• Main site
  • Forums
  • Kit_L?

kitlaughlin

~ occasional thoughts, images, and videos

kitlaughlin

Category Archives: Travel

Includes some experiences and observations while travelling, tips for more comfortable travel, and the odd amusing event

The Future Has Arrived — It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed (William Gibson, 1992, or thereabouts)

07 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by kitlaughlin in General, Technology, Travel

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

kitlaughlin.com, remote access, remote control, TeamViewer, WeTransfer, William Gibson

I am having a ‘the future has arrived’ moment as we sit here: I am in an apartment in Brisbane, writing a blog stored live on servers in the US somewhere, while (on another window on the mighty MacBook Air) a free software (TeamViewer) has allowed me to remotely control my MacBook Pro, sitting on a desktop in Canberra… this is kind of scary, actually. And by controlling that machine remotely, I am using that computer to upload sound recordings from Day one of the ST for GST programs, via another free software, WeTransfer.

The back story. Our ST for GST editor, Theron, lives and works in Istanbul. Last week I sent him two USB3 drives, with the Final Cut Pro X (FCPX) program’s “Library” bundles, which contained all the footage from the four days of shooting; let me take a step back. The four cameras we used for the shoot record in AVCHD; to be used by FCPX, these highly and cleverly compressed files were recorded onto SD cards, tiny insubstantial things the size of postage stamps (when was the last time you saw one of these, anyway?; for reference:

Aist_post_stampThe bordered-in-green image of the nurse is reproduced here about the size of an SD card (not the whole stamp) so they are pretty small things. Mine hold 16 or 32GB of any kind of information. When you “Import” these AVCHD files into FCPX, they are “transcoded” (this means that they expand in size by a factor of 10 to 20 times, depending on the complexity of any recorded movement, and what file size and frame rate you select on the camera) and “optimised” (this means converted into an ‘intermediate’ codec that FCPX can use).

And in the same process of ‘ingestion’ I copied the audio files from the Sony PCM-10 we used to record the ‘second system’ sound. But while FCPX copied the optimised footage into the hidden “High Quality” footage folder inside the Library bundle, it did not copy the Sony .WAV files—it left them in the original folders I had copied them into. I can only surmise that FCPX did not copy these files across into the Library because they were already optimised for FCPX (16 bit, 48KHz).

So, I received an email from our Istanbul-dwelling editor today, saying that all the logged footage was found in the Library bundles, all in the expected places, but all the sound files are ‘off-line’, meaning that FCPX only has a reference to them. In the process of copying the bundles to the hard drives, the sound files went AWOL. Well, they stayed where they were, and the other files made the journey.

What to do? The road distance between Canberra (where the sound files are hiding) and Brisbane is (according to google) 1,200.7 Km—and we flew here. it’s a very long drive (especially without a car). Did I need to head to the airport? I thought so. Or, could I ask Mountain Hammer to do yet another favour for me (go around to my house, Mission Impossible-style, find a way in via the hidden key, turn on the MBP and navigate through the many files on the 12TB of mirrored RAIDs I have set up for editing) and having located the files, copy them to me? Or was there a better way?

Google to the rescue once more. What about some remote control/remote access software? A quick search revealed a number of contenders for this role, but MH’s true-geek friend said there was only one: TeamViewer, and (amazingly) is was not only the best, it was free. Sounded too good to be true to me, but off investigating I went. In the meantime, I started reading the TeamView User manual, and offered to send the link to the manual; I got this note from MH, via email, in reply:

tech_support_flow_chart1

…along with this note: “Hahahahahha I don’t do manuals.” OK; understand, I trust this guy.

MH (with support crew), hit the road around lunchtime, got access to the inner sanctum, and called me. Over the phone we did the password thing (to access the MacBook Pro); he downloaded and installed TeamViewer; sent me the PW his copy generated; I entered this on my TeamViewer interface window; and I took control of my laptop in Canberra. At that point, MH’s role was reduced to that of spectator, and he headed back off to work.

It took but a moment to locate the sound files; MH had set up a shortcut to the Safari app (because my big laptop drives its own screen plus a big one I work on) and put that on the desktop I can see here in Brissie (there is a way to switch windows, but he doesn’t do manuals, so this was the workaround). I opened Safari, and opened WeTransfer, loaded it up to the max (just under 2GB of files) and pressed “Transfer”. In the time it’s taken to write this up, this is what has happened in the background:

TeamViewer in action

About 10% of the 2 gigs are already in the cloud somewhere, to be joined by the rest, and when Theron wakes up tomorrow (his time; actually yesterday) the files will be there. Of course (this is an aside), because TransACT will not enable any residential service’s upload speed more than 1Mb/sec, this will take about nine hours to finish uploading. Faster than flying home, though, and a lot less expensive. And now that software is installed, I can connect my two computers when I head off, and leave the big one in sleep mode—TeamViewer can even wake it up.

The Future Has Arrived — It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed, indeed.

