Yet Another Cycling Forum
Off Topic => The Pub => Topic started by: rogerzilla on 18 April, 2020, 01:04:18 pm
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1. The fact that the Google Assistant on my phone can listen then tell me what song and artist is on the radio.
2. Bike lights. Does anyone remember how shite they used to be?
3. Petrol car exhausts no longer stink.
4. My fridge/freezer never needs defrosting.
5. Much as I despise them as a corporation, eBay means I can track down real obscurities that would have been thrown away or buried for ever. Bike parts, old books, odd fixings and fasteners.
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1. That I'm still alive.
2. Computers that are good enough and ubiquitous enough that you don't really have to care about computers.
3. That much of the real world is now available on the internet, to the point that it's actually useful for something other than talking to fellow nerds.
4. I'll second the LED thing. Bike lights, low-energy lighting, it's all good. Except when done badly (eg. strobe-o-vision lighting or excessive use of retina-searing blinkenlights).
5. Cars no longer needing exhausts.
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1. Google maps. I can go places on my own and actually get somewhere without having a nervous breakdown. Yeah, it would be better to be able to navigate with a paper map but I don't have that sort of brain.
2. Things like Brewdog's Hopdrop app where I could order food and beer and have them paid & delivered to my table. Welcome to the future.
3. Google Lens. I can take a photo of a random plant and Google will give me some ideas as to what it is.
I'll think of some more later
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- The fact that I can meet up with people when plans go awry. (Remember the 'good, old days' when you'd struggle?)
- Modern mapping that can tell me how to get somewhere with a good degree of accuracy - generally
- I lived abroad in pre-internet days when BT ensured foreign phone calls were prohibitively expensive, whereas now Skype, et al. make things easy and free
- Doing an essay on Hungary post-Treaty of Trianon and being able to dig up verifiable facts and figures from multiple sources without having to rely on an encyclopaedia
- Word processing. How brilliant is that? Don't take it for granted. Hand writing work is a real PITA.
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The fact that I can meet up with people when plans go awry. (Remember the 'good, old days' when you'd struggle?)
Double-edged sword, because people don't commit to proper plans any more. But on balance, I agree.
I should probably have included GPS. It's utterly brilliant.
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1 Carbon fibre elegance
2 Satellite navigation systems
3 Seeing stuff that's billions of light years away
4 Genetic engineering
5 Unbelievable levels of precision in manufacturing
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The fact that I can meet up with people when plans go awry. (Remember the 'good, old days' when you'd struggle?)
Double-edged sword, because people don't commit to proper plans any more. But on balance, I agree.
I'm old-fashioned enough to make sort-of definite plans, but knowing that there's a safety net is reassuring.
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On demand TV programmes.
Freedom from the tyranny of scheduled viewing and the TV recorder.
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1. video calls, and free worldwide calls in general, mobile to mobile.
2. all (or most of) the knowledge at your fingertips, within seconds.
3. all modern conveniences - we can live better than the kings of the past.
4. making ideas a reality easily (3d modelling, 3d printing, computational/fluid dynamics, structural design etc.)
5. building, reaching your audience and sharing ideas worldwide, easily and simply
p.s. even the best bike ligths together with the whole bike industry are still at 4-6 out of 10, a long way to go towards engineering excellence, imo.
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The bike industry keeps reinventing the wheel (often literally) and usually gets it wrong. For every success (headsets that don't go indexed, well-sealed bottom brackets) we get other stuff that causes more problems than the thing it was intended to replace (integrated headsets, PF30).
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A lot of the big stuff is up there ^, so my list once those have been removed is:-
1. Rechargeable batteries that generally work, and aren't killed by over-overcharging or being not used for months.
2. Mains transformers that don't use 20% of full power with no load, and work on any input voltage, don't give out 50% too much voltage with no load, don't mind being shorted and are small enough to be comfortably supported by even USAnian sockets and are stupidly cheap.
3. Being able to get data sheets for electronic components without having to wait for the post, finding it's completely wrong, having to wait for the post, finding it's completely wrong.....
4. Television and computer screens that are so thin that their depth is irrelevant.
5. Plastic water pipes that don't need funny tools, big spanners, fire risk and arcane skills to fit.
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1. That I'm still alive thanks to someone being able to cut the right sort of hole in the right part of my skull, because they could see inside it before they started. I don't think trepanning worked out so well for the Neanderthals.
