bikes and things

Lost and found.

Via RAC.

So good.

Via Kottke.org

Now I’m not sure if this has ever been on my wish list as a feature but it’s pretty good to see Adobe come out with an iOS version that syncs with Lightroom. It’s not a self contained version but a companion app to the full Lightroom which you need to have on your PC/Mac. You also need to be running version 5.4 and have a Creative Cloud account which I’m a massive fan of. At £8.50 a month for Lightroom, Photoshop and Bridge I’m happy to pay for legal software.

Anyway to use it you download your shots to your host machine. Create a collection and right click and choose sync with Lightroom mobile.

Then pop over to your iPad and see the photos appear in the app. They’re not the actual photos but enough data to render a decent sized preview and some metadata which gets synced back to your host machine. You have the usual grid of images which is fairly familiar to work with.

Tapping on an image takes you to a larger view where you can flick up to pick and down to reject. This is the first part of my editing process so it’s nice to be able to do this bit from the sofa before heading back to the machine to do more in depth edits. Having done my picks you can then sort by this to then go in and do a bit more work.

Whilst you’d never really want to do colour accurate work on an iPad it’s nice to be able to flick through and have a rough edit at exposure and white balance.

It’s also possible to do crops, add clarity and contrast and most of the basic edits and the overlaid histogram helps. The interface for the white balance presets is pretty intuitive and the previews are nice for those who are less familiar with white balance adjustment. There are also presets but these are the stock ones not any you’ve built yourself. I’m sure these will come soon though.

My iPad mini wasn’t entirely up to rendering my X100 files, or previews of, overly quickly but I guess this is aimed at a new iPad air which has far better graphics. Still it’s nothing that would stop me working, just at a slightly more leisurely pace perhaps.

When I got back to the Mac my work had all synced and I went in and did a little more and fine tuned a few. 80& of what I had done was good though. I did some brush work on a few to bring out some detail which clearly couldn’t be done on the iPad at this stage although the touch screen would make this very intuitive.

The last part of this process was to add my shots to the map which I sometimes do. I noticed that it was still syncing back to the cloud and after a while it crashed.

Unfortunately this meant killing the sync and starting again. My data had made it all one way though so I’m not too bothered about this.

Obviously this has only just been released so I’m not going to be too critical but it’s pretty promising stuff. I wish there was a way to edit my main Lightroom catalog with my laptop from the sofa without VNC or separate catalogues though. Great to see Adobe doing this kind of development and including it for Creative Cloud subscribers. Judging by the comments on the App Store others aren’t as keen.

Don’t try this at home folks. My heart rate was through the roof watching this.

So long coming but entirely worth it. I spend far less time on Twitter these days and more time in Reeder on iPhone or iPad reading stuff. So it’s nice to have the option to read it all on the Mac again and have it sync to the other devices. I can’t stand any of the various web interfaces.

Download Beta 1 here.

With all this talk of smog and pollution I was reminded of when I first cycled in London in 2001 from Clapham (I know, London for beginners / London for people who don’t like London) to Old Street. I used to wear a face mask then and remember two things about it. The first being the horrid black deposits on the bit where you had been breathing. The second being the nasty set of spots I used to get around the side of it where sweat and dirt would collect. I eventually stopped using it for the spotty reason.

The other reason I was thinking about face masks was that I recently went for a bike ride with James and ended up back at The Gowlett after to have a OJ and lemonade in the sun. This guy rocked up on his bike and clearly wanted to chat. He asked us where we’d been and then went on a big speech about how he uses a cycling mask when riding around London and how much better he felt for using it. We then politely asked where he’d been on his bike that day and if he’d been far.

Oh no, not too far today I’ve just been to the shops to get some cigarettes.

The irony seemed completely lost on him.

Two things that caught my eye today.

Firstly, and I know there’s source no for the figures, but how many people cars have killed vs the number of people dictators have killed. Seems especially relevant due to our current smoggy pollution issues.

Via @evolvingcities

And of course my favourite alternative is the bicycle. The evolution of which is beautifully described in this little video.

I’d had this idea in my head for a while now having seen it mentioned on LFGSS many years back. I’ve long since stopped posting on there but for some reason fancied giving it a go. The arrival of my geared bike back from the shop with a new lick of paint also meant I wanted to try a longer ride without being too far from a train ride back in case of the worst. The idea was to ride all of the bridges in London you could legally ride on a bike. Fortunately this ruled out the one over the M25. It also meant the millennium bridge was out but then I didn’t see that as a problem as I was more interested in the ones less ridden as it were.