Working with time, from a traveller’s perspective

18 Thursday Jul 2013

Posted by kitlaughlin in Technology, Travel

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

GMT, kitlaughlin.com, Skype, visual site time zone

To start, see HERE.

How cool is this? For example, Yuri (handstand pro. and all-round nice guy) wants to talk to me about the process of epub production—and he lives in Las Vegas. See how easily ha and I can work out business hours overlaps so that we can Skype? Brilliant.

All the other time sites use the GMT system; wonderful in its way, but completely user-unfriendly, compared the the site on the link above. I love clever technology.

Heading back into the arms of America

17 Friday May 2013

Posted by kitlaughlin in General, Travel

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Astral Travel, ESTA Visa waiver, jet lag, jetlag, kit laughlin youtube channel, kitlaughlin.com, Los Angeles airport, Robert Bruce

This will be a quick one today: I am travelling back to Australia via Los Angeles today. Thanks to Olivia I now have a current ESTA Visa waiver in addition to my US O1 work visa. I am hopeful that I will pass through Los Angeles in transit to my final destination with grace and ease. Watch this space!

There is another curious phenomenon, one that I am about to experience; I leave Vancouver on Wednesday and arrive in Australia on Friday local time even though the journey itself is only one day long. For me the most persuasive theory on what jetlag exactly is was offered by my friend Robert Bruce who wrote the extraordinary book Astral Dynamics, among others. He says from his own direct experience of spending thousands of hours travelling astrally that the human soul’s maximum speed is only about 250 miles an hour—accordingly, the detached dopey hazy experience that we call jetlag is simply your soul taking its time to catch up your physical body.

Now I have no understanding of these things, but that is a beautiful and poetic description of what jetlag feels like to me. And although we are told that ‘West is best’, for me returning home always produces the strong physical and mental effects that we label jetlag. I have tried every suggestion I have been able to find to reduce the effects of this including one long alcohol-free trip which was thorough hell and none of these things has any effect on the phenomenon.

So, with ESTA Visa waiver in hand, I am hopeful that my passage through Los Angeles will be a lovely one, and I am posting this in advance of my arrival in Australia because I doubt that I’m going to write anything once I get home, for a day or two at least.

Finally please keep your eye on my YouTube channel. I have come back with a wealth of material that I’m going to cut into at least two new clips and I would be very excited to hear you about what you think of these. And as I said in a recent email-out to our member list, if any of you want to see me make a video on any other subject, I’m happy to consider it. Off to pack now.

Today’s Vancouver airport experience

16 Thursday May 2013

Posted by kitlaughlin in Travel

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

clusterfuck, obesity, security ineptness, Vancouver airport, wheelchair, YVR

Clusterfuck is the apposite word to describe the totally inept people wrangling I experienced at YVR today. I note that this is the worst example I have experienced here (my many past experiences were relatively pleasant), and I want to stress that the usual difficult passage, US Immigration, was quick and almost friendly. More on that below, as what I learned today plays into an earlier post on LAX Immigration experiences recently.

Opening the show was the Air Canada check in counter: no signage indicates that one must use the external kiosks to check in and—worse—an unhappy middle aged man, an Air Canada official, asked me my flight time, then informed me, “Well, you have to check in”, and gestured me directly to the busy line (about 40 people; this all 3.5 hours before flight time).

I shuffled my bags through the tape cattle barriers (which sadist thought that up?), and then another official told me to get my bag tag from the kiosk and then to return to another area to be ingested by the system more quickly; I agreed. Despite a higher degree in science and a more than passing familiarity with both logic and the English language, navigating the kiosk was a nightmare; not only did it ask me for a street address in the US (what is LAX’s street address?) it would not issue a bag tag, despite correct entry of the critical variable in the relevant screen: the integer 1. OTOH, it was able to burp up three baggage tags; things were looking up!

I returned to the indicated ingestion point, whereupon yet another official, this one looking like a harried, and simultaneously baffled, aerobics instructor who had done way too much of it in the past and whose body was clearly unhappy about this told me that I had to return to the end of the first queue, now swollen to ~100 upset people. I gave her a brief précis of the circumstances that brought me to her, and further indicated that I would not return to the end of the line. An operative became free, and I walked to her. She was able to coax a tag out of a sulky machine, and I was past check point 1.

I dragged my check-in bag (smoothly rolling despite the carpet) to the bag drop-off conveyor belts; interesting and inexplicably, the lower ends of the belts, where anyone else would have thought to be the best place to actually load heavy check in bags was blocked off by more of the blue cattle wranglers. So, as a direct result, the elderly, the overweight, and the infirm, had to lift their bags up ~800mm, over the 300mm edges of the belts, even though the actual ends of the belts (sensibly designed to allow bags to be simply tipped over on to them) were not accessible. Both belts were set up this way. Check point 2.