2. LEDs.
3. Bike tyres that grip in the wet and rarely puncture.
4. Disc brakes for bikes.
5. Web conferencing that means people can do things like play music together in 'lockdown'.
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I can't answer that; haven't done it myself, only enjoyed the results. I expect a great deal of editing is involved.
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5. Web conferencing that means people can do things like play music together in 'lockdown'.
I would like to know how as we tried it (Zoom, Skype, WhatsApp) and latency meant it was not possible.
I get this on my Facebook feed a lot:
(https://images2.imgbox.com/1b/65/RBatlVp3_o.jpg) (http://imgbox.com/RBatlVp3)
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1.Spotify on my running watch, and I dont need to plug it in.
2. My chromebook. So much slickness for £250
3. YouTube/Internet. I can now fix most things on my car that dont require getting underneath it.
4. Whatsapp/Zoom: I can have an online beer with friends in Italy without it costing the price of a round. Can also do online yoga and pilates. Can talk to friends I am unlikely to see in person for years. Can have written word 'conversations' that play out over weeks and are incredibly funny
5. Synching and integration between devices that actually works
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a relatively simple thing that has not been widely implemented so far - identical and stable (from one use to another) water temperature from the taps. every time i have to wait ten seconds or so for hot water to arrive and temperature stabilise, more noticeable/annoying now with the frequent hand washing. surely i must not be the only one wishing for such feature being an industry standard?
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Cars that are reliable.
Not all modern cars of course.
Oh all right, scrub that one.
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As others have said, mobile communications. 20 years ago I phoned my wife, and she answered with "I'm on the bus at Melbourne Airport" Astounding. (The call, not that she answered from where I expected her to be. On second thoughts....)
Sonos and Spotify, and wifi stuff in general.
Car tyres. I mean, for the price they're amazing value.
GPS and all it's associated mapping etc. And it's free (FCVO free)
The tablet computer.
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How modern?
1. Blood type matching
2. Translation tools allowing instant communication anywhere there's a signal
3. GPS
4. Being able to see and talk to people on the other side of the world
5. Being able to ignore people on the other side of the world
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1 Dental tools and techniques. Changed beyond belief in my lifetime and I don't want to think about anything earlier.
2 Modern medicine. OK, we're having problems at the moment, but the changes in the past 100 years have been almost unbelievable
3, 4, 5 probably repeating what others have said, communications, computers, bike lights...
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Good quality food. If you're prepared to look for it.
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Once this is I could not do will outline anything is fine isn't autocomplete.
Wonderfully ideas.
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5. Web conferencing that means people can do things like play music together in 'lockdown'.
I would like to know how as we tried it (Zoom, Skype, WhatsApp) and latency meant it was not possible.
I expect they're mostly recording themselves playing along with a recording and syncing it up afterwards.
You could probably get the latency acceptably low enough if you used a landline telephone (no GSM or VOIP, which probably includes most conference bridges) to synchronise, but the quality would be so awful that you'd want to record at higher bandwidth and edit them together anyway.
Or everyone could play to a click track synced to the atomic time source of choice. But you'd still have to synchronise the streams at the receiving end, which would likely require timecode shenanigans the usual conferencing solutions won't have. And since nobody would be able to hear anyone else in real time, you might as well use recordings...
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Or everybody records their own part separately and it's put together by a sound engineer? Which I think is what nick-nack said.
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Maybe because of my age, most of these lists are things I don’t know about, and I’m quite pleased about that in general. As soon as I try to interact with modern tech stuff I end up in a world of stress and pain. I’m happy doing an Audax with a turn by turn paper copy. I’m happy with a phone that just- well, phones . The person who sold me a new phone assured me that it was easy. She lied! I used to be able to service my own car. Now only a registered mechanic with a secret code can touch it. It strikes me that a lot of “ progress” is about picking my pocket!
And - don’t start me with the “ your device is no longer supported” after no time at all.
Medical advances and such are, of course, brilliant and I admire the people that drive the stuff.
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Or everybody records their own part separately and it's put together by a sound engineer? Which I think is what nick-nack said.
Yes, I think that's pretty much what happens.
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Or everybody records their own part separately and it's put together by a sound engineer? Which I think is what nick-nack said.
Yes, I think that's pretty much what happens.
