Well, only 14 days to go, so I think I’ll review how I’ve done this year now!
Continue climbing regularly, 10 times over the year, and improve by a grade (to 6b+, think) – ✔ ✘
Both a tick and a cross! I only managed 8 times according to my climbing log, but I did manage a 6b+, and started lead climbing.
Take a photo got every day – ✘
I managed it up to the start of October, at which point I made the decision to stop the 365 project and just continue on an ad-hoc basis. I’ve posted 37 photos in the 78 days since then, so just under every other day – my aim is probably a couple a week.
Go to the cinema – ✔
YES – and for me! I went to see Despicable Me 2 on Odeon Kids, but also Gravity and Star Trek Into Darkness – both awesome films. I really want to see Catching Fire, but I think this will have to wait.
Go camping – ✔
YES – in the back garden with the boy, over the summer.
Cook something I’ve never cooked before.– ✔
YES – two offerings are Jamie’s Lamb Pot-Roast, but also Mary Berry’s Apricot and Almond Meringue Gâteau (nom nom nom).
Go to Spring Harvest (yay) – ✔
Oh yeah. I’d missed this so much.
Maintain weight at around 72kg – ✘
That’s a big fat no! (literally). Last time I weighed myself I was pushing 78kg, but that was a couple of months ago, and before Christmas snacking kicked in. Ho hum.
Pray and read the bible every day – ✔
.. ok, so maybe not every day, but to within acceptible error margins.
Put my boys to bed every evening – ✔
As above.
Complete a Times crossword (electronic aids allowed) – ✔
YES! Dead chuffed by this one. I’d got to the stage where I was fairly regularly managing to complete them (in several hours, with electronic aids and Chambers), and only rarely not understanding the answer when I saw it. I haven’t attempted once since the summer though, so I suspect I’ve rusted.
Continue blogging and twitter-ing (20 blog posts) – ✔
Yes – I didn’t think I’d posted that much, but this will be my 21st Post. My tweetrate has defintely dropped (and my tweetrate calculator has broken too, it seems.)
Take C# and HTML5 MS exams (towards the new MCSD qualification) ✔ ✘
Did the HTML5 one.
Well, the Practical Photography Photo School is over (although the next one has started straight away), so I thought that I would collate my 6 homework assignments in one place!
Module 1: Landscapes
Bridge over Ure
Taken in Ripon, just after sunset. Tripod, 50mm lens.
Grade: Bronze
Comments:
Image is underexposed
Image isn’t sharp enough
Composition needs more attention
Module 2: Portraits
A Selfie?!
With the homework deadline looming, I could only find one willing model who’d put up with my endless experimentation – me! Taken at 9.30pm(!), ISO 400, 50mm lens at f/4.0, 1/25s fired with a remote shutter release. Silver reflector in my right hand to try and make the most of the light! I pre-focussed on a brush, then took lots, moving myself forwards and backwards until I had one with my front eye in focus. I think the brief has it as out of camera, otherwise I might have cropped the top and left a little to nail the rule of 1/3rds, and given a bit more contrast.
Grade: Gold – Pass with distinction
Module 3: Action
Hotwheels
I made this homework hard for myself! Even on a very bright sunny day I was struggling to get a fast enough shutter to freeze the car and small enough aperture to get it all in focus, and had to push to ISO 400 which gives too much noise for my liking on my (ancient) camera. It also doesn’t do continuous focussing in shutter priority, and only 2-3fps in burst, which was nowhere near fast enough! Still, the ‘driver’ is (just about) in focus, the plane of focus is sharp, the subject fills the frame, it’s coming towards us, and there’s a sense of motion. Setup was camera on the tripod pointing at the end of track and pre-focussing slightly nearer then the end. I let go of the car and tried to fire the shutter as it launched. f/8, 1/640s, ISO 400 (and about 200 attempts)
Grade: Silver – Pass with merit
Comments:
Image isn’t sharp enough
Nice effort, but focus on wrong point.
Module 4: Nature
Sage
The bumble bees absolutely love this plant! Bright sunny day so hand held my 100mm macro. f/6.3 – which isn’t wide – but this close needed the depth of field. 1/250s, with -0.7 eposure compensation (which may have slightly over-egged it, but the highlights were burning out otherwise). I did get some bee’s feeding, but had to use my flash which doesn’t meet the brief!
Grade: Silver – Pass with merit
Comments:
Image is underexposed
Ever so slightly underexposed – even 1/2 stop more would make a huge difference.
Module 4: Black and White
Trollied
I like the pattern these trollies made as they go away into the distance. Choose a wide aperture for a narrow depth of field, and tried to align the focal place with a vertical third. Handheld at f/1.8 and 1/640s outside Sainsburys!