Like any decent game, the next barrier was more challenging: security. After I showed my boarding pass and passport to a 100% asleep official (I believe I could have shown her my MasterCard), I was pointed left; and the woman in front of me the “Exit–Sortie” gate to the right, which opened directly to a security belt—one of only two operating. Lucky her. I joined a queue of approximately 75 unhappy people; this queue snaked its way all around the perimeter of the security area, a demented Conga line, where eight other, un-personned, security belts waited, their blinking lights a mute presence. I asked another official what criteria were applied to the streaming of the lucky ones directly to the closed belt; she offered three or four inconsistent possibilities, before saying, “That’s a different company”. She had zero idea; her job was simply to control the Conga line.

Time passed; I was waved through to the second belt. I did the usual: the MBA was placed in its own tray, and my other items put on this belt into the machine. Then I waited, again, for about ten minutes. I glanced past the metal detector and saw the holdup:

A gigantic overweight (OK; total frankness here: obese) woman in a wheelchair, was wheeled past the metal detector, and then was asked to stand with her arms outstretched; she could do neither. So, one of the other security staff who was thus taken away from her job of getting bags into the X-ray machine left her post, stopping this process, and she and the first official worked heroically to lift the passenger into an unstable, upright position, whereupon the most lengthy, and thorough, frisk that I have ever witnessed occurred: no fat was untouched.

It gets better: the same official (Lilli) then patted the wheelchair down: the crazy thing (in addition to the obvious general craziness) was that this was a YVR official-and-stamped wheelchair. When I asked an official (not a worker; a lurker with no clear function) why Lilli was patting down the official airport wheelchair, she answered, “Well, something could be packed in there”.

But Lilli was only brushing the chrome and vinyl of the exterior surfaces of the chair, so it was not immediately clear how this process would uncover contraband. If you can tell me Lilli (if you are reading), please do, I’d like to know. Check point 3; one to go, the big one: USCIS.

But total anticlimax (and I was ready, I can tell you, ESTA visa waiver in hand). The official (friendly, within the no-doubt prescribed official limits) told me that my “O1 visa trumped all other requirements; exactly what the Embassy in Sydney told me. But the LA official, on the way in, was not going to let me pass the barrier: his supervisor overrode him, readers may recall. A classic case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing? Security requirements? Need to know? Noentheless, he told me that with both an ESTA Visa Waiver and an O1 work visa, I was “covered”, and with that blessing I stepped onto US soil. I took a deep breath, and relaxed. The fourth and final barrier had been passed; I am on my way back home.

Man plans; God laughs—no sooner than I finished this, the zip on my pants has broken: this is the new look:

_DSC0531

The extraordinary experience of coming to America in the 21st century

08 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by kitlaughlin in Travel

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

entering the US, ESTA Visa waiver, extraordinary alien, Immigration, O1 visa, USCIS

Yesterday I flew into Los Angeles via Auckland on and on an Air New Zealand flight. I will talk about the flight itself in another post; what I want to concentrate on today is the process of disembarkation, and the experience of navigating Immigration.

When I arrived at the immigration hall, it was already completely full. A rough estimate would be well over 1000 people, all with their hand carry luggage, and children, and accompanying family members. I joined the line marked Visitors. I had a camera with me and I wanted to take an image of this huge collection of people but there were signs everywhere prohibiting taking of images so I decided not to. And the line moved very slowly: in fact, the total time for me to actually get to talk to one of the gatekeepers was just under two full hours.

Like many others I was reading a book while moving my carry on luggage with my foot, but reading it on my MacBook Air. At one point, an immigration official came over to me and she said, “Turn off that electronic device”. She then called out in a loud clear voice, “You know what the problem is with electronic devices, don’t you?” I replied that I did not.

She elaborated: “They cause explosions.” She walked away.

Finally I got to talk to an Immigration official. He opened my passport, took my fingerprints (four fingers of the right hand only) and look carefully at the inside cover photograph. He informed me that I had the wrong Visa. I said what do you mean? He replied that the very difficult to get 01 Visa (currently in my passport) is only good to allow me to enter America for the purposes of working. And as I was in Los Angeles only in transit to Vancouver he could not let me in. There is something Kaska-esque about present US immigration policy. I told him that if he looked at the Immigration stamps around the O1 Visas that I have held the last three years, he will see that I have used the visa to transit without hindrance a number of times. He told me that I need the ESTA Visa waiver in order to transit through the US because, repeating himself, the O1 Visa’s purpose, and correct use, is only to allow the holder to enter the US for the purpose of working.

I told him that the US Embassy in Sydney had explicitly told me that the ESTA Visa waiver was not available to anyone who actually held a current US work visa; that the work visa supervened over the ESTA Visa waiver, which by its very nature is an explicit acknowledgement of the non-necessity to have a Visa for the purpose of a holiday visit or for transiting. He told me that I had been advised incorrectly; I responded that each time either my host or I have contacted the USCIS, we have been given different information. He then departed his booth to discuss my situation with his supervisor.

