there. It's best just to go along with the charade when it's feeling like that.

But not today. Today, it was wearing a dusting of snow, reminding me of one of those chocolate cupcakes mother used to make. Today, it was a happy mountain, basking in the morning sun and making it clear that not everything in the world is munted*. Today, it declared a holiday and I took the day off.

*munted: a Canterbury word  originally used to describe things that got broken during the Canterbury earthquakes. Now in general use to describe anything broken.

The quantified life

I had been dabbling. When I first got the Pebble watch, I loaded up the Misfit app and had a go at measuring my activity and sleep. But, who wants to wear a watch all the time? I certainly didn't want to wear one to bed at night. And so my experiments at quantifying these things, gradually faded and died. And yet, as I get older and my health becomes more fragile, there is value to ensuring that I get enough exercise (but not too much) and that the quality and length of my sleep is as it should be. The numbers matter more today than they used to.

Enter Misfit's latest gadget - the 'Link'. The Misfit Link is a small button on a clip. It weighs next to nothing and you can clip it to your clothing or just slip it in a pocket where it sits recording your every movement. Aside from clipping it on after the morning shower, the Link is very much a set-it and forget-it device and performs well as long as you don't think of it as a pedometer. Wearing the Link on the main mass of the body gives results that compare well with something like Google Tracks (which measures trips using GPS) but don't think it will accurately record every step you take. The results on the body were, however, much better than from a wrist-based device like the Pebble.

The Link can tell you how you are doing, with a series of lights that can show progress and even the time. But, if you are wearing it discreetly on the body you won't be looking at the pretty lights very often. So, you access the Link using the Misfit app on your phone. From the app, you can set your own goals, see your daily progress and chart activity across weeks or months. All this data is also uploaded to the Misfit server where it is available on your personal dashboard. Should you be so inclined, you can share your data and compete with your friends.

Aside from measuring your activity, the Link also has other tricks - it is a button that can be programmed to take actions you define. How about programming it to trigger an 'emergency' call to your phone when you are in a difficult situation? This, and a whole heap of other actions are available through IFTTT.com (If This Then That) and you can assign different actions to a single and double press of the button.

Oh, and perhaps the best part, the Misfit Link is only US$20 and runs on a coin battery that lasts 4-6 months. Those are a couple of quantities that make the quantified life much more sensible.

A trip to the Dark Side

After praising Windows 10 for an excellent upgrade experience (still loving it btw) I have just had a very different experience with my Galaxy Note 3 which, last week, decided to give me Android Lollipop 5.0. I admit that I had been waiting for this upgrade, largely because of the new features and the look and feel of Lollipop. So, I let the phone go ahead and upgrade.

Bad move. There has been a variety of issues with Lollipop ranging from lag to overheating. The problem I encountered, however, was Bluetooth stability. When you also use a smart watch, Bluetooth is vitally important. What's the point of having notifications come to your wrist if they stop without warning? Bluetooth started dropping its connection several times per day and at least once per day would actually lose its pairing information. This had never been a problem with the previous Android Kitkat.

First, I spent a week reading the web and trying various 'solutions' including a full factory reset of the phone. Nothing improved the flaky Bluetooth. In the end, I had to resort to downloading a Kitkat ROM from the internet and flashing the phone back to Kitkat 4.4.2. A procedure that found me surfing a wave of near panic, in case I bricked the phone. Fortunately, the phone survived and I now have a robust Bluetooth installation again with calming green leaves for a wallpaper.

This problem seems to have been around ever since Lollipop was rolled out, but no one seems to know who should fix it - is it Google's Lollipop OS, Samsung's implementation of Lollipop, or an incompatibility with the Note 3 hardware. Who do I bill for my time? Grrrr...

Windows 10

I have been with Windows from the beginning - when Windows shipped with MS Word  and Excel so that those programs had something to run in. I was there through most Windows versions, up to and including Windows 7. I learned to wait until Service Pack 1 before installing a new version, I learned to skip every other version of Windows because it would be a 'dog' (I'm looking at you Windows ME, Vista and 8.0). I learned that upgrading meant hours of reinstalling apps and searching for new drivers. I learned to be very, very, careful.