Grade: Gold – Pass with distinction
Module 6: Animals
Feeling a bit sheepish
Full length portrait with my 75-300 @ 300mm. f/8 to try and minimise the softness of the lens, and 1/125 shutter so braced on the fence. Iso 400 which is the most I can go before too much noise kicks in. Tried to frame it to give the sheep some space, but put its eyes on a third. Used focus/re-compose as my camera has limited focus points. I really did try to get one of the neighbours cats, but they wouldn’t play with me. I’m not trying to fleece you, or pull the wool over your eyes!
Grade: Gold – Pass with distinction
So that’s a bronze, 2 silvers, and 3 golds. Not too shabby, but room for improvement.
This is transposition cipher, with “Q”s substituted for blanks.
The big clue is in the frequency/histogram of the letters, which matches normal english, except for Q.
It’s 143 characters, which is 13×11. So try writing as a 13×11 grid:
A W V L I Q I Q V T Q O S
Q O E L G C V I I Q W D L
C U Q E E O E N N W W O A
O L T D N U Q T G A W T S
M D O Q T L A O Q S D C H
P Q Q I Q D Q Q T Q O O T
U D B N I Q H B H H T D U
T E E T F D U E A U M O R
E S Q E Q E M L T M E T I
R E C L I C A I Q A T U N
Q R A L T E N E I N R K G
Then read the columns
AQCOMPUTERQWOULDQDESERVEQTOQBEQCALLEDQINTELLIGENTQ
IFQITQCOULDQDECEIVEQAQHUMANQINTOQBELIEVINGQTHATQITQ
WASQHUMANQWWWDOTMETRODOTCODOTUKSLASHTURING
Which is pretty easy to translate into:
A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human www.metro.co.uk/turing
Puzzle 2
This links takes you to a download site, with a single file – “comp1.key”, the contents of which are:
This looks like an RSA private key, so first thoughts naturally resolve around decrypting something.
However it isn’t a valid key. Using OpenSSL to examine it, we discover:
$ openssl rsa -check -in comp1.key"
RSA key error: p not prime
RSA key error: n does not equal p q
RSA key error: d e not congruent to 1
RSA key error: dmp1 not congruent to d
RSA keys fundamentally consist of two prime numbers, and the fact that one isn’t prime is very suspicious. Let’s look at them.
Run each part through a hex decoder, and you get gibberish except for prime2 (notice all all the repeated 0x20s at the end of prime2, and 0x20 just happens to be the ASCII code for space.)
Very clearly a hex stream, but full of non-ascii characters. Convert it anyway and you get nonsense.
At this point I needed a little nudge. Because I knew the RSA key from puzzle 2 was broken, it didn’t even occur to me to use it to decrypt this, although in retrospect in seems very obvious. I’d tried using the key with openssl trying to solver puzzle 2, and it was no go.
The nudge pointed me to the site below, where it transpires you don’t actually need the 2 primes, just the public modulus, public exponent, and private exponent. http://nmichaels.org/rsa.py
Stick these values in from the key, together with the hex string, and what happens:
Obvious guess is that there’s something encoded in it.
Standard first step is to check the HTML page source and URL, no clues there. No mouseover magic or anything like that (there hasn’t been so far) – it’s just an image.
I’m also assuming that the picture itself isn’t the answer.
Let’s look at the EXIF. Nothing there.
Two choices – one is there’s some visual data, two is there’s digital data encoded somehow.
No joy with fiddling with brightness, contrast, or shifting images around.
JSTEG may be promising – download, patch, compile, extract and we get:
Nonsense in ASCII – maybe need to decode it using our RSA key? Nope – still nonsense.
Steghide looks good, but we need a passphrase. Nothing obvious works though (“turing”, “enigma”, “enigma2013”, “bletchley”, “GCHQ”, “lovelace”).
Because it’s a JPEG, the image hiding options are limited.
What about the image structure of a JPEG – it runs from a Start of Image (0xFF,0xD8) to an End of Image (0xff,0xD9), and in theory you can put stuff in the file after the End Of Image marker. This particular file has 2 SOIs and EOIs – so two images, running from 0x0 to 0xcbd3 (52180) and 0xcbd4 to 0xf404?
So, let’s skip the first 52180 bytes, and put the rest into a new jpeg:
I think, with a slightly heavy heart, I need to draw my 365 project to a end. One of my principles is ending well, and I would rather finish it definitely than have it just flicker out.
For the past two a a bit years, I have had a picture to assign every day – that’s about 870, but over the last couple of months the advertised day has slipped further from the photographed date – so I’d find myself taking 5 at the weekend, and using these for the following 5 days. This was never my intention, and I think it’s right to call time.