He returned and said that his supervisor was “overriding him” and was allowing me to transit and the reason was that immigration was simply so busy at that moment—there was no acknowledgement of the possible reasonableness of the position that I had put to him over my understanding of the use of the work visa. He repeated to me that “it is always better to do the right thing”; I responded that doing the right thing has taken years to result in the visa that I actually held, and which was considered the best of its type. It became clear that he knew exactly what the auspices of the O1 Visa are (because he referred to me at one point as an “extraordinary person”; I replied to him that I was an “extraordinary alien” according to the tenets of the O1 Visa. I see that since the last time I looked, “alien” has been replaced by “individual”, so progress of sorts!

I exited the booth, to pick up my checked bag. Now I faced a very similar line of people who were going through Customs this time and there were only three customs officials working. I asked the Customs official if I might go to the head of the queue as I was going to miss my plane at this rate. She replied that I needed “the orange card from the airline” in order to jump the queue. She further elaborated that the orange card was given out by airlines in a situation where a passenger going through Customs would be too late to catch the schedule flight. I then mentioned to her that the airline on disembarking us had no idea that any of its customers going to Immigration would take almost two hours and, hence, no one had been given an orange card. She then went and asked one of the customs officers whether I could jump the queue and he repeated the same thing “without an orange card, there was nothing they could do”. I resigned myself to missing the flight.

In the event, I was able to go to Air Canada’s desks, and physically put my check-in bag on their X-Ray machine and was given the assurance that it would be on the flight I was booked on. Further, the AC attendant assured me that, as this flight had not commenced boarding yet, “I should be alright” with respect to actually getting on board. In my mind, though, was the memory of having to personally ask over 400 people if I could jump the security queue (same security area, too, as it happened) three years ago, where only one machine out of the four available was actually being used. So, I asked another official if I could jump this security queue, and she told me to go and talk to someone else. I put a bit of energy behind my next request, though, and asked her directly, “I do not want to do that: what can you do for me, right now?” She took me to the official inside the area, who looked very carefully at the photograph in my passport (without looking at me, which was interesting) and let me into the line at that point (about 20 people ahead of me). I made it through, and ran to the gate, where the flight was boarding, and I go on. It was only when I went to open the computer that I realised that, somewhere in the run to the Air Canada desks, I had lost my reading glasses, so I meditated instead.

There’s a side note: I want to observe that only Singapore has what I consider to be truly effective transit lounges. The Changi Airport Transit Lounge contains a short-stay hotel, a large variety of places to eat, not-too-terrible coffee and, if you’re so inclined, duty-free goods. The entire transit area is quarantined from the rest of the airport and thousands of people go through there in both directions every hour. The system works superbly and has no security issues whatsoever. I have to wonder why the greatest country in the world can’t duplicate this simple, elegant, effective, solution.

Tips for travellers

07 Tuesday May 2013

Posted by kitlaughlin in Travel

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Cool Hand Luke, Crumpler, headphones, Kata carry-on bag, tips for travellers, torch

I wanted to share my somewhat eclectic approach to carry-on luggage: as a very frequent flier, I have learned one or two things that might be helpful to others. The context here is that I need a stills camera,  a video and sound recording capacity; and the software to process; anyone interested in how I arrived at my choice of solution on the camera front, please refer HERE.)

Checklist #1 (the must-have-no-matter-what-else-you-take items):

1) Current passport (most jurisdictions require 6 months remaining as a minimum; and double check you have a valid visa for the countries you intend visiting.

2) Credit cards (and reading glasses if you need them)

3) Airline ticket or electronic version thereof

So: three items only in this list, but travel cannot happen without them, so make this ‘holy trinity’ the first items you check as you head out the door. I use ‘tech’ pants that have Velcro closers over the leg side pockets; this is where these critical items live; at all points along the route, a touch of these pockets can be reassuring.

If the wheels fall off everything, you will find post-crisis life  easier if these items have never left your body.

Checklist #2 (the carry-on bag(s)):

I use a Kata camera bag (similar, but much older than THIS one, and without in-built wheels), and I always book exit rows (usu. $60 more); I use the Kata case to elevate my feet; a kind of relaxation (more akin to Purgatory than Heaven, truth be told) is possible, in the event the Premium Economy flight does not come though, or the upgrade does not happen. The Kata bag had a material band through which to slide the extending handle of the check-in bag, which has wheels; both are easily moved though airports.