So why, on earth, did I choose to upgrade to Windows 10 only one week after official release? Well, because for once I wasn't hearing howls of pain from every corner of the Internet. For some reason, even the usual Microsoft haters were strangely quiet. Then there was the fact that it was free, I didn't want to fall too far behind in my versions, and I wanted to try Windows 10 to see whether my next PC needed to be an Apple device.

The upgrade process was a breeze. Going from Windows 7 to 10 seemed like a rather large 'patch Tuesday'. The download was 3Gb and, once finished I said 'yes' to the upgrade and then went out for a walk (madness, I hear you say). When I returned an hour later, the upgrade was almost complete - just a couple of setup questions to answer and a short wait later, Windows 10 appeared:

Moving from Windows 7 to 10 is no drama; it looks a bit different (in a nice way) but everything is pretty much where I would think it should be - not just because I have known Windows 7, but because I  also know tablets and phones - It's not a mish-mash but things have moved closer together in terminology and in use, and its all good. Everything just works; programs, hardware, the lot without having to hunt around for any updates. This, without any doubt, is the sweetest Windows upgrade there has ever been and it's hard to imagine that it could be any easier.

Lunch

At my time of life, having lunch with a beautiful, sassy, young lady is a thing of dreams or of very foggy memories. Yesterday, however, I had the pleasure of sitting opposite the lovely Rhylee for lunch.

Now, it's usually the job of grandfathers to tease their grandchildren but this young lady is much too smart for that - *she* does the teasing, thank you very much *and* you have to be pretty quick to get anything past her sharp little mind.

I could well have met my match with this one, and she's still only three years old.

Rainbow in infra-red

Most usually, when processing infra-red photographs, they are converted to black and white; basically because infra-red doesn't have any colour that we can see. In black and white, white means lots of infra-red, and black means little or none - it's a convenient representation of something we can't actually see.

However, our cameras have sensors that capture light in three channels; red, green and blue. Even values of infra-red radiation get captured in these three channels though infra-red wavelengths have very little red and no green or blue at all. So, when we process an infra-red picture, it is still made up of red, green and blue data and, if we produce a picture from these three channels of data, it is usually known as a 'false colour infra-red' - which can look quite unnatural; hence why black and white is often favoured.

However, when a rainbow appeared today, I wondered how it would show up if photographed in infra-red and the colour channels were retained. So, because every man woman and child in the world are dying to know the answer to this question, here it is:

Rainbow over Oxford - false colour infra-red photograph

3 out of 3

Our third and last geocache on this sunny winter afternoon found us at the start of the Lees Valley Road. A smart walk uphill (goodness, I made it!) and Bethany found the little capsule hidden behind a large rock.

Fortunately, I had 'Irene' (the InfraRed Canon A590) in my pocket, as I felt that the play of light and shade on the folded hills would come out well in the IR spectrum which, I think, it did.

Canon A590 IR, 1/80 sec, f7.5, ISO 80, 60mm efl.

No, the white isn't snow; just the tussock reflecting the IR. So, with the light and the temperature both fading fast, we decided not to venture further along the road but headed home to light the fire and settle down with a warm cup of tea.

Maruia Falls

The Maruia Falls have always seemed quite impressive to me; well worth a stop on the way from Christchurch to Murchison. Fortunately, the falls cannot be seen from the highway otherwise the road would have a rather high accident rate. But a pull off into the carpark and a few lazy steps brings you to this magnificent sight.

What is even more remarkable is that these falls did not exist prior to 1929. In the Murchison earthquake of that year, a landslip diverted the course of the Maruia River so that it rejoined its self further down stream, falling over its own bank. At that time, the falls were about one metre high. However, in the succeeding years the falls eroded the base of the river until, today, they plunge a good ten metres to the river below.

We tend to think that such things happen over thousands of years but, in the case of the Maruia Falls it has all taken place in a rather short 86 year period. Great productivity, New Zealand!