The original intention was to meet the challenge of having to take a photo every day, with the subtext of getting much better at using my camera and understanding its settings as well as improving my art. I feel I have achieved these ends, and I now find it hard to go places without having my camera with me! I intend to carry on with the Camera School in Practical Photography, and I will continue to post photos on my 365 site (and this blog), but I suspect this will be closer to once a week than once a day.
I have by no meas exhausted my “pictures I want to take” list, and I look forward to more adventures in photography, and hopefully a new camera once I’ve saved up enough (Canon 7D please!!)
It has been a fantastic and most enjoyable project, and I have no hesitation in recommending a 365 to anyone!
I love geeky jokes – these ones are all thanks to the Grove Boooks newsletter. Incidentally Grove Books are awesome – theology bookettes on almost any subject you may care to think of.
To the optimist, the glass is half full. To the pessimist, the glass is half-empty. To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
A photon checks into a hotel and the porter asks him if he has any luggage. The photon replies: “No, I’m travelling light.”
“Is it solipsistic in here, or is it just me?”
A TCP packet walks into a bar, and says to the barman: “Hello, I’d like a beer.” The barman replies: “Hello, you’d like a beer?” “Yes,” replies the TCP packet, “I’d like a beer.”
An electron is driving down a motorway, and a policeman pulls him over. The policeman says: “Sir, do you realise you were travelling at 130km per hour?” The electron goes: “Oh great, now I’m lost.”
An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The bartender says: “What’ll it be, boys?” The first mathematician: “I’ll have one half of a beer.” The second mathematician: “I’ll have one quarter of a beer.” The third mathematician: “I’ll have one eight of a beer.” The fourth mathematician: “I’ll have one sixteenth of a…” The bartender interrupts: “Know your limits, boys” as he pours out a single beer.
It’s fab having a 2 year old around – they are so funny.
Couple of humurous recent ‘conversations’:
Me: I don’t want you two to get into an argument
2yo: But I want to get into an argio
Me: No!
2yo: I want to get into an argio, please can we build an argio?
2yo: Is (9yo) brushing his hair?
Mum: I doubt it! I’ve never brushed your hair in the mornings. Does that make me a deficient mother!
2yo: No, I don’t think so
Mum: Oh, thank you!
2yo: That’s my welcome
9yo: What’s the time Dad?
2yo (interjecting): It’s 25’o’clock
Mum (to 9yo): What does your bother call Mario Karts?
2yo (interjecting): He’s Bothering me!
9yo (ignoring 2yo): He calls it “zoomy cars”
One of the things that being a parent has shown me is how disconnected my thinking can be. As a parent of 2 I have an utter disconnection between my expectation of their behaviour and relationship, and my entire experience to date of siblings (mine own and others).
So, when No. 1 came along, he’s very much his own person, but with elements of me and A. clearly visible. No. 2 comes along, he’s also his own person, with elements of me and A. clearly visible, but is completely different from No. 1. I don’t know why I was/am surprised by this. I am very different from both my sisters, who in turn are very different from one another. My wife is very different from her sister. All my friends at school are different from their siblings. All my friends’ kids are different from one another. My many Aunts and Uncles on my Dad’s side are all completely different. Sure there is a strong familial resemblance. You wouldn’t question that No 1 and No 2 are brothers, yet they are so different. I’m surprised that it surprises me, but it does. Somehow I expected someone – especially of the same gender – born of the same stock to be the same.
But it hasn’t stopped there. I also expect them to be able to get along and play nicely (like A. and I do). Where does this expectation come from? I can’t imagine anyone I know of that age playing voluntarily with their sibling, expect perhaps a specific card or board game. When I was that age, friend’s brothers or sisters were largely to be ignored. If I think of No 1’s school friends, there is no example of any I can imagine playing with their sibling. I think I imagined that brothers would automatically be friends somewhere, but I have no idea where this notion came from.
I rub along well enough with my sisters now, but when I was growing up given the choice between doing almost any other activity or spending time with them, I know which I chose! When I was with them, I seem to recall being extremely annoying to them. Mind you, that hasn’t changed.
The one exception to this rule, at least when I was at school (and a teenager!!), was my friends with younger sisters. These magical captivating creatures were usually far more fun to be with then their boring older brothers!
I’ve been thinking about the assertion that everybody has 15 minutes of Fame.
I’m sure this isn’t true, but it’s actually quite hard to disprove. If you find a counter-example, then they automatically become famous for not being famous – a bit like a googlewhack.
I wondered if you could get anywhere mathematically? We know the world has approximately 7 billion people – let’s assume that this is static for now.