Checklist for carry-on bag contents

  • pen (I like the thick ball type); for Customs and LaMigra forms
  • LED torch; essential for finding anything on board
  • toothpicks (“Interdens”, wood, discontinued, but best of their type; a triangle profile)
  • electrical plugs for region I am travelling to (phone, MBA, other)
  • MacBook Air (I have written about this HERE); never leave home without it!
  • paper book (airline fodder; you know what you like)
  • headphones (not the noise cancelling type, perhaps surprisingly, but closed-ear type; result is better sound quality. I favour the Shure bros. SRH-440s): they FOLD, which feature is never mentioned in the promo material)
  • moisturiser—make sure smaller than 100ml
  • all my hard drives; like credit cards, must travel near me; holding movies, work, data
  • my ‘sleeping’ hat (I use this for meditation in bright or noisy places; pulls down over eyes and ears; airline air conditioning has long lag times and heads get cold
  • thumb drive; my travel one is 32GB; holds certificate templates etc.
  • metal filter for AeroPress
  • Thunderbolt and USB3 cables
  • enough space to hold bag #2, below

Bag #2 (Crumpler Mild Enthusiast, S; can be placed inside Kata bag for pesky officials)

  • NEX 6 body, with Sigma 30 ƒ2.8 lens (EFOV: 45mm, my favourite all-rounder)
  • 16GB SDHC card, two batteries, USB-driven charging cable
  • spare charged battery
  • hot-shoe level (essential for landscapes)

Total weight for both bags: make sure this is under 7Kgs; I will never forget an argument I had with one official; I was heading out for a paid photo shoot, so had quite a bit of gear with me. My carry-on camera bag weighed 7.8Kg. She made me remove one lens (the amazing Nikkor 14–24/2,8, worth $2,400 then) and carry it on board in a plastic bag. She claimed that the extra 0.8Kg rendered the carry-on bag “dangerous”. I did try to explain that the difference in kinetic energy between 7.0Kg and 7.8Kg, assumed to be falling approximately 1m (to head of hapless passenger underneath, me) was trivial, but that attempt definitely was a failure to communicate (my favourite line from Cool Hand Luke).

Checklist #3: checked bag

A no-brand roller I bought in the US in Chattanooga; I forget the shop, but one you find everywhere in the US: gigantic, requiring a car simply to navigate. This roller cost $47 USD, and it is better built than any of the many other bags I have trialled. I have a “Qantarse” ‘Q’ Tag (free when I received my two as a silver FF; now they actually charge travellers for them… no shame).

My tripod (Benro “MeFoto“; hate the name, love the tripod, lives in the check-in bag, as does the iKan Field Monitor (in a Tupperware plastic container, fits in the NEX 6 hot shoe on a ball-swivel; I use this to shoot pieces to camera on the road). The hot shoe level is used to set up the NEX; then the field monitor replaces it; very handy. I record ‘second system sound‘ on a Roland R-05 (packed in a second food container), and using a Samson levalier microphone; amazingly good quality and budget price. I edit in Final cut Studio; total overkill for YouTube videos, but I am an intermediate-level user, and the software has a massive learning curve and I am strongly disinclined to change to another editing program. The MBA and a USB3 HD handles the HD video from the NEX 6 with ease, too.

Socks (if taking Vivo shoes; to Vancouver, essential—like Seattle, it knows how to rain!), a dozen underpants, two teaching pants; ten T-shirts; sleeping pants; second beanie, Gore Tex rain shell, three pairs Vibram Five Fingers—that’s it, I think. Total weight ~15Kg.

So, I will add to this if I find I have forgotten anything.

Yes, one addition: following the wardrobe failure I wrote about recently, I recommend wearing pants that have pockets, but no zipper. These can, and will, fail (much like hard drives); it is only a matter of time.

An addendum to “I love my sleeping bag”

28 Sunday Apr 2013

Posted by kitlaughlin in General, Travel

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

coffee grinder, five precepts, silent retreat

I forgot THE most important use I put the bag to on the silent retreat (which ended at 11:00a.m. yesterday: as a sound blimp.

Background: on a five precepts retreat like this one, Surāmerayamajjapamādaṭṭhānā (the fifth precept) is usually translated as alcohol but more recently, the term has been expanded to ‘intoxicants’; this broader definition includes stimulants, of which one is coffee.

The presenters of this workshop were given dispensation to have coffee—critical when arising at 04:30 to present at 05:30.

Good coffee requires freshly ground beans—but have you ever really listened to a coffee grinder? They make a truly harsh, discordant, deeply intrusive, sound: full of high energy, high frequency sounds (the motor, the cutting burrs, the sounds of the burrs crushing the coffee, and so on); picture this now on a silent retreat, where the room where the grinder will be used is acoustically bright (glass windows, hardwood polished floors), and ones fellow meditators are in adjoining rooms?

Sleeping bag to the rescue: place the half-opened bag on the floor, place the grinder on it, and simply cover the grinder loosely with the rest of the bag. No precision is required: you have constructed a field sound blimp: turn the grinder on and it is virtually inaudible.

Sound damping is all about trapping still air (or in the case of some double glazed windows, which perform a similar sound blocking action) a degree of evacuation. “In space, no on will hear you scream” is both dramatic and accurate: as space is a complete vacuum (or, at least as complete as the Universe can manage!) there is no sound at all. So (now to urban dwellers who are troubled by traffic and other noise) good double glazing can be your friend.