It's much easier to edit if they're playing at the same speed, so they're probably listening to something. Which may be no more than a metronome. Note they're usually wearing some sort of headphones to enable this...
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Or everybody records their own part separately and it's put together by a sound engineer? Which I think is what nick-nack said.
Yes, I think that's pretty much what happens.
It's much easier to edit if they're playing at the same speed, so they're probably listening to something. Which may be no more than a metronome. Note they're usually wearing some sort of headphones to enable this...
Digital click tracks ensure everything fits together nicely.
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I was under the impression that some bands are trying to have rehearsals with each member at their respective homes. Perhaps I was wrong; it wouldn't be the first time.
I'm sure plenty of them are *trying*
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I am not aware of a way that this can be done sensibly. Certainly we knocked the idea on the head pretty quickly. I'd be very interested to be proved wrong though.
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I'm struggling to think of a way to keep the latency/jitter to an acceptable level without mangling the audio too badly. Even the proper VOIP solutions are likely to add hundreds of milliseconds of delay. There's got to be some buffering somewhere. Especially if there's video involved.
I suppose if everyone was playing electronic instruments you could just send MIDI data over the network. Given a half-decent connection that should get the latency down below human reaction time (after all, it works for the gamers). No good for vocals and other instruments that can't be MIDIified, though.
I suspect any practical solution is going to be analogue. For analogue values of practical. And the speed of light still gets you with intercontinental distances.
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I suppose if everyone was playing electronic instruments you could just send MIDI data over the network. Given a half-decent connection that should get the latency down below human reaction time (after all, it works for the gamers). No good for vocals and other instruments that can't be MIDIified, though.
They got the midi working on this one https://youtu.be/SQHdFAm7g7E?t=1011 (https://youtu.be/SQHdFAm7g7E?t=1011)
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1: The all singing, all dancing navigation tool / camera / web browsing/ email touting, / instant messaging / video conferencing and lots lots more "phone" in my pocket.
2: internet and phone network connectivity for 1 above wherever I appear to want or need it.
3: The big flat screen in the corner which just works whether I want boring old television, streamed services, to use it as my computer screen, casted content from 1 above, Zoom video conferences etc.
4: 3D printing and other modern manufacturing tech which can be rapidly switched without huge cost and expensive wholesale retooling to produce different things.
5: Clean renewable energy. Lots and lots and lots of it, and more and more and more to come.
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1. That I'm still alive.
Me too. 3 stents. Chum has about 8 and still does mountains.
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I suppose if everyone was playing electronic instruments you could just send MIDI data over the network. Given a half-decent connection that should get the latency down below human reaction time (after all, it works for the gamers). No good for vocals and other instruments that can't be MIDIified, though.
RTP-midi (RFC 6295) has a packet size equivalent to VoIP I think so the same latency issues. However it does include clocking information which the devices receiving the midi stream should use to synch playback against a local accurate clock source (NTP presumably) so they should all be in synch. Dont know it in depth but I would assume if the latency gets too great the midi player or at least the RTP-midi stack should just start dropping the packets (as there is no point playing them at that point) that took too long to arrive and you would get drop out.
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Single market making the provision of really obscure spare parts viable. I bought a model specific set of replacement drive belts for my 20 year old double tape deck from Portugal.
Oh wait!
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Or everybody records their own part separately and it's put together by a sound engineer? Which I think is what nick-nack said.
Yes, I think that's pretty much what happens.
It's much easier to edit if they're playing at the same speed, so they're probably listening to something. Which may be no more than a metronome. Note they're usually wearing some sort of headphones to enable this...
The ones I've seen, no one's been wearing headphones. But there's probably a metronome, presumably on flash mode, out of sight, and I expect a lot of these are pieces they know well anyway.
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If you ever want a gems of how much latency there is and how variable it is, when on a multi user conference.
Count “one two” having asked the others to say “three” as soon as they hear “two”.
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1) Modern medical technology means I'm still alive
2) Modern dentistry means I still have something approximating front teeth, and wasn't screaming in pain throughout the process
3) Hmm, everything else starts to pale after those two.
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5. Web conferencing that means people can do things like play music together in 'lockdown'.
I would like to know how as we tried it (Zoom, Skype, WhatsApp) and latency meant it was not possible.
I get this on my Facebook feed a lot:
(https://images2.imgbox.com/1b/65/RBatlVp3_o.jpg) (http://imgbox.com/RBatlVp3)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWF00hRfsX0
"We'll fix it in post..."