I’d originally planned a route on Garmin Connect and suggested it to a few people although the ride never materialised. It’s tricky planning the route as you have to cross each bridge but then aim to get the nicest riding between each one – ie not ending up on a busy 3 lane main road. As it had originally been intended for meeting people from North London the start was a little odd. We rode down the old canal in Peckham and ‘the back way’ via a coffee shop in Bermondsey to Tower Bridge and then promptly turned round and rode back south, neatly avoiding the awful road by the Tower of London. Turning right onto London Bridge a little later put us back on the crappy road but we were soon off again and up over Southwark Bridge, one which I rarely ride over. This pattern continued although with less abortive u-turns.

After some faffing with cleats we got going properly. We ended up riding some bit of the Thames Path I hadn’t seen before as well as a great ride through Battersea park. We ended up on a few more rough patches which were a bit more CX than planned as well as a few trips up stairs with the bike shouldered, but it was all pretty good going really. The Hammersmith Bridge was one I hadn’t seen before and we stopped to admire it if a bit before riding over it. The other treat was riding the north bank of the river around Chiswick. I’d only ever glimpsed this from the madness that is the drive along the A4 by the Fuller’s Brewery to get to the M4 to the West Country, but there’s a lovely stretch of river and path here. We ended up on a footbridge at Putney with some incredible views over London with the hail that had briefly hit us earlier.

As I’d hastily planned the last few bits of the route on Garmin Connect I’d not really checked them all properly, including the section that had us going through the middle of Kew Gardens. The six foot wall kind of put a stop to this but we found our way around and back onto the route again skirting around Richmond, through Teddington and through Hampton Court. The tarmac was lovely on this bit. So smooth and fast! Back around the other side of the Thames and into Kingston which was horrid. Another trip over a bridge and a u-turn to say we’d done it and then up to Richmond park via a few wrong turns. We got there in the end and enjoyed a coffee at the stall at the top after the first hill. James was starting to run out of energy so we got some more food and limped round the other side of the park.

We then retraced some of our steps on the north of the river through Chiswick and Hammersmith before finding ourselves on a strangely diagonal route through Chelsea which seemed to cut through London in an odd manner. This would have taken us on a fast route up to Buckingham Palace but the Chlesea match was kicking out and the streets were mobbed. Fortunately they had won so they were all pretty friendly. We then stopped at the Rapha Cycle Club for coffee and lunch and James headed home and I went to work for a few hours, via Regents Park. All told it was about 105k so a fairly big day out although not at a fast pace due to lots of little twists and turns of the Thames Path. Still great to get some proper distance in and explore some new parts of London and oh so pleasant to be riding geared again! 100k isn’t too shabby for the first ride back.

Lovely stuff by Wes Anderson.

I’m sure it’s no coincidence but it reminds me of this previous post on Kubrick’s use of single point perspective.

I’ve avoided using the word ‘pimped’ as it implies a Max Power stuck on type approach to tinkering and adjusting your ride to reach that perfect machine. This thread over on lfgss.com really is quite a treat. Lots of thought, and cash, has gone in to making one of the nicest looking Brompton’s I have ever seen.

Having recently come to terms with my Brompton I’ve completely fallen in love with it for short trips to the station and to site. The only thing which is annoying about it is the weight of carrying it around if you ever have to switch platforms or something. This guy sought to solve that by investigating just how light you could make it through upgrades. There’s also a wealth of information in that thread about longevity of various components, tyres, axle sizes as well as some of the design decisions that went in to making the Brompton so amazing.

Some nice bits include carbon mudguards, lots of Ti bolts, a Ti seat post, carbon bars and even Campag carbon cranks! The end result is pretty impressive but as ever with some of these things it is the working out that proves out clever it is. I bet it flies along!

I’m in the process of selling my white Brompton so I can get the clear lacquered S3L. It’s pretty tempting to go down some of the routes that he has done. A Ti seat post & Carbon bars wouldn’t be too spendy. There’s no way I’d ever go the same extremes but it looks like there’s a couple of easy wins in terms of weight. A lovely project to see and well documented.