Back to the retreat: I ground the morning’s coffee each evening after dinner when everyone else was still in the eating hall, and I boiled water at 04:31, and was able to make excellent coffee (black, with Nityananda’s herbs; more on the process and its dramas tomorrow).

I love my sleeping bag

26 Friday Apr 2013

Posted by kitlaughlin in General, Travel

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Dave Wardman, house pests, how to keep a sleeping bag, inner bag, Kinky Friedman, kitlaughlin.com, Mont sleeping bag, two suitcases and a macbook air

I am on a silent retreat, co-presenting with my friend Patrick Kearney. This is our third attempt in combining orthodox Theravadan teachings on sati-pattana (the four foundations of Mindfulness) with explicit body work that is designed to bring awareness to the present, in the body and, not trivially, to show peple how to sit without pain in the body, so the work of  sati-pattana can be done with full awareness—of the patterns and structure of your thoughts and emotions, rather than on the pain in your back or your knees! I know that every retreat I have attended before working with PK on these ones, as soon as moun (silence) is lifted, most of the initial conversation is about the pain people have suffered, doing this most natural of things: sitting still.

You may read about this workshop HERE.

My friend and colleague Dave Wardman and I have agreed to blog for 90 days continuously, so here is my first of 90 posts.

His blog is HERE.

But this post is about my sleeping bag: bought for me by Olivia, at a Mont sale; I have spent many happy warm hours in it. It unfolds to a quilt (albeit a rather unusually shaped one, given the shape of the bag):

Only half opened while I write this blog

Only half opened while I write this blog

When I do a Yoga Nidra, or relaxation practise, I use it over my legs so I stay warm; when I am writing or reading, I make a half-tube and put my legs inside (it gets cold at night here in Govinda Valley) and because I run the first session in the meditation hall each day, I need to be up at 04:30, and it is particularly cold then.

That puddle of red in the left lower corner is a silk ‘inner bag’: these are essential for two reasons: cleanliness (very quick and simple to hand wash; silk dries very quickly); for maximum warmth when you need it; and to reduce wear on the bag—if you use a silk inner bag, you can move around inside the bag more easily, and stress the seams. less. My bag is now eight years old, and it looks brand new (and I use it regularly; in addition to retreats, I use it if we have guests in the house, and when I visit my Mother, to reduce “house pest” stress (thanks Kinky Friedman).

When not in use, I leave my bag stuffed lightly in the linen cupboard, so that it retains no memory effects. And (most readers will know this) if you want a bag to last, do not store it in its bag and, when you do need to put it in the smallest place possible, always stuff the bag into its container randomly.

Anyhow, I find this technology beautifully rendered. When I need a new one, I will get one that allows a bit more feet space (I have the bottom of the bag unzipped for this movement); this is the only aspect of the design I would change. Otherwise, in my life, I find this an essential.

The new 13″ MacBook Air, two softwares, and DropBox: on-the-road perfection

03 Monday Sep 2012

Posted by kitlaughlin in General, Travel

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

1Password, anti-glare screen coating, ChronoSync, DropBox, kitlaughlin.com, MacBook Air, photography, SSD vs. ordinary HDD, synchronise bi-directional, syncing two computers

Background (skip this if you just want the main story; see Main Story, below)

I change my computers annually, usually. I like to use the best technology, for aesthetic and efficiency reasons and, because so much of my working life revolves around airports and being away from home, I have specific needs for computing hardware and softwares.

I am a photographer, so need colour-accurate screens; I make all our YouTube clips, so need real number-crunching power (high definition video, at 25 or 50 frames a second, when being output, uses most any CPU capacity you can throw at it and Final Cut Studio takes over the machine as it does these intensive tasks), and then there’s the much lesser demands of writing and emailing, which can be done on a machine of any power or size, especially now in the cloud era. Weight, transportability, and screen legibility are essential on the travel machine, but it must be able to do the ‘heavy lifting’ while on the road: this means it must run Final Cut Studio and Aperture, as well as the Microsoft Office Suite, Ultra Edit, Photoshop, and Transmit, among others.

Speaking now about the latest advances in the Apple ecology, I have found that the high-resolution screens of the newest Apple computers have reached the ‘diminishing returns’ point: the latest Retina display 15″ MacBook Pro (MBP), for example, did not move me enough to buy it, simply because the 15″ MBP I already had features the matte, higher-resolution screen (a special order, for the photographic work)—and when I did a side-by-side comparison, I just did not see the Retina screen advantage any significant improvement for my needs; the CPU speed increase was negligible; and my present 15″ MBP has a DVD player/burner as well which has been dropped from the Retina 15″, to decrease thickness and weight.

Last year’s 15″ MBP features quad-core processing and that, too, is approaching the diminishing returns point (assuming a fast SSD is fitted, which mine has, and better technology that Apple’s, and maximum RAM). This last point is significant: if the SSD is fast, it can be used as virtual memory when necessary; the differences in opening another app and in saving are very significant over any speed Hard Disk Drive (HDD).