J
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1. Safe navigation in cars. Gone are the days of balancing a map on your knee and looking up/down/up/down as you approach a roundabout with increasing panic.
2. I can see how much money I have left by looking at my phone and pay for stuff by bashing my phone on the thing. No more dread trips to the cash point to check balances and then walk away empty handed in front of the smugly silent queue.
3. Rechargeable Batteries that are worth buying, last for ages and don't need goat sacrifices before every partial charge.
4. Phone boxes are now cute anachronisms instead of vital lifelines. Remember when "Call an Ambulance" would be preceded by "Find a phone box or nearby house"?
5. Medicine. A visible demonstration being the way that Ambulances have evolved into mobile trauma treatment centres staffed by two specialist medics. They used to be little more than a van with two stretcher bearers.
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1 - I'm living the science fiction of my childhood.
2 to 5 - see 1.
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I suppose if everyone was playing electronic instruments you could just send MIDI data over the network. Given a half-decent connection that should get the latency down below human reaction time (after all, it works for the gamers). No good for vocals and other instruments that can't be MIDIified, though.
RTP-midi (RFC 6295) has a packet size equivalent to VoIP I think so the same latency issues. However it does include clocking information which the devices receiving the midi stream should use to synch playback against a local accurate clock source (NTP presumably) so they should all be in synch. Dont know it in depth but I would assume if the latency gets too great the midi player or at least the RTP-midi stack should just start dropping the packets (as there is no point playing them at that point) that took too long to arrive and you would get drop out.
If you want a really accurate clock use GPS.
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Well yes but GPS based NTP servers aren't the sort of thing most people have lying around. Quite common on enterprise networks as the primary time source but it's not exactly a home studio piece of kit normally.
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Yeah, but they're cheap as chips and probably worth it if you're doing timing-critical stuff on a congested or asymmetric[1] link. It's not like home studios are common either.
[1] NTP should be able to measure and correct reasonably well for *consistent* round-trip latency, but it has no way of knowing if the inbound trip is faster than the outbound trip, as it will be for most consumer broadband connections.
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You could always build one yourself - https://vaxxi.net/log/android-phone-raspberry-pi-gps-ntp-server/
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You could always build one yourself - https://vaxxi.net/log/android-phone-raspberry-pi-gps-ntp-server/
What an absolutely terrible way of doing it! That won't get you any more accuracy than NTP (though of course it doesn't need an internet connection, which can be extremely useful[1]), as you've no idea what the latency of the serial data from the GPS is - to say nothing of the vagaries of Bluetooth.
Better to get a GPS receiver with a hardware pulse-per-second output (Adafruit and the like do convenient modules that don't involve any SMD soldering) and connect that directly to the Raspberry Pi's GPIO/serial ports. That should give you precision in the microsecond range.
[1] I have a GPS feeding into ntpd on our Raspberry-Pi-based alarm clock, so that it knows what time it is if it powers up without a network connection. I could have used a battery-backed real time clock, but it being a stratum-1 time server was more fun.
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I'm impressed that my exercise bike keeps different time to my watch (which I assume slurps it's time from the Apple-verse) – in the space of a hour's workout, there's a good 90 seconds difference (the bike winning the race).
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Eddies in the spacetime continuum possibly ? Doubtless generated by the massive electric fields generated by your work out.
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I'm impressed that my exercise bike keeps different time to my watch (which I assume slurps it's time from the Apple-verse) – in the space of a hour's workout, there's a good 90 seconds difference (the bike winning the race).
It's all to do with Einstein's relativity theory. Einstein would have been a great cyclist had it not been for Hitler. Not many people know that.
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You could always build one yourself - https://vaxxi.net/log/android-phone-raspberry-pi-gps-ntp-server/
What an absolutely terrible way of doing it! That won't get you any more accuracy than NTP (though of course it doesn't need an internet connection, which can be extremely useful[1]), as you've no idea what the latency of the serial data from the GPS is - to say nothing of the vagaries of Bluetooth.
Better to get a GPS receiver with a hardware pulse-per-second output (Adafruit and the like do convenient modules that don't involve any SMD soldering) and connect that directly to the Raspberry Pi's GPIO/serial ports. That should give you precision in the microsecond range.
[1] I have a GPS feeding into ntpd on our Raspberry-Pi-based alarm clock, so that it knows what time it is if it powers up without a network connection. I could have used a battery-backed real time clock, but it being a stratum-1 time server was more fun.
I just googled without reading. As long as you are happy to work outside I think you could have an entirely software based setup on an android tablet accessing the gps time. Last millenium I had a GPS receiver plugged into my laptops rs232 before satnav, before I had heard of Bluetooth or usb and before the internet had its .com bubble. That could pick up the time.
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I just googled without reading. As long as you are happy to work outside I think you could have an entirely software based setup on an android tablet accessing the gps time.
That would still have the same problem: The GPS chipset is connected internally to the CPU via a serial interface. Therefore all it can know is that a stream of characters has arrived in the serial buffer, some of which contain the timestamp. You don't know[1] the delay between the start of the second and the string appearing, so your clock is slow by some unknown amount. (On my NTP server, the time obtained via NMEA strings is a couple of hundred milliseconds late.)
GPS receiver chipsets usually have a hardware pulse-per-second output to get around this problem: A physical wire that is switched on and off at the exact start of each second. NTP servers running on suitable hardware can use that to get microsecond precision (which they can combine with the less precise serial data to tell them *which* second they're on). The problem is that an Android device won't have this capability.
Last millenium I had a GPS receiver plugged into my laptops rs232 before satnav, before I had heard of Bluetooth or usb and before the internet had its .com bubble. That could pick up the time.
See above - any GPS will give you the time, but no more accurately than NTP over the internet.
Some RS232 GPS receivers will connect their PPS output to one of the handshake lines on the serial port, which ntpd can use. Timing's still an issue, so it's better to use a good old-fashioned serial port on the host computer rather than a USB-RS232 dongle, as that will introduce more difficult-to-quantify delay.
[1] You can estimate the best-case minimum delay from the baud rate. It's not pretty.
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I'm impressed that my exercise bike keeps different time to my watch (which I assume slurps it's time from the Apple-verse) – in the space of a hour's workout, there's a good 90 seconds difference (the bike winning the race).
It's all to do with Einstein's relativity theory. Einstein would have been a great cyclist had it not been for Hitler. Not many people know that.
I installed this (https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/queen-elizabeth-ll-looks-into-a-model-of-the-head-of-albert-news-photo/72256578) into Buck House for a Science Day they were having there about 15 years ago.
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That is a disappointment. I am pretty sure on the old gps unit the pps was one of the connections on its external connector and it was an adapter cable to a D type connector that gave rs232 levels. It was over 20 years ago so I can’t remember precisely. What I do remember is that it had a battery life that rendered it all but useless.
Edit: no, I seem to be making that up as I think it was a garmin gps 38.
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You could always build one yourself - https://vaxxi.net/log/android-phone-raspberry-pi-gps-ntp-server/
What an absolutely terrible way of doing it! That won't get you any more accuracy than NTP (though of course it doesn't need an internet connection, which can be extremely useful), as you've no idea what the latency of the serial data from the GPS is - to say nothing of the vagaries of Bluetooth.
Better to get a GPS receiver with a hardware pulse-per-second output (Adafruit and the like do convenient modules that don't involve any SMD soldering) and connect that directly to the Raspberry Pi's GPIO/serial ports. That should give you precision in the microsecond range.
I agree. When I have compared two pulse-per-second from cheap GPS receivers they are well under a microsecond apart. The Ublox PAM7Q modules are about as small as you can get with an integrated antenna, without surface mounting.
The good GPS time standards allow the length and type of cable from the aerial to be entered, so that can be compensated for as well. When the cable delay isn't going to be more than 50 picoseconds and is still worth compensating for, adding a bluetooth link is just silly.
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Sub microsecond synchronisation over a network is possible but forget NTP, you need PTP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_Time_Protocol). I had the 'joy' of implementing that on a job some years ago.
I think PTP or a proprietary clone of it is probably how Sonos and the like stay in sync.
[ETA] I am greatly relieved to find my recent-ish new network switch does not support IEEE 1588. This rules out all temptation to go down the google rabbit hole investigating a Pi based PTP powered Sonos-a-like. Phew.
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I love the way you can use Skype's lousy performance as an excuse to cut off a boring conversation.
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1. Modern tech has mostly paid my mortgage and fed my children for the last 35 years or so. Before that the tech was a bit older.