This means for you need 7,000,000,000 x 0.25 fame hours, or 1,750 million fame hours, or 199,772 fame years for everyone to be famous for 15 minutes. However, the average life expectency is only about 70 years.
So if fame is exclusive, only 1 in 2,854 people will get their 15 minutes of fame in their lifetime, disproving the assertion.
On the other hand, if fame is non-exclusive, that means 2,854 people need to famous concurrently every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day, to satisfy the fame requirements of the current population. Or, over a given 24 hour period 274,000 people would need to be famous.
Clearly universal global fame is out straight away – 2,854 people is a lot. To list the names of the famous people on a given day would require around half a million words, or 5 normal length novels’ worth. In newspaper speak, perhaps 17,000 column inches, or 700 pages, and that’s without any sort of indication abut why they’re famous. And that’s each and every day, just to cover the current population of the planet.
So, let’s assume that fame is regional, but still exclusive (i.e. only one person can be famous at once). Let’s say that for me to qualify as famous, everyone else in my town needs to know my name for those 15 minutes. There’s about 160,000 of us in Harrogate, so this suddenly seems a bit more manageable now! If we assume each of those 160,000 people will be famous for 15 minutes, and let’s limit it to waking hours (10 hours a day), we now only need 4,000 fame-days for everyone to have their 15 minutes, or a little over 10 years. Clearly we can relax down to having 1 famous person per 7×15-minute slots to meet the life expectency figure.
If we go back to our non-exclusive example – we require 2,854 have to be famous concurrently every 15 minutes, and this seems reasonable at a global scale. There are something like 200 countries in the world, so that’s a mere 14 or so famous people per country per 15 minutes. It’s still a fairly unmanageable 336 people per day though – so we need to break it down a bit more.
Let’s take cities with more than 500,000 people, of which there are ~1,00 globally. That’s only 3 people every 15 minutes! Go down to cities of 150,000 people (i.e. about 3,000 globally), and we now need less than 1 person to be famous in a given city at any one time to meet the ascertion. Of course, we still need someone to be famous each and every 15 minutes. But also bear in mind that by limiting ourselves to cities, we’ve accounted for less than half the world’s population as consumers of fame.
So, yes, it is entirely possible for every person on the planet to be exclusively famous for 15 minutes in their lifetime, as long as they only need to be famous to people in the nearest city!
So I’m off to Amsterdam tomorrow, for a work meeting all day Thursday. I’ve been acting cool about it at work, but I’m actually as giddy as a kitten. I’ve been to Schipol a few times in transit, although the last time I was there it wasn’t in transit when it should have been, but that was my Boston adventure back in 2006/7. I’m not particularly giddy about the meeting, but I love travelling and flying, and don’t do it much these days.
The meaning itself is actually outside Amsterdam, pretty close to Delft / The Hague, but my geography of that part of the world is pretty poor.
Anyway, one result of an all day meeting is that my colleague and I have to go over the afternoon before, which means we should be able to jump on the train into the city itself for our evening meal. Last time I was there it was a cold drab January, so I’m hopeful that a sunny June evening will be a different story altogether.
I have a 1Tb partition on my hard disk that I’ve reserved for storing my photos and videos (such as they are). When I specced the drive out I thought “that’s loads of space – PC will need replacement before I run out of space.”
I’ve been noticing that I’m down to my last 100 Gb – and put it down to my increased numbers of photos. But at 5Mb a shot, that’s still a lot of photos, and I have started being more ruthless with my deletions, and avoided taking video off the camcorder, and even then storing it lossy compressed. It’s also meant I’ve not seriously thought about off-site backup of my photos, because the only way to do it would be an external drive of at least 1TB, and than that would be full almost before I started.
However, it’s been nagging away at me, particularly the thought that if we have a house fire, we could lose every photo we’ve taken over the last 10 years. We also have a fire-proof safe, and so I decided to bite the bullet and get some USB memory sticks as an emergency (sort of) off-site backup.
I went to work out how many I would need. Size of “Photos” folder – 50 Gb. H’mm smaller than I was expecting. Must be all the video files. Size of “Videos” folder – 50Gb. That’s weird. I also store backups of miscellaneous documents on this drive.. Size of “Backups” – 1Gb. Few other system folders kicking about, but they are all empty / 0Gb.
So, where has the other 800Gb gone?
Turns out that Windows backup has filled up almost the entire disk with backups – I turned off Windows backup some time ago as I go my own way (gotta love cygwin), nevertheless there was a whole collection of 20Gb files which were hidden from view at the root. I don’t mind system files being hidden (although it’s the first view option I switch off), but I do mind Windows storing 800Gb of data on my disk without me being able to determine where!
So anyway, only 64Gb memory stick will sort out my photos, and I can now suck across the video (in raw) from the camcorder.