Up until now, I have run a 13″ MBP alongside the 15″ MBP, both fitted with the same Mercury SSDs; using both means I can keep working while the bigger machine crunches the most recent 1,000 image shoot, or is rendering and sending a HD video out to a FireWire drive, for uploading to YT. This dual-machine system has worked very well for a year or so. I did not keep these machines synced; I simply copied the ‘main’ machine’s Documents folder over onto the 13″ MBP from time to time. More on this below.

Coincidentally, when the latest MacBook Air 13″ surfaced, the 13″ MBP started developing possibly terminal hardware problems (faulty logic board, we think), so I went off to the Apple store near the Uni (thanks Tristan!) to check the new Air out. I have owned earlier iterations of both the 11″ and 13″ MBAs, but sold them both and replaced them with the now-ailing 13″ MBP: the earlier Airs were, I felt, too compromised on the performance side) while definitely ticking the portability box), and the Solid State Drives they incorporated were not the best; are not able to be changed by the owner and, the worst aspect, the glass screens were virtually unusable in any airports: reflection city. The 13″ MBP, on the other hand, has no such limitations (apart from its shiny glass screen), and I had fitted a Mercury SSD that was both less expensive and a faster, longer-lived, performer (anyone wanting to know more about this performance aspect over time, check out the term load-leveling).

And looking at the latest MBA’s glass screen in the Apple store, I realised that my #1 complaint about the earlier MBAs was moot: the new model has an extremely effective coating that reduces reflections to a completely tolerable level; not quite as effective as the made-to-order matte screen on the 15″ MBP, but very close. Further, using Geekbench, the new top spec MBA (with the i7 chip), max. RAM and a 256GB SSD, scored 7,500; and despite the extra cores, my quad-core 15″ MBP scored only 10,300—the Air’s real-world performance that is definitely  in the same ‘ball park’. No DVD SuperDrive, but I do have the external version for the MPA, for when needed.

Main story

If one runs two computers, instantly a major potential problem arises: how do you (or do you?), keep them in sync? And, if so, are we talking softwares and data (documents) or does the on-the-road machine have a lighter software suite, but with the same documents? I decided the latter, but the problem of how to keep the documents synced remained: one’s memory is just not reliable enough to recall which articles/notes spreadsheets one wrote or updated while away. Copying 15GB of Document folder back over the other machine takes quite a while, too. So, I started to investigate the software options.

Before I begin this thread, though, I should mention that I am running Mountain Lion on both machines, so Contacts, Mail, Bookmarks in Safari and so on are all synced automatically. When I say “documents” I am talking everything you can priduce on a computer, from a new YT clip to edited images in Aperture to written (word processed) documents and spreadsheets—I need these to be the same on both machines, and for this to be a simple easy process, because I used to sometimes take the bigger machine on the road if I anticipated a lot of editing (and the bigger screen makes this a little easier, too) but I always resented the weight.

ChronoSync won me over (you can trial, for a month, the full version; you need to really test a software before buying, in my view, and it has to be a full version at that—why don’t more software developers understand this?). Anyhow, I had been working on the MBA, and wanted to update the Documents folder on the 15″ MBP, using the MBA as the source. So, using the nifty Thunderbolt–FW800 connecter, I fired up the 15″ machine in Target mode, and ChronoSync went to work. It blazed away (it seems to have very clever algorithms that know whether a file is changed, or is new) and within five or six minutes, the sync was complete. Much faster than brute copying the whole folder. Most of that time was spent actually copying, too; excellent software design. Checking revealed a large number of files I had forgotten I had changed or created were now, in fact, identical on the MBP. I used the “Synchronise Bi-Directional” mode (there are many others) because its use achieves two identical versions on the two machines, including deletions (after the first sync); it operates in both directions across both machines, and thus automatically makes a faithful backup as a consequence as well. I do run TimeMachine on both computers, too (but you can’t be too careful in this regard).

One final part of the puzzle remained: wanting better security for internet passwords (my natural nervousness in this regard having been moved to DEFCON 5 by THIS article on Ars Technica), how could I implement better passwords and usernames and keep these in sync over both machines—because only the nature of the day’s work determines which machine I choose to take out the door?

I tried all the options suggested in the Ars Technica article, and settled on 1Password: an elegant interface that not only has the best security the industry can offer presently, it also has a random password that can be configured (length, number of number characters, etc. to better fit any password restrictions on particular sites), all the usual potential problems about needing to enter a current password while generating/changing to a new one have been anticipated and solved; and the “Vault” (the super-secure place all this info is kept) has one other unexpected and wonderful other feature, the “Wallet”.

This is where you keep all credit card details: and, identically to the “Logins” window, you can copy and paste from there to a shop site easily. No more miss-types of 13+ account numbers: do it once properly, and you are good to go. I spent an afternoon one day, and a morning the next, and not only was all the info. entered, I had re-checked it, all is now accurate AND all my usual logins feature 20-character versions, randomly generated, including some numerical characters.

One last problem remained: how to have the Vault on both machines? I went back to the 1Password’s on-line user’s manual, and found that DropBox is perfectly integrated with it, and I had installed DropBox on both machines already. All I needed to do was to go in to 1Password’s preferences and tell it to use DropBox—and immediately it began syncing the plist file that contains all the Vault’s encrypted data with its cloud.

I loaded up 1Password on to the 15″ MBP (I bought the Family Pack so Olivia’s passwords can be made more secure), and Dropbox loaded the data file into the second machine’s version of 1Password as soon as the software was started. I then spent the morning on the second machine, still a bit worried about whether all the new passwords I was generating on the 15″ machine would sync back to the MBS, but the worry was needless. As soon as I opened the MBA, Dropbox went to work and synced the 1Password date file back the other way—and opening the Vault revealed the morning’s work. I was impressed, frankly.

So: the upshot? I take whatever machine I want out the door, either to a photo job or to the airport, and I know that any new passwords that I might need to create will sync automatically, as soon as the other machine is connected to a network. And all I need to do to sync documents and videos (more on this below) is to do the Bi-Directional sync using ChronoSync when I get back home.

The final note I want to sound here is that, against expectations, the MBA with a USB3 drive attached is perfectly capable of editing 720p HD video. A MacBook Air: small and light enough to fit in an envelope! Before I edited the most recent YT clip, I did not think this would be possible (first, because I did not know if USB3 would work for HD and Final cut Studio; it’s a fickle beast in this regard), and because the Thunderbolt port is needed to run the 30″ Cinema HD display in my setup in the studio, meaning that I could not run the usual FW800 external HDDs via this port). But now I can say this tiny system works perfectly: I have a high-def video editing suite that weighs practically nothing.

I will write another blog on the other part of the video-creation on-the-road puzzle: what to shoot the video with? Stay tuned.

Tips for travellers, #1

15 Thursday Sep 2011

Posted by kitlaughlin in Photography, Travel

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

John Deere, kitlaughlin.com, The North Face tech pants, tips for travellers, two suitcases and a macbook air, wear minimisation

A silly little thing, really, but to someone who always washes clothes the way they were taken off, and folds them the same way as they come off the line (defended on the basis of wear minimisation; see below), this one struck me with the force of a revelation.

From now on, I decided, not only would I turn T-shirts inside out, I would fold them with some part of the writing showing. Breathtaking, no? I am always amazed at things I realise which, in the moment of realisation, are either things that everyone else already does, or that others (like one’s Mother) said 35 years ago. Now I will know what each T-shirt has written on it without unfolding/turning inside out!

There’s more in todays ‘Tips’: the “tech pant”.

I did a big John Deere shoot in 2010; the art director was a very talented Israeli named Iftach Shevach. We were doing three or four setups per day in southern Queensland and Norther NSW (you can imagine, perhaps, how fast we were working when I tell you some of the locations were over 100 miles apart…); and mostly in red dirt. The shoot lasted a week, from memory, but it seemed longer. As we were shooting John Deere Water irrigations systems, low angle shots were de rigeur, as was the unconscious attraction/application of what (later) seemed like tons of this fine red earth, deep into the fabric of approximately 98% of the pant surface area.

After the first day, my pants (loose drill cotton, belt and lots of pockets) looked like I’d been wearing them for, oh, a year or so, and without the benefit of any kind of washing. Imagine my surprise when I saw Iftach the next day: he was wearing what looked like the same pair of pants, which were immaculately clean. How was this magic wrought, I wondered?

The secret, it turned out, was a nylon fabric made by The North Face (the link show the design of the pants I am talking about). Not just a pant, they convert to shorts (and the conversion point length makes shorts that are perfect for me) and the zips are colour coded, too, so they can be refitted easily: match the colours. Genius. This pant is amazing quality, will hand wash and dry overnight; will not stain, will not pick up dirt (I had to relegate the pair I was wearing to the annual Kit-mows-the-lawn event); will not rip (even barbed wire; I have tested this); and will not even create static if worn with polypropylene tights (as is necessary in a Canberra winter). The best? $80 USD. I travel with two pairs (one of each of the two colours) and that’s all, formal/semi-formal work pant-wise. Never leave home without them.

*wear minimisation: another term, perhaps, for “laziness” (my Mother’s perspective), or “god, what next?” (unattributed)

← Older posts

Subscribe

  • Entries (RSS)
  • Comments (RSS)

Archives

  • August 2019
  • October 2018
  • August 2017
  • May 2017
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • March 2016
  • January 2016
  • July 2015
  • February 2015
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • September 2012
  • October 2011
  • September 2011

Categories

  • General
  • Mindfulness
  • Monkey Gym
  • Photography
  • recipes
  • Relaxation
  • Stretch Therapy
  • Technology
  • Travel

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

Cancel
Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy