At 1:00 a.m., we trekked to an office that had a PowerPC prototype. We looked at each other, took a deep breath, and launched the application. The monitor burst into flames. We calmly carried it outside to avoid setting off smoke detectors, plugged in another monitor, and tried again. The software hadn't caused the fire; the monitor had just chosen that moment to malfunction. The software ran over fifty times faster than it had run on the old microprocessor. We played with it for a while and agreed, "This doesn't suck" (high praise in Apple lingo). We had an impressive demo, but it would take months of hard work to turn it into a product.

• China is actively building high speed railways and is dreaming about trains from Shanghai to Helsinki, Paris and London. Current trains are travelling at 300 km/h, and they already built over 12000 km of high speed railroads.
• Perfect cup of tea as instructed by George Orwell. By the way, his opinion is definitely tea first, milk last.
• Nice read by Om Malik on Microsoft, announced cuts, Steven Elop and Nokia.

• Story of a man who wanted to make a web based game called Game Neverending, but ended up (accidentally) creating Flickr and Slack. The latter is a sort of corporate chat client, which we at Red Badger loved from the first day. If you ever used IRC, Slack is the modern evolution of IRC client. IRC commands actually still work in Slack.

In April 2004 Stewart was scheduled to give a talk at an O’Reilly conference called Etech in San Diego on some pretty technical things found in Game Neverending—APIs, REST, RSS. It so happened that these were all features of Flickr. He decided to use it as a venue to announce and launch his new thing instead. Surprise! Flickr wasn’t even finished. The team pulled an all-nighter to get the presentation ready. At around five in the morning, Cal added the last touch: a way to upload images via email, so you could share pix from a mobile phone. The demo blew everyone’s mind. By the time they walked out of the room at ETech, Flickr was famous.

• In addition to the recent news from Russia banning import of food from other countries, there is another (absurd) law recently passed, which requires people to provide true identification when connecting to the public wifi spots. The whole thing being largely discussed, disproved and confirmed few times over the course of the week. It seems like in the end people will indeed have to provide passport details to use public wifi spots. This opens lots of interesting scenarios, one of which is banning certain citizens from accessing the internet altogether.
• Flappy Bird is coming back, now with multiplayer mode and slightly updated graphics. The catch - it is exclusive to the Amazon Fire TV. Interesting move by Amazon to get some popularity for their platform.
• VIM clutch - an open hardware project by Aleksandr Levchuk to enable users of Vim editor easy access to the text editing mode. Confess, you always wanted a clutch in addition to a normal keyboard.

• World's largest model of the Solar System can be found in Sweden. The Sun is represented by Ericsson Globe in Stockholm, all the planets and asteroids are placed and sized proportionally and located all around Sweden all the way to the north.
• One of many R&D departments in Microsoft is actually doing amazing stuff - last week they broke the (hacker)news by coming out with the technology for stabilizing and speeding up video footage made during various sport activities - such as riding a bike. The result is something called hyperlapse - video, which is speed up, but still remains watchable. My speculation is that engineers at Microsoft improved on the tech used in Photosynth app, by analyzing all the frames from video and recreating the 3D environment, together with the virtual camera in it. Fascinating stuff.
• More of a news than a proper story - fresh rumor of the Babylon 5 being brought as a fully featured movie. JMS is still fully enthusiastic about having a properly budgeted project, which is said to be more of a reboot to the original story.

• The most comprehensive guide on drone photography. Detailed instructions on choosing your first drone, extra parts, gymbal stabilizer, notes on the max time of flight and carried weight (aka how big camera can you attach to the drone without it falling back to Earth). The article is filled with pictures and videos of drones in action, explaining every intricate detail of owning and flying the camera drone.
• Last Kodak film factory is about to be closed. Handful of Hollywood directors managed to convince their studios to try and save this factory. JJ Abrams is filming new episode of StarWars on film, Quentin Tarantino is also full of warm feelings towards the analogue feeling of shooting on celluloid. The plan is to order as much film as they can for the future needs, and so provide factory with necessary money to continue operations (for some time). Personally I'm not a huge fan of 35mm film, but 70mm IMAX film with 15 perf still remains the best way of capturing moving pictures (if you know what you doing, of course). Likely not for long.
• Nice post by Jean-Baptiste Quéru on the complexity of our world and software.

Тechnology has done such an amazing job at hiding its complexity that the people regulating and running the patent system are barely even aware of the complexity of what they're regulating and running. That's the ultimate bikeshedding: just like the proverbial discussions in the town hall about a nuclear power plant end up being about the paint color for the plant's bike shed, the patent discussions about modern computing systems end up being about screen sizes and icon ordering, because in both cases those are the only aspect that the people involved in the discussion are capable of discussing.

• City of London police figured out their own way to fight piracy on the Internet. They are buying ad placements on the (allegedly) illegal sites and putting banners that urge visitors to leave the site immediately. Interestingly enough, this way they are actually sponsoring said sites.
• Film director Martin Koolhoven asked good people of the internet to share his featured film on torrents. He didn't own the copyright on his film titled Suzy Q (which is a normal practice), and those who did, didn't own the copyright on the music used in the film. The original license on the soundtrack has expired and nobody wanted to renew said licenses. In the end there was a film, which nobody could legally distribute or broadcast. Thanks to the torrents, the film and it's cultural values are again available to the humanity.

• Incredibly detailed and illustrated TheVerge's take on the subject of Virtual Reality. If you trust Gartner's 2014 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, VR just made it through the Trough of Disillusionment and on its way to the Slope of Enlightment. I think so too.
• Pics taken by monkey cannot be copyrighted, or so at least was the verdict of the US court this time.

Works produced by nature, animals or plants or purportedly created by divine or supernatural beings don’t count

• In addition to the largely known Stonehenge, there is also Woodhenge, placed just few miles and a couple of thousands years apart.
• Doctor Who season 8 is premiered last Saturday, and here is a nice recap by TheVerge. Contains minor spoilers, so in case you haven't seen the opening episode, it is time to do so.

• Article by one of the Russian expats currently living in San Francisco. In light of the recent events he is having personal identity crisis and leans towards calling himself "euro-slavic".

The population at large is, statistically speaking, not very bright. Many are deranged from overuse of alcohol or drugs. A big number are simply aging elderly rooted in USSR-centric mindset who never adjusted to the modern world. Most of them do not “work” in the sense we understand full-time employment here: they occupy placeholder positions sponsored by the government. Being dependent their whole life on government help, they are psychologically unable even to think government can do something wrong.

• Tales From The Lunar Module Guidance Computer - breakdown of the mistakes made in the software and hardware of the computer used to land first humans on the Moon. Will illustrations and commentaries of the authors of this computer.

Garman said, "go". Larson gave a thumbs-up. (He later said he was too scared to form words.) So Bales answered, "go", Flight Director Gene Krantz said "go", and capsule communicator Charlie Duke passed it up to the crew. At MIT, where we realized that something mysterious was draining time from the computer, we were barely breathing.

• If you are making Ruby on Rails apps, chances are that you are slightly disappointed with the built-in assets pipeline system called Sprockets. Luckily, here is a guide how to switch to Gulp.
• Timeline of the far future - captivating read if you are interested in things like "what will happen in 1 billion years according to the current knowledge of things".

• Ever needed an argument on what exactly is wrong with Comic Sans? Here you go.
• The Curious Case of iPhone 6+ display. By now it seems that everyone is aware of the downscaling aspect of the 1080p display on the new "bigger than bigger" iPhone. Also, true 1px lines are over.
• If you ever decide to shout at the London Cabbie on the street, think about all the troubles he had to go through to get the official badge. Incredibly detailed story on the way to The Knowledge - learning every single geographic details within 6 miles radius of the Charing Cross.

A study by neurologists at University College London found that the hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for spatial navigation, of a London cabby is significantly larger than those in the rest of the human population—a result of the intense memorization and route-finding undertaken while doing The Knowledge.

• A very rare book - story of the Sidereus Nuncius work by Galileo, discovered in 2005.

To mimic the process of creating a seventeenth-century book, a forger would have to cut “punches”—individual pieces of lead type—for every character and punctuation mark, in addition to carving woodblocks for ornamental capital letters. All these elements would have to match those used by the original publisher. Then, in arranging the type, the forger would have to insure that the spacing between letters precisely followed the original book—for dozens, if not hundreds, of pages. Who would do all that work, with countless opportunities for error, given that the product would likely fetch only a few hundred thousand dollars? A forged painting could sell for millions.

####Watch

• Scientific xkcd on the orbital speeds and how to shoot things to space
• Trailer to the upcoming Dreamfall Chapters narrative game, continuing the story of the original Dreamfall and The Longest Journey. They've had quite a bit of troubles to get this thing rolling, and now with the help of Kickstarter, the game is set to be released in November 2014. What makes it amazing? Think of quality interactive storytelling, with awesome voice acting.
• Why you should film your next feature in Finland - showreel by Finland's Film Commission

• Hands-on with Oculus' new devkit prototype. Codename - Crescent Bay, now with built-in headphones, more tracking sensors and something they call "new display technology". Also, here is a highly technical keynote by John Carmack on Oculus development, display technologies and action-to-photon time.
• Using smartwatches while driving is illegal in UK and in terms of punishment equals to <= £100. Same fine is used for drivers who are busy talking on mobile phones without handsfree.
• The dude updates iOS on his 16Gb iPhone 5S. The phone becomes 32Gb.
• Every fifth Londoner falls into a category of people who are employed but have no disposable income or savings. There is a word for those people - Endies.

• 25 years old enthusiast from Czech Republic tries his best at reassembling the very original versions of the classic Star Wars trilogy, without all those alterations and additional VFX. George Lucas thinks that modern versions of the Star Wars is exactly how he wanted to make them from the beginning, but fans are disagreeing.
• Engineering team at Instagram is sharing some technical details on how exactly Hyperlapse app works. It's all about smart zoom, gyro sensors and stabilization.
• The art of waking up every morning
• If you are born before 1985, you are the last generation to remember life without the Internet

In the foreseeable future I'll be processing and releasing stereoscopic pictures from Edinburgh, Inverness, Loch Ness, Urquhart Castle, Fort William, Ben Nevis track, and finally - Glasgow.

Meanwhile, London 3D short film is progressing slowly, with more filming scheduled around the city. The plan is to get a teaser trailer and a website at some point. Trailer will be released also in 4K, and those lucky to get new iMac with Retina 5K display will be able to enjoy it in full glory. I'll probably render another version for retina MBP resolution, since that's something I'll be able to enjoy myself.

Filmed quire a few hyperlapses during our Scotland journey, expect a short film any time soon.

Now back in cozy London, where we get to enjoy Finnish summer weather in the middle of October. London is awesome, but, as usual, there are far too many interesting things to do, and far too little time for everything.

Don't forget about the latest episode of the Radio Badger. It is released and very much available for listening.

Yours truly, @karismafilms

Lots of hyperlapses included in the video. Half way though our journey I've discovered hidden dev settings of the Hyperlapse app, and that was the moment when resolution of those lapses got bumped to a full HD (from a decent 720p which you get by default).

One accessory that was tried during this trip is a retractable selfie stick. It comes bundled with a remote shutter button which simply triggers volume down button on the iPhone. Not only this allows taking decent selfies during the trip, but also the stick acts like a natural stabilizer while walking and filming (as opposed to holding phone in your hands). And yes, the whole video is indeed shot with iPhone 5S. I think it's very much comparable to what you'd get with GoPro, except you don't get the benefit of gyroscope sensors and Hyperlapse on GoPro. Something tells me that sensors will be present in future generations of action cameras.

Enjoy the video!

• Reasons behind Facebook launching its Dark Web site. In other words - Facebook is now available via Tor
• Tripping through IBM’s astonishingly insane 1937 corporate songbook
• Subversion of business strategies has nothing to do with being illegal

####Watch

• Jason Scott: Confessions of the Angriest Archivist. Story of the archive.org project, which goal is to download and archive all of the internet

####Listen

• Fresh episode of our Radio Badger podcast is available, offering blabber on new perks at Google, Gaia hypothesis, multidimensional spaces and WebVR coding experience with Oculus Rift. Full shownotes and download links available here.

####Tweet of the week

• Elon Musk on Antares rockets two years ago

####Personal notes

It's getting chilly in London.

• Story by TheGuardian on Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde, currently serving in Swedish prison. He is vegan too.
• David Graeber is pondering the phenomenon of bullshit jobs. It seems that people could legitimately work less in the year 2014, but for some reason this doesn't happen.

####Watch

• John Cleese - How to inspire creativity within yourselves. This lecture is dated 1991, but still as brilliant as it was 25 years ago.
• Timelapse from a space station
• John Lewis Christmas special

####Play

• Internet Archive and their collection of arcade games
• Spin Tires - simulation of getting your car stuck in the mud of Russian roads, and then getting the car out of the mud

####Personal notes

• First batch of the stereoscopic pictures from our trip to Scotland is now available for those, who possess red-cyan 3D glasses (or prefer other means of watching 3D content).
• Going to participate in the upcoming Silicon Milkroundabout on Sunday 16.11. If you are around, come to say hi. We are the badgers.
• New feature is implemented and released to this blog. Now all posts are paginated, and you'll find links to navigate to the older and newer pages at the bottom of each page.

• Colonization of the Mercury is not so obscure idea as you might think. Yep, there is a scientific article on Wikipedia on this topic.

Unlike the Moon however, Mercury has the additional advantage of a magnetic field protecting it from cosmic rays and solar storms, and a larger surface gravity of about 0.38 g, nearly equal to that of Mars.

• The dark side of the .io domain
• Long read on the history and origins of Tesla Motors. The story by BI on pre-Elon era.
• Meet the people with keys to the Internet

####Watch

• Trailer of a fresh new time-travel sci-fi thing titled Predestination

####Listen

• New episode of the Radio Badger is out in the wild. Stories on extreme UX research in Kenya, pondering on the topic of AdBlock and morality, with usual extras on space, SpaceX and Tesla.

####Personal notes

• I'm in the middle of this book titled Hackers - Heroes of the computer revolution. There is a chapter on hacker's ethics, which mostly revolves around the idea that information should be free to access and build upon. Information is a short word to call all the software, music, films, books, and basically any content humanity has or will create. It just feels right. The usual argument is - you have to pay so that creators would get paid. We often forget that the world where you must get paid to survive mostly exists just because things always been like that. This can easily change.
• When you are not restricted by artificial boundaries of business strategies and bureaucracy, things can advance and improve pretty fast.
• Did a Silicon Milkroundabout day last weekend. Being on the other side of the recruiting barricades was a refreshing experience. It's interesting to see that most people doesn't have a good clue why they got into the area of software engineering. Some other people had a career doing something very different and then decided to pivot. The nice thing was that we didn't had to chase people - they came to us. Badgers are cool.

Some of the talks and slides are already available online, so I'll just go through some of those, worthy of your attention.

Matteo Collina did a rather brave demo of live hacking on a Tessel - Node-compatible microcontroller with built-in wifi and a bunch of extension modules.

What's the first thing you do, when you get a shiny new microcontroller? Make it blink the light.

There are a bunch of npm modules compatible with Tessel, which makes a great fun to hack on the hardware and make it do various things for you. Like blinking lights in a various fashion. As was expected, things didn't went smoothly, but Matteo managed to stay away from cursing and get things blinking (again).

Mathias Buus was venturing onto p2p side of the internet. After a short introduction to the technology behind torrents, Mathias demonstrated how easy it is to implement your own torrent client with Node, and even stream video. But that was not enough - the next stop was infamous Docker with its (rather large)images. During the course of a spotless demo Mathias managed to share a Docker image via torrent, stream it on another machine, boot it and launch things. If you'd decide to launch Node, if would torrent-stream all the necessary files for a proper launch, but nothing else. And yes, you can do this too - the thing is named Torrent Mount and allows you to mount a filesystem via torrent link.

Check his talk (Docker demo starts at around 15 min), and slides.

C J Silverio told a story of something we all take for granted most of the days - npmjs registry. How it's all started as a small side CoachDB project and then miserably failed when the world suddenly start doing npm install way too often.

Watch how things evolved for npm, becoming faster and more reliable (or check out slides).

Full list of talks is available on the Rising Stack YouTube channel. Ok, here is another worthy talk - Design for Retry by Aria Stewart. She talks about something we all try to avoid - errors and how to design proper error handling in web apps.

Breaks were spiced by a special kind of cold brewed coffee, mixed with nitrogen. Yes, nitro powered coffee is a thing, and I'd love to taste it again next year.

• Alternative ways of launching things to the orbit
• London life: A day in a life of a bookie
• Story on VR documentary shot for Oculus Rift
• Stephen Hawking warns artificial intelligence could end mankind

####Watch

• Blackout city timelapse. An experimental film on how London would look like in a night if the city lights would go pitch black.
• Wanderers, short film voiced by Carl Sagan
• Stereoscopic pictures from Inverness, Scotland

####Listen

• Christmas special episode of our tech / art / science podcast Radio Badger is out in the wild

####Personal notes

• Average size of Christmas trees sold on London streets seems to be half of what you'd usually get in Finland. Then again, living space.

• The Elephant's Foot of the Chernobyl is considered to be the most dangerous piece of waste in the world
• This guy is going to spend 28 days in virtual reality, living someone else's life
• Official Astronaut's Photography Manual by Hasselblad

It is impossible to have "perfect" exposure for the shaded cargo bay and sunlit earth at the same time. Since the cargo bay with the Orbital Maneuvering System burn is the more important part, the above image is properly exposed to make the best looking transparency.

####Watch

• Seat 22 — Trans-Siberian Odyssey
• Time travelling sci-fi trailer of this week - Project Almanac
• Even more stereoscopic pictures from Edinburgh

####Listen

• Serial podcast

####Personal notes

• Rules for servicing parachuting equipment in UK are sort of different compared to Finland. There was mandatory service check of the parachuting rig in Finland every 2 years with some small repairs here and there, which was usually performed by a special company in Turku. In UK they check your rig every 6 months when they repack a reserve, and that's it. Also, when it's time to send your automatic parachute activation device (Cypress) to the service in Germany, they rip it out of the parachute, and handle it to you, together with a padded box and a form to fill. The device is really handy, and fully autonomic, but the battery (and device itself) require a service at the manufactor place every 4 years.
• Seen a real crime scene today next to our tube station. With police tapes around the perimeter, police women with radios. That surreal feeling of being in the crime tv show. Also, spooky.
• Episode 08 of the Radio Badger podcast is recorded and will be released shortly. It is Christmas Special issue, but nevermind that - expect more topics on space exploration.

####Read

• They found 11 millions of cubic kilometers of the oldest water on our planet, deep within the Earth's crust
• It's time for a third HFR 3D film, although from the same series. HFR debuted now 2 years ago in cinemas, and still remains something very, very original and new. Things do change towards the higher framerates in videos, with YouTube now supporting 60 fps, but in cinema world it's still all about 24 fps (or, to be even more precise, 23.976 fps). TheVerge did a fresh story with review, and reluctantly agrees that HFR is indeed cool when done right.
• It's time for a rocket landing... on a drone ship
• Language designed to be understandable by any possible intelligent extraterrestrial life form

####Watch

• LapseLondon timelapse - A day in the life of London seen through the eyes of 40 photographers
• Episode of Small Empires on Vimeo and their mission to have ads-free videos

####Lifehack

• Google silently released better bookmarking manager for Chrome. You have to install it separately, but it's totally worth it.

####Personal notes

• Fresh 35mm black and white film is processed and scanned. Shot with Zenit ET SLR camera over the course of year 2014, with some episodes of Finland, and mostly London. Shutter fabric in my Zenit is fading, and so the whole camera acts a bit unpredictably. You never know what you gonna get.
• Kicked off post production stage of the London 3D timelapsing film I've been shooting for some time now. It'll probably be called London Timescapes 3D. Maybe should check with Tom Lowe first. Going to release special Oculus Rift version of the film, and maybe an experimental 4K HFR one.

• My summer vacation in North Korea - long read, full of rare details and pictures

I glanced up from the paper at the airline safety video, which starred the exact same flight attendants who had greeted us minutes before. It made me wonder how many commercial planes there are in North Korea. Was this… the plane?

• Lost 1927 Disney Christmas film found in Norway archives
• You have to earn certain amount of £ in UK to keep your family in the country

Independent think-tank the Migration Observatory said an estimated 43% of British workers did not earn enough to sponsor a spouse from outside the EU.

• While hackers are spreading their findings hacked from Sony's servers, authorities once again took down ThePirateBay pages. Peter Sunde, now released from jail, thinks in his personal blog it's for a greater good.

####Watch

• Correct way of implementing interactive scrolling on a web page - better.coffee
• Something new and exciting is in development in CSS land
• Past, present and future of React JS by @Vjeux, broadcasted live from Red Badger HQ this week

####Personal notes

• Attended for the very first time book signing event. Space Commander Chris Hadfield was signing both of his books this Friday at Waterstone's Piccadilly. After queuing for about 1 hour outside of the shop, and another 20 min inside I've got my autograph and recorded a very super short interview for our podcast. Was pretty nervous about the idea, but Commander was super cool in this respect - even made sure that my recording is on before answering. Expect this thing in a first Radio Badger episode next year.
• Same day in the afternoon something happened to the air control computer in Swanwick, and all London air traffic was grounded. People of Twitter were posting pictures of the quiet airplaneless sky of London (while others were stuck inside planes in Heathrow).

Early Christmas morning is that rare moment when you can catch a glimpse of London without flocks of people around. Public transport is suspended, so only those owning a car or the most resilient tourists can make it to the downtown. And then you'll find peace, and that unusual feeling when you can freely walk around major attractions and take pictures, without disturbing anyone else. Well, maybe a few other photography fanatics like myself.

• Even with a modern phone in your pocket filming one second of video every day requires an effort. Best things of the day rarely happens on your command, and often cannot be anticipated (and filmed). Some things are also just incompatible with video.
• My job happens in the office and consumes most of the time of the year. The project we've been busy with is still secret, and still unreleased. Quite a large portion of my life is happening with my (awesome) colleagues, and there is simply no way I can film it. Well, maybe a little.
• I'd often end up filming my commute. Then again, that commute would often happen on a bike through a picturesque areas of Brick Lane and Shoreditch. As a result there is quite a bit of public transport and street art seconds.
• In August 2014 we started recording our podcast, and Instagram released Hyperlapse app
• Was considering putting everything on a soundtrack - and then after seeing 365 decided to keep the original sound.
• Hyperlapse seconds do not offer any sound at the moment
• Stanisla participated in the ice bucket challenge in the beginning of September
• In October we did a train trip to Scotland, which was awesome
• There is also a glimpse of Budapest in November

The whole project turned out to be more fun that I expected. It is comparable with film photography experience, when there is a significant time gap between doing something and seeing the result. Sometimes it felt like every day is the same and the year cut will look extremely boring. And it didn't.

Will I do this again this year? Absolutely!

• BFI features a special article on Tarkovski's Solaris and Stalker films

####Listen

• Radio Badger podcast New Year episode, with musings about space, stormtroopers, living in London and tales from English, Scottish and Soviet childhoods
• Accidental Tech Podcast - or ATP. Show about software dev that is actually interesting to listen. One of the guys is a developer of Overcast podcasting app.

####Watch

• Alternative posters to Interstellar
• Phone Home short animation by The Brothers McLeod
• Island of Dharma - short film from Sri Lanka
• My one second of video every day, year 2014

####Personal notes

• Made it to the Shoreditch Old Station cafe, which is one of the few places around where you can spend your bitcoins. They couldn't charge me unfortunately - it seemed like they are using app on the phone for that, and the phone wasn't feeling good. They also had Futurecoins dispenser machine, which can convert cash into bitcoins. Tried that, worked brilliantly.

Have a nice fresh start of the year!

####General feelings

It shouldn't come as a surprise that being a tourist somewhere, and living in exact same place are two very different things. When traveling to London and enjoying its attractions, often you would do it during week in daytime. This is something you will not be able to do once you actually move here. Unless you opt for spending your holidays in London (which is not such a bad idea), daily routine and office hours will push everything else to the weekend. Now, on weekend, in addition to all the tourists there are also local crowds, desperately trying to get around and entertain themselves.

Coming from a place like Finland, amount of people around can be mind boggling. They are everywhere. You start appreciating places with slightly less amount of people. Thing is, everybody else are hunting for such places too.

####Cost of living

Food and cafes are slightly cheaper compared to Finland. Renting apartment is about twice the amount you'd pay in Helsinki. Generally speaking, half of the income after tax goes towards rent and utility bills. There is also council tax, which will cost anything between £70-200 depending on the size and cost of the place (better place - higher tax).

Most of houses are not energy efficient - again something you get for granted in Finland. That usually means bad windows with single layer of glass and non-existent insulation. There is generally no such thing as central heating, and every house / apartment is on their own. When you start burning natural gas or electricity in order to warm yourself up, most of that heat will go as contribution to the global warming, and not towards warming of your house - unless you are lucky to live in the energy efficient house with double-blazed windows and good insulation.

####People

Pretty much everyone is open and easy to communicate with. In fact, coming from Finland this might be almost shocking. People will talk to you more than usual, will make contact and ask questions about yourself. There is obviously a catch - most of such conversations are small talk, which is important part of being socially accepted and considered a nice person. You might end up doing lots of small talk but not finding anyone, who would actually genuinely be interested in spending time with you.

Having said that, over the last year me and my wife met some of the most wonderful people. I think, if you want to find interesting people and great friends, London is the place to be. In a way, being cramped into a relatively small place, riddled with challenges to survive, you have to help each other. London is also a huge crossroad where you can find all sorts of people. All the most talented people of the world are here all around. And that might be the biggest reason to move here.

####Public transport

In addition to obvious choices like tube and doubledeckers, London features one of the best implemented citybike hire system in the world. There are hundreds of stations scattered all around zone 1 and 2, where you can get a bike and start pedaling. There are still some things to improve, this network of hire bikes is pretty much absent beyond zone 2 and even zone 2 coverage sometimes is not great. Hackney is half covered, areas to the south of Thames are also covered very little. Despite all that I've pedaled over 1500km over the last year on a city bike commuting from Bethnal Green to Chancery Lane.

London is the only place in the world where amount of personal cars is decreasing. Having a car here doesn't make much sense. Having a car when living outside of London makes a lot of sense, but again, not for commuting into the city.

Biking usually happens on the very same road with the rest of London traffic. Luckily speed is limited to 20-30mph for everyone, and traffic lights are equipped with mirrors so that lorry drivers could see bikers underneath the cabin.

####Communication

Cheque books are not in general use anymore, but role of phone calls is still unnecessary big. I generally despise phone calls - it's one of the most inefficient ways of communicating important information, especially in a new country with lots of unfamiliar accents. Spelling email address and credit card number on a phone are few of those things that just shouldn't exist in perfect world. In Finland most of things can be performed using web. In Britain when you need to change your payment card details for internet provider, you have to call.

Quite anecdotal situation happened when I applied to upgrade my bank account in Halifax to what they call Reward account. After a successful upgrade they sent me a brand new bank card, with a new number. Old card deceased shortly after. Then shitstorm started. Various services tried to charge me for things, but couldn't do it anymore. Highlights were BT and TFL bike hire. BT called me and we agreed to move billing to direct debit (basically, you agree to give access to your bank account to a 3rd party). Despite that they kept telephoning about outstanding debt, and finally I had to call an automated number with robot on the other side, who managed to charge my card. TFL simply blocked my account when they couldn't charge £1 worth of money, and again required a phone call with a new bank card in hand.

####Time

Theory of relativity claims that time flows differently depending on the speed you are moving with. It seems that there is no such thing as being bored in London. In fact, you have to make a list of most interesting things, and then prioritize, and then pick a few from the very top. There is no way of having time for everything, unfortunately. But you can cherry pick the most exciting stuff, and leave a bit of time for a cup of great coffee.

####Was it worth it?

Yes.

• Top 10 strangest things in space

• Elon Musk doing AMA on Reddit last Monday, few hours before launching a rocket that was supposed to land its first stage to the drone ship few miles off the coast.

  The Mars transport system will be a completely new architecture. Am hoping to present that towards the end of this year. Good thing we didn't do it sooner, as we have learned a huge amount from Falcon and Dragon.

• New Year celebrations on board of International Space Station, with pics

• HAL, Mother, and Father - Watching the sixties and seventies through 2001 and Alien

####Watch

• NASA releases fresh 1.5 Gigapixel photo of the Andromeda galaxy. You can view it in your browser.
• Projections in the Forest - short film about couple of guys projecting animations live on flora and fauna of the pine forest
• 257 CES gadgets in 3 minutes, epic video by TheVerge

####Personal notes

• This blog is officially migrated to be HTTPS only. The last tip was recent episode of ATP podcast, where they spoke about ways how HTTP traffic can be altered by free wifi networks - on board of an airplane in particular. I vaguelly recall some wifi networks embedding a huge banner on top of every page served via HTTP. Horrible thing to do, but one way to avoid this is to serve content via HTTPS - this way nothing (in theory) can interfere between your browser and original server.
• I also added Cloudfront distribution - basically a CDN that serves these pages to people from geographically most optimal location. People in US might notice a slight difference.
• Using Cloudfront actually provides you with a free HTTPS option. Catch is if you decide to use your custom domain - then you have to buy your own certificate that belongs to your domain.

• A guy goes to Cineworld cinema and (allegedly) attempts to do a screen rip of a film. In 3D. With a custom video camera rig he constructed. Staff calls the police. Guy denies everything. Judge says there was absolutely no legal basis for the case.

####Watch

• 365 - one second of animation every day
• Trendy Cafe
• HTTPS everywhere
• Landing attempt of the Falcon rocket on a sea drone ship.

Close, but no cigar. This time.

####Listen

• Radio Badger's first episode of this year is live. Featuring very short and very special interview with Commander Chris Hadfield of the Canadian Space Agency.

####Personal notes

• After testing SSL status of these pages with SSLLabs service turned out there were some problems with incomplete chain of certificates. Basically when you upload certificate to AWS, you have to specify all the intermediatory certificates in a correct order. I ended up creating a special certificate chain file, as was instructed by AWS docs, and now everything is fine. Should put everything into a blogpost at some point.
• It was snowing in London yesterday.

####Tweet of the week

"We see it as a long-term revenue source for SpaceX to be able to fund a city on Mars." World's reaction: Ah ha ha hah omg he's serious. via @levie

• Long read on travel photography by @Stammy of Twitter
• I paid $25 for an Invisible Boyfriend, and I think I might be in love. On the same topic, don't miss Ex Machina, now in cinemas.
• Dark Deep Web marketplaces research. How people buy things on the hidden side of the Internet.
• Google is going to disqualify SHA-1 SSL certificates and display warning symbol in Chrome instead of trusty green lock icon

####Interact

• The Dawn Wall - new media article by NYTimes, and a benchmark how to use WebGL in web storytelling

####Listen

• How to Think Like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos - fresh episode of Tim Ferris show podcast

####Personal notes

• Just finished editing interview with radio astronomy professor Oleg Smirnov talking about Universe and Square Kilometer Array project currently being prepared in South Africa and Australia. It was our first remote interview for the podcast, quite a different experience, but turned out really well in the end. We should do more. Interview will be live in the next episode of Radio Badger podcast.
• Thanks to Clojure for the Brave, I'm now hooked on Emacs. This weekend migrated my RSS subscriptions to GNUS, and looking forward to integrate Evernote. Also, they've got Tetris.

• The Duct Tape Programmer - good never gets old, and this write up by Joel Spolsky still very much relevant, although represents another extremity

You see, everybody else is too afraid of looking stupid because they just can’t keep enough facts in their head at once to make multiple inheritance, or templates, or COM, or multithreading, or any of that stuff work. So they sheepishly go along with whatever faddish programming craziness has come down from the architecture astronauts who speak at conferences and write books and articles and are so much smarter than us that they don’t realize that the stuff that they’re promoting is too hard for us.

• The UX reader - book from Mailchimp guys, collection of the most popular articles from their UX newsletter

• Oculus Story Studio is founded with aim to produce VR films

####Watch

• Speaking of conferences, React Native was announced last week on React JS conf at Facebook HQ. Learn once, use everywhere.

####Listen

• Fresh episode of Radio Badger podcast, featuring interview with radio astronomy professor Oleg Smirnov. Expect topics on dark ages of the Universe, Square Kilometer Array project, processing big data and perspectives of building massive array of radio telescopes in space.

####Personal notes

• Did a guest write up on why I moved my static blog to HTTPS only - read it on Red Badger blog. Will probably do a more technical follow up on practical side.
• Adventures in Emacs land - moved most of my activities on Twitter to Twittering mode on Emacs, and started using Org for notes, agenda and todo. There is even a book on how to use Org.

• Long read on designing recently released Twitter Video feature. I'd say it is a rare insight into how engineering at Twitter works, with lots of details, phases of the prototypes and pictures.

One thing became clear — there was no good sense of feedback while using it. The culprit was the progress bar. With a 30 second time limit, that thing moves very slowly and it doesn't reinforce that you're recording. It also had the side effect of encouraging users to fill it up or worse, make them feel like they needed to fill it up.

• A beautiful but unpractical idea of laying biking paths in the abandoned London tube tunnels
• Adblock's principles of acceptable ads. Stack Overflow largely follows same principles by the way.
• Recently opened Sky Garden of London City, visited and reviewed by Roisi

####Listen

• Delete This Episode - fresh episode of the Stack Exchange podcast with Joel Spolsky on careers in software, and using $40M to find a better job for developers in need of one
• Tim Ferris show special episode with the gouvernator Arnold

####Tweet of thought

• Snowmen protesting in front of Saudi Arabia embassy in Helsinki

####Personal notes

• Currently rendering trailer for my timelapsing short film. Film (and trailer) will be released in 2D, 3D, 4K and HD formats, and it takes quite a bit of time to render all these versions. I think I'll also render an Instagram version.

• Poor unlucky people with green bubbles
• The freefall camera prototype development story
• Review of Cereal Killer cafe on Brick Lane
• How Canadian Spies Infiltrated the Internet's Core to Watch What You Do Online. Fresh leaks from Ed Snowden. It's actually pretty smart idea of creating signatures for patterns of packets.

Such technology works by observing small portions of internet traffic known as packets, and matching the information describing each packet against a library of signatures—including known applications, protocols, network activity, and more. Internet service providers have been known to use DPI technology to identify subscribers using peer-to-peer filesharing protocols such as BitTorrent on their networks, for example. But such devices, generally speaking, can do much, much more.

####Watch

• 10K timelapse demo filmed with PhaseOne IQ180 camera. Obviously Vimeo doesn't support such resolutions (even 4K is only for Pro members), but the demo nicely zooms into the original footage.
• London Timescapes trailer on Vimeo, or in glorious 4K resolution on YouTube.

####Listen

• New episode of Radio Badger podcast is released. Expect stories from sunny San Francisco, Facebook HQ, React JS conference, Sky Garden of the London City and topic of privacy in the Internet.

####Personal notes

• Launched a dedicated site for my London Timescapes project - stereo3d.london. At the moment it contains basic info about the project, as well as download links to the multitude of formats you might want to try. Stereoscopic formats are included.
• Implemented tags for this blog ↓ Works as expected - click on tag, get a list of posts with the same tag.

• Marco Arment defends high-speed way of listening to podcasts
• Fair review of Hello Fresh box delivery service by Roisi. Something we got hooked on as well.

####Watch

• Helsinki from above photo post
• Fresh React JS meetup video, organized by Red Badger and this time hosted at Facebook London office. Expect talks and live coding on React Native iOS, Flux and some impressive show-n-tell presentations.

####Listen

• Episode of our podcast titled Badger Don't Care About Exploding Diplodocuses in Kensington now available with shownotes and blogpost (and on iTunes as well).

####Personal notes

• Went to the Warner Bros studios at Leavesden to celebrate my birthday and check out Harry Potter props. Place itself is a bit in the middle of nowhere - a former war aerodrome where they used to construct bomber planes in WWII. Later WB turned airplane hangars into huge sound stages where they filmed all 8 movies. To get there you either get overground line to Watford Junction, or a train from Euston. Watford is still in Oyster zone, but that zone isn't even numbered - it is simply marked as 'special fares apply' on the very edge of tube map. From Watford there is shuttle bus service to the studios - proper Routemaster, of course. If you take a train it's not that bad actually - 15-20 min from Euston. Place itself is pretty remarkable, a must go for any movie geek - even if you're like myself not a huge fun of Harry Potter moviesation. It's pretty surreal to be there. And the way they get you inside the studio is very unexpected and simply magical. No spoilers here.

I'll provide links to the Chrome Store, but some extensions are also available for Safari and Firefox.

####Stylish

When there is annoying sticky header, huge footer or some overlay that you can't get rid on the webpage, it is important to remember that you have full access to the page's source code. Open developer tools of your browser, select annoying element and add display: none; to the styles. Magic. However, when you reload the page, that particular annoyance will be back. Solution? Extension that keeps track of your CSS modifications for a particular webpage (or domain).

Meet Stylish. In addition to remembering your mods, it also contains a fully fledged community with lots of available hacks. Did you ever wanted Yahoo bar to disappear forever from Flickr? Here is a (very popular) preset.

####Clearly

At Red Badger we're taking typography on Web very seriously. Fonts must be of a proper size and color, with appropriate background. This is however not the case with most web pages. Readability of text almost always far from perfect - columns are too wide, too narrow, text size or color are wrong, and riddled with extra elements that have little to do with text itself. If you're on Safari, there is built-in Reader View. It is perfect in 95% (sometimes browser gets confused and unable to detect that single chunk of text that you're most interested in).

On Chrome I found Clearly from Evernote the best. Works even better that Reader View on Safari, fully customizable, with 4 built-in ready to use themes. Do you remember that feeling when reading paper book, and there is nothing in the book but the story you're interested in? That's the feeling you get after using Clearly.

####Disconnect.me

If you're ever opened browser settings and were curious enough to check how much cookies your browser stored over the ages, you might have a fair idea how much sites are interested in tracking all of your activities. Even more so - advertising networks and various social services (which are again aimed on reselling behavioural data of you to the 3rd parties).

Disconnect.me is a small harmless extension that by default blacklists most of the tracking activities on webpages. Chrome only, and apparently developed by former Google employees, so you can assume that they were a) a little pissed at their former employer, and b) knew exactly what to do.

This nifty extension will provide you with breakdown of all tracking attempts, and will let you whitelist whatever you think is appropriate. Do you want to allow Google Analytics to track you? Fine, one easy click.

Here is another blogpost by Roisi on this helpful extension.

####Adblock+

I'll just say it - it's ok to filter out ads. Internet without Adblock extensions is a very hostile place. Recently Adblock started promoting concept of acceptable ads. By default Adblock will let through ads that are following guidelines of being acceptable and non-disturbing. You are free to switch them off too.

Using Adblock is a bit of a heated debate at the moment - it's obviously legal, the debate is largely revolving around the fact that you're consuming content without supporting producer of that content (by not watching ads). This topic deserves a separate blogpost.

####Conclusion

Unlike TV, Internet browser gives you power to filter content in any way you want. It seems that safety and privacy on Internet are getting more traction, browsers become more safe and able to warn you when there is something evil is about to happen. There is still a large grey area of what is ethical, acceptable or simply legal. Concept of privacy is under constant review, some people go all the way to claim that there is no privacy on Internet. In any case, you have full control over your machine and browser.

Use it.

• Understanding the Enigma machine with 30 lines of Ruby. Practical implementation of the algorithm that was exploited and (cleverly) brootforced by GCHQ and Alan Turing during WWII.
• How crazy am I to think I actually know where that Malaysia Airlines plane is? Long read by Jeff Wise, revisiting mistery of MH370 flight, tracking airplane with Inmarsat satellites, and a theory how thing could end up.
• Proof That Oscar Voters Are Clueless About Animation (and many other things).

In this world, a voter would identify the Irish film Song of the Sea and the Japanese film The Tale of The Princess Kaguya as “Chinese fuckin’ things,” not watch either film, and still cast a vote for the best animated feature of the year.

• How an industrial designer became Apple’s greatest product - (very) long read on Jony Ive's side of story.

I asked Ive about the slightly protruding camera lens that prevents the iPhone 6 from resting comfortably on its back. Ive referred to that decision — without which the phone would be slightly thicker — as “a really very pragmatic optimization.” One had to guess at the drama behind the phrase. “And, yeah...” he said.

####Watch

• Analog alternatives of Photoshop tools like gradient exposure, dodge and burn when processing film in darkroom
• Composing music in VR with Ableton Live, Oculus Rift and Hydra gloves
• Citizenfour - Oscar winning documentary available for few more days on 4OD

####Listen

• Fresh episode of Tim Ferriss show with Justin Boreta of Glitch Mob electronic band. I got hooked to Glitch Mob after this fan made teaser of Tron: Legacy (which quickly became official teaser later).
• Special version of the latest Glitch Mob album Love Death Immortality with commentaries for each track.

####Personal notes

• Last year UK approved a new revision of law where it is now ok to rip CD:s, DVD:s, Bluray:s for your personal use, as long as you own the actual media. Afaik this is still illegal in most EU countries including Finland. We have a projector at home, which I usually hook to Macbook for streaming films to the wall. Problem is that Apple no longer considers Blurays a worthy media to support, while at the same time you can get boxsets from Amazon with huge discounts. Solution? Buy a disc, rip it on PC, copy it to Macbook and watch it on a big screen in full quality. And own a disc.

• Notes on watching Aliens for the first time with a bunch of kids. A grown up dude describes his childhood memories of watching Aliens on a big screen for the very first time. And then later on he suggests this very movie for a slumber party of kids in his house.

Guys at the urinals were peeing as fast as they could because they didn't want to miss another minute of "Aliens." You'd have thought somebody was timing them. Like this was the Olympic qualifying round for the bladder evacuation team. But they weren't going fast enough to suit a guy standing near the front door of the men's room. He yelled, "Goddammit! All of you, piss faster!"

• The man who posted himself to Australia in mid-1960s

####Watch

• The Value of Values with Rich Hickey. Talk by the creator of Clojure programming language on things that are obvious, make total sense, but nobody talks about.

####Learn

• How browsers work
• React Native – The Killer Feature that Nobody Talks About. @robbiemccorkell long read on how you can soon make native iOS apps with Javascript and the upcoming React Native thing.

####Personal notes

• Managed to jump start my skydiving season yesterday at Headcorn dropzone. It was sunny but windy, and fields were full of sheep with little sheep. I remember jumping in March in Finland - strong winds, -20 in the sky, but lots of soft snow for landing (and consequent shaking of the canopy to get all that snow out before packing).
• Recorded fresh new episode of Radio Badger podcast with Robbie. Expect it out this week with insights to tech stack we use and love at Red Badger.

• How to bring up a baby in the Finnish way - special project by Yle
• Pi day flyer
• Exploiting the DRAM rowhammer bug to gain kernel privileges. Curious way of hacking software through the physical hardware of the RAM chip

Bit flipping works when a hacker-developed app or process accesses two carefully selected rows of memory hundreds of thousands of times in a tiny fraction of a second. By hammering the two "aggressor" memory regions, the exploit can reverse one or more bits in a third "victim" location.

####Watch

• Flying a drone through Crossrail tunnels in London. Crossrail is a next generation underground transport system that should be released to public in 2018.
• Unreal Engine 4 tech demo - Kite

####Listen

• Radio Badger fresh episode on web dev, tech stack used by engineers at Red Badger, VR gadgets and testing strategies of No Man's Sky upcoming game
• Story of Double Dick Dude - Upvoted podcast by Reddit

####Personal notes

• Processed a fresh batch of stereoscopic pictures, this time from Stratford-upon-Avon town. Do have red-cyan 3D glasses?

• The Cold Rim of the World - The rise and fall of Pyramiden, a Russian mining town located in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard
• UK government's styleguide on Git commits
• Roads were not built for cars: how cyclists, not drivers, first fought to pave US roads. Ano in related stories - The forgotten history of how automakers invented the crime of jaywalking.

The National Automobile Chamber of Commerce, an industry group, established a free wire service for newspapers: reporters could send in the basic details of a traffic accident, and would get in return a complete article to print the next day. These articles, printed widely, shifted the blame for accidents to pedestrians — signaling that following these new laws was important.

• How Motion Picture Film is Made - story of Kodak motion picture film with detailed insights into the Kodak factory and current perspectives of analogue filmmaking.

For the upcoming documentary Everest: Conquering Thin Air, the filmmakers needed a stronger base for the shooting conditions on the mountain. Martin suggested polyester, usually reserved for archival film because of its toughness and higher propensity to cause a camera jam. “When they were shooting in Everest, they wanted something that was going to hold up to the elements so we made them polyester film with our emulsion set from our 500 tungsten camera negative film”

####Watch

• Andrei Tarkovsky: The Essential Documentaries On Russian Master. Impressive collection of documentaries and interviews on making of most films by Tarkovsky, including Solaris, Stalker and The Sacrifice.
• HD version of my Nordic Prelude short film is now available on Vimeo. It is also available in 3D and 4K on request. Expect timelapses from our roadtrip to Koli, Lapland and rocks of Nordkapp.

####Personal notes

• It is my third day without a phone. Few days ago I tried to clean a lens of iPhone 5S camera from inside, and while the operation went successfully, the phone doesn't start anymore. This led to an interesting (although forced) experiment when I trying to have a life without reassuring feeling of a phone in my pocket. Going to put all notes into a separate post - it's going to be an insightful write up.
• Had an induction in the local photography darkroom. Analog photography is dying, but thanks for places like London there's still plenty of spaces, interesing people and possibilities to excersise long forgotten craft. Booked my session in April, the plan is to process and print two rolls of 35mm film. The place is crawling with rolls of medium format film, making 35mm look very small in comparison. If all goes well, I'll get Mamiya camera next year.
• Stereo pictures from Budapest now processed and uploaded. You will need red-cyan 3D glasses.

• Why giving basic income to even the richest makes sense - The Water Room Analogy
• An open letter to banks by creators of 1Password. The reason for this publication was tweet by one of the banks that "your password should be commited to memory rather than password manager". In all the fairness, my current bank in UK doesn't even support one-time passwords - access to the online account is protected with two passwords maintainer by user.
• 67 Things You Learn When You’ve Lived In London For Five Years

The Central line in the evening rush hour is actually an underground Bikram Yoga club. Get into it!

• How doctors choose to die
• There should be no disabled users on the web - write up by @hoppycantstoppy on current state of things on accessible web and why you should care

####Watch

• Time Couch - VR demo. YouTube now supports 360 spherical videos which you can control using mouse / keyboard (or Oculus, if you have one).
• Pedro and Frankensheep - Sleep Guinea Pig Sleep. Short animation on life.

####Learn

• React Native is released and you can implement native iOS apps now by re-using skills of Javascript and React

####Play

• Pillars of Eternity is released. Made by the guys who delivered Fallout New Vegas, in true old school style of gameplay. At the same time graphics updated to the level of year 2015. Camera is fixed on a classic RPG game angle, the only accepted way of manipulating camera is zoom in and out. Game mechanics is again classic D&D, if you played Baldur's Gate you'll feel like at home. Made possile with Kickstarter campaign.

####Install

• Flickr Tab extension for Chrome

####Listen

• Radio Badger podcast new episode 14 is on Soundcloud. Expect me, @robbiemccorkell and featuring @charypar talk about pi day, synesthesia, Apple, memory chip hacking, quantum physics, React and upcoming micro pig event in Hackney.

####Personal notes

• We had a new London React meetup this week at Facebook Euston shiny office. Expect blogpost and videos soon, as well as story of our React based project still evolving into something huge and powerful.

• I know none of my passwords - story how to use internet without worrying about security
• After Snowden, The NSA Faces Recruitment Challenge. NSA now competes with companies like Google and Facebook for bright minds of US citizens (and loosing this game)
• Amazon tests delivery drones at secret Canada site after US frustration.

As if to underline the significance of the move, the test site is barely 2,000ft from the US border, which was clearly visible from where the Guardian stood on a recent visit.

• The ‘Tsar Bomba’ Was a 50-Megaton Monster Nuke - story of testing most powerful nuke in war history

The five-mile wide fireball reached as high in the sky as the Bear bomber. The shock wave caused the Bear to drop more than half a mile in altitude before Durnovtsev regained control of his aircraft.

• This goes into category of best stories on April 1st - CERN researchers confirm existence of the Force

####Do

• Smithsonian offers you a unique holiday opportunity with insights into Russian Space program and trip to Baikonur to witness proper space rocket launch. Space is limited.

####Tweet of the week

• On home automation and robot overlords

####Personal notes

• Spent almost a week using Yubikey. Turned out to be an exciting piece of programmable hardware. Expect a proper blog soon.
• Slowly getting into a field of native iOS programming with React Native. Once you get your mind around flexbox model, things become pretty straightforward. Amazed how much of UI elements are ready at your disposal right from the start. Meanwhile community is making and sharing its own custom UI components ready to be plugged into your app.
• It's long holidays in Britain (and pretty much anywhere in Europe). Chocolate dinosaur eggs are a very important part of this celebration of Christ.
• We got third mic to our home made recording studio in the shed. Expect some dramatic sound quality improvements in the next episode of Radio Badger podcast, which is recorded and will be out soon.

It can also let you to forget all passwords and keep your memory cells occupied with more important stuff. Like birthday date of your spouse or when is the next episode of Silicon Valley.

Here's my personal experience of using Yubikey for a week. It will probably lack some details like security algorithms used by Yubikey internals. But you should get pretty good idea on what it is and if it's of any use to you.

The very basic and highly promoted use case of Yubikey goes like this:

• You activate 2-step authentication on Gmail
• Once Gmail require you to authenticate, you type in your usual user/pass combo, and then plug in Yubikey
• Yubikey generates one-time password (OTP), which is then approved by Gmail

At this point you might say that there is Google Authenticator app for generating OTP:s, and you're using it already. The difference is that you a) need a phone for that, and b) OTP generated by Yubikey is so much more stronger. And, unlike codes via SMS messages, it doesn't require any cellular coverage.

The very first thing I did after getting my Yubikey Basic Standard key is opened Google Account Security settings, went on to the 2-step verification tab and tried to add new hardware security key. To my great surprise, Yubikey wasn't recognised by Google. Few minutes of reading documentation produced following important details:

• It only supported by Chrome browser
• Your key must be compatible with a special protocol called FIDO U2F (which can be checked by presence of a golden key logo on a button)

Turned out Yubikey Standard wasn't compatible with FIDO U2F. "Bummer", I thought, "What a useless piece of hardware".

That was the first lesson - not all Yubikeys are created equal. To be completely fair, if you read on into the spec matrix, there is a row titled "Google Accounts Compatible". And there is a special version of Yubikey that supports only FIDO U2F and is cheapest of them all.

"So what is this thing and what can it do?" I asked the Universe and delved into documentation.

Most important discovery was free app, provided by Yubico and called YubiKey Personalization Tool. It is available for both Mac and Windows, and once you have it, the world of possibilities is suddenly open. It'll also unleash tons of security specific terms on you - the very top level of choices will be: Yubico OTP (you can probably guess what it is by now), OATH-HOTP (tricky), Static Password (guessable), Challenge-Response (no idea), as well as extra settings and tools.

You'll also discover that Yubikey Standard has 2 programmable slots. First slot will be pre-programmed to produce one time passwords, and second slot will be waiting for your decisions to make it whatever you think it should be.

Let's go back to the Yubico one-time-password option for a moment. Yubico wants web developers to easily enable 2-step authentication for their online apps. It works via something called Yubico Cloud. Once you generate OTP string from the key, it is submitted to Yubico, which respond with either yaarp or naarp, thus letting the app know if the authentication was successful.

The key moment here is Yubico Cloud. In order to authenticate your key, it needs your, well, virtual key (string of characters), stored in the hardware key. By default everything is pre-generated, key is uploaded to Yubico Cloud and ready to use. You are free to regenerate private keys for OTP feature, which might be a good idea if the hardware key was compromised during delivery. After generating new pair of keys, you can use the same app to upload keys to Yubico.

Once again, to be completely fair, you don't have to tie yourself to Yubico Cloud servers. There are open source options to host your very own verification server.

Another easy win is static password feature. Yubikey can be programmed to simply output up to 38 characters - or actually scan codes, since it pretends to be a keyboard. I ended up programming strong static password into slot 2, and it is now available with long tap on the button.

Here is a full guide how to trigger slots on your Yubikey:

• Slot 1: short tap on the button
• Slot 2: long tap (2-3 sec) on the button

What else can you do with strong static password? Well, you can follow advice of this guy and protect your 1Password app with a 2-part master password, consisting of strong part stored on the hardware key, and easy part stored in your memory. This way you will end up not knowing the full password to unlock all of your secrets (he still recommends printing full master password out and storing in a safe place). If the key is compromised, the evil party will only get part of the master password. They still might torcher you and get second part of the password, but that's another story.

There is an interesting ongoing discussion on AgileBits forum between users asking for native Yubikey support in 1Password, and devs explaining how Yubikey actually works. Basic argument against having support for Yubikey OTP is that this will require internet connection, and you can use Yubikey anyway for static password by simply activating input field on the screen and pressing button on the key.

I guess, the most exciting thing about Yubikey is that it is fully transparent, reprogrammable and can be used in many different ways. It makes a lot of sense in corporate IT environment, since you can setup your very own authentication cloud and distribute keys to your employees already pre-programmed and ready to use. One thing to remember is that Yubikey doesn't have any internal clock, neither a battery that would power that clock. This is somewhat compensated by a special apps on your computer that can generate timestamps.

And by the way, Fastmail supports Yubikey logins natively.

Yesterday I spent 8 hours (mostly) in the dark, sniffing chemicals and trying to distinguish contrasts on a negative black and white picture in red light. This blog is all about it.

Place's name is Four Corners. It is located very conveniently, and despite heavy Saturday rain, I managed to get there before getting completely soaked. Two rolls of exposed Ilford HP5 film and pack of fiber based photographic paper were expecting to cross their paths with help of underground facility I was about to pay visit into. Place itself is not huge, but packs a nice variety of things and activities. They got their own exhibition space, offices, terrace, rental services, video editing studio. They also got underground labs and darkrooms for all things analog.

I used to print black and white during my happy Soviet childhood. As my dad just shared with me, he used to print black and white even before their village got electricity. There would be diesel generator and heavy set of limitations of "no more than two lamp bulbs per house". He and his friend basically hacked the system in 1960th by implementing an additional electricity socket in the transformator, and would perform heavy printing while nobody would watch it. Photo enlarger is the only piece of printing that really requires electricity. So here it is - since I was something like 4 years old printing was exciting part of my quality time with dad. And it would take a whole weekend. Usual schedule was as following:

• Day 1. Prepare chemicals, process film, put it on the curtain strings to dry. Then, when it's night, set up our darkroom in the kitchen (food and chemicals, I know). I was very proud to be big enough to spend night not sleeping but doing something cool instead. We'd usually split the job in a way that dad would expose paper, and I would be in charge of developing, stopping and fixing pictures. I would also participate in discussions which picture deserves to be printed, and how large it should be. We would finish by placing all prints to dry on sheets of old newspapers.
• Day 2. Check out on prints, and collect those that dried up. Decide which prints go into which album. Distribute good ones to albums and make labels. Proudly display result to mom.

Things haven't really changed since then, despite 20 years of time and a very different country. Equipment is sort of different, and there is just more of it. There are tools for every single aspect of printing, including special can opener for film cassettes and cabinets for film drying. Dave Than from Four Corners was kind enough to spend quite a lot of time on the day, showing around, setting up my printing place, teaching how to use tools and machines, bringing up neccessary chemicals and explaining how to use them. In the end this pretty much was a crash course into film processing and printing. This is something you don't get from a normal printing course, which cost more, and expect you to turn up with already processed negatives ready to be projected onto paper. Not going to diminish value of such courses - printing is hard and definitely deserves such attention.

Processing film is pretty much straightforward, but took me about 2 hours to finish. Nowadays everyone is using something called Paterson Tank - it is indeed a sealed tank to soak your film in differend kinds of chemicals. The trick is to load it with film. In total darkness. Dave asked me when I used to do this last time, and after learning that I indeed only seen it on YouTube videos, handled me a roll of exposed film, Paterson tank, showed to me how to load film on reel, and suggested that I'd train this for a while - first with lights on, and then in the dark. Once you get film into the tank, it is very much safe from light. The trick is to get it there in a first place.

Another issue that came out while I was already in the pitch black film loading room (size of a large cabinet), is that my film was still inside the cassette. There was a special tool (Ilford branded) that looked like a can opener. To this moment I never opened film cassette before. There is first time for everything. Wasn't hard in the end, and in general the whole film loading thing felt like learning how to ride a bike.

Once the film is processed and well rinsed, it was time to dry it up (special machine) and cut into pieces (light table and scissors). A professional would also take notes at this point, pre-select frames for print and maybe even put some notes on how the printing should be done in terms of exposure. When I was a kid, we'd never cut film, but instead used special film holder with the enlarger that would hold a whole roll. However, this feature was absent from De Vere film holders, and this was good reason to split film into small enough pieces.

There is a communal darkroom and a couple of "private" darkrooms in the basement of Four Corners. Communal darkroom is large, I counted 6 spaces with enargers for printing, common sink for chemicals and baths, and 3-level waterfall for proper rinsing of your final prints. There was another couple printing their pictures, but they left in the afternoon. I was the only guy for the rest of the day there, figuring out things and just being fascinated by the process. Suddenly there was quite a lot to do. My general process was like this:

• Pick a strip of 6 frames and try to pick a picture to print by holding it agains a bulb of red light
• Put film into holder, adjust frame and install it into enlarger
• Try and figure out exposition time by looking at how bright the frame is. Adjust exposition time and light intensity (iris?).
• Cut the photo paper in half - I got 8x10 inch large paper, which was generally a bit ambitious (and expensive).
• Expose paper by using handy timer gadget connected to the enlarger
• Develop print in a first bath. Try to figure out if the exposition time was correct. Try not to ruin the print by overdeveloping.
• Stop developing in the clean water bath.
• Move print to fixer bath. Move prints that been in the fixer long enough to the second level of waterfall.
• Move prints that been long enough in the 2nd level waterfall upstream
• Move prints from the top level of waterfall to the drying sieve
• Repeat

I was running around darkroom for most part, and wasn't really effective at all. In 4 hours I managed to print around 20 pictures from 2 rolls of 36 frames long film. That was about time when I realised that it's time to try and finish things before studio would close. This was also time when I started thinking that prints will not dry up in time for me to pick them home.

There was indeed a tool for that. It was a print dryer - hot drum and fabric that would (slowly) spin your prints and give them injection of heat. It was very effective too, and soon I got my hot fresh prints, very dry and ready to be taken home.

Things I'd do differently next time:

• Process film at home. This is not hard, and once I have Paterson tank and a bit of chemicals, this should be easy to perform at home. This will also save a good hour in the darkroom that can be dedicated for printing. I mean, 4-hours slot cost £25, but this easily turns into 8 hours if you're going to process and select pictures on the spot.
• When processing film, use a few drops of water agent when doing final rinsing, as was suggested by Dave and ignored by me. This should prevent drops of Thames water from staying on film and leaving nasty traces of calcium.
• Pre-select frames for printing at home, and prepare photographic paper of a proper size. Maybe get a cutter.
• Get smaller sized baths for developing and stopping. Large bath for fixing was actually quite handy, since you'd want to avoid piling up of prints in fixer.
• When using drum dryer, put the emulsion towards the fabric, not towards the hot drum. Yep, that will ruin the print, and will leave parts of this print sticked to the hot drum.

Thanks again to Four Corners and Dave for being calm and understanding with me having not much clue about things. I'll be back in that darkroom!

####Links

• A few scans of my prints can be found here. I think I'll move to 500pixels now for this sort of thing.
• Four Corners site

• If you ever wondered what airport security equipment can do to analog unprocessed film - Kodak got you covered

X-ray equipment used to inspect carry-on baggage uses a very low level of x-radiation that will not cause noticeable damage to most films. However, baggage that is checked (loaded on the planes as cargo) often goes through equipment with higher energy X rays.

• 70 maps that explain America. Or how to stop worrying and accept fact that most of the population on Earth are immigrants.
• Thoughts on Keybase.io service. Check the comments too. All in all, keybase.io is a very interesting step for the (cryptic) world of PGP encryption towards normal people.

####Watch

• Inside Abbey Road studios - Google interactive tour on the legendary place in London
• Blade Runner or real life? Project by BFI together with special screenings of the film.
• SUNDAYS - sci-fi short film and proof of concept for the potential feature. I'd love to see that feature.

####Listen

• Codes that Changed the World - BBC Radio 4 project on history of programming languages
• Fresh episode of Radio Badger podcast. Talks by me, Viktor Charypar and Robbie McCorkell on F8, aerospace grade tungsten, React Native, VR, basic income and Formula E in London.

####Personal notes

• Had a session in a local darkroom. Managed to process two rolls of 35mm film and print few frames. That's my first time back in a darkroom in probably 20 years or so. Also revived my 500px account and uploaded scans of the prints there. 500px seems to evolved quite nicely, and offers much friendlier UI compared to the modern incarnation of Flickr for art pictures.
• As mentioned earlier, I started using Keybase.io service. My public key can be found here in case you want to send me encrypted email or something. I've also added PGP signature to all my emails now.
• Attending O'Reilly Fluent Conference next week. Will have few days to get around San Francisco. Happy to meet new people, so feel free to ping me.

San Francisco was pretty cool, although windy and cold. Despite that I managed to burn my face on both days when I wasn't in the basement of the Mariott hotel, where O'Reilly Fluent conference was happening. By far this was the most epic conference I've attended. 5 simultaneous tracks of web dev related talks, plus ongoing meetups and exhibition of hardware. O'Reilly being a publishing house also brought a number of book authors, who were signing and giving books away for those lucky enough to get into the queue early. On the last day of the trip I managed to get out of the city and traveled to Mountain View and Palo Alto. Googleplex, check.

Arrival to Corfu island was accompanied with 10 hours of jet lag and very little sleep. End of April is still low season on the island, and so we were spending time in a quiet neighborhood of Glyfada beach, pretty much deserted for the most part. We rented a car and were cruising the island for the next week, discovering places and eating lots of local food. I almost forgot how tasty tomato can be. Even potato chips were somehow delicious, especially combined with local tzatziki. Another thing not everybody might appreciate - local made ginger beer on Corfu is absolutely gorgeous.

Flu part was mostly boring. On the second week of suffering I decided that it's time to finally register myself as a patient in a local surgery. That's something you have to do in person, during office hours of weekdays. My plan was to arrive with filled forms, and ask for medical help. Registration part went without a hitch, as for the actual help they told me to call next morning. Which I did, got appointment and made my inaugural visit to the local GP. She pretty much ignored my complaints on excruciating cough, checked my weight and height, listened to me breathing and concluded that this is indeed a virus, and I'll get better all by myself.

On a film front - California trip video is edited and available for watching. Expect lots of hyperlapses.

Signing off.

Events

We did two events with Red Badger. First was React London meetup, part of Digital Shoreditch fest. Unlike previous few events that were hosted at Facebook Euston offices, this one was at Cargo club in the heart of Shoreditch. The place was practically under the railroad, and each time a train would pass on top of the club, you’d get a true underground feeling. It seems that many attendees thought the same, and despite some AV related hiccups we got a nice praise for the event.

Couple of talks to watch:

• BabelJS by author himself Sebastian McKenzie
• React & WebGL - Peter O’Shaughnessy talks on his experiences integrating ThreeJS with React

Another event was hosted at Red Badger HQ. Again part of DS, this one was titled Global Accessibility Awareness Day. Check out recording of the live broadcast with brilliant presentations by our UX director Joe Dollar-Smirnov, head of design Sari Griffiths and developer Dominik Piatek.

Film

My Helsinki Timescapes film is now available on Vimeo in its full HD glory. Took me about one year to complete, mainly because it was filmed and processed in native stereoscopic 3D. A unique project for Helsinki, was premiered in Germany as part of Beyond 3D fest in autumn 2013. This year they are once again accepting entries, and my goal is to get back - this time with London Timescapes short film, currently in post production. Might as well release HD 2D version on Vimeo once the moment is right.

Another idea we discussed with Dominik Piatek, who is currently composing music for London Timescapes film, is to make a virtual reality experience out of the film. Desperately need to get my paws onto some VR goggles - there are lots of teases but currently nothing actually available in shops. Maybe next year.

Podcast

Last Friday me, Robbie and Roisi recorded 17th episode of Radio Badger podcast. Expect it out this week - probably Friday. Talking about recent trips to California, Estonian e-residenship, Apple Watch, Bitcoin pizza day, as well as getting live first impressions on Firefox OS phone.

Meanwhile episode 16 is available for listening.

Hardware corner

Received a reference phone with Firefox OS onboard. The phone is codenamed Flame, features 2 SIM card slots, 2 cameras, dual core CPU, 1Gb of RAM, and in general very nice looking for an entry level phone. Also it features quite a few controversial ideas, now implemented and ready to be probed. Firefox OS runs all of the UI on top of Gecko rendering engine - in other words, everything you see on the screen is run inside Firefox browser. I’m still getting my way around it, yesterday flashed latest nightly build of Firefox OS 3.0, and going to use it as my main phone for a week. Expect lots of intimate details in a blog.

Writing

Got published in Red Badger blog with my recap on O’Reilly Fluent conference in San Francisco. Trends on web dev, Internet and how it all looks like from sunny California.

Chemicals

Successfully finished second roll of 35mm film, and ordered kit of Kodak T-Max chemicals for developing. If all goes well, will book some lab time at the local dark room. Yeah, assuming that nothing goes wrong with films during development. There are at least two shops in London where you can get everything you need for analog film printing (that I know of) - Silver Print at Elephant and Castle, and West End Cameras in Euston. Latter is just 10 min on bike from our office, and I was buying my fibre based photo paper there last time. Convenient.

This week

Podcast editing, Firefox OS instead of iPhone, monthly company day, and a hackathon with a chance of winning tickets to Mombasa. Should be fun.

Also Fastmail is not free. Are you ok being a product? Somehow it feels that dedicated paid service will always beat free ad-powered one. Fastmail comes with a number of different price points, and what's best - they accept bitcoins. I'm paying with bitcoins for my VPN provider, domains, and now - email provider. A little bit of privacy here and there.

What about second factor authentication? Fastmail natively supports Yubikey generated one time passwords. Plug the key and press a button.

There is a little bit of setup if you want to integrate Fastmail with a custom domain. Receiving mail is easy - just get your MX records for the domain in place. Sending email is slightly trickier. In a modern world of email there is lots of spam. To combat this issue, email providers came up with a technology called DKIM or Domain Keys Identified Mail. It is basically HTTPS in the world of email - a way of signing each email message with an authorized signature, which can be checked by receiving server and sent to spam folder in case of failure. Fastmail got you covered there too - they provide a signature which you add to a special TXT domain record. After that your custom domain is all set.

Drop me a line on hello@alexsavin.me if you feel like it.

And yeah, I was not paid by Fastmail. Quite the opposite.

First time in my life I did a huge mistake when planning my and Stanisla's travels. Original plan was for me to arrive from San Francisco, sleep, and us together take off to the Stansted airport, and to the warm island of Corfu. What I didn't accounted for is timeshift. Turned out time flies twice as fast when travel from west to east, and I ended up totally missing the flight.

Situation was quickly fixed in a way that I’d get a 6am flight from Gatwick, and Stanisla would take the original flight and be waiting for me at the sea resort. This worked pretty well, and soon I was receiving keys for the rented car at the airport of Corfu from the local guy also named Alexander. My highly jetlagged brain noticed that the car I'm getting is somewhat of a different brand from what I booked - but Alexander assured me that yes, it is a different car, but the same price class.

It's been 2 years since I gave up my car, and probably 5 years since I drove a stick. Corfu island landscape features steep hills, sea, cliffs, lots of villages and one large(ish) town. I only had troubles driving in town - it was my Finnish mode that was letting people safely cross the streets, which was something of a revelation to local drivers - on many occasions they signalled me that I should indeed just drive over pedestrians and stop annoying other drivers waiting behind. In addition there were quite a few very steep serpentines, and so there was general speed limit imposed for the whole island at 60 kmh. Which was pretty much ignored by the locals who tried to accelerate to a maximum speed on any straight part of road.

Having a car on Corfu is a must. End of April is so-called low season, and public transport is a rare breed. Our week in the end of April and beginning of March was a little strange, since many places were very quiet, beaches empty, but all spots were open and happy to feed you and provide drinks. Corfu might not be a cheap place, but the food was extremely good.

Each day we would pick a place on a map and start driving, with mandatory stops at bakeries, olive wood workshops and pharmacies - Stanisla got a nasty cold prior to the trip. Road ads were promoting a local "British GP" you can visit right here on the island, but it wasn't clear if he'd accept Stanisla's NHS card. In the end one of the pharmacies sold a nuclear cough mixture with bee propolis, which was highly effective and had the most awful taste at the same time.

Cruising the island was actually fun. It used to be part of ancient Greece, Venice, Great Britain, France, Germany and once again Greece. Venetians built a castle which proved to be great engineering feat and major pain for the Ottoman empire trying to conquer the island over the course of some 200 years. Castle stood, and Ottomans fled the island (after some mandatory pillaging). It is also featured by Gerald Durrell in his book "My family and other animals" - he pretty much grew up on here, and Durrell family house is still a local attraction near Kalami beach.

One particular place was especially magnificent - Old Perithia is a 14th century built village, now abandoned. It is off the sea, hiding between mountains, not easily reachable even by car. Only the most persistent tourist will get there (or maybe once again it was just a low season thing). Some say it was built during the Venetian rule and features details of Venetian engineering. It is actually not that abandoned - there are 3 taverns that will feed you, and some houses actually being bought and restored. Ever wanted to own a 14th century Venetian house?

On one occasion we travelled to a small town of Palaiokastritsa. We arrived early, thanks to me being jet lagged for the good first half of the week. Thankfully there was this local version of coffee - Greek coffee. It was strong, tasty and I’d consume it in double shots. One of the advertised sights in Palaiokastritsa were sea caves, reachable by boat. We ended up taking a boat trip, and that was easily one of the highlights for the whole trip. Beardy captain of the light boat with me, Stanisla, other couple and 2 small kids guided our vessel straight into what looked like an open sea. From time to time captain would start praying to the Saint Spyridon, then switching to singing in Greek. Waves were high, sea was very blue, and caves were rather small and insignificant.

Air, smells and food were somewhat magical on the island. Contrast is especially huge when travelling from a large city where tomato tastes like nothing, and in many occasions you try to pretend that you don't need air. On the first day after my arrival, we took a small trip to the closest village - Pelekas - to find some breakfast. Being vegetarian is not a problem by the way - you will have to skip local souvlaki dishes, but the rest is very much vegetarian and highly enjoyable. In a local tavern of Pelekas village they brought us tzatziki, olives, salad, toasts with tomatoes, dolmades and they also insisted on potato chips. My god, these were most delicious chips in my entire life.

Local guidebook highly recommended to try ginger beer. During the British rule they started doing ginger beer on the island, and never stopped after that. Current incarnation of the drink is a pure perfection - unique taste, with a gentle bitiness and soothing effect that goes straight to your brain. My quest now is to find it here in London.

####Podcast

Not only we recorded a new episode of Radio Badger with Roisi, Viktor and Robbie, but also previous episode was finished and released all over the Internet. In August it'll be turning one year, and Roisi had an idea of having live broadcast on that day in front of the audience. Sounds like fun.

Blog on the episode 17 with shownotes and links is here.

####Photography

Did a bike trip on Monday to the West End Cameras shop in Euston. Now I have a stock of film developer, fixer, stop bath and photo flo solution from Kodak. It takes 50 min to get on bike from Euston back to Bethnal Green, if you have no idea where you're going. Got a bit lost, and then rode along the channel pretty much all the way to Haggerston.

This bunch of chems allowed me to successfully process 2 rolls of 35mm film - and with negatives in hand I got a session at the local darkroom for printing. Yesterday me and Stanisla spent 4 hours at Four Corners Film studio doing prints, and seems like both of us enjoyed it big time. I think we managed to do about 40-50 prints, all of them where left to dry in the studio until Monday. Expect some scans soon.

Finished a batch of stereoscopic pictures from my trip to California. If you have necessary hardware - like red-cyan 3D glasses or a 3DTV - have a look.

####Web dev

Got pretty excited about PostCSS this week. It's an elegant solution to skip CSS pre-processing nonsense and simply post-process CSS with whatever extra stuff you might put into it. Practically it is BabelJS for CSS, with lots of plugins already created by the community. There is also CSSnext plugin that allows you to start using CSS4 features. The issue with current project we have is that all styles are in LESS, which somewhat limits what you can do. Since LESS must be compiled first, you can't put any non-less syntax into it - and so CSS4 features will have to wait. You can still do lots - like lint styles against Can I Use database, and make automatic fallbacks for older browsers. It's hard to be excited about CSS, but Andrey Sitnik somehow made it possible.

####Video

Finally tried Microsoft Hyperlapse Pro preview on Windows by feeding it one of my skydiving videos. It took quite a while to process it, and to be completely honest the result wasn't great. I think Hyperlapse app from Instagram on the phone would perform better in this situation - but that's kind of unfair comparison. There are no gyro or motion sensors on GoPro or sport cameras in general, yet there is a need for hyperlapsing (or maybe that's just me). I think GoPro will get sensors in the next 1-2 generations, and then things will be much easier. But for now smartphone is the tool for hyperlapsing.

####Gadgets

We got a smoothie machine, and so far it's been incredible. Main feature of this machine is 4 detachable bottles of 2 different sizes. Get a bottle, put ingredients, smooth everything together, detach a bottle and take it with you. Large version of the bottle is enough to replace a good breakfast - especially if you put a generous amount of peanut butter and cocoa into it. Must research smoothies with coffee.

####Writing

Finished a blog on our trip to Corfu island - accompanied with short film. Also iA Writer is amazing and actually helps with the process. Write - leave it to cool down - review - edit - repeat.

What is it?

9 min long audio-visual experience around London and time. Filmed in native stereoscopic 3D in 4K resolution. Properly color graded, with original music composed by Dominik Piatek specially for this movie. In many ways it is my personal exploration of this big city, places, people and rhythms. I think it’s stereoscopic aspect will provide viewers with unique opportunity to immerse into the experience and feel the beat of this place.

How is it going to be released?

I’m currently looking for opportunities to screen it in proper stereoscopic 3D. Otherwise I think it’ll be released soon for free in full HD 2D on Vimeo, with options to license it in 4K and stereoscopic formats.

Another idea is to create a virtual reality experience. There is enough resolution to allow viewer certain degree of freedom to look around. It’s not going to be 360 spherical experience, but combined with native stereoscopic it’s still should be enough to give you proper sense of presence. I need to find an Oculus Rift for some tests. Or just throw test renders at the VR community.

Future plans

Timelapsing is one of my passions, so the plan is to upgrade my stereoscopic rig in a next month or so. I’m thinking about Canon 750D:s - it’s capable of 22Mpx native resolution, which will allow me to capture proper 6K footage in RAW 12bit. They are also quite good at night nowadays. I think next year will be about VR, and so the next logical step would be to get one of the HMD:s and start cracking on VR experiences - something that will likely combine games and movies in a very near future.

Trailer

Trailer is still available for viewing on Vimeo.

Space - Mind Candy office in Shoreditch

Organizer - Rewind.co

Mind Candy was conveniently located on my bike route between home and office. Trickiest part was to get tickets - originally they released 50 of those, and I was way too late for that party. Then there was Tube strike day - and event got postponed for a week. 2 days before new date they released 50 more tickets, and hurray, I was in.

In addition to talks they made a small exhibition of everything VR. Headsets, rigs, simulations, software solutions. Couple of notable things were:

1. Red Bull Air Race simulation by Rewind. Real time render of you piloting an acrobatic plane. It was interesting to note that pure visual stimulus of you being in the airplane can generate authentic feeling with your vestibular system. It felt very much like gravity was shifting according to the movements of the plane.
2. Live broadcast of a 360 degree video from a rig into a VR headset. They’ve built a camera rig with 6 GoPro:s, which was filming surrounding area. Next there was a black box stitching HD video from all 6 cameras into a spherical video in real time. This was in turn fed into Oculus Rift DK2 headset. Resulting effect was astounding - since the rig was in close proximity, you’d had a relatively authentic out-of-body experience. Relatively - because there was a tiny bit of latency and resolution issues. The idea behind this is to get real time broadcast from events like concerts.

VR is situated at the interesting cross section of things like filmmaking, games, sound and web. Everyone feels like there is a huge potential in whatever your area is, but nobody have much clue above that. Once again there was mention of a quality content. VR itself will not make bad content awesome - quite the opposite. Since you are suppose to be immersed into the content, it is content’s responsibility to be attractive enough that users would want to be immersed.

Few trends are now become distinctive for VR applications:

• Interactive simulations. Basically, games, but with you strapped to a seat / space. You can look around, and it’ll be rendered in stereoscopic 3D.
• Actual games with you affecting the environment
• Films. 2D 360 degree (more often) or stereoscopic 3D (less often, more complicated). Can be very powerful with documentaries. 360 degree videos are now natively supported on YouTube.
• Web. Content is rendered with WebGL in stereoscopic 3D. Some examples available on Mozilla VR pages.

From all of the above mentioned trends WebVR might become the most popular one. It might not be a replica of Second Life or what VR was imagined to be in sci-fi films of past century, but it will find its shape.

Next London VR meetup is announced too - it is going to be on 10th of September at Madam Tussauds.

• Screen is nice. I’m a huge fan of Kindle, and also one of my first watches was classic electronic Casio. Pebble screen is great when you shine light on it, and is ok with built-in backlight. Screen is indeed always on.
• Pebble is quite usable in the dark room studio with safe lights on. Even a dim light is enough to read off the screen without activating backlight.
• Battery life in reality is 3-4 days. It depends quite a bit on usage and screen refreshing needs. Some watch faces contain special settings for optimising battery life by turning off bluetooth for the night and disabling incoming notifications. I think it’s possible to live on a single charge for a full week, but that would require a bit of tweaking and using watch faces with little animations. Each screen refresh counts.
• Can vibrate, but otherwise completely silent. No speaker.
• Also no touch screen. It seemed that many people expected Pebble screen to be touchable and were slightly disappointed to learn that it is proper old school buttons only experience.
• There are 4 buttons in total and a microphone. Latter is pretty much useless with iPhone, but suppose to shine with Android devices.
• Smartwatch with timer on your wrist is surprisingly useful when cooking food or developing film. Smartphone is much less so.
• It is second generation of Pebble watch, and it is fully open for third party developers. All first generation apps and watch faces are compatible. They are also black and white only.
• There are way too much cool watch faces for Pebble. Some cool apps too. All free.
• Yes, there is authentic Hypnotoad watch face
• And Fallout PipBoy watch face, with extra mode displaying radioactive clouds and outside temperature. Activated by shaking your wrist
• By default shaking your wrist will turn backlight on. It will also start Nyan Cat flight mode if that’s the watch face you’re using.
• It’s ok to change watch face multiple times a day.
• It can function without a phone, but its purpose is to be a companion device. It will forward all notifications from iPhone without any extra settings. It will also dismiss them on the phone once you dismiss them on the watch.
• Waterproof
• Contains activity tracker. You can have one app at a time having access to it and collecting data. It can also be a watch face - which is basically an app that displays time. Fallout PipBoy watch displays step counter as XP and gives you levels as you progress.
• You can have a virtual pet app. It can also be a watch face and activity tracker at the same time. Yes, I’m looking at you, FitCat.
• Not sure if there is limit for the amount of installed apps or watch faces. So far I’ve installed 15 watch faces and 8 extra apps.
• You will need phone for installing / managing content on the watch. Pebble Time app on iPhone is a bit sluggish when it comes to its own AppStore, but otherwise nice. All apps are free too.
• Pebble SDK is C language based, but there is also Pebble.js option.
• When holding both (large) Apple Watch and Pebble Time, latter feels lighter and smaller.
• Timeline mode is one of the basic features, and feels incredibly natural. It will suck all events from the phone for the 3 next days, as well as weather data and sunrise / sunset times.
• Someone mentioned that Pebble feels like Nintendo device - nice friendly appeal, animations, with low res graphics.
• There is Authenticator app for 2-factor generated passwords. With some trickery it’s possible to have same passwords generated on both phone Google Authenticator and watch app. Needless to say, it’s super useful.
• There is a watch face imitating my good old Casio electronic watch. And about 20 other classic Casios.

Couple of things to announce regarding London Timescapes experimental short film.

Firstly, it will be premiered at the Beyond 3D festival this October in Karslruhe, Germany. Same place where Helsinki 3D film got its slice of fame two years ago. For this special occasion I'll be mastering a DCP package in the upcoming week.

Secondly, I got my paws on the Oculus Rift DK2 kit for a weekend. This resulted in a few experiments and a special VR(ish) version of the film. And it is available for download.

How exactly it is optimized for Oculus headset? It is obviously not a 360 degree experience. What you will get however is a native stereoscopic full view film, with composition and transition optimized for viewing inside a VR headset. Each shot was recomposed bearing in mind specificity of the VR hardware. I'd obviously loved to give some head tracking abilities, but literally have no idea how to implement this. Maybe special video viewing software would help? Or it has to be a full blown Unity based simulation?

Few things that I learned on my way:

• Having static shots even with things moving in the frame is not great. Having a shot slightly animated however gives a nice feeling. By animation I mean having it slowl pan or tilt. Too fast panning would also not look great since we're talking about 24fps of a conventional cinema. That's actually another important matter - HFR is kinda must for VR enabled videos.
• Animation of a shot slowly zooming in might look cheap on a normal screen, but actually feels great in VR headset. It sort of gives you feeling of immersing yourself into the scene. Or flying forward.
• All shots must be composed in a way that most important subject it put in a dead center of a frame. Things would be different if head tracking would be enabled.

Download link for London Timescapes VR experiment. View it with any video player while wearing your Oculus Rift. I think any other HMD will work too.

Don't forget to tweet me what you think.

It’s been a whole year now since me, Roisi and Robbie started a podcast titled Red Badger Don’t Care. Since then 21 episode of our show was recorded, edited and released into the world. It is something none of us done before, but I think we all loved listening to other podcasts and dreamed about one day making our own.

I’m going to put a randomly organised list of thoughts on what I learned during this year of making.

• The most important thing is that everyone is having fun in process. Recording and editing must be a reward in itself. And almost always it is.
• Listeners count is heavily dependent on the topic of a given episode. This seems to be the case also for seasoned podcasts like Tim Ferris show. It also depends how well given episode is advertised. Nothing new here.
• iTunes is the platform for podcasts. It is horrible, clunky, but everyone are stuck with it. It will not host your episodes - instead you have to provide iTunes compatible RSS feed with links to your mp3 files, hosted on your server.
• It’s great having guests on the show. After 10 episodes with the same hosts you get into certain template of doing things. Templating is great, but you need unexpected things happening in order to maintain energy and fun.
• This is a bit opinionated, but I believe it’s ok having podcasts going over 1 hour as long as content is good. Listeners are free to stop listening at any point, or skip things. That’s what I do. You are not under obligation to finish listening every single episode of what you’re subscribed to.
• Having guests over Skype requires careful planning and good internet channel. It will also require good editing skills for the post production.
• GarageBand is ok for recording multichannel audio. It is horrible however for editing actual podcast. I’m using Audition, and mostly happy with it. For good mp3 packing there is no better tool than Lame.
• In many ways hosting podcasting can have therapeutical effect. You’re talking about topics you truly care about, with clever co-hosts who will help you advance this topic. In the age of Twitter when every conversation on a given topic usually lasts few seconds, podcast gives you unique opportunity for a proper conversation.
• Usually we spend 2 hours on recording and then I spend about 4 hours more on editing and posting.
• There’s plenty of Creative Commons music on SoundCloud which you can use in your episodes and not break any copyrights. They have handy filters to find fresh good stuff.
• There is a secret to having fun while editing podcast - have a week of cool down between recording and editing. This will inevitably make some topics less relevant.
• It’s important to learn how to shut up while other person talking
• 3 hosts is the most optimal number for a show. It’s a good idea however to have extra hosts to rotate and swap if someone won’t make to recording.
• Personal cardioid mics significantly increase sound quality
• Always monitor while recording. Like, with headphones. On one occasion an old ongoing issue with MacOS destroyed a whole episode of recording. Waveform looked fine, no overloads or any other visual sign of heavy noise, which was there all the time.
• Most of your friends will not listen to your podcast. That’s ok. I think my mom would listen, but she doesn’t speak English.
• Cursing is ok. Topics on religion and politics should be avoided in general.
• Hosting a podcast is a great start for public talking. It’s ok to fail and try multiple times, since everything will be edited later. You can even come completely unprepared and still have a part in conversation.
• This will change the way you listen to other podcasts.

For the next episode we're going to try livecasting. Tune in this Tuesday evening.

It’s getting rainy in London, and tomorrow is the first day in school for local kids. This is notable since we’re living just next to one. Today is also Late Summer bank holiday, which occurs every last Monday of August for no particular reason.

Radio Badger live broadcast

Our podcast turned 1 year and in honour of this we decided to try something new. Not only we brought a new host on the show, but also last episode was broadcasted live as we were recording it. Edited version will be available this week, while full length live version is available right now.

In addition to everything, Roisi was attending the live cast remotely. If you think about it for a second, it is quite a complex setup - at least for amateurs like us. We had 5 hosts in total, one of them remotely, 3 microphones in our shed studio with 4 more hosts, while at the same time broadcasting everything to the rest of the world. Our USB audio interface is also experiencing an old OSX bug when it would suddenly start generating lots of static noise - which means you have to monitor constantly what is actually being recorded.

Couple of tools that made everything possible: Audio Hijack and Google Hangouts.

Audio Hijack is an (expensive) but brilliant piece of software. It is node base interface for building your flows of sounds inside of your Mac. It understands multichannel USB interfaces. You can ask it to do things like “get sound from Chrome, record it in lossless format, display level meter and also mix it with the rest of sounds before you feed everything into my headphones”. Super intuitive, with lots of built-in tools. I think this is time to finally move on from Garage Band, which we were still using for recording. It’s fine for simple recording, but not great for fine control.

Google Hangouts on Air is almost universally recommended tool for live casting - be it video or audio only. Free, no limitations concerning length of the broadcast, with good tools for getting other people online. This way we get Roisi as our remote host online, while I was still recording everyone as separate channels for later editing.

Full setup looked something like this.

Relay, GraphQL, CSS modules and PostCSS talk

Me and @albert_still were busy for the past couple of weeks building our Relay based app for Red Badger. It’s been quite a dream project so far, since we were able to pick all the newest tech on our way. Our stack so far includes Node, React, Relay with GraphQL schema, CSS modules and PostCSS, all wrapped in Webpack. We’re building something that will eventually replace current company pages, and blog. Latter is our current priority, and once it works properly there’s good chance it will replace our current Wordpress setup.

Last Friday we did a talk on our progress, which is also available online. A bit of audio issues in the beginning, which you can skip. There is a good intro to Relay, why you might need it, frustration points and moments of joy. It is indeed a missing piece in the whole React / GraphQL stack, and chances are that we’ll be moving away from REST into something more flexible, learnable, adaptable. Something like GraphQL enabled endpoints. A technology we all deserve.

Cambridge

Did a day trip to Cambridge this weekend, with Stanisla and friends. Train to Cambridge takes off in Kings Cross station, and rushes with incredible speed to this small university town. Both times it was a direct train with no other stops, and it took about 50 min to reach our destination.

General hint about crowded destinations - find a botanical garden. For a modest fee you get lots of space and very little other people.

Our camera stack was fairly impressive - 3 film cameras, 4 iPhones and 1 digital mirrorless. Cambridge is a perfect photo destination, with ancient buildings, trees, churches and college buildings. I could easily spend another day there and just walk around the old town with a cup of coffee and slice of apple pie.

Will eventually post some film prints here.

Second VRLO meetup happened last week, and it was a success. More gear, more simulations, heavy weight companies, and highly enthusiastic VR crowds. Mind Candy was once again kind enough to host this madness in their colourful office just a stone throw off the Old Street.

I managed to try quite a few simulations, two of which while being immersed into HTC Vive. So far my VR experience consists of Oculus Rift DK1 and 2, and Vive is a pretty good leap forward in terms of resolution - 1080x1200 per eye as opposed to 1080x960 on DK2.

The Third Floor presented a Vive simulation while also utilising Vive VR controllers - two of them for both hands. Apparently Vive headset is able to track them, which gives you ability to see your virtual hand movements, as well as being able to pick up virtual things and wave them in the air. I literally spent some time just waiving my hands around. Funny moment was that after each session someone had to put the gear on and put all the virtual objects back to their places, ready for next player.

Vive simulation consisted of a ping pong table and a robotic opponent. Simulation would ask you to press buttons with your hands, pick up the racket, and play ping pong. Then you would gain access to a pong gun, which you could shoot at the moving target.

You might never heard of The Third Floor, but they are the guys making previz work for big Hollywood blockbusters. Currently merged with Framestore. Gravity, anyone?

Framestore were present too - they did a talk and were showcasing Avengers simulation on Samsung Gear VR. Which was pretty cool. They are quite serious about VR experiences, and are saying things like “game engine is the king”. Which is very much true.

Another big studio was The Mill. They went after an alternative approach to interactive storytelling and presented a short 360 degree film which you could watch on an Android tablet. You’d move the tablet around and reveal more of the film as it envelops you in action. I quite enjoyed it, especially when sound would play a nice part suggesting which way to look.

Interesting development in wearables was presented by a company called Pretender Motion. They would attach a special sleeve to your hand, and then one of them would control movements of your hand. I know, right? One of them would wear a similar kind of gear, and hand movements would trigger some sort of electro magnetic impulses targeted at muscles in my hand. With some strong tingling sensation my hand would start mirroring movements without my personal participation. Not much details on the actual tech behind. They are going to try and target VR games as a physical feedback kind of thing.

Inition presented a something I’d call a correct direction into VR filmmaking. Their simulation was a 360 degree spherical stereoscopic film of a London Philharmonia Orchestra performing a classical piece. You’re standing just in front of the director and are free to look around. They are claiming to produce a consistent stereo depth across the image with little stitching errors. It was pretty good I’d say. Sound was following the image, properly binaural, originally recorded with 8 channels and dummy head.

Also played Crystal Rift while wearing Vive. It gives you a new perspective to dungeon crawlers, and is quite entertaining - especially once you master the controls.

Guys behind VRLO meetup are still full of enthusiasm and I can only expect third meetup coming in some near future.

Svema film is a curious unicorn. It used to be the film of my childhood - pretty much the only available film for photography in Soviet Russia. It was not great, but it was local, available and widely popular. It is also discontinued and no longer produced. But thanks to the miracle of Ebay, you can still find some expired stashes of hobbyists selling rolls of Svema.

Few challenges apply. Firstly, the film is provided as a roll without a cassette. That’s how it always used to be. Cassette is reusable, and you are expected to load it with the film yourself. Again, thanks to Ebay, 35mm film cassettes are still available for a very modest price.

Secondly, developing instructions for Svema films recommends using proper Soviet chemicals. This is a tricky one. Ideally you’d want to keep the amount of expired parts in your equation to a bare minimum. Meaning, if you have expired film, it’s a good idea to develop it with proper chemicals and print on a not expired paper.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise - London is full of hidden underground history. Clapham South is one of these slices of history. Situated about 10 meters under the tube station with the same name, built in 1942 to provide shelter from the German bombs. Generally these sort of places are also hidden from the public. Once a year TfL arranges guided tours to a selected locations in London. One of them is often twin station of Charing Cross, stuck somewhere in 1990s. Another one is Clapham South.

One of our stops during Black Forest adventure was a small village of Malsburg-Marzell. It is very quiet, with lots of stars during dark nights, and not much else. There was a tiny town of Kandern just a few kilometres away, and a 1165 m high mountain of Blauen, with huge antenna on top. Both of these places we visited on our first day.

“Let’s go to Basel” I said on the second day, and off we went.

Basel was pretty close too. The only tricky thing was that I promised not to take our rented car out of the Germany. Luckily Basel pretty much spans 3 different countries. You can even cross countries on a comfy tram. With that in mind we headed to the German side of Basel called Weil am Rhein. With a bit of luck we parked just next to the Passerelle des Trois Pays - pedestrian bridge that connects Germany to France over the river of Rhein.

During our recent London React meetup co-creator of GraphQL Nick Schrock did an hour long talk on how they came up with this idea (together with Lee Byron), and why you should use it too. This post will be mostly bulletpoints on his talk, with some pics and my thoughts mixed together. Full talk should be available soon online - Facebook AV team records everything in amazing quality.

What

GraphQL. Have you ever used SQL? Same idea, but so much better. It’s not a storage, despite the graph in the name. It’s a query language. You compose queries and get responses in return.

Not only queries. Also mutations. You can compose a mutation to change something on the backend and send it to the GraphQL endpoint. In return you get a response of the thing you wanted to change, with your changes applied.

On the Web we usually use REST. It’s a standard that each of us interprets differently. During my years of web dev I haven’t met a person that would understand and use REST in precisely same way as myself. Reason might be with me, but apparently I’m not along - lots of people are struggling with REST.

If you’re developing a RESTful API endpoint, you’d usually aim to:

1. make it highly intuitive and easy to use by clients
2. alight with Web standards
3. allow clients to make as little requests as possible to retrieve all data they need

These things often contradict each other. Not to mention that without good documentation it’s almost impossible to start using any RESTful endpoint.

GraphQL allows you to create nested queries of unlimited complexity that are in turn sent to GraphQL server. You can have multiple queries in the same request too. In the ideal world your React application would contact GraphQL endpoint, which would resolve the query and respond with the data of exact shape as the original query. No more fixed inflexible JSON responses that you need to decode and reshape. You request the data in the shape you need, and this is exactly what you get in response.

History

It all started when FB realised that their HTML5 based mobile app doesn’t work. If you remember, there was a period when Zuck proclaimed that well made web app can perform as fast as native mobile app. This all happened around 2012. Didn’t worked out. So Facebook quickly admitted failure and started working on native mobile apps for iOS and Android.

Obviously these apps needed a reliable API. They also turned out to be first clients (in addition to the website) to consume that API. One option would be to create RESTful endpoints. Because of the earlier mentioned reasons that was not the best thing in the world. This is when Nick and Lee started thinking about GraphQL.

You see, if you don’t adapt to the new world fast enough, you can die. Even if you’re a huge and successful company. Try, fail fast, learn, adapt and retry.

GraphQL turned out to be the answer they were looking for. A highly flexible way of requesting data for your client app, which constantly evolves. It’s not 100% perfect, but combined with things like Relay it is quite revolutionary.

Back to the real world

Facebook open sourced GraphQL standard and reference implementation this summer. Turned out that it is highly useful also outside of FB infrastructure. Namely for frontend web developers. You see, we are highly dependent on what is going on with backend. Most often backend is not something we control. Quite often it is something that’s developed by people in a different country, and provided AS IS. You must deal with it. The answer in this situation, surprisingly, is GraphQL.

This was one of the slides in Nick’s presentation. In the ideal world you’d want to:

1. implement a GraphQL enabled API serverside
2. adapt your React app to request GraphQL queries

While b) is something in control of front end dev, a) can very well be out of reach. Meanwhile you can implement a GraphQL endpoint yourself, have your React app consuming it, and have resolvers in that endpoint pointing at the legacy RESTful API(s). Yes, all RESTful endpoints are legacy from now on.

Mobile

One of the things Nick mentioned was React Native apps. You see, FB started using React Native for mobile apps this year. You can use React Native with Relay and GraphQL. Here’s where things start to be interesting - for their Ads Manager app on iOS and Android they were able to re-use 87% of the code. Thanks to React components that are wrapped into Relay containers with data requirements in GraphQL.

This obviously is not limited to just iOS and Android. You can re-use same code for Web too.

87%.

Introspection

I mentioned earlier about need for documentation for any RESTful endpoint. About a week after releasing Relay, FB also released a tool called GraphiQL. It’s a visual tool that hooks to your GraphQL endpoint and allows anyone to explore it. Anyone without a slightest clue about your endpoint can start typing queries, which is surprisingly easy since there is autocomplete feature. You can also ask endpoint for what you can request from it, and get a full schema in return.

This leads to interesting things. GraphiQL is easy enough to be used by UI designers. They can play with queries and see what kind of data can be acquired from the server. Later they can design features based on this real world experience. No more guesses, no lengthy conversations with remote teams on breaking lines. Try, explore, see, learn.

GraphiQL allows you not only provide self describing queries, but also give feedback to developers that some features are deprecated. This will be displayed within the tool itself.

In short, GraphiQL will help you to convince anyone on the idea of GraphQL.

Ecosystem

FB is pushing their vision for web apps of the future. It is React apps, with Relay and GraphQL. Interestingly there are implementation of GraphQL in other languages too, most notably - Scala. This stack makes most sense when you’re tasked with creation of native clients too. React Native currently targets iOS and Android, but you can imagine this spreading to desktop OS:s too in the very near future. Learn once, use everywhere.

Conclusion

In many ways Nick’s talk was a sales pitch, but the audience was right. In the world full of inconsistence RESTful interfaces, that are clunky, inflexible, unintuitive and hard to evolve GraphQL is a breeze of fresh air. Obviously not everyone needs it. But tools are evolving, as well as cloud services. GraphQL backend as a service is already a thing - currently in beta. Tools like this will enable a new generation of apps, and reduce amount of grumpy developers.

Looking forward to it.

London Timescapes short film was premiered as part of competition programme of Beyond 3D film festival in Karlsruhe, Germany. Me and Stanisla managed to get a glimpse of this presentation this Friday, and it was awesome.

It’s my second time on Beyond 3D fest. First one was exactly 2 years ago, film was Helsinki 3D, place - Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie or ZKM of Karlsruhe. This time they’ve migrated towards the historical town centre, into a David Lynch looking cinema called Schauburg Cinema. Red velvet blinds, glass chandeliers and circular symmetrical stairs. Two screens, and competition shorts were displayed on the largest one. I really need to get a local place to proof watch film in a proper cinema before sending it for festivals - it was great nevertheless, but certain things could’ve been optimised specifically for cinema experience.

There isn't much perks for getting selected into competition, but one thing is always for sure - you get fest passes into as much screenings as you can bear. With film fests this is not always great, since they often present you with a bunch of trash you'd rather left unseen. I think with 3D fest situation is slightly better, since the technical barrier is much higher. Having said that, there was still quite a few shorts I'd love to have unseen. It seems that the world of YouTube and Vimeo in a way makes world a huge favour - it's really hard to get through with a highly conceptual but trashy looking, and simply questionable productions. Festivals are their last refuge.

I’ve submitted London Timescapes for Barcelona 3D Music & Film fest now, with some luck it might get some screenings there this December. Might actually go there to catch some fun. Meanwhile expect a free release on Vimeo - going to prepare a special version of the film with slight changes from the one submitted to the festivals.

Happy to submit it to more festivals / screening opportunities, preferably in the original stereoscopic format, or even 4K 3D. Ping me.

I’ve recently acquired a lot with 4 35mm vintage film cameras. Two of them were advertised as “likely functional”, with two more as “likely not functional”. This description was provided by seller based on the fact that shutter was clicking on some cameras, but not clicking on others.

Last week the box arrived, and I started the archeological process. This usually includes:

• Checking camera around and pressing every single toggle / switch on the lens and body
• Rotating all rings on the lens
• Figuring out how to open the camera
• Giving up and finding a pdf with original manual on the Internet
• Winding the shutter and taking blank pictures. See if shutter actually clicks.

With SLR cameras this process also includes unscrewing the lens and checking the mirror. This batch got me 3 SLR cameras, and 1 rangefinder.

Zenit EM

<img src="https://alexsavin.me/photos/2015-11-01-35mm-cameras/IMG_0268.jpg" class="featured" alt=“Zenit EM camera”>

Soviet made SLR, mass produced between 1972-1984. With 58mm Auto Cosmogon lens. Seems to be in full working order - shutter, focus, exposure, aperture - all switching fine. There is a light metering cell, which works fine too - I’ve compared its reading with my portable light meter and they appear to match.

Zenit:s are notoriously inelegant, heavy cameras. A proper USSR design. They are also very rugged, can survive hard conditions and generally long living cameras. There’s very little in its mechanics what can break with time, or because you dropped it on the concrete. This specimen indeed appears to have lens filter bent, with glass and rest of the lens completely intact. One can only imagine what happened to this camera.

<img src="https://alexsavin.me/photos/2015-11-01-35mm-cameras/IMG_0269.jpg" class="featured" alt=“Zenit EM camera”>

Another Zenit I own is ET model, slightly newer and even less elegant. EM seems to have a few professional features like film sensitivity gradation in both ASA and DIN units - still relevant today. Other than that it’s basically same good old Zenit camera - strong, reliable, functional and you can easily use it as a cold weapon in case of danger. Most of the camera and lens is thick solid metal.

London Timescapes is a short documentary film made of timelapses. I’ve been shooting them for the most part of last year, and then processing raw materials for the most part of this year. It took a moment to assemble everything together.

It premiered this October in Karlsruhe, Germany as part of the competition programme of Beyond 3D film festival. Yes, I shot it in native stereoscopic 3D. Hence the trouble. Double the amount of materials, need to constantly synchronise colour grading settings for both eyes. But stereoscopic timelapses is something that you don’t see to often, and I think it was worth it. Especially when you watch it with Oculus Rift.

Digital photography is easy and quick. It doesn’t take much time to snap a pic and move to the next one. I think this is the reason why more of us are moving back to analog film. Slow photography forces you to spend some time with the subject, appreciate the moment, be in that moment. Timelapsing is the same thing. You go to the unknown place, discover it, then set a shot and start filming. It takes anywhere between 15 and 45 min to finish that shot. Plenty of time to appreciate the subject. You might end up taking another shot at the same location, but quite often you would move to the next one. One shot, one location. That’s also a general rule when shooting film.

Timelapsing on busy streets of London turned out to be not that huge of a deal. I did a bit of research, and general advice was that you can film anywhere you want, but if someone asks you to stop, you indeed should do so. On two occasions this happened to me. First was in Greenwich Naval College - after me spending almost 2 hours of timelapsing there someone finally noticed my tripod and asked for permission to film there. Tripod is basically a red flag for differentiating between commercial and hobby photography. Second time was next to the Kings Cross railways station - again with a delay of about half an hour they asked me to move off the grounds of the train station square.

Busy streets and crowds are also manageable. Generally crowds are following certain patterns and are moving in a limited amount of directions. There are plenty of corners even on a busiest street where you can park your tripod and not be an obstacle. Takes a few moments to find that spot. With stereoscopic photography this is more tricky, since you have to maintain certain distance to the closest subject, and not let anyone get closer. Long exposure time helps.

For the next project I will probably try 360 degree timelapsing. With 4 cameras to cover the full panorama and 5th camera to point at the sky, this should be something quite suitable for VR goggles. And VR is going to be hot topic next year.

London can be overwhelming. It is huge, constantly changing beast that never sleeps. It takes years to explore this place. This project was a good start for me. There will be more.

Barcelona

London Timescapes short film is selected to participate in 3D Film Music festival in Barcelona. This is second time when I’m participating in this festival, and first time when I’ll be able to be there in person. No doubt Barcelona will be great in any time of year. The plan is to attend second day of the festival and spend the rest of the weekend shooting film and eating tapas.

Meanwhile 2D version of this film hit 2000 views on Vimeo, which is a huge deal for me.

Fallout 4

This highly anticipated game was finally released. To my surprise it refused to launch. Turned out that if PC is your platform, then NVidia GTX550 is the minimum supported graphics card. Mine GTX 295 was out of the game unfortunately. I was thinking about upgrading it anyway, since latest Oculus VR drivers were requiring something modern and powerful. GeForce site recommends GTX970 as the minimum configuration for VR.

Two days later I got upgraded to GTX980, and Fallout 4 launcher decided that this time it can run on ultra settings. It looks indeed very pretty. Funnily enough last time I upgraded my PC rig was in 2010 to get Fallout 3 to run. Graphics and gameplay are bumped up quite a bit, with many usability issues now gone. In a way it is simplified for a Twitter generation, with max 4 options of dialog and most of the character settings now turned into perks. It sort of makes sense. Classic Fallout games are still there, still available and playable. But for modern generations Fallout 4 delivers very well in terms of more action and less boilerplate.

Mamiya RB67

I always was curious about 70mm film format, and now I have camera to shoot on it. Mamiya RB67 is big, heavy, full metal block that supposedly can shoot amazing pictures. This remains to be seen. Film type is called 120, which is a bit confusing. It’s not 120mm wide, but more like 69mm. It is indeed medium format, not to be confused with 35mm film or large format, which operates on sheet film of 4x5 inch size (and larger). One roll of 120 film can shoot up to 10 pictures.

Mamiya camera is amazing because you can disassemble it into blocks and assemble again with different blocks. Film magazine is fully detachable and nothing stops you from having multiple magazines. You can easily have WB and colour films in 2 magazines, and switch when needed. It also rotates independently from camera body between portrait and landscape modes.

My plan for now is to shoot couple of rolls and then develop them at home. Fingers crossed.

GraphQL

We’ve officially started using GraphQL at my current project. Not only it helps us to consolidate our comm logic to external services, but also is a great learning experience. Big plan is to use GraphQL server side and Redux client/server side.

I’m also preparing a talk on practical GraphQL in large scale applications. Maybe also on small scale. Plan is to tell few real life stories, do an intro into history of GraphQL, touch on Relay, maybe show our blog engine using Relay. I’ll probably do a small app with help of Reindex beta. Talk itself is happening on 3rd of December in Brighton, and I’ll be rehearsing it one week earlier at Red Badger HQ in form of our lunch-n-learn session. Should be fun.

I’ve started now seriously thinking about owning a bike. Something foldable but relatively speedy and nice to use. City bikes are brilliant to some extent, but there are occasional moments of frustration when all docking stations in the City are full. This is when I remembered that our employer is indeed enrolled into Cycle Scheme some year back.

Took me a few moments to figure out the whole thing. It is not super simple as their site promises - there are a few catches that you should be aware of.

Catch #1: It is not a discount for a bike. It is basically a (legitimate) tax evasion scheme. It works in a way that 100% of full bike price is split in 12 and deducted each month from your salary for a year. Before taxes. This is where you save. Bigger your tax, more you save by reducing your incomes before taxes. This is not a bad thing - there aren’t many ways of legitimately reducing your income before taxes, and my financial adviser recommended grasping every single one of them.

Catch #2: Max price for a bike is £1000. You have to fit full bike with (optional) accessories into this sum. This means there is certain limit to how much you can cut from your taxes.

Catch #3: You don’t own bike for the next 4 years. For the first year it is your company that owns the bike and rent it back to you, while deducting full price of the bike from your salary every month. After the first year, assuming you want to keep the bike, you have to pay extra - 7% of the original price over £500, or 3% if less than #500 - to the Cycle Scheme company. This company is interesting on itself - they use tax exemption rule to promote Cycle Scheme, while helping other companies with the paper work. It looks like Cycle Scheme Ltd is for-profit company that uses UK bureaucracy as an excuse to promote their services.

Catch #4: If you are planning on changing your employer during first year, outstanding price of the bike will be deducted from your final pay. Same happens if you get fired. You will likely loose your bike too, since you don’t own it. At this point you just paid full price for something you still don’t own.

Catch #5: After first year and for the next 3 years it is Cycle Scheme Ltd that owns the bike and rents it back to you. After you deposit a refundable 3-7% extra of the original bike price. It is only refundable in a way that if you decide to give up your bike during this period, it will be refunded. If you still want to keep your bike, Cycle Scheme will transfer the ownership to you after that extended period of 3 years is over. This is when you realise why you had to pay that extra 7% of the price - this is how much your bike is worth now, after 4 years since you bought it.

Obviously, if you decide to leave the country during these 4 years, bike stays in UK.

So, who might benefit from this scheme? If you don’t plan to leave your employer during next year, and leaving UK during next 4 years, and you really really want brand new bike, and it cost under £1000, and you are paying lots of taxes - Cycle Scheme might be good choice. You’d save about £400 off the list price, and you get a zero interest credit for a year - in other words you don’t need to scrape full price of the bike out of your savings.

On the other hand, if you happen to have private health insurance - check for the benefits they offer. Most likely than not they can match Cycle Scheme savings in the form of cash back or plain discount.

Last week me and Stanisla spent 3 beautiful days in Barcelona. Sunny weather, blue sky, amazing vegetarian food and 3D film festival.

London Timescapes was selected for the competition, which was awesome on itself. Festival was held over the course of 3 days, we arrived on the very last day when they had screenings of the winning entries and awards. To a huge surprise they announced my film as a winner in a short 3D documentary category. After that London Timescapes got screened on a largest screen ever. Honestly, I never expected it to be projected on a such scale. If I’d knew of such possibility, I’d probably put a bit less of stereoscopic depth into it. You know, stereoscopic films are very sensitive to the size of the screen.

Very last screening of the festival was “Barcelona, LA ROSA DE FOC” - feature length documentary about the city. Hugely ambitious project that took over 3 years to complete, shot in native 3D with lots of CGI added in post. Whole film is basically a camera flying from one scene to another with no traditional cuts. Sound was mastered in Dolby Atmos. It looks and sounds stunning on a big screen. Funny thing is that it’s not really available anywhere to see. I hope they’ll find proper distribution soon.

London Timescapes is an award winning film now, and it is also very first film award for myself. You can watch it in glorious HD on Vimeo - there is fresh new build available now, with updated music by Dominik Piatek. I’d love to distribute 3D version of the film more, but it is not easy. Ping me if you’re in London and want to see it in stereo. Or if you’d like a private link to the stereoscopic side-by-side version.

If you are a happy owner of Google Cardboard, or even Oculus Rift kit, there is also a VR special edition of the film. It’s not like you’ll be able to look around, but you’ll get a native stereoscopic experience with proper aspect ratio optimised for viewing with VR headsets.

What’s next? The plan is to get 2 more SLR cameras and create a 360 degree rig. With 4 or 5 cameras I should be able to film proper spherical timelapses for VR. Let’s see how this goes. 3D Film Fest had dedicated category to VR films already this year, hopefully I’ll be able to submit something for 2016 programme.

It’s been another year now, and a new chapter of one second a day film project is finished. Check it out here. Mainly London, but also bits of California, Corfu, Germany, Barcelona and various spots in England.

Title picture for this post is made by capturing a snapshot of the video every second and transforming it into a vertical strip of colours. Horizontal strip effectively represents the whole year, with vertical strips being days of that year.

I guess my biggest inspiration for the last year was Casey Neistat’s daily vlog project. Stuff he is doing on a daily basis (without getting much sleep in between) is fascinating. I’m not really in a position to start proper daily vlogging, but I’d certainly be making advances in that direction. Even one second of video a day requires some efforts, disciplines you to look for shots.

Interestingly, live photos feature on the new iOS can be a great help (or cheat). It’ll film 1.5 seconds of footage on 15fps framerate in parallel to every single picture you take. Quality is not super great but could be enough to get your project going.

Thanks to elves on this Christmas, I’m bumping now resolution of the video to 4K (which is ridiculous and awesome at the same time). Year 2016, here we come.

Moving from Finland to UK and London in particular was one of the biggest changes in my life. Comparable events probably include my initial move from a small town in Russia to Finland when I was 15, and then much later my move to Helsinki. London is practically a separate country living by its own laws. You can tell that rest of UK is very different. London is a huge beast, which requires certain ways of taming. Its rewards are huge, but so are expenses. I guess my general feeling at this point, 2 years after moving here, is that life in megapolis is something that everyone should try at some point in life. You might stick around for little or long, but the amount of experience you gain is hard to get any other way.

Here are various notes and feelings on spending 2 years here. My general point of reference is life in Finland and Helsinki, since that is what we left behind.

It’s important to get out of town once in a while. London can be almost limitless in terms of activities and entertainment, but it also affects your head. At some point you’ll notice that you become more of an asshole than a caring human being. Especially to strangers. To prevent this, get out of town at least once a month.

You might notice that travelling to another country can be faster and more convenient than getting around British island. We’re living in Bethnal Green and are lucky enough to have direct bus to Stansted airport, which is a main hub for Ryanair. It is also faster and much more comfortable to get to Stansted on a bus than to Heathrow on a tube. Another time-space paradox of London.

Scotland is awesome, but for the same price of time and money you could (potentially) get to Iceland.

Wales is somewhere far far away.

Life / work balance is important. Work never ends, projects are never truly finished and things can forever be improved. There are always tools to learn and talks to listen (or given). Depending on your situation, you can be happy or less happy doing your work. Even when you have chosen a profession that you love, some projects can suck all the fun out of it. As a consequence, you start hating what you do. But even if your job brings you endless amount of happiness, you might spend way too much time doing it and as consequence your personal relations will suffer.

So, in one word - balance. Super important, hard to master, needs to be constantly practiced.

Read more books. Spend time with friends. Occasionally do nothing for a day or few.

Do exotic things that you like. In a past year I’ve discovered a local darkroom for analog photo printing, and a virtual reality meetup. Both places are full of people that are happy to share their experiences. Both things would not be possible in many other locations around the world. Thanks to its enormity, London can provide ways of satisfying most niche interests on a very high quality level. Not only you get to find courses, workshops or talks on great topics, but they also will be presented by the very best professionals.

If you love cinema and analog photography, London is the place to be.

Both Amazon and Ebay are very accessible here. If you’re into vintage film cameras or sewing machines, Ebay is amazing source for getting everything you want, for a very affordable price. There are lots of sellers in UK that would only deliver within the UK. On a flip side you’ll loose count to the lucky finds, and will get a large basket to basically pile it up with treasures.

Finding a new larger place to live will become a never stopping obsession.

While local dropzone is open around the year, weather in December is not good for skydiving. My dropzone near the village of Headcorn, Kent is open almost every day until Christmas, and then every weekend until March I believe, after which it is again open every day. However, winter in Britain is generally wet, windy and cloudy. It is not as dark and cold as it used to be in Finland, but the runways are made of grass here and they been regularly shut down because of wet weather. This was not the case some few (tens of) years ago, according to the locals. Occasionally you stumble on pictures of Bethnal Green from December 1960 covered in snow. Things used to be different around here some 50 years ago.

I really miss proper forest and Finnish sauna. On forest - there are some amazing parks around London featuring wildlife and tall trees. I’m sure we’ll probably find eventually a national park at a reasonable distance from the town. But no luck so far. On sauna - I found one this year. Our company was celebrating anniversary and hired a whole island with amenities for a weekend. It included proper Finnish sauna module, with hot stones and steam. Weirdly it didn’t included shower. But there was open air pool next to it. Most of my colleagues in London never experienced sauna before, and are baffled by my stories about it.

It might as well be that closest proper forest is Black Forest in Germany. It takes only 1 hour to get to Frankfurt Hahn from Stansted, and another hour of driving to get to the Black Forest area.

Recently it’s been a huge challenge to concentrate and invest into things. In my experience biggest pay off happens when you manage to invest for a long period of time into a single thing, whatever this thing may be. London will try to distract you in a million different ways. Another trick it’ll try to do is to get you consume stuff instead of producing your own. There is enormous amount of quality things to consume here.

It’s important not to be a dick. Somehow living in a large crowded place where many are rude and pushy makes you think that being a little bit of a dick is somehow ok. It’s not really. More importantly, if you help other people with their luggage on the steep stairs of the tube station (while guiding them to the left hand side of the stairs), they might think that all local people are like this here. It’s super easy to create an impression that everyone is a dick, but same is also true for the opposite.

There is city farm right behind MI6 head quarters. They have alpacas. You can hand feed them. From now on, all James Bond films will never feel the same to you.

London is a dream place to be if you love cinema. Not only you get to stumble on film sets while biking to the office in the morning, but also there are all sort of events and places to watch films. Last year Christopher Nolan released Interstellar in IMAX 70mm 15 perf format, which is considered biggest frame size resolution-wise. It is rather awesome, but most of cinemas including IMAX are not equipped anymore to project such stock. BFI IMAX was literally one of few places to do so in the country.

Tarantino was apparently impressed by another rare film format - ultra wide Panavision. With the aspect ratio of 2.76:1 it was originally projected on a curved screen using 3 synchronised projectors. If memory serves me, they also originally shot films by using 3 x 35mm cameras with conventional 4x3 aspect ratio. This proved to be highly inefficient and was later replaced with a single camera, anamorphic lenses and 65mm film. Only 10 films were released so far in Ultra Panavision 70 format between 1957 and 1966. Hateful 8 is officially 11th film to be released in this rare format.

As Tarantino explained, considering the rarity of format it would be naive to think that film would be released across the world in Panavision 70 only. However you could do a so called roadshow - special event with overture, intermission, specially printed programme and extended version of the film. This used to be a thing back in 1960th, and sort of died nowadays. It was back in a time when audience would put on a dress when going to cinema. There are 5 locations in UK currently screening Hateful 8 in Panavision 70, and London got one of them - Odeon on Leicester Square. One of the very few 70mm projectors in town was put back to work.

Leicester Square is full of cinemas, even its tube station tiles made to look like film. I’ve been there precisely twice, both times before we actually moved to London. This city is full of amazing cinemas, but in all the honesty, Leicester Square is not the place to be. I guess my biggest beef with Odeon is the size of the screen compared to the size of the auditory. Nowadays all modern cinemas feature steep stairs and seating plan raising up - at the same time not too far from the screen itself. In the old days the screen was considered large enough if you could see it from the back. In Odeon Leicester Square when you sit at the very back of the cinema, you can cover the screen with your thumb. This was probably ok back in the days, but by modern measures you are suppose to be immersed into the screen (and sound). IMAX is the obvious example, but also Vue and Cineworld are following this idea with super large screens.

Speaking of old school cinemas - one of best and most authentic cinema experience in London you can find at the Olympic Studios in Barnes. A former legendary sound recording studio, nowadays refurbished into a most beautiful place to watch films. They also have Dolby Atmos. Red curtains are something like straight from David Lynch films.

Screen size at Odeon Leicester Square is decent, but far from being huge. You have to compensate this by sitting closer to the screen. It is also not curved. To accommodate ultra Panavision aspect ratio of pretty much 3:1 they had to crop the screen from top and bottom. In practice this means you're getting less screen space compared to the conventional aspect ratios - 1.85:1 or 2.39:1. In all the honesty there aren’t much original ultra wide screen cinemas left in the world. Wikipedia lists 3 of them (one is surprisingly located in West Yorkshire, not so far from Leeds).

Before start of the film there was something called overture. It’s again part of the old way of screening films, before ads and trailers. Overture would be printed on film with music, and would be projected while people are taking their seats. Music would also be part of the official soundtrack of the upcoming feature, putting audience into a proper mood. In practice however Odeon showed normal batch of ads, followed by trailers to all sort of films, including Batman vs Superman and Independence Day 2. Generally this part takes up to half an hour, at which point the audience is properly tired and waiting for the film to start. This is when overture kicked in. I’d say it was 3-4 awkward mins of music and a static picture. Unless you have read on history of cinema, you would be properly confused at this point.

Film starts with a bright snowy landscapes, and this is where another curious thing happens. The way films are projected on the screen is that half of the time you are watching darkness. A single frame is projected for a fraction of a second, then a rotary disc shutter closes the picture, film is advanced forward, and a new frame is projected. This happens 24 times a second, which gives you, well, 24 fps or 24 Hz refresh rate. This also produces a noticeable flicker. It is especially present on bright pictures. Like snowy landscapes, which are effectively bright white light flickering at 24 Hz. In digital cinema flicker doesn’t happen - pictures are still changing 24 times a second but the part when screen would be dark between pictures is absent nowadays. Our brain is smart enough to adapt to film flicker, and it was perfectly fine with it since the invention of cinema. Somehow for the past years of digital cinema I forgot how proper film flicker looks like. This is probably also true for Tarantino - otherwise he would put less bright scenes in the beginning of the film, or would even abandon idea of snowy landscapes completely.

Most of the landscapes are shown during first quarter of the film. After that we arrive to an undisclosed location, and the rest of it happens indoors. It is well shot, and things are often put in the opposite sides of the super wide screen. But for me indoors action doesn’t justify the chosen format. It could as well be shot on 35mm. Once Upon a time in the West is shot on 35mm, and it didn’t made it less epic. Most of it is shot outdoors, occasionally featuring places like Grand Canyon. Funnily enough, they share the same music composer.

After about 2/3 of the film it was intermission time. Lights went on, and people started moving. I have to mention that Odeon Leicester Square was full on this day. Considering that length of the intermission was about 10 min, queueing to the bathroom or getting more refreshments before the film would resume was out of the question. However everyone decided to try. A stranger dude next to me brought a big plate of nachos about 5 min into the part 2. Pretty soon he regretted his decision.

You see, part 2 is when all the bloody action starts happening. Film suddenly becomes very brutal, and this is when you recall R rating. Nacho dude forgot about his meal until the end titles. I was strongly regretting we haven’t left the cinema during the intermission. Watching bloody violence on 70mm ultra wide Panavision is not great. It’s pretty awful. I generally not able to enjoy such scenes - but then again it could as well be intention of the director - to shock the audience. In which case it indeed worked.

I deliberately waited a week to write few notes on Hateful 8 roadshow. For an attempt to revive old film format I give props to the team of filmmakers and Odeon. For the film itself - well I’d rather see something else. I’m one of those guys believing that cinema is suppose to deliver you into a state of something transcendental, enlightening, higher realisation. Something cathartic. Interstellar used 70mm 15perf format to achieve this. Hateful 8 didn’t.

And I’m going to West Yorkshire to see some more of Cinerama.

Couple of weeks ago we moved from Bethnal Green to Walthamstow, and it was our first big move inside London since we moved here 2 years ago from Finland. E2 to E17. All post indexes are indicating direction from the central London, and in a way by a greatness of number you can tell how far it is.

Prehistory

I remember the original plan when moving here was to find temporary small place, cheap but not too far from the City. Something around £800 / month. Meanwhile we’d settle down, save some money and move on after 6 months or so to a more decent place.

There were few fundamental flaws in this idea which I didn’t spot originally. To start with, lots of people are flatsharing here. If you’d be up for a shared flat, it is possible to find a room for under a grand / month. Decent room would cost around £1000 and would be located in zone 1-2. There seems to be a hidden agenda of most agencies to get people into flatsharing for as long as possible, hence driving rent prices even higher for a single flat.

Separate decent flat with 1 bedroom in zone 2 starts at around £1200. There are obviously anomalies for less, but there always will be something wrong with the place. Or you are simply very lucky person and landlord needs to find a tenant super fast. Our previous 1 bedroom flat in Bethnal Green was 1230£ / month. Plus £77 council tax - which is quite low by local standards. The reason being that flat itself was tiny. Living room was effectively combined with kitchen, and bedroom was a size of a good clothing cabinet by Finnish measures. There was also a nice view towards skyscrapers of the City, and a ridiculously short commute of 10 min on a city bike to Old Street. 20 min to Clerkenwell.

Another thing is that most of contracts start at 12 months minimum term. If you decide to move earlier, you have to keep paying the rent until landlord finds a new tenant. After first year you can continue living in the same place without contract renewal with agency - there is a law about automatic tenancy continuation, but the agency will try to get you sign contract renewal for extra fees in the end of each fixed term. In any case - finding a temporary place for less than a year is hard.

We ended up spending 2 full years in our flat at Bethnal Green. It’s a decent solution for an “outgoing” type of life, but doesn’t really offer any perspective. Towards the end of 2015 Stanisla started looking for a new place. Flat hunting is another sensitive topic for any person living in a sizeable megapolis. Stanisla was spending every free minute online, refreshing new flats and sending out viewing requests. A decent option would quickly gather lots of people willing to see it, and agency would arrange a “pillow fight” day - when all 33 people would show up at the same time to view the property. We were aiming at something with 2 bedrooms and some sort of a private garden. Such properties would start at around £1400 in zone 3. Add council tax of about £150, higher utility bills and £140 monthly cost of a tube card.

After some months of fruitless search I remembered that most of badgers of Red Badger are living in a fairytale place called Walthamstow - with some exceptions living in Leyton. Stow is a bit off town, still zone 3, with a Victoria line and overground trains straight to Liverpool street. One of my wishes was also bikeability to the office. Google Maps promised that you can indeed bike in under an hour from Stow.

Stanisla kept looking until Christmas when she had a breakdown and thoughts of doubt about finding anything decent for a remotely affordable price. Then suddenly after New Year holidays she found this place - 3 bedrooms, small private garden, 5 min walk from overground and tube stations. £1325 / month.

Paperwork

There is a lot of bureaucracy involved when trying to rent a flat. Generally, if you like the place, the process goes as follows:

1. Pay the reservation fee, preferably right away. This way you express your interest in renting the property, which in turn kicks off the whole process. £500 in our case. I suspect it is non-refundable, as pretty much all fees in here.
2. Get through the referencing process. Agency would hire another company to do that. Referencing company will aim at knowing everything about you, will phone your employer, bank and current landlord. You must have good relations with your current landlord for this very reason. You will also have to provide an extensive report on your income, and they will verify this with your employer.
3. After successful referencing the agency will ask you to immediately pay full remaining monies consisting of 6 weeks rent deposit, current month rent and referencing fees imposed by agency. It’s a small fortune comparable to a budget of a small country.
4. You sign the actual renting contract. It will consist of 11 pages listing your obligations and 1 page of agency and landlord’s obligations. No pets.
5. And then you get the keys.

In our case the agency ringed me 10 min later and told that they gave us wrong keys. At that time we were choosing nesting box at a local Wilko.

The move

Moving within boundaries of London turned out to be easy. There is a special online service where you describe scale of the disaster, and men with vans are competing to provide best price and promise of a service. Stanisla honestly described 11 cast iron sewing machines, 4th floor of the original flat and lots of heavy boxes with books. She also mentioned that she will not be carrying boxes. We went on with the proposal of 2-3 men with big van for £300. Feedback thread was full of “amazing service” and “polite movers” messages. We pre-paid £60 and agreed on 8am Sunday to start the operation. Another slot would be 2pm, and that’s because they are moving 2 houses on a normal day. Impressive.

Saturday we spent packing everything that wasn't already packed by Stanisla during previous 2 weeks. Our tiny apartment featured quite a lot of stuff in the end. At some point we ran out of boxes and did a trip to the local Tesco. It didn’t sell any moving boxes, but they had bunch of boxes just lying on the floor ready to be thrown into rubbish. They gave us all boxes for free as much as we could lift.

Men and van arrived perfectly on time, loaded all boxes, furniture and sewing machines into a van in about 2 hours. First part was tricky since you had to climb all the way to the 4th floor. As they were carrying boxes, we cleaned the place and threw the rubbish away. Then we moved to Walthamstow, where they unloaded everything in probably less then one hour. Stanisla was steering the unloading process by guiding boxes into correct locations. It was before midday when the operation was fully completed.

Aftermath

After a week here this seems to be a huge success. Area is very nice. We met our neighbours and they invited us to a local concert of classical music. We actually went there - it was in the old church on the other side of Walthamstow, proper 2 hours concert with drinks during the interval.

We have 4 rooms now with quite a bit of potential. 2 of them are quite tiny, and 2 others are slightly bigger. There is also a garden which we can observe but cannot visit - door is completely stuck and would not open. Apparently it’s a common issue during winters.

I’m getting a dedicated mancave room. Considering about “VR research” sign on the door.

We also found an attic, which was completely unexpected. Thanks to the fact that we’re living on the top floor, there is a proper attic with lots of space. It is so big that someone could probably sleep in there during summer.

Kitchen is also alright. You can actually sit in it and have some lunch.

I will write a separate post on changing address with banks, services and utilities. Stay tuned.

Don’t get me wrong, I (mostly) enjoy new fibre broadband from Virgin. Last week I got it installed and working. The process however was slightly different from the Virgin’s 5 min installation guide. So I wanted to put it all together, here. The honest guide.

It took 2 hours and 2 calls to the support. Then it worked. Not to worry, here’s how to avoid those calls.

Pre-requisites

Box from Virgin Media arrived with Super Hub and cables. You already have Virgin socket in the house.

Part 1 when you activate The Signal

Connect everything. Don’t turn on the Hub. Make the call to the Virgin automated number. Have your Virgin account number and area reference number on hand. Both can be found in the email that was sent prior to the box dispatch. You’ll find them on top of the email. Area reference code is 2 digit long.

If you’re confused at any point during this automated call, the robots will ask you random characters from your Virgin account password (have it at your hands too) and then will connect you to the human. Virgin humans been very helpful (and patient) with me.

But generally you only need your account number and area number. As soon as you type those, The Signal should be activated.

Part 2 when you try to activate the activation

Once The Signal is activated, you can boot up the Super Hub. It will take ages to boot, but then you should be able to see Internet light all green. Don’t be happy - it’s a trap. There is no Internet yet.

As the guidebook will warn you, before you get Internet you have to navigate to Virgin Media / activation site and activate everything once again.

Tricky part for me was that it didn’t worked on Chrome. I don’t know why. You also are not sure when is the right time to try. Ok, if you’re on Mac - open up Safari and try there. Safari worked nicely and managed to open the activation site.

After navigating through and registering myself again it displayed a message saying something about settings being updated on the Super Hub. The Hub indeed slowly rebooted, and…

Part 3 when Super Hub is waaay to cool to be super

Super Hub was blinking the Internet light for some time. Then it blinked red Internet. Then it rebooted again. This loop continued for some time. No Internet.

At this point I called the support for the second time. They checked things and asked for how long exactly I’ve been waiting before calling them. I said - 17 minutes. They said “your Super Hub is one of those newer models, so it takes up to an hour to connect. Call us back in an hour.”

This turned out to be true. After about 40 mins of reboots Super Hub started providing The Internet.

How I was imagining it to work

This is a bit silly, but I know some companies are investing serious budgets into user research. Here it goes, free.

Open up the box, connect Super Hub to Virgin socket. Boot up. Internet.

The Signal should be activated automatically on the same day when box is dispatched. No user action should be involved. Also no silly “navigate to our activation site before you get full Internet” thing should ever be there.

That’s great, but how fast is the internet after all?

Not bad. It drops to 5 Mbit during peak hours between 20 and 23 o’clock, which is a bummer. Otherwise it is in double digits, and gets to an honest 100 Mbit during night and early morning. We live in London E17 by the way.

During our recent trip I’ve tried making and posting short video logs every day for the whole duration of the trip. It turned out to be 8 days long, and hence 8 episodes of the vlog are now available online.

In a way this felt like a filmmaking hackathon. There is only one basic rule - every night you must cut and release new episode whatever the cost. On average post production on each episode took about 2 hours, which often meant I had 2 hours less for sleeping. Nevertheless, it was a huge fun. Two of my colleagues - Roman and Kadi - were on the same trip, and luckily tolerated myself pointing camera at them and occasionally stopping in the middle of the busy street to film random things.

In this blogpost I want to gather some ideas and words on how it all went. And maybe put a few notes on future improvements.

Hardware

I’ve used new Canon EOS 750D camera attached to Gorillapod, with external mic by RØDE. The mic turned out to be much larger than I anticipated (always check the specs!). It also required its own 9V battery. This led to 2 consequences:

• Increased overall rig weight
• Attention from the strangers on the street

I generally aim at the least attention on the streets. DSLR camera itself doesn’t draw looks anymore, but having a huge mic attached to it does change things. Suddenly you are perceived as a videographer, and a professional one. This eventually led to the fact that I mostly used the big mic indoors only, and reverted to the built in mic for streets. It worked rather well, except when it was really windy.

Combination of 750D with Gorillapod (and Joby’s head) was a huge success. I had no camera strap, and carried camera by having the tripod in my hands all the time. This turned out to be quite handy. At any moment I could quickly setup either a handheld shot, or put the tripod on the ground and film timelapses. Each of the Gorillapod chains on its legs also contain rubber rings which makes it super reassuring to hold with just one hand.

Camera

750D can shoot full HD video at 25fps. As usual it packs it into H.264. Not exactly cinema grade, but more than enough for YouTube HD. Having a photo lens in front actually contributes to cinematic experience much more than uncompressed 12bit colour - you can have selective focus and nice blurring any time you want.

This leads to another issue - focusing. In the beginning video capable DSLR:s had no auto focus whatsoever. This camera does feature automatic focus during the video. It is however not great. With handheld filming you often end up shooting something close, and then changing perspective to a landscape. It takes a few seconds for the camera to figure out that the scene has changed, and another few seconds to adjust the focus. What can drive you mad is that first camera tries to adjust the focus the wrong way, and then goes all the way back, slowly.

Auto focusing is even less reliable in the night. Bright lights confuse it a lot.

I ended up pre-planning shots in my head and then often switching to the manual focus and using focus ring on the lens. It takes a bit of skills to operate it fast, but it does work. Another life hack is to turn the auto focusing off and then on again. There is a touch button on the viewfinder for this specific purpose.

Music

All music is Creative Commons and is from Soundcloud. Their advanced search is not super great, but it does allow you to search for tracks that allow you sharing and re-using. Soundcloud been my source of nice free music also for all the podcasts.

Editing

All the editing is done in Adobe Premiere. It is possible to use pure trackpad for that, but I think having a mouse speeds things and precision a lot. Despite editing fast you still want the video to be cut precisely on the music beat.

I’ve spent roughly half of the time doing draft cut, and then going over it again and cutting out all the unnecessary parts. Generally each episode is 5 to 9 min long. As some directors say, cut away everything you absolutely can’t live without.

Streets experience

We’ve spent most of our trip around San Francisco area. Our base was at Inner Richmond, which was a very nice an quiet area. Central city is much weirder and felt less safe. A friend of mine after seeing the rig asked me to take an Uber (it was late) and not carry it around the city.

Having two friends more or less constantly around helps a lot to feel safe when strolling Mission district at night. I think there was only couple of occasions when I was only by myself, and on one of those a stranger old women came to me and started asking with a huge suspicion in her voice why am I filming wires on the street?

Feedback on structure

Constructive feedback on the structure of episodes was mostly around things that I’ve accidentally promise on the video and then would never show. Obviously we had no script and everything was just happening and I was filming whatever was around. I also tried not to film the food we were eating, conference we were attending, and the concert we were going to out of town. On occasion the episode would become more or less random.

I think structure is something that should be improved going forward. The aim is to produce a small film every day, and film does imply certain rules.

Future

I’ve certainly enjoyed doing this. I’m not going to do this every day. But on occasions I think this is a great way of having fun.

For my recent trip to California I decided to try something new and not bring any cash across the border. Instead I’d bring Mondo and Revolut cards. Latter promised no fees when withdrawing cash from ATM:s across the world.

In case you have no clue, both Mondo and Revolut are London based fintech startups. Mondo is generally based around the idea of slick mobile app and instant notifications, while Revolut is a multi currency card, again, with a nice mobile app and Google-grade exchange rates (meaning - you get same rate as if you’d Google it). I’ve been using both of them in the UK for about a month, but so far never abroad. Upcoming trip to the US sounded like a nice excuse to try them both in the hostile environment of travel.

As soon as we arrived to the San Francisco International airport, I’ve located an ATM (Bank of America) and inserted Revolut card. PIN code worked, and the ATM asked for how much I’d like to withdraw. I’ve put $400. The ATM started making noises, and moment later displayed “unknown error” message, apologised for the inability to provide any cash and ejected the card. Second moment later I got notification in the Revolut mobile app that $401.50 were deducted from my account. No cash were dispensed.

“Oh well”, I thought, “let’s try another ATM”. Minute later I found another ATM (Bank of America) and retried the procedure, but this time with just $100. The story repeated precisely - money got deducted from my account, but no cash and unknown error message. The ATM also encouraged me to call Bank of America.

I was pretty much about to leave the airport, but then stumbled on the third ATM, which was not from Bank of America. “Maybe Bank of America doesn’t like multi currency prepaid cards from England?” I though while trying my luck for the 3rd time. This time it worked. Unfortunately the ATM (I’m struggling to remember who it belonged to, it was next to the money exchange counter) withdrew money from my £GBP account and applied its own conversion rate, which was far from Google rate. While I was trying to withdraw $100, it actually took the equivalent of $115 in British pounds.

At this point we left the airport, and I finally had some cash.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining - I’m just documenting exactly what happened. The world of finances is full of traps, and navigating this sea of piranhas is tricky, even when you have cheat codes.

I haven’t tried withdrawing cash with Mondo card, but I was paying a lot with contactless Mondo. Exchange rate I got with Mondo payments was basically Google grade, even despite the fact there was only GBP account and they had to apply conversion for each payment.

Revolut card doesn’t have contactless option. In the US more then often they would be able to charge you by simply swiping your card. However things has recently changed - in places like Target they got fancy new terminals that are capable of detecting that your card is indeed chip card. Such terminal would ask you to insert the chip card and enter PIN code. With Revolut card I suddenly started getting rejected PIN code entries, even when I was 100% sure that the code is correct.

Quick contact to the Revolut support (which is fast and excellent) revealed that I have to “activate” the card by putting it into the ATM, entering correct PIN code and checking the balance. It is worth mentioning that I have anticipated such behaviour and have activated the card while still in the UK. It seems that you have to activate the card in each particular country separately when travelling.

Indeed after another successful trial of withdrawing money in the local ATM of the Target (which also took $6 of fees), Revolut card started working perfectly fine. While in San Francisco there are surprisingly little places where you are unable to use cards for payment nowadays. The only exception I can think of was CalTrain tickets machine, which was declining both Mondo and Revolut cards, and I had to produce some of good old cash.

Back to the story with $400 lost in the void. I pretty much immediately posted Revolut support, and they replied that indeed money is frozen on the account, and will be automatically released back to me in about 10 days. They also told the only way of speeding up the process is contact the ATM owner and ask for a special code. I called Bank of America on the next morning, they were very polite, but basically told me same story and couldn’t speed up the process in any way. 5 days later money was released and appeared back on my USD Revolut account.

One thing I realised half way is that Revolut allows you "fee free" cash withdrawal only up to certain fair use limit - $700 in case of US dollars. Frozen money was counted towards fair use and maybe that was the reason for all those ATM fees? I've contacted the support, and they confirmed that I indeed overused the fair use limit. I've explained the frozen money issue, they agreed to refund. Moment later I got $1.58 refunded back to my account.

There was another funny glitch with Bank of America. You remember when I tried for the second time to withdraw $100 from they ATM? 3 days later they charged my GBP account on Revolut for this amount, but then refunded it back… to my USD Revolut account.

Some conclusions

Depending on the location you might not even need too much cash nowadays. For cashless transactions both Revolut and Mondo are quite excellent. Just remember to PIN activate both of them (I assume Mondo will require the same procedure). For cash however ATM:s will impose a withdrawal fee, which will variate from anything between $1.50 to $6. Also never go with the ATM:s proposal to use their conversion rate. It's a trap.

UPDATE 22.3.2016: Mondo pinged me and said they don't require you to PIN activate card when travelling.

StereoFinland dot com has been a fun project to do on a spare time. I’ve started it 6 years ago in the early 2010, while still living in the town of Tampere, Finland. That was the year when suddenly all digital cinemas became 3D capable, and things actually started to change. I made my own stereoscopic SLR rig and decided to learn proper 3D photography. Hence, the website. It was suppose to be a source and a platform to learn things, spread news, publish pictures and receive feedback. Little did I knew the trend of the web was already going against web portals, which were super hot thing since like 1998.

StereoFinland contains bunch of stereoscopic pictures and galleries of… Finland. I’ve travelled pretty much all over the country during next 2-3 years and took a lot of 3D pictures. Some of them are hosted on the site itself, most of them however are hosted on Flickr and Phereo. Both of which are still up, which is positive. I’ll provide a list of links in the end of this post. In addition it contains a few tutorials on StereoPhotomaker, sort of outdated tutorial on making your own 3D DCP packages (was super hard task back at a time). And a bunch of nowadays irrelevant news and links.

Preserving the Wordpress site without paying too much

Biggest question is what to do with the site. It is a basic Wordpress site, nothing fancy. And we’re living in the age of Docker, EC2 images, clusters and clouds. How hard and expensive can it be to just have it hanging in the AWS?

In order to host Wordpress you will need EC2 instance, probably a t2.micro. This will cost around $10 / month. You can clone it from one of the available Wordpress images in the AWS Marketplace. This will effectively spawn you a ready to go Wordpress site on your EC2 instance. Then you’d need to ssh into it and apply whatever customisations you had. There is a handy plugin that can do all of the dirty work for you. Depending on the situation, you might have to tweak the config of your Apache.

The new and hot option would be containers. Create a Docker container locally, have local environment on your machine that is equal to the remote, deploy changes with the container. With Wordpress generally it’s been always pain to have exact copy of the remote site on your machine. Docker would take this problem away. In order to do this you’d need to compose your ultimate container from a few basic ones, create a cluster of EC2 machines and deploy container to it. This would be totally awesome, resilient, easily maintainable Wordpress site. It would also be an overkill.

I’ve decided instead rip the site into static html, and host that html on S3 bucket. Consider this an archiving action. Site is still accessible, but no more changes will be done on it. I do have snapshot of the site too just in case, but obviously I’m never going to bring it back to life. Another option would be to just shutdown the whole thing - same way as things usually happen on the Web. Archive.org is trying to literally save the whole internet and preserve it for history precisely because people do amazing things on the Web, and then just take them down. So for now StereoFinland will be still accessible.

Notable materials

All stereoscopic galleries and pictures are also freely available on my Flickr and Phereo accounts.

This stereoscopic Flickr collection contains 144 albums of pictures from all over the world, mostly in red-cyan anaglyph format. All galleries from StereoFinland can be found there.

This Phereo collection contains most of the same pictures as above, but available for viewing in a bunch of formats (in addition to black and white anaglyph). You can view pictures on 3DTV, Oculus Rift, 3D capable Android device, or pretty much anything else 3D capable.

Book

StereoFinland book is still relevant and available in the iTunes Books store (for free). A bunch of stereoscopic pictures from all around finland, carefully selected and packed into a neat digital book. Download and view it on any Apple device nowadays. It used to be iPad only thing in the beginning.

You will need red-cyan 3D glasses for watching.

Direct link to the iBookstore - Finland in 3D book

What’s next

Probably VR. Looking forward to my Oculus pre-order.

I never heard of black and white Polaroid films. I also had no idea about the peel apart films. Polaroid of my childhood is the good old type 600 cassette cameras, which spit out the print and you shake it in the air to speed up the development.

Turned out this is a “modern” generation of Polaroids. Before that they had something called “peel apart films”. What is that?

Polaroid Land cameras are the ones requiring a type 100 peel apart film. It is a peculiar type of film, where negative, positive print and chemicals are packed into a sandwich ready to be exposed. Chemicals are initially stored in the pocket separated from the paper. When the shot is taken, you would pull the print out of the camera (with a considerable force), through the metal rolls. This action would get chemicals out of the pocket and distribute them between negative and final print.

Then you would wait. The print is hidden and you won’t see it until the process is finished. Depending on the film and outside temperature, it would take about 2 mins. Once that is done, you would peel the final print apart from the negative. And this is when you’d see the picture. It would be wet and slimy, and it would continue developing for a while. But it is still considered an instant shot.

We’re back from Netherlands. Me and my wife Stanisla spent a week in Amsterdam, occasionally getting out of town. For both of us this is first visit to the Netherlands.

I generally read Wikitravel before and during the visit. Amsterdam is regarded as a heaven for cyclists. However if you read Wikitravel carefully, you might suspect that something is not right with the kingdom.

Cyclists do not have the right of way even though it might appear so when observing the typical Amsterdammer's cycling behaviour

…cycling the Amsterdam way takes a significant amount of skill: the locals have been riding bikes from the moment they could walk and this informs their behaviour. If you don't feel entirely comfortable on a bike, it may be a stressful affair rather than the smooth ride you may imagine it to be. On top of that, if your lack of confidence makes you block pathways used by other people who can skilfully manoeuvre along them (e.g. groups of people, between stationary vans and the rows of bollards dividing street and footpath), who have appointments to make and jobs to attend, it can create tensions between you and locals.

Source

I’ve personally been cycling pretty much all my life. Started as a kid, then moved to Finland, which is covered in dedicated cycling paths. It is a bit harder to cycle during winter, with all that snow - but Finns are very effective in cleaning cycling routes. At some point I was cycling 14 km each way from Espoo to our office in Helsinki, along the sea, on my hybrid city bike.

After we moved to London I was pretty excited to discover a city bike scheme. London is a huge place, but strangely compact enough to enable cycling commute for lots of people. They have rental bike station spread all over the zones 1 and 2. My initial cycling took 10 min to the office, then 20 min. Now we moved to a new place, and it takes me 40 min of relaxed pedalling across the town, every day. (I had to eventually give up rental bikes in favour of my own).

It seems that Amsterdam was planned to be cycling friendly place. However, this is not the case.

Let me explain.

Right of the way

This is probably the most fundamental rule - if something is moving slower than you, it’s you who must give the way, or not endanger the situation. Faster moving vehicle assumes full responsibility over the slower moving subject in front. This applies in aviation too. When we do skydiving, everyone else must give us the way. That includes the Boeing Jumbojets.

On the city streets the slowest moving vehicle is pedestrian. Hence the fundamental rule for the cyclist - you must respect the pedestrian. Whatever the pedestrian is doing, however slow it moves, or even if it stopped in the middle of the road - you must respect this decision.

Even if you have to use brakes.

Even if you have to dismount from the cycle and start walking.

Both of those options are widely practiced when cycling in London. You just accept it.

(yes, London also has crazy cyclists that defy any kind of rules, but they are mostly the exception)

The Amsterdam reality however is far from that. Cyclists in Amsterdam do not respect pedestrians. Yes, most of those pedestrians might be tourists. Yes, some streets are pretty narrow. Yes, tourists like to stop and take pictures. None of this gives you right to endanger the pedestrian.

Amsterdam streets are also poorly marked. Often there is only one path, and no dedicated pedestrian path. In London cycling on pedestrian paths is strictly forbidden. All cycles are forced on the road, together with the rest of the traffic. This way when you’re walking, you can feel safe and relaxed.

Not in central Amsterdam. I found generally walking in central town very stressful. There is always some cyclist passing a few millimetres away from you, with a significant speed. They do not ring the bell though. Crossing the roads is also hard - cyclists would never stop or slow down, even where I would be on the pedestrian crossing. This is a big NO NO for cyclists in London. I think you will be fined if police spots a cyclist not respecting the pedestrian crossing. (Yes, we do have cycling police).

A few times I would just start crossing the street (on the marked crossing) and see if a cyclist would slow down. They would never do such a thing. After that I started filming every crossing, just in case.

Safety

Cyclists in Netherlands also do not wear helmets. Apparently it’s a local thing.

Speed limits

London is a very busy place. So busy that they have 20 miles / hour limit for everyone in the central zone. Strangely, this makes cycling a lot safer since everyone are moving with more or less the same speed.

Apparently they don’t have speed limits for cyclists in Amsterdam. This might sound like a strange thing to say, but it is totally possible to cycle too fast. In fact, when you cycle in central Amsterdam, on streets filled with people, cars, trams and bridges, it is way too easy to cycle too fast. What is too fast? It’s when you will unable to react in time to prevent an accident.

In Finland we had a concept of a “common sense speed”. It is a speed you choose depending on the situation. I like this concept. The rule is only one - drive safely. So, pick a speed that you are comfortable with, that allows you to brake or stop if something unexpected happens.

Cyclists in Amsterdam are not familiar with this concept. They are driving as fast as they can. They also are not braking when making turns. Even if they cannot see what is behind that turn. I get it - they are locals and well aware of the landscape. But this feels like borderline arrogant behaviour.

Conclusion

Interestingly enough, the above described behaviour is mostly limited to Amsterdam itself. We did few trips out of town, and in town of Utrecht cyclists are much more respectful of pedestrians, driving with common sense speed and letting you cross the street.

I’m not saying they don’t know how to cycle in Netherlands. Most of the described rules do not apply when you cycle in a countryside, or a small town with no people. I’m saying that when you do cycle in a large town with dense population, you should be aware of the environment.

Otherwise it’s just tears for everyone.

We’re back from the Netherlands. Our base was in Amsterdam, but we also managed to get out of town and travel to a few locations around that beautiful country. For one week I also made daily video log episodes, all of which are now available for watching. As usual, everything is filmed, cut and released during the same day.

Day 01: Gatwick to Amsterdam

We get through the morning rush hour in London to catch a train to Gatwick, then hop on the plane and land in Amsterdam Schilpol airport. Quick travel to our AirBnb location in Spaklerweg, and then evening in the town. We try (second) best potato fries in town, stroll along the channels and see the thunderstorm in the night.

This post was not sponsored by Brompton. I bought it with my own money.

Brompton is a locally made brand of foldable bikes. They are praised for easy folding and tiny amount of required storage space. They are also very well built and suppose to last for years. I’be been biking all my life but never owned a foldable before. You can see Bromptons everywhere, often with well dressed people riding them around City. Because of a small size you are allowed to take it on board of tube and trains during rush hours. It can also be considered a proper last mile vehicle - more than often during bad weather I’d take a tube and then jump on a bike to quickly get to home from the final station.

History

In March 2009, Brompton Bicycle achieved a record monthly turnover of just under £1 million; the employees were rewarded with fish and chips.

Source

The company is actually very small and very local. Original design was invented in 1976, and hasn’t really changed in the past 40 years. They increased amount of accessories, frame colours, and there is even optional titanium upgrade which will cost extra £600 and will make the whole thing about 0.74kg lighter. Everything is assembled in London from mostly unique parts.

There’s also Brooks B17 special men’s and ladies optional saddle.

Buying

Bromptons are pricey. Base models start at around £700, but with bare minimum set of options you are looking at £900. If you want a colourful body (as opposed to the basic black), and, say, original travel bag, it easily goes over a grand. I went with 3 speeds, mudguards and default black body set.

Now, if you're a UK resident, there are couple of lifehacks that can provide you with a significant discount on a new bike. First is so called Cycle Scheme - a legit tax evasion scheme which can give you up to 40% back. There are a bunch of catches in order to qualify for one, but it is fairly popular way of getting a bike. Second option is related to private health insurance. Your employer might have you enrolled into one, and that insurance might offer you cashback on new bike. In both cases there is a hard limit of about £1000 for a full price of a bike. But that will give you a new Brompton.

I ended up using health insurance cash back option. Biggest difference between those two is that with Cycle Scheme you don't need any money before you get a bike, while with health insurance cash back you have to pay full price upfront, and only then eventually they send you money back. You also own the bike from day 1.

Riding

The bike is unlike anything I’ve ridden before. Proportions are vastly different from any conventional bike. Wheels are small. Steering feels very unsteady in the beginning. Pedalling with only one hand (or - look ma, no hands!) feels impossible.

It is also fast. I’ve been hopping on and off the city bikes around London (they also feature 3 speeds), and by all means top speed of Brompton is much faster.

Speed combined with unsteadiness and overall lightness of the bike is an explosive combination. If weather is particularly wet on a day, it becomes even less steady. You’d want to avoid pebble roads, old brick roads, and anything with uneven surfaces and ditches. When making sharp turns, there is a small chance of hitting ground with a pedal in lower position. It’s a nasty way of loosing your balance.

Just like learning how to ride a bike, none of that will matter after a few weeks. I can even ride it with no hands now - not for too long. Except from pebbled roads - they are quite unforgivable and very uncomfortable to ride even in dry weather.

Rolling

This bike features a way of rolling it around when it is folded. There are 2 rolls behind the seat and one more small roll on a back mudguard. With those 3 rolls you can get folded bike rolled from one tube station to another.

However, default wheels are not meant for prolonged use. They are very small, not very good at rolling, and any uneven surface will be a problem. First time I was rolling folded bike around the tube stations, one of the locking pieces (which also is a suspension) broke away and was never found again (replacement cost: £12).

What you can do is get better wheels. Apparently wheels from most rollerblades would fit just fine. I got official Brompton “Easy Wheels” for something like £20. They are larger and actually meant to be rolled. To be fair, I would expect them to be installed by default. The bike weight is around 11kg, and ability to roll it is very important.

Getting around

Train and tube stations in London are famous for being wheel chair unfriendly. They are full of stairs, sometimes circular stairs, long corridors, and, of course, crowds. With foldable bike you suddenly get option to jump on a public transport whenever you feel like it. This in turn requires some technique.

It is possible to carry the bike while folded as well as in full unfolded mode. Overground is relatively easy, there is much more space, platforms are large and there’s always that far side of the platform where nobody goes. Tube is trickier, but is doable even during rush hour. I find it easier to carry the bike in unfolded state by putting saddle on top of my shoulder. It is also much, much easier to roll around. I’d usually get as far as possible with unfolded bike, then fold it right before jumping into the train. On overground trips it is also possible to unfold the bike inside a train right before arrival.

Station staff will usually issue a friendly reminder that bike has to be folded during the journey. They will also help you get through the gates. It is technically possible to get through the narrow “pedestrian” gates, but they will start alarming as you are going through, thinking there are two persons trying to get in. No one really will care about the alarm, but it is annoying. “Luggage” gates are much more comfortable to use.

Build

The bike feels pretty solid, considering the amount of moving parts. All parts are well made and fit nicely together. My only complain is about speed switcher. Strangely it is made of what seems like cheap plastic. Switch itself becomes loose during the trip and starts making annoying sounds.

Tyres are made of something called Brompton Kevlar. No punctures so far. And yes, there’s plenty of broken glass on roads in the city.

Folding speed

Here’s a video of a guy folding Brompton in just under 6 seconds. Takes me about 15 seconds to perform the same. Unfolding takes about the same time, if not faster.

This is a big deal. You’d think that during the trip you would need to fold and unfold it maybe twice. In practice on a morning commute I’d go through this at least 4 times. There might be extra folding involved if I’m commuting to, let’s say, Charing Cross station - it is notorious for its super long tunnels connecting tube to the railways station. This way I’d unfold it while still underground, roll it around, fold it again, get on the escalator, and so on.

Point is - when folding is not a pain but a very quick and painless operation you have no problem of doing it at the smallest convenience.

Commute distance

My commute looks somewhat like this. It’s about 10km one way, with not much of hills. Central London is relatively flat. I’ve been commuting mornings on overground train + bike, and evenings pure bike. Goal is eventually to start biking both ways every day. I strongly feel that commute eats into your life, and there is nothing that can really compensate it. But if your commute is cycling, it is actually pretty awesome and doesn’t feel like commute at all.

You’re also much more in control, unlike when on the train and it stops, and nothing happens for a long time. Time to cycle home is much more predictable than taking train. And don’t even get me started on the ticket prices. Daily cycling can save a significant amount of £.

Brompton seems to be handling distances very well. It is strangely a solid bike for long distances. And by long distance I probably mean up to ~15km one way, which is my absolute mental limit for daily commute on a bike.

Conclusion

Foldable bike in the city is like a Swiss knife to all sort of situations. It fits perfectly into life and for me it’s almost impossible now to imagine getting around without one. Ground traffic is always stuck, underground traffic is crowded and often broken. Cycling will actually get you around in reasonable time, and you get to spot fresh street art of Shoreditch area.

Not only in city - on weekend I’d often go to my dropzone in a small village in Kent. There is this hugely annoying and plain dangerous part when you walk from the train station to the airdrome - about 30 min of walk on a narrow British road with cars whizzing past yourself. Bike changed everything - 10 min of pedalling and I’m there, signing my name on a flight manifest.

It takes some time to get used to steering and riding one. I’d also wish they put better mini-wheels for rolling it by default. And better switch for gears - something more solid and easy to switch. I also greatly miss some sort of standing support. It is impossible to leave unfolded bike for a second while buying cup of coffee - you have to find a wall to put it against, and even then it will somehow roll and crash to the ground. Some sort of an extra leg would be amazing.

In all the fairness, London offers excellent city bike scheme where you don’t even have to buy your bike - there are hundreds of stations with large, indestructible bikes ready to be borrowed. I was using it for 2 years for commuting. Unfortunately they are only available in zones 1 and 2, and since then we have moved to zone 3. Still, I’m happy to have my own bike now.

And I can carry it anywhere.

I’ve got my CV1 order now about 2 months ago and been playing with it semi-actively. It’s a solid piece of experience, it works, and there is good selection of content.

Ordering

In January Oculus did that famous announcement of a pre-order date for a consumer version. They had a countdown on a site. I think it was around 4pm in the UK when it stroke 0:00, and the whole Oculus site went down. Multiple Cmd-R presses, some cursing, and parallel chatting to a friend who also wanted to place his order. Finally, we got through. This was the moment when the price of the headset was revealed for the very first time. There was a moment of hesitation, and then I ordered. A friend hesitated for 5 more minutes and ordered too. Delivery date was set to the late March. The grand total price with UK VAT and delivery fee was around £550.

I think in March Oculus announced that the delivery will be delayed. In the end of March, they waived the delivery fee, and new grand total price became about £500. That was a nice gesture I thought. My delivery date was pushed to the end of May. It was beginning of April, and we were about to embark on a trip to Amsterdam. I also suddenly remembered that since the pre-order we moved house and I should probably update the delivery address.

While in Amsterdam I’m getting notification from Oculus that “good news, we’re about to deliver your order, and going to charge you any moment now”. Next day they charged me and dispatched a note that headset will be delivered in the next couple of days. Next thing I know there’s notification from UPS with tracking number.

You can actually postpone or even redirect delivery of a parcel on the UPS site. Alas to do so you have to register and confirm your address by receiving a mail with a secret code in it. So no, I could not postpone or cancel the delivery before they would try and deliver it first.

One more day later I get notified that UPS tried to deliver, nobody was home, and - phew - they didn’t leave the package with neighbours or in the bushes, but brought it back to the UPS pick up point, where it was waiting for me.

Upgrading PC

My PC is from 2010. It is pretty decent. Back at a time, it scored the fastest consumer grade graphics card on the market, astonishing 12Gb of RAM and Intel i7 quad core CPU. I vividly remember buying it so I could finally play Fallout 3. Last November we got Fallout 4 out, and it refused to launch.

The reason being that Nvidia GTX 295 graphics card is not cool anymore. “Not a problem,” I thought and upgraded it to GTX 980. Nvidia site also listed GTX 970 as a bare minimum for VR. Fallout 4 launcher tested new system and set all settings to ultra quality. Gaming never looked better on that PC.

I’ve also upgraded the main hard drive to SSD and added extra USB 3 ports. The only thing that Oculus currently complains about is CPU. Recommended CPU is Intel i5-6400. However, CPU is probably the only part on a PC that is almost impossible to upgrade. You’d have to change motherboard then, and at this point, you might as well buy a new PC with components tested and fit together. For now, I’m sticking with my Intel i7. Especially since it doesn’t seem to matter now, with GTX 980 taking most of the load.

Unboxing and setup

There aren’t many parts in the Oculus box. In addition to the headset, you’ll get the tracking sensor, Xbox controller and an Oculus remote - basically a simplified controller. Tracking sensor is expected to be placed on the table in front of yourself. There’s guided installation from Oculus that will get you all setup. For me it just worked, cables got connected and devices got recognised. The biggest trouble was getting Xbox controller paired with the USB stick. After that, you put the headset on, and the magic begins.

Oculus Home is a Steam-like piece of software that you get out of the box. There you can browse your library, buy stuff, download, and potentially chat with friends (I still have none). It is slowly evolving, they are bringing new features into it. Oculus Home is a proper VR app where you can remain and do stuff, and switch from one experience to another while fully immersed in VR. There is also a desktop version, much less amazing.

Oculus Home will be the primary entry point for getting and consuming content. They are also bringing Oculus exclusives that are only available there, and only for Oculus. Eve Valkyrie is one example, Chronos is another. I was generally amazed how you can switch between apps comfortably, without a need to get the headset off. Before with DK1 and DK2 you would download an experience, try to launch it, and with some degree of success, you’d get it working on a screen and only then you’d put a headset on. With CV1 headset is no longer a secondary or mirrored screen. It is a separate device. This also means that some of the older DK2 experiences are no longer functioning properly with CV1.

Content

Oculus Home and Steam are the two places where you can get content for Oculus VR.

Oculus Home is something you’ll get out of the box, and will be somewhat ushered to use as a primary store. There’s nothing wrong with that. You can buy games, software, and potentially films in the future. You also get a good deal of free content, some of which will be bundled with your headset. Drivers for both headset and Oculus controller will be updated via Oculus Home. It will also provide access to early concepts and demos, most of which you can get for free.

My only problem with Oculus Home at the moment is prices. Most of the exclusive games currently cost around £40 with no discounts in sight.

This is where Steam comes in.

Steam is a clunky ancient piece of software that is good at one thing - discounts. Another thing that Steam can do well is refunds. If you buy a game, play it for a few minutes, and decide it is not fun - you can apply for a refund and within one day you most likely to get it. Refunds are somewhat critical when we talk about VR content. You see, with VR it is very personal. What is fine for one person will make another person feel sick. An action is no longer happening on a remote screen while you are controlling it from a distance. You are immersed into it. And you want to feel good while being in there.

Not many studios get VR UX today. Some do it better than others. In many cases, it is hit or miss. Hence refunds. It is super fun to try lots of things from the catalogue, as long as you can return the product back on a shelf and get your money. This is not the case with Oculus Home, and some people are furious about this.

Another killer feature that has absolutely no relation to VR in Steam is the ability to pay with bitcoins.

You can easily filter VR games in Steam. An important part is to remove HTC Vive tag and leave only Oculus compatible games. There are lots of incredibly awesome content for Vive, but all of it requires trackable controllers. Things will hopefully change towards the end of this year when Oculus releases Touch controllers.

There is also the ongoing debate about DRM locking content to a certain kind of headset, with Oculus, I believe being the bad guys today. This might play out in a way that Vive users will never get Eve Valkyrie or Chronos, and it might swing the other way too by Valve locking Vive exclusives. Let’s hope this will be resolved in a friendly and calm manner.

Feeling sick

It truly depends on a content.

Most games you’ll find in Oculus Home seems to be fine. It’s important to get the headset fit comfortably on your head. There is a certain sweet spot when the image is the sharpest and you almost don’t feel the pressure. Interocular distance is also important. Spend some time, adjust all the adjustables. After that putting headset on is incredibly easy and fast.

So it’s down to the content. There are multiple issues that can cause uncomfortable feelings. They can be put there inadvertently or deliberately. In both cases, you’ll want to stop and get out.

I’ll try and categorise.

Head spinning. Can be caused by movements in the simulation of nature not anticipated by the brain. Our brain is pretty good at anticipating things and can incur actual physical feelings when all goes according to the plan. On the other hand, say, when you turn your head left but the picture turns right, the brain goes completely mental. This is also accompanied by the most bizarre physical sensations.

Horror. Heavily amplified in VR, can be caused by quite non-threatening things when observed on the screen. It is also generally accompanied by feeling of helplessness since you don’t even have trackable motion controllers.

Disgust. Again, can be caused by relatively harmless things that are heavily amplified by the feeling of presence.

Sickness. I’ve had it only once, and it was in a flight simulator where the camera was attached directly to the plane. You could look around, but once the plane was spinning there were absolutely zero inertia involved - which you would normally have if you’d be flying inside the plane and had you head. Turned out inertia is a very important part of a comfortable VR flying experience.

Selected bits

From what I played so far, here are some of the best experiences.

Windlands.

A very simple looking game where you jump from one flying island to another. Somehow those guys got everything right. Feeling of propelling yourself through the air is incredible. Put a fan on the table for increased wow effect.

Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes.

You’ll need at least one another friend to play this one. It is also absolutely perfect for VR. You are the one immersed into a room with a ticking bomb nobody else can see. Your friends got instructions on how to disarm it. Go.

Radial G: Racing Evolved

Super fast futuristic racing game with techno music. This is how I’d imagine games in 2016 would be.

Crystal Rift

Grid based dungeon crawler with a VR twist. You get a glowing sword in your hand. Wait, there is no hand, just a glowing sword hovering on a side. You can strike skeletons with it. Also, find keys, unlock loot and on some occasions hop onto the miner rail trolley. There will be lava.

Apollo 11

This one is not strictly speaking a game. It’s a historical simulation of a legendary mission with a documentary audio track and a very dramatic music. It is also one incredible package.

I’ll just say one thing - when you are sitting in the command module, and the rocket is about to blast off - lean to the left and look out of the window. You can thank me for the hint and everyone at Oculus who invented trackable sensor.

Technolust

I’ve saved best for the last. Technolust is for the fans of Ready Player One and cyberpunk in general. It’s a sort of narrative with not so much shooting. Although, you will find yourself in the arcade full of games at some point. You’ll be able to jack into the classic arcades and experience all of them in VR.

There are some technical issues with Technolust on Steam. If you haven’t got it via Oculus Home, there is a life hack - launch the game via good old .exe file in /steamapps. It’ll work just fine then.

How bad are the lens flares?

They can be annoying at the beginning, but then you don’t generally notice them. However, this heavily depends on the position of the headset and sweet spot. Once the headset is adjusted, the issue is much less noticeable.

The issue here are fresnel lenses, and Oculus lenses apparently have smaller fragments, which liquidates chromatic aberrations, but introduces glares. Lenses are tricky business.

How about built-in headphones?

They are one of the best usability features of the Oculus. Thanks to those, now you can put the headset on and off with a single sweeping move. One device on a head with everything you need for immersion.

With both DK1 and DK2 there was alway that awkward dance when you put the headset on, then try to find headphones, then try to put those on too while figuring out the audio cable. There is a single cable now with CV1. It is long and feels durable.

Features for CV2

This is obviously a step towards something bigger. It is not the first step (which was DK1), but surely there is more to come.

For me, I’d say better lenses and retina grade resolution. Lenses for resolving glares issue. Better resolution for reading emails while in VR. You can do this now too, but you’d want to get an experience equivalent of having Macbook screen. Resolution is pretty decent today - for games, simulations and videos. I’d say it is not enough for precise work - whatever it might be.

Conclusions

CV1 is a solid consumer product. They also did a great job by implementing Oculus Home. Yes, it is maybe DRM locked and evil. But it’s homey. There are pillows. They might let us walk around sometimes in the future. Collect trophies in games and put them on shelves. Oh, I’d love that very much. Your personal home with inflatable extra rooms. That is something of a dream.

It is not perfect obviously, but it is a huge step towards accessible VR. Yes, you’ll need a powerful PC and Windows 10. This might change too - or they might actually come up with a backpack PC VR thingie.

Looking forward to it.

There are so many words written on the topic of Brexit that I was going to just ignore the issue and move on.

Especially since I have no vote on the matter.

However, I live in the UK now. I pay taxes. And I genuinely love this place. Well, mostly London. But also rest of the country, the bits I've seen.

The reason I live here is my Finnish passport. I was born in Russia, but then moved to Finland when I was 15. Thanks to free education in Finland I got my degree, found a job, and did quite well for the next 15 years.

Then, thanks to the freedom of movement, I decided to try another country. It is pretty awesome when you can find a job anywhere within EU, move there and start working, with no need for a working permit or any other bureaucratical nonsense. Freedom of movement is one of the essential things in the world, strangely restricted in some parts. If you’re a less lucky citizen of a non-EU country, generally you would have to either stick with that country or spend lots of efforts trying to achieve the same level of movement freedom.

UK has always been a bit of a special fruit of EU. My first visit to London was in 2009 when I only had my Russian passport. Application for a UK visa was 36 pages long (not kidding), cost me around 90 euros and an extra day to travel to the UK consulate in Helsinki. Today they don’t even have a consulate in Helsinki - the closest one is in Stockholm, and you'd have to send your passport there, along with the biometric data. Despite all of that, I remembered that feeling of a huge but cosy megapolis where I could settle for a few years some day.

It’s been 2.5 years now since I and my wife relocated from Finland. If we talk strictly about British things, it’ll be separate cold and hot water taps, electric shower, full English breakfast, jacket potato - although who am I kidding, I love jacket potatoes here. Fish and chips are less relevant since both of us are vegetarians. But London makes up to you with a diversity of cultures brought by immigrants like myself. Most amazing Turkish baklava, Greek coffee, Sichuan food, falafels. I’m talking food now, but actually, to me, London is a place of acceptance. It is the only place in the world where you can come with your accent, and people will say - “Hey, nice of you to come, what would you want to do?”. No one cares about your accent or being a foreigner here. Even if you're a talking bear, it will not make you special here. What matters is who you actually are, what do you actually want. It’s a place of endless possibilities with the most amazing people around.

Again most of the people you’ll meet will be from somewhere else. Either from different parts of Britain or more than often from other countries.

London is a place of tolerance. It is not a funny idea you entertain in your mind, read about it in books or watch in movies. You are surrounded by a thousand of different cultures, every time you step out of your house. Tolerance and empathy towards things different from your views and opinions - you just get it, like a level up, after living here for a while. There is literally no other place in the world like this. (Or maybe is, but I haven’t been there). In here you live in constant realisation how diverse people can be. And it’s a good thing. Diversity and tolerance teach openness toward others.

In my idealistic version of the world, everyone can freely travel, settle anywhere, and do stuff they want. People are friendly and we help each other. Also maybe a universal basic income for everyone, in case you just don’t feel like doing anything today. Oh, also free food, free unlimited energy, robots building stuff for us. Some parts of this dream are already here, although not evenly distributed. EU managed to provide freedom of moving and settling around a significant chunk of countries. You’ll get free health care, social benefits (if eligible), education and language courses. For me, the idea of helping each other and uniting everyone into something bigger just feels right. Breaking this is the opposite of right.

It is highly tempting to compare running a country to running a commercial company. There is, however, a fundamental difference. Countries cannot be run for profit. The main purpose of any country is to provide the best possible environment for its residents. Not pile up money. Not lock down its borders and pretend that there is no one else around. Denial was sort of possible one hundred years ago when communication was largely non-existent, travel was hard and was performed mainly when going to war. Today you can follow up climate change via live HD broadcast from space. This is our planet, it’s the only one we have, no one is getting out of here anytime soon. Denial is a sweet thing, but to me is a sign of ignorance.

Running a country like a commercial company has largely messed up our priorities. Somehow we put monetary gains above humanitarian values. This is happening in the age when we all know that money is highly superficial. We have invented it, it is not backed by gold anymore, it is largely made of overvalued mortgages. Yes, we stick to the idea that money is the most important thing - but mainly because we used to this. In my mind money is very much secondary, and today with all the technological advancements we should be able to provide everyone with free food, shelter and stuff. Honestly, today we have enough stuff for everyone. For the first couple of years while living in London we got all sort of stuff from streets, left by people who couldn’t fit it in the (tiny) apartments.

London is an amazing place, but it wasn’t like this for always. I think it became highly attractive in the past 5-ish years. Suddenly there are small creative companies changing the historical ways of doing things. This is where you want to be - change the world, play a part of improving it. The only way forward really is to completely dissolve borders, welcome talented people from all around the world, with their cultures and ways of thinking. This is certainly an idealistic view, and surely there will be people who just want refuge. This is again where EU steps in, and a coalition of countries can figure out a way of evenly distributing challenges.

Change is good. And we should be able to handle it. It wouldn’t be a problem for me and my wife to move to another country. Let’s be 100% honest - the UK is not on top of the family friendly country list. Today I’d say it’ll be Sweden or Finland. Or even Estonia with their electronic government and a way to pay taxes in 5 mins, online. Full data transparency, a personal chip with a private key for every citizen. Ability to vote online, while enjoying a drink in your country house. I could work remotely too. But there is something here in London that makes me wake up every day, commute for an hour into the city. This something is people - some of the most talented people in the world. Together we are making it better. As one of the founders put it, our tiny company employs people from 20 nationalities around the world. We’re all immigrants here. And all of us will have no problem to move somewhere else, job wise. The world is a big place.

But I’d prefer to stay here. London is one amazing place. After a recent move, we’ve found a bunch of Eastern European food shops selling pretty authentic food straight from my Soviet childhood. In many ways London is like Lego - it gives you an enormous amount of bricks, and you can build out of it any life you want.

And I love building.

Update: there is an ongoing discussion on Reddit for separating London from the UK and keeping it as part of EU.

Update 2: If you haven’t seen the #CatsAgainstBrexit, it will make your day.

One of the basic needs when dealing with governmental services for a person is to prove your current place of residency. It may sound trivial, but there are multiple approaches to solving this problem.

In the UK it is called “proof of address”. It is always required when you want to:

• Open a bank account
• Register with a local surgery
• Change your address details with a bank
• Apply for a travel visa

What is it? To prove that you are indeed residing at a given address you must provide a council tax or utility bill, with your name on it, delivered at a given address. There is a catch - it should be issued within 30 days or it is not valid anymore.

As everything in Britain, this rule was probably a brilliant invention in its simplicity at some point of history. Today, not so much.

Your local council will mail you tax bill about once a year. Utility bills will be issued at various intervals. However, all my current utility bills are electronic. I pay for electricity and gas directly from a mobile app. This leaves council tax bill as the main source of being one and only available proof of address.

In practice, you can make a telephone call and order new council tax bill at any moment. They will generally mail it within next couple of weeks. After that, you have a valid proof of address for the next 30 days. Problem postponed.

In Finland, they have a state register with data on everyone residing in the country (as well as citizens living abroad). This register contains your current address, marital status, national security number, and probably a bunch of other stuff. The register is used by the post office to verify delivery address. The same register is used by pretty much every other government agency when they need to verify your residency.

When dealing with Finnish banks, the local version of NHS or any other government agency it is generally enough to tell your national identity number. They will check it on the state register and will verify everything else from there. This comes super handy during phone calls - all you need to tell is your private state ID - which is much easier than spelling out your name, address and phone number.

Handling things with the Finnish Register Office is also not ideal today. Access to the main database is limited to the clerks only, and the database itself is also not very fast from what I can tell. My dream scenario would be some sort of open repository where I can issue key and authorise 3rd parties to access certain parts of my personal data registered with the state. This repository should be international. For example, today marriage should be registered separately in each state of your residence - and in the case of divorce - unregistered separately.

To be fair, this year Finnish Register Office started offering online services - quite a limited subsection of them. They are going to extend the list of online services during this and next years.

TLR means twin lens reflex. Unlike SLR:s, TLR features 2 lenses and a mirror. Most TLR cameras are made for medium format film. 35mm film TLR:s are a rare breed, Agfa Flexilette being one of those.

Flexilette itself is a rare find. It’s been manufactured in 1960-61, succeeded by Agfa Optima Reflex camera. Agfa struggled to compete with the growing range of SLR cameras and gave up after producing these 2 models. Today Flexilette represents a unique camera with an unusual design, waist-level viewfinder, twin lenses, durable mechanics, and it is guaranteed to draw at least some attention in today’s world full of technology.

We got Flexilette during one of the recent camera fairs in Westminster. In perfectly working condition, with original case. Since then I’ve been using it as an everyday 35mm film camera, compact enough to always fit into my backpack. It is not the lightest camera, most of the body is made of metal after all. But it feels very good in hands, with no sharp edges, nice and rounded body and easy to press buttons.

Now that you are the proud owner of an Agfa Flexilette twin-lens reflex camera you will be able to take wonderful photographs as a constant reminder of the past. You are to be congratulated on your choice. — Official manual.

A word of warning if you are reading this on mobile connection - this post contains lots of pictures.

It’s early summer morning. I’m 15 years old. I and my mum are standing in a long crowded queue outside of the embassy of Finland in Moscow. The consulate reception is not opened yet, but the queue is already impressive. Tourists, businessmen, travel agents. Our case is somewhat different - a couple of months ago I was picked as an exchange student to be sent to a foreign country, together with another dude from our college. We’re not from Moscow. We’re from Cherepovets - a small town the size of Helsinki, famous for the density of local factories and purple clouds around the industrial area.

Cherepovets is considered the largest town in the region, and in my first 15 years of life I never been to Moscow. Up to that point, Cherepovets was my biggest town, cultural centre and the place to be. The general path of a career in Cherepovets consisted of finishing the school, getting into a professional school, maybe local university, doing a summer internship at one of the factories, and eventually working for the next 40 years there. Your freedom was largely represented by the variety of factories. You were free to pick from a chemical factory, matchstick factory, ship factory, dairy product factory. Despite that, you would likely and inevitably end up working for a metallurgical conglomerate, one of the largest in the country. In fact, the college I ended up after the school also belonged to that corporation and was in practice an incubator for the skilled people going straight to metal production.

There was a student exchange program however with a small town in Finland. Most of the towns in Finland are small. This one was especially tiny, with around 20k people, far up north, next to the gulf of Bothnia. What made is special is that also had a metal production plant, a professional school and a university.

Let’s recapture for a second. I’m a 15 years old dude from Cherepovets. I need to get to Finland. How hard can this be?

Passport

Normally you’d get your passport at the age of 16. You can apply earlier, but you’d need a special reasoning for that. I think it took me about few weeks to get that done.

Passport for travelling

In Soviet Russia, no one needed to travel abroad, since everything was perfect in the place of your residence. If you did need to travel, that would require you a bunch of paperwork, recommendations from you place of work or study, release papers from the army, background checks by the KGB and lots of questioning. This has changed slightly after the USSR was gone, and a new era was begun. Slightly, but not hugely. You would still need to apply for a special passport that would have your name written in latin letters, and be valid for foreign visas.

And of course, you would need to have your “main” passport done first.

It took an impressive pile of paperwork and about a month (I think) to get the travel passport done.

Visa

Because I needed a student visa valid for a year, I had to travel personally to the consulate of Finland in Moscow. I should mention that if you’re a lucky resident of Saint-Petersburg, you would also find a local consulate in your town. Everyone else had to travel to Moscow. I mean, I was lucky to live in the European part of the country, just a train day away.

It also wasn’t really well organised at the consulate. No appointments, a live queue outside of the fence, then getting through the security inside of the consulate and queueing to the bulletproof reception windows. Most of us were also hastily filling up the long forms and glueing profile photos. Another impressive pile of papers, forms for myself and the second dude who was also picked to be exchanged. Finally, we’re told to wait for a month, call and check on the status. After the decision is done you’d have to come down again (just a day on a train away) and pick up the passports.

We got visas 2 months later and an extra slice of bureaucracy from Finnish consulate - one of the papers was missing and they delayed the answer for an extra month, up to the point when we already needed to go.

All in all, 4 months of paperwork, and you were good to go.

Sometimes I feel like people don’t appreciate the freedom of movement. This is largely concentrated around people who have always had it. It’s one of those things that feel essential while you have it, but you are shocked once it is taken away.

As far as I know, freedom of movement implemented in the EU is unique and only experience, that no other union or country has done. At least not on the same scale. Can you consider the United States as a bunch of different countries? A bit, maybe. But culture wise Europe is an amazingly diverse package, bundled with a million of different languages, foods and traditions. Yet somehow there’s an agreement to let everyone (within the Union) travel and work freely, anywhere you want.

With zero paperwork.

I remember my first time crossing the border of Finland and Sweden. We were driving in a car. It was forest, then more forest, then a bridge across the river. And a sign saying “Welcome to Sweden”. No delays, no paperwork, no one guarding the border with a barbed wire. I was shocked.

At this point, you want to be a part of this amazing thing. You want to be part of the EU, contribute, and make it even better. You make it the purpose of your life. Because this is one of the most amazing things humanity has ever achieved. Instead of fighting each other - give everyone freedom to live anywhere you want, to be anything you want. Free medicine, free education, social support for everyone in the union, doesn’t matter which language you’re speaking. That’s something that inspires you.

This is humanity at its best.

A very special cookie

First few countries you visit while living in Finland are most likely to be Sweden, Norway and Estonia. This is when you learn that Norway is not in the EU, but somehow the border between Finland and Norway looks exactly the same, as between Sweden and Finland. No one is guarding it, and if you miss the “Welcome to Norway” sign, you might later notice that speed limits have changed, as did colours of the road signs. This is when you start learning about the special status of the Norway. In addition to the EU, there is the Schengen agreement. You might not be an EU citizen, just a tourist (or a student) - but you’re still going to enjoy a good portion of the same freedom of movement as the EU citizens do. Yes, you will not be able to work in another country, but you will be able to freely visit almost all of them. And more - as in the case of Norway, which is not even a part of the EU.

As you progress in your travels and reach the farthest reaches, you are likely to encounter an ancient island of Britain. This will be another eye-opening discovery - despite the UK being part of the EU, they will not let you in with a Finnish visa. The reason being that the UK was never a part of the Schengen agreement, hence you have to apply for another visa. The UK visa. Unless you are a proper EU citizen, in which case you can freely come and go as you please.

My first visit to the UK was in 2009. I’ve filled 36 pages long form - this achievement still holds my personal record for being the longest form I’ve ever filled in my life. Paid 90 euros of processing fees. Arranged an appointment at the UK consulate in Helsinki. Gave up my fingerprints and retina scan. All of this only to find out that they are unable to process my request. The reason being that I was planning to travel in April, while my Finnish visa was expiring in May. According to The Rules, a visa from the origin country must be valid for at least 2 months after my visit to the UK is concluded. I guess the UK was secretly afraid I’d illegally stay on the island.

Now let’s combine the bureaucracy of one country with the bureaucracy of another.

The Finnish visa that was about to expire was, in fact, 3 years long visa. After that, I could apply for a permanent residentship (doesn’t equal citizenship, completely different topic). However, because I had to renew it before full 3 years of that visa would expire, I couldn’t apply for the permanent visa just yet. At that point, Finland gave me 4 years long visa, and I could finally apply for a UK tourist visa.

I’m sorry for the amount of the details, but I really want you to feel the absurdity of the whole system.

The problem is, it doesn’t feel absurd at all, as long as you don’t think about it. This is the way we’ve arranged our travels for a past couple of hundreds of years (we all know that before that you’d simply gallop into another country on a horse while swinging your sword).

London was a nice place in 2009, but somewhat unattractive in terms of interesting software related jobs. And back at home Nokia was still dominating the world - although some signs of the decay were coming through. The most talented software people in Finland would likely be employed by Nokia at a time, and then maybe poached by one of the Silicon Valley -based companies. Fast forward 5 years and everything has changed. Nokia is no more, and London somehow managed to turn things around and became one of the most attractive places to work in the software industry. I also got my EU citizenship and could finally exercise proper 100% pure freedom of movement. You would think that the story ends here with a nice happy ending. That’s a big fat nope.

While I was living in Finland I got married to a girl from Russia. She got Finnish residentship (6 months of processing and 150 euros in fees). Then we moved to the UK. She got the UK residentship (6 months of processing with both her and my passports taken by the Home Office). Unlike Finnish residentship, UK residentship sucks at freedom of movement - it is simply not appreciated anywhere beyond the UK borders. Not even in the Commonwealth Countries (a term you learn after moving here). UK residentship allows you to stay in the UK, and that’s about it. If you’d like to travel to the EU, you have to apply for a visa.

I did quite a bit of research on this topic. Technically there is an EU law that allows family members of the EU citizen to travel without a visa. However, people tend to agree that explaining this to a Ryanair employee might not get you on a flight. So, let’s be honest, the law doesn’t work and you need a visa.

Things get more interesting at this point. You can apply for a normal tourist visa (~£60 fee), or a family member visa (£0 fee). You will still have to fill in a lengthy form of a country you want to visit, attach profile pictures (£10), proof of address (free, but you have to order it at least 2 weeks in advance) and marriage certificate (phone call to Finnish magistrate, 27 euros of fees and 2 weeks of delivery). Family member visa only allows you to travel together with your “more entitled” family member. Same-sex partners are ok. If you want to travel alone, you would still have to apply for a normal tourist visa.

Once again you’ve probably noticed how quickly things became complicated. Let’s for a moment compare this to a scenario when you have a residence of a Schengen area country. You want to visit another EU country - you jump on a flight and go.

Zero paperwork.

My wife could eventually get a UK citizenship (7 years of residence, £1200 in fees), and we could both enjoy a freedom of movement. However, Brexit happened. The UK is aiming at the Norway special cookie case. Considering that the UK already was a special cookie within the EU, that makes them a very special cookie. However, it’s not going to be exactly a Norway case, since Norway is a part of Schengen area. Freedom of movement is something the UK residents wants to limit by all cost. This obviously cuts both ways, but sometimes you have to get what you really want. From the freedom of movement perspective, UK citizenship gets massively devalued. You’ll get to stay in the UK, but is it something you really, really want? Home Office is inflating immigration fees and tightening rules, Brexit campaigners want immigration to stop completely and get all the foreigners out. And let’s be honest, the best way to do that is to ruin the country and make it complete unattractive on a global scale.

After living in a few countries you start to view the world from a different perspective. It’s a hugely diverse world, but it should be open for everyone. Freedom of movement should be universal. It is likely not to happen on a global scale anytime soon. But somehow the EU made it work on a significant part of the planet. This is an incredibly huge achievement.

Implementing freedom of movement is considered hard and is opposed by many people. But it transcends us as a humanity. This is when you start thinking about the planet as a whole, and not just about your personal lawn. And we are having global problems on our hands - like the ever heating planet that might as well destroy all of us tomorrow, despite the residence statuses or saving accounts. Should we maybe grow up a bit, develop a sense of empathy and maybe just a tiny bit of tolerance for each other?

And, eventually, cancel all the paperwork.

We're off to the epic trip in Russia, and I'm implementing a new season of the daily vlog. 5 episodes released so far, much more to go. You can follow our adventures on this YouTube playlist. All new episodes are being added there daily.

This is the longest stretch of daily vlogs I've ever done.

Expect Saint-Petersburg, Cherepovets, Vologda region, small villages, countryside, trains, metro, super fast boats from USSR times, lots of coffee, vintage soviet arcade video machines and hunt for rare vintage film cameras.

I should probably explain why there are no fresh blogs here. The reason is daily vlogging.

For the past 43 days I would film an episode, cut it, and publish. YouTube is my primary platform for now. Every day a small short film is finished and revealed to the world.

This takes a bit of dedication, concentration, passion and self organising. Latter one is probably the most important. Editing, rendering and publishing of an episode takes anything between 2-4 hours, each day. That’s a significant chunk of time which just has to be made available. The rest of the day has also be organised into something that would offer an opportunity to film a short story. I’m still working on that one.

A simple recording of a mundane day is, well, boring. You have to do something about your life, then live through it, experience it and then pour it into a vlog episode. It is sort of like blog, which in my mind is a more refined form of self expression. You need to master the punctuation, wordsmithing, organise your thoughts perfectly and create a chunk of information filled with elegancy. For me to write a proper blog usually takes anything between one week to couple of months. Bear in mind the nature of a language which is not my native, although slowly becoming my first.

Podcasting is another beast. It takes a bit of preparation, then we generally are able to talk effortlessly into mics for an hour or two. You could release that straight into the Internet, but I usually listen to the whole thing and edit it. That takes another 2-3 hours. Podcasting requires less efforts to express what you think from the hosts, but it sort of outsources that onto the audience. They have to invest their own time into processing the information, which is rarely fine filtered, and in worth case scenario just a stream of consciousness.

In my mind vlogging sites somewhere in between. There is heavy editing process involved. There is also unpredictability of the, well, life. You plan for certain things to happen - and they don’t - and you have to embrace the day and live it to the fullest - literally make the best of it. You are constrained by the circumstances, but you have time and some resources to figure out a topic.

A single topic can make the film.

It is also pointless if you have nothing personal to say. Look - Big Ben.

I’m struggling every day, but it is huge fun. It pushes me to my human and artistic limits. It is highly challenging, there are no rewards, and it is exhilarating.

Let’s see how long this’ll last.

You can follow my struggles too.

Some of my highlights and notes on the recent conference in Bratislava. 3 days, 2 tracks, lots of cake and some Angular.

@swannodette on Datomic

David Nolen of Cognitec and Clojure gave a good overview of issues we're experiencing today when implementing mid to large scale apps, before explaining how Datomic database might solve some of them. Some of my thoughts here inspired by his talk.

If you have a choice of investing into tests vs investing into a simpler system, latter is always better. Less moving parts mean fewer things to break and less time for debugging issues. You still have to invest time into designing simpler systems though. Making large and complicated systems is easy and straightforward in a short term, this is what we're all doing after all.

PLOP aka place-oriented programming - a term Rich Hickey used in his classic talk to describe our traditional approach to mutable programming. Originally was required by limitations of old computers with little memory available. Things have changed quite a bit since then.

Conventional databases in the system are effectively huge mutable variables with all the applicable consequences. Debugging large systems is hard because it is impossible to replicate the exact state of it during the issue. We've figured this quite some time ago for React - if the state of the app is immutable things become much easier to control. We haven't transcended, however (for the most part) beyond just the apps - our systems are still full of mutable parts making a life of a developer hard and miserable. Datomic is effectively an immutable database, like a huge Redux store.

I've tried setting up Datomic in the past though, and it was not an easy task. It is also not free, although they do have a free tier. It was also only useful for Clojure apps. Things are getting better, however - Datomic JS client is coming, and you'll be able to start a Datomic instance from AWS Marketplace in a couple of clicks soon. Even today people manage to run it for their Node.js apps, but that does require some setup.

Homework:

• Couple of true classics - Rich Hickey - Value of Values and also Hammock driven development
• Out of the Tar Pit book
• How to solve it book by mathematician George Pólya describing methods of problem-solving

Focal from Grammarly

Neat FRP UI library from Grammarly and also used by them in web and desktop apps. Written in TypeScript.

Jest as a platform by Rogelio Guzman

Apparently, Jest is becoming a full-fledged platform. The good news is that gives us some neat customisation options, as well as allows to peek inside Jest itself.

As of today most of our unit tests are quite a mess of libraries and conventions. Sometimes it is Jest. Sometimes it is Mocha + Sinon. Add a bunch of extra tools for better mocking, reporting results, linting the code. What Jest is trying to do is to pick and swap parts of itself to other things you prefer. Will we ever end up with a perfect testing setup working with all apps? Probably not. But you could have conditions in that setup.

A basic lifecycle of a Jest run consists of

• Finding all the relevant files
• Running tests
• Reporting results

Jest contains tools for achieving that, quite a few of them. What you can do today is to pick the tools you need, leave out the tools you don't need, and replace some default parts with other alternatives. You can swap test runner to Mocha, or even write your own.

Jest used to be a highly opinionated test framework that made choices for you, but they are opening the hood now for everyone to tinker with.

Sean Larkin on Webpack and OSS community

I've missed the 2 hours long workshop on Webpack but managed to attend an AMA with Sean Larkin. The good stuff:

• There is a SurviveJS Webpack book, free to use.
• A fascinating insight into how community influences feature picking decisions and the overall development of the project. Also how to deal with frustrated members of the community. Apparently, you have to show them love <3. In the words of Sean "The best weapons against trolls is show that you care". The general idea is transparency of the backlog. Another important influencing factor is potential sponsors of the OSS project. A company might decide to sponsor your OSS so they could get a preferential treatment, which is totally fair.
• OSS is done best when done full time, but that's not really the news - and that's why sponsors are important.

Richard Feldman on CSS as byte code

This talk might've been also titled "Why you should use Elm for CSS", but we'll get there in a moment.

"CSS was never meant to be used for creating user interfaces"

Not really. Back in 1990:s HTML was conceived as a content-only language, but users wanted to make the content look pretty. So around 1996 CSS started to happen so that users could write it in the browser and format the content the way they wanted it to look. Yep, CSS was meant to be written by users. This explains my long-standing question on why there is default CSS in each browser - because this is where all of the CSS where suppose to be by design.

Things are rarely used the way they are originally designed. Well, most of the time, but not always. Today Web is the biggest user interface delivery platform.

We're quite used to JS transpilers as of 2017. Yes, we have a bunch of browsers with different implementations of the new ECMAScript features, but this is why we have handy tools to make the shiny modern code we write compatible with every outdated browser there is. Most of this today is done automatically. Compiled JS is effectively today's bytecode.

You could draw some parallels into the CSS world - there are PostCSS and LESS and SASS, and CSS3 is sort of happening. But the vertical positioning of a content is still a tricky thing (unless you're all flexbox that is). There's room for more effective tools offering more powerful features and transpiling it all into browser compatible CSS. Hence Elm-CSS. It doesn't just build on top of existing CSS conventions maintaining the old mindset of "oh well it's still CSS", but tries to invent a new UI building language, evolved from CSS but not inheriting any of its bad parts. You also get full benefits of this being written in Elm - all CSS in JS ideas work here too, but the code looks much prettier.

Igor Minar and Evan You on client side app optimisations

Make the client side app as light and fast as you can they say. The art of optimising frontend bundles slowly moves towards the dark arts - and both Igor and Evan did a great job at demystifying it. Most of the job is done by Webpack anyway.

Today there are handy tools allowing you to peek into the compiled Webpack bundle and see what's really going on in there. Source-map-explorer got a special recommendation, I've tried it - it totally deserves its reputation. You have to have a certain understanding of the needs of your code in order to use it effectively - but even deep diving into the unknown codebase might give you some insights. The trick is to look at the way the modules are imported and question the need to import the whole module or only the necessary parts.

There's also a flip side - when writing a module, make sure it is, well, modular. Allow clients to pick what they need instead of dumping everything into export default.

Webpack is capable of concatenating modules, but not by default. For that, you have to enable moduleConcatenationPlugin.

"In the past, one of the webpack’s trade-offs when bundling was that each module in your bundle would be wrapped in individual function closures. These wrapper functions made it slower for your JavaScript to execute in the browser. In comparison, tools like Closure Compiler and RollupJS ‘hoist’ or concatenate the scope of all your modules into one closure and allow for your code to have a faster execution time in the browser."

Code splitting is still a good idea. My general argument about it was the speed of HTTP requests on slow mobile networks - but this is where http/2 comes in handy - and you can totally use it today. Code splitting is very effective for single page apps where your landing page does not necessarily need the rest of the app straight away - something we still do almost always, letting our users wait for the whole thing to load before anything meaningful can happen.

Honorable mention - Webpack Dashboard from Formidable. "Now when you run your dev server, you basically work at NASA".

Prop based testing by Gave Scholz

"So much of JavaScript unit testing is ineffective against preventing bugs."

Randomized Testing in JavaScript

When testing things we need test data. Most often than not the data would be hardcoded. Sometimes (if we feel generous enough) we might write a generator. The idea of randomised prop testing is to use generators that understand types of the objects and can generate unique objects every time within the set type.

Why would this be possibly a good idea? This is effectively introducing entropy into your otherwise perfectly isolated test environment. That's exactly why. To design a fail-proof system you have to define boundaries of it, and let the robots test those boundaries properly. An average unit test will perform a very niche scenario with a single given value out of sometimes millions of possible values. Sometimes it is possible to test all of them for every build. Sometimes not. Randomisation is a middle ground.

JavaScript is a dynamically typed language, but nowadays we have FlowType or even TypeScript. Once you do have type definitions, making randomised test data generators becomes possible. Here's a Babel plugin for transforming FlowType into generators.

Andrey Sitnik on Logux in production

We're notoriously bad at handling errors when it comes to the client side. Well, maybe also server side. But mostly client side. The forgiving nature of an app in the browser is that once a user is frustrated, they can always hit a reload button.

This was not always the case - in a native app, there is an option of hanging helplessly and hoping a user knows how to kill an app that is stuck. Or throwing the whole OS into a BSOD state.

But I digress.

Single page apps are easy to get into a stuck state because they rely on a good network connection. Which is rarely the case. Andrey brings an example of the internet in China where packet loss can reach 40%. It's just the way it is, there is no way around. Network connection is actually mostly bad in most parts of the world. Africa, New Zealand and Bethnal Green are among these places. You have to face the fact and address it as a web developer.

Logux is a solution to synchronise app state with a server in a reliable, fault-tolerant way. You could sort of compare it to Apollo and Relay Modern in a way - but it is much more minimalistic, relies on WebSockets and doesn't force you to use GraphQL or wrap your React components into containers. Its API is Redux compatible. It allows you to define app actions and have central app state, parts of which are automatically synced to a server side.

The secret sauce is The Log (hence, LOGux). The log is timestamped and allows to figure out the ultimate state of the app at a given time. Logux also implements its own timestamping, since you can't really rely on clients, or, in some cases - even servers. All it is, in the end, is the log of actions, coming from either client or server. Once the actions are received and reduced to the app state, all of that is rendered and presented to a user.

Logux has grown to a version 0.2 since its announcement on React London conflict in March 2017 and is used today by Evil Martians in production.

Bonus track

• Did a vlog on the conference - check it out

Since then I've started a micro blog: http://alexsavin.micro.blog/. This is effectively my replacement for Twitter, as it is still maintaining open Web ideology, and is a nice place to be. Do subscribe, and let me know if you also have a micro blog - I'd be happy to follow you.

Ok now it is time to press publish and see if this ends up on my blog.

What usually happens next is that real-world users break your app. Not deliberately, of course, there's no pre-meditated evil intention. There are a few biases we have as software developers, and one of them is that if a feature is well specced and unit tested with 100% code coverage, it'll work just fine on production.

Except it, of course, won't. The real world will always have more edge cases that you can spec in your JIRA ticket.

Your freshly released feature might work just fine until it hits one of those cases when input data is not properly validated, or even manually entered directly into a database. In a rush. With typos. And then you'll have an unhandled exception, carefully captured and reported to Sentry. I hope you are not writing software for space rockets.

"But wait", - you'll say. - "Isn't this the usual circle of life? You write code, it breaks, you report a bug and fix it".

It totally is, and in most cases, there's absolutely nothing wrong about it. Most of us are never trusted with writing software for space rockets, nuclear reactors or financial instruments that automatically trade in millions of pounds. That's of course until you find yourself in charge of a team building a space rocket, and a JIRA ticket (sized as a medium) titled "MVP of a rocket, must not explode".

Shadow testing is a technique that can help you with that.

It's not going to help you launch the first rocket though. For that, you'll have to rely on your usual set of tests. But once you have a regularly scheduled rocket in place, it'll help you updating this rocket in a safer, less explosive way.

Hello, my name is Alex and I'm in charge of Revenue Assurance tech at one of the fastest-growing energy suppliers in the UK. We have over 1 million members right now, and significant cash flow.

Traditionally, energy business works like this - you burn some electricity, and then pay for it. The bill is generated monthly, and this is when you're expected to cover your energy usage with cash. In the UK we also have this thing called Direct Debit - this is when you agree for a company to charge your bank account directly, doesn't matter if there are sufficient funds or not. In the ideal situation, everyone is paying for the things they buy or use. However, once your business grows, you'll start having something called revenue at risk.

Revenue at risk is literally what it says on the tin. Some of the hard-earned money that belongs to you, and you are entitled to receive, is not coming your way. Parts of it can be delayed, and some of it will never find a way to your bank account. This is where Revenue Assurance comes in. They can think of the reasons, why the cash doesn't flow and find ways to make it do so. In an ethical, user-friendly way, of course.

For example, we have a set of cronjobs that can automatically detect failed payments, match it to a customer, check their circumstances and decide if we want to send a reminder about it. This is not a happy message you would like to receive in the morning, but it is something that could potentially prevent you from going even further into debt. This is also not a message you would want to receive by a mistake.

"But hey" - you'll say. - "Just copy the whole database into a staging one, and test as much as you want."

This was sort of ok until very recently when GDPR was introduced. Even before, copying sensitive customer data left and right was worrisome - but now this is completely illegal.

You could however, construct a version of staging data derived from production data. Names and addresses obfuscated, with non-sensitive data replicating current state on production. This is useful for some use cases - but not very useful to us, as we intend to send emails and other forms of comms. Besides there's also a replication delay between prod and staging data - about a week if you're lucky, and over a month if you're not.

What is the worst possible outcome?

This might be the most important question you have to ask yourself when releasing software. If everything goes horribly wrong, what sort of harm this can do? Is it something we can contain? What are the rollback procedures?

Depending on your answers you can decide what sort of testing you need. Facebook's famous mantra used to be "go fast and break things (as long as you can quickly fix them)". The worst possible outcome for an early Facebook was that someone's status update would go missing. On the other side of the spectrum are banks, transportation and space tech. The potential for harm is huge, and rolling back is tricky or impossible.

Where are you on this spectrum? For me, it is somewhere in the middle.

A traditional approach

At Bulb, we're pretty good at code quality. We do peer reviews. We have automated CI builds. Unit tests are a must, and a code coverage tool will post its report to a pull request. We have a staging environment, everything runs in Docker containers, and what you test is exactly what gets shipped to production. This gets us very far on the scale of confidence when releasing to prod.

But not to 100%.

There are a few things can go wrong and it is very difficult to predict it while still in the staging environment.

So what is the fine line between staging and prod?

• Production data consistency. Although the schema is well defined, the actual data can be unpredictable, and there is no way of knowing all the edge cases beforehand. Things have improved a lot though with us moving to Typescript and translating data typings into the code.
• Performance issues. Our staging environment is a replica of a production one, but it is not exactly 1:1. Certain operations that are fast in staging can be very slow in prod. Timing also matters, and while things can be fast at some hours of the day, they can become slow at other hours.
• Integration with 3rd party services. Almost every service nowadays has a development environment where you can test things, but again - in real prod situation things can behave differently, and exceptions can be thrown when you least expect them.
• Integration with internal services. Something that can be tested with a good integration test in a staging environment. However integration tests are bad at discovering edge cases, and again - ideally you want to run it against production data to get to the real thing as close as possible.

None of this might be a problem for you. The question you should be constantly asking is - what is good enough? How much confidence is enough confidence? And what is the plan when things go wrong?

(the plan is - rollback the deployment and data, of course, but this is like a whole other topic)

An improvement

At some point in my job, I was tasked with implementing an automated system reminding our customers about missing payments. An initial version was fairly simple, was tested internally on staging and then on production with a group of brave beta testers. All was good, and it was successfully released.

Sometime later an improvement had to be released. Now this job was running against millions of customer records, daily. How do you test for regressions? How do you make sure the existing customers are not affected?

To make things more interesting, there are multiple stages a given customer is progressing through. At any moment you have thousands of cases at different stages of the process, and you want for our customers to never notice any transition to a newer version of the process.

My first idea was to look at production data we have gathered so far, extrapolate use cases and write a lot of unit tests. This could work. I would also have to maintain that huge set of tests and constantly be on the lookout for new cases - which are extremely tricky to identify.

My second idea was to release the change to production and see if anything breaks. But in a safe way.

We are talking classic reliability engineering here, but before things hit the fan. Imagine a way you could throw features to production, but if anything breaks only you would know about it.

Shadow testing

A feature is released in shadow mode. It is there, in production, running side by side with the real thing.

Step 1: Your shadow instance receives live data. It processes the data and logs everything. In the end, it logs the result and doesn't actually mutate the state of the system.

Step 2: Your master instance receives the same live data. It does the same logging of all the decisions and actions.

Outcome: Now you have 2 sets of logs - shadow and master ones. They were fed with the same input data. Have they behaved expectedly and produced the desired result? We can find out this by simply diffing the logs.

Shadow testing is not a new thing - big companies with business-critical software are using it all the time. Tesla is using it to test autopilot features in its cars around the world. They push candidate updates to a selected group of cars without users ever knowing about it.

A candidate runs in shadow mode along with the master, receives inputs from the cameras and sensors in the real world and makes autopilot decisions, which are logged and sent back to Tesla servers for post evaluating. The only other alternative would be learning from actual car crashes. But that's, you know, hard to rollback.

Implementation

Remember the part when a candidate instance in shadow mode is not supposed to modify the state of the system? This is the real key to shadow testing.

If you zoom out a little bit out of your app, you can see a larger picture where there's data coming into the app, and actions happening as a result. Some of the data could be persisted in a database. Emails could be dispatched. Phone calls could be made. A webpage could be rendered. What we want is for our app to be able to pretend to do all these things but not actually doing any of that.

Once you have identified all possible ways how an app can modify the state of a larger system, you'd want to implement a special flag. When this flag is enabled we want the app to run in a harmless mode where it receives production data, processes it and logs what it would do (instead of doing all those things). In our app, we called it toothless mode. When enabled, the app would become completely harmless and instead would simply log its intentions to change the state of the system.

You might want to rethink your approach to logging. Logs are the key to shadow testing and they should represent an accurate sequence of actions, as well as intentions to modify the state - aka results of the run. Every intention to state change should be logged, as this is how you will be detecting regressions in the behaviour of your app.

First run

Once you have toothless mode and logs in place, you are ready for shadow testing. In our case, we run our apps as cronjobs once a day - so a single run has a clear beginning and an end. If your app is a service which is always up, you can run a shadow instance side-by-side. Depending on how actions are triggered in your app, you might have to think about routing this trigger to both instances simultaneously. For example, if your service is triggered by an HTTP request, you want this request to land on both shadow and master instances, with the same inputs.

It is entirely possible that your app modifies system's state in a way that it affects shadow instance. For example, during the run, your app requests data from a remote source, but also the same data is modified as one of the outcomes. This is not an ideal situation, and an immutable approach is always preferred. In the ideal world, your app is like a pure function, takes inputs, produces outputs and never mutates input values. However, if this is the case, you probably want to first run shadow instance, collect logs and only then run the master instance.

Here's the side by side comparison of the master and candidate logs running in production against the same input data. If they match 100% - there are no regressions or change in behaviour.

Collecting logs should be a simple case of tailing everything into a file. Some systems would also offer you auto-saving logs into a cloud storage bucket, which can be handy if you have huge logs and it takes a significant amount of time per run. Once you have your log files, you'd want to make a visual diff. VSCode is pretty good at this.

Concurrency

The sequence of events is important in shadow testing. A regression can express itself not only through bad output but also with a different sequence of actions performed. If you're using concurrency in your code (think promises), you will find out that the sequence of data processing is not guaranteed. Your diff will reflect this with chunks of logs shuffled around. Simply put, if your code uses concurrency, direct diffing of logs is not a good option.

Instead, you'd want sorted logs.

This is also the first step towards structured logs. You'd have to think a bit on how you'd want your logs to be sorted. Most importantly, you'll have to get rid of timestamps in your logs, as they generally confuse sorting functionality.

We use account ids. They are unique, always consistent and related to a given account that is being processed. Once sorted, you can easily spot regressions, even though the sequence of the events is now shuffled. Once you have detected the regression, you can switch back to the original log and restore the real sequence of events.

Tools

VSCode is a pretty good tool for starters. It has a built-in diff tool which will let you easily compare two files. You can also sort all the logs in case there was a concurrency issue and simple diff is not working out for you.

Things are easy when you have two separate files from shadow and master runs. At the moment we have an arrangement when logs are automatically uploaded into Google Storage bucket. Basically, all logs are dumped into the same file, and a new file is started on every hour. A single run can span across multiple files, and the same file can contain traces from both shadow and master runs.

Originally this wasn't a problem, as you could retrieve logs from a k8s deployment after it has finished running. However there is a limit on how many logs can be stored, and once you hit it, you will only get last ~10k logs. Google's recommendation is to setup logs streaming into a storage bucket, which is precisely what we did.

Now, it is possible to manually sort logs out of log JSON files. It is also not a particularly exciting task. Especially if you have to do it over and over again. So we implemented shadow test tools. It is a collection of scripts that can parse a group of files, pick the logs for both shadow and master runs, separate them and also structure them for easier comparison.

Another thing it can do is automatically handle expected differences. If you expect a difference in behaviour between shadow and master runs, you can describe this difference to the diff tool, and it will skip it from the final diff.

The tools currently are quite specific to our needs, but we might as well open source them at some point, if they become truly useful beyond the boundaries of our team.

Next steps

In my mind, the ideal scenario would be having a shadow test run as part of the CI build. This could be one of those optional steps in the new Circle CI flows where you can let it run a shadow test when needed.

Running shadow tests is time-consuming. In our case, a single run can take up to an hour, after which you need a human to fetch the resulting logs, generate a diff and look for regressions. This can be automated further - you initiate the test, it runs in the background, generates a diff and posts it to you personally on Slack if there are regressions detected. Pats you on a shoulder if not.

Further reading

Tesla shadow testing https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2019/04/29/teslas-shadow-testing-offers-a-useful-advantage-on-the-biggest-problem-in-robocars/

Also watch Tesla's presentation from their AI day - specifically on how they use shadow mode to deploy increments to their autonomous driving model: https://youtu.be/Ucp0TTmvqOE?t=7892

Traffic shadowing with Open Diffy https://github.com/opendiffy/diffy

Traffic mirroring, also known as traffic shadowing, provides a powerful way to bring changes to production at the lowest possible risk. The mirror sends a copy of real-time traffic to the mirroring service. Mirrored traffic goes outside of the critical request path of the main services.

Alibaba and traffic comparison https://www.alibabacloud.com/blog/traffic-management-with-istio-3-traffic-comparison-analysis-based-on-istio_594545

Testing in production - the safe way https://medium.com/@copyconstruct/testing-in-production-the-safe-way-18ca102d0ef1

Feedback

Are you using shadow testing in your company? Let me know and let's catch up and talk! You can drop me a line to hello@alexsavin.me or send me a message on Twitter: @alexsavinme

This question came up a few times recently in conversations with my friends, so I thought I'd write a more detailed explanations.

I've been an active user of Instagram for a number of years. Daily logins, thousands of posts. Never became a proper IG celebrity, or even a micro-influencer - but I've had my fun following a significant amount of users posting pics from film cameras. It's been a long time since IG purists demanded IG is only appropriate for pictures taken on a phone camera. Doing that today would be your direct path to failure, since there are a billion users with the latest iPhone cameras, and every single one of them wants to become an influencer.

You have to be more inventive to win the game today.

Do you remember a time when all photos where forced to be a square? Oh, and a good selection of frames?

The answer to a question why you shouldn't use Instagram today have a few slices, so let me try and split this cake a little.

You are a product

I don't really like ads. I mean, it's totally justified for an online product to use ads as a revenue stream. Often, ads are the only viable revenue for an online service.

I used to like Instagram ads - they did nail the targeting thing and at some point it was recommending relevant events and things I actually was interested in. Lately however it feels that Facebook is grasping for increasing revenue. Facebook's core product is accessible via browser, hence ads can be blocked with extensions. I'm sure they are not happy about it. Instagram technically has a Web version, but it was deliberately strangled in order to push people towards the native app. This is where the majority of users are, and this is where FB has total control over the content.

This is where you can crank the revenue all the way to 11.

There are tricks for blocking ads in the native apps, but none of them will work with Instagram as I'm pretty sure that will block the rest of the content too. And, let's be completely honest, when you subscribe to services T&C:s, you also agree to watch the ads.

The only other fair alternative is that you stop using the service and leave.

API

Instagram used to have a nice API - a way for third parties like myself and yourself to build an alternative client with unique features to access pictures, leave comments, schedule posts and enjoy the experience on iPad - the core team been ignoring tablets forever. The bad news is - FB wants to strangle the third parties and stop them from existing.

The reason is easy enough - you don't have control over ads on those side apps, hence they don't contribute to the revenue. Why should you invest into features that don't contribute to your KPI:s? How are you going to get that quarterly bonus?

With the third party apps gone, the rest of the users will be forced to use the main client app, have all the latest features. And ads.

A sense of a timeline

Algorithimic timeline is great in some ways. Your best friends' pictures are always on top. The first picture is guaranteed to capture your attention and a like. One of the success metrics for the timeline team (I'm sure) is that top post must always get your like or comment. Because second post is an ad, and you'd want to scroll to see it after the success of a first post.

Algorithmic timeline is also a perfect tool for creating echo chambers. To guarantee your likes and satisfaction you will only be displayed posts from your previous likes and current desires, which means less relevant to your current mood posts will be pushed out of your timeline. People you follow become merely a number on your followers count.

In the current political climate of deliberate division I feel like algorithmic timeline might be a single most powerful feature that can bring extremely awful people to power.

I also like chronological timelines. I like how in Google Photos I can just scroll to a June 2017 and pretty quickly find what I'm looking for. Things will probably become more complicated once I'm old enough to loose track of time, but hopefully that'll take a few more years for my brain to soften on the social media apps.

Restricted access

One problem with closed platforms is how do you share your content with someone, who isn't there? There is instagram.com browser version of the app, which allowed anyone to view my stream of photos. React - the most popular JavaScript framework of all times - was literally invented as part of that project.

As of right now, you can still access my account online on https://www.instagram.com/alexsavinme/ . As soon as you arrive, you will be prompted to log in by a not insignificant banner at the bottom of the page. If you dismiss the banner and start scrolling through the pictures, you will be stopped by a proper overlay forcing you to either login or sign up. There is no way of dismissing that.

So much for the open access.

Alternatives

"This is all great" - you might say. "But there is literally no competition right now. Well, maybe TikTok."

Lately I've been following the Open Web movement, and they have a few options in a form of open source, decentralised, anyone can host this apps. Decentralisation and openness are probably two key things that matter the most to me.

Pixelfed

One of the direct competitors to Instagram is Pixelfed - https://pixelfed.org/ It is a web app which anyone can host. The clever twist here is that every instance can communicate with each other using a standard called ActivityPub. This way the network is decentralised, but you can still follow users from other networks, and everyone can like and comment on each other's photos.

You can post stories too.

At the moment of writing there are no native apps for Pixelfed, however their Web version works beautifully.

You can follow me here: https://pixelfed.social/alexsavin

If you decide to join Pixelfed, here are all the available instances: https://the-federation.info/pixelfed

Price: free (if you join one of the hosted instances)

Micro.blog

Not a direct competitor to Instagram, more like a slow Twitter sort of service, which also fallbacks nicely to Open Web standards. It is what is written on a tin - a service allowing you to post small blog posts. You can follow friends too.

Here's mine: https://alexsavin.micro.blog

It looks just like a homepage, and there is RSS feed to subscribe to, if you are not a user of Micro.blog but still would like to keep an eye on new posts.

Yes, RSS is alive and kicking, there are still amazing clients like Newsblur to subscribe to feeds and read latest updates. In fact, 95% of all podcasts are distributed via good old RSS. And there is an argument if you can call podcast a podcast if it is not available via RSS.

Microblog allows you to post pictures too. And they have something called emoji tags - it's when you use an appropriate emoji to signal the type of the content in the current post. This in turn enables discovery of photos (and books, and movie recommendations, and music) that users posted on the platform.

I mostly use Micro.blog as my Twitter replacement + open bookmarks registry. The community is nice too. You can fave posts, but also you get thoughtful comments and some of the greatest discussions with strangers on the Internet.

There is a native app for iOS and MacOS too.

Price: 5$ / month. This gives me hosted version of the service, so I don't have to host it myself. And, hopefully, helps the creator of the service to keep it up.

Flickr

It's still around - now saved by Smugmug, which tries to figure out what to do with it. I mainly use it as my main full res photo storage for all the film scans. There is no limit on how big a single photo can be - or it is incredibly high.

There are some unique communities still around on Flickr - one of highlights would be stereoscopic photo communities, and anaglyph in particular. If you have a pair of red/cyan glasses handy, you can discover tons of 3D photos on Flickr for your personal enjoyment.

My personal Flickr (been going since 2008): https://www.flickr.com/photos/karismafilms/

Cost: £4.50 / month

Openness

I should probably mention that every single above mentioned service allows public access to your public posts and photos for everyone with a link, with no need for registration or SMS. This is quite literally the fundamental principle of the Web how it was invented and intended to be used. It was also how the Internet was different from a bunch of other networks that existed long time before - everyone are invited, anyone can learn HTML and post your own webpage in no time. Also, you could view the source code of anyone's webpage, learn a trick or two, and use them on your own page.

These times are mostly gone now. Viewing page source on the Web is mostly reserved for software developers.

In short - although we are mostly a traditional "work from office" company, for a software developer there's nothing that would stop you from being 100% productive while working remotely.

Step 1: No meetings Wednesdays

This was a tiny idea that quickly became integrated into our culture. On Wednesdays we have no meetings. This also means you can from from anywhere. You can come and work from the office. You can fly to Budapest and work from there. Whatever works for you.

Most of our product teams are working from home on Wednesdays, and this has created an environment where we had to test and maintain our toolset and best practices. Our VPN has failed a couple of times, issues were addressed and now it is in a great shape and I haven't had a connectivity issue in ages.

Step 2: VPN

As a fundamental security precaution, connectivity to business critical resources should be limited to the office network or a VPN. This means a reliable VPN setup, able to handle a load of every developer, QA and data scientist connected to it simultaneously. Load testing a VPN before going 100% remote is a great idea.

Step 3: Culture

Work from home is not the same as remote work. This has been highlighted a few times now in HackerNews discussions. We are not really doing remote work, but more like enabling office type of work from any chosen location. This means most of the teams are starting work at 9am and finishing at 6pm. This means we don't do async work, but instead everyone are more or less synchronised even on WFH days.

This is not neccessarily a bad thing.

Synchronisity allows interoperability. It means you can easily switch between working in the office and working remotely at any given day, not just on Wednesdays. It allows pretty good flexibility in terms of when you need to work from home - you don't have to adjust your working patterns, everything mostly stays the same.

This means, there is no effect on your personal productivity. Things continue the usual way.

So yes, morning standups happen every day, everyone turns up - on site or online, and we plan together the new day ahead.

Step 4: Meetings and informal catch ups

Slack and Google Hangouts are all the tools you need really. But you have to build a culture of using them in the most efficient way.

Slack

Have a channel dedicated just to your immediate team. Encourage ongoing chat about who is doing what and if there are there any blockers. This is like a sound of an engine - you know it's working when there is rumbling going on.

An alternative would be to periodically ask everyone who is doing what right now. This is counter productive and can be perceived as annoying micro management.

Hangouts

Every meeting should be available on Hangouts by default. Ideally, every meeting should also be recorded and available to view later, but there might be some privacy concerns there. At the very least, you should be able to join every meeting via a phone line.

Hangouts are pretty handy also when you want to have a quick informal catch up. Those are irreplaceble - and often are an argument for working from office. When everyone are in the office, you can interrupt and talk to any of your co-workers at any moment, right?

Not really. Even in the office, even when sitting side by side there are good and bad times of interrupting your teammate. We try to indicate those moments by having a headphones on policy - when I have my headphones on, treat this as a do-not-disturb sign.

Now when it is a good moment to catch up, you might as well use Hangouts to do a bit of pairing, discuss a particular feature detail or do a mob review of a particularly challenging pull request. Reviews over Hangouts work equally well, if not better - no need to lean over each other around a laptop screen, you can hear everyone well (especially true when your office is a huge open space), and there are clear turns when it comes to providing feedback.

Step 5: Team autonomy

Team autonomy is probably the single most important enabler of remote work efficiency. Every team member should be able to deliver features either independently, or with the minimum interaction with the rest of the team.

This doesn't mean everyone decides for themselves what they are working on. In a traditional setup you would have sprints, goals and pre-defined tickets that are commited for delivery. Each team would hold refinement sessions when tickets would be created, fleshed out and readied for implementation. Dependencies would be highlighted and resolved. Once the sprint starts, you can pick up a ticket from the sprint backlog and start cracking.

At this point there shouldn't be much stopping you from delivering a ticket all the way to production. There might be some gates to open - QA would potentially be one of them. You might want to implement automatic pipelines for QA, or you might be lucky enough to have a dedicated QA engineer on your team. However the case, each engineer should be in a position to pick right tools for the job, do the job, test it and ship to production. And then verify it on production. And maybe create some alerts for a business critical feature.

There is a danger of siloing here when every team does things in their own way. You can easily mitigate this with a good open engineering culture.

Good engineering culture

Have a tech guild wide presentation on the things you've been shipping and challenges you've been solving recently. Extrapolate good solutions into easily reusable libraries, and encourage others do the same. Have an ongoing company-wide tech chat on Slack. Once a month we also do a mini tech conference in the company when anyone can come up and talk about practices they'd like to spread across the company.

Coffee

Most importantly, don’t forget to get out of home for a nice walk to support your local coffee provider. Not every area of London is equally well covered with fancy cafes, but I feel like this situation has improved significantly in the past years. Keep your steps count up, even when your office is 5 steps from your bed.

A natural timeline of events might look something like this. A logic is designed and a JIRA ticket is created for implementation. While implementing it, a developer discovers a bunch of edge cases. Logic is refined accordingly and evolved to work flawlessly. Code is tested and deployed to production. A shiny set of unit tests provide an insight into how the logic is supposed to work.

6 months later a product manager tries to understand how the feature is functioning. Remember, it's been in production for a while now. The original spec was never updated, and the only place where business logic is described is code itself. A PM needs to have a deep understanding of the current state of things, however, they can't read code. In some instances, they might not even have access to Github.

At this point, a current developer is asked to document the logic in Confluence. A new shiny page is created where behaviour is described and all is well for now. At least for the next few months.

Engineers are a lazy bunch. We like to do things once and let computers do the rest. Doing documentation feels like doing the same job twice - and in many cases it is. First, you tell a computer what to do, then you explain to a human what you just said to a computer. Can these two things somehow be combined? Well, here's my best shot.

Let's imagine we have a web service for buying cinema tickets.

/**
* # Cinema Tickets Service
* ## Buying tickets
* 
* A successful booking will be made of charging a credit card
* and booking seats. If any of that fails, we skip sending
* email confirmation and refund a possibly successful charge.
*/
const buyTickets = (customerData: Customer) => {
  Promise.all([
    chargeCreditCard(),
    bookSeats(),
  ])
  .then(results => sendConfirmation())
  .catch(error => report(error));
}

This looks sort of like jsdoc, but instead of describing input arguments of a given function here, we have a human-readable documentation of the business logic. In markdown.

Since we can't have code as documentation, here's the next best thing - having documentation next to the actual code. This way it can be written and updated as part of the same PR changing the code. It will also help a new dev on the team to understand the context of the code. This is not about the what this code is doing - it is about why this code is doing what it's doing.

A nice perk of VSCode is that it will render markdown into a human-looking rich text when you are going to use this function elsewhere.

Sharing context is an undervalued problem - many things are assumed as obvious - generally by people gained context while spending years in a given company or a project.

In the next part of this series, we are going to talk about how to generate documentation from the blocks of markdown comments scattered around the codebase. Stay tuned!

This might not sound particularly exciting, but it is one of the fundamental tools when building fault-tolerant systems.

I believe the very first time I've heard about idempotency was when reading through Stripe API documentation. Stripe is dealing with financials, which is a very sensitive topic. One of the most common issues on backend systems is when a given operation seems to fail, then it is automatically retried, and suddenly you have performed the same operation twice. This might not be a big deal when you are trying to write a log or send a message - but it is a big deal when you are charging someone's bank card.

Stripe has a whole chapter on Idempotent requests. The way they do it is each request gets assigned an idempotency key - a random-looking alphanumeric combination that is attached to this particular request to perform this particular action. Once you have this key, you are free to retry the same operation as many times as you want - the result will always be the same. Also, a bank card would only be charged once.

Example

If you are dealing with automated jobs charging people millions of dollars on every run - or maybe you are writing software for controlling nuclear reactors - a concept of idempotency has value for you.

Let's say you have a job that would charge a list of accounts late fees on a given day.

It could look something like this.

// pseudo code
lateFeesDailyJob() {
  todaysAccounts = getTodaysAccounts()

  todaysAccounts.forEach(account => {
    accountDetails = fetchAccountDetails(account)
    accountMissedPayment = getMissedPayment(accountDetails)

    if (accountMissedPayment) {
      // is it time to charge a late fee?
      if (accountMissedPayment.date + two_weeks === today) {
        chargeLateFees(accountDetails)
      }
    }
  })
}

This function would be part of a cronjob which is triggered daily. This is all fine, until one day this cronjob fails halfway through the run. Some accounts get processed successfully, while the rest of them never get to be processed. Now you are in trouble - you'd probably want to process the rest of the accounts. However, simply restarting the job would also charge accounts in the first part of the list twice.

You can increase fault tolerance here by modifying the date comparison slightly:

if (accountMissedPayment.date + two_weeks <= today)

This way even if your job misses a day or two, it can still catch up the next day and process all the accounts that were skipped the day before.

But what if you have to re-start the job on the same day as soon as the run failure detected? With the current implementation, the same accounts will get processed twice, or even more if you have multiple retries.

Let's make this function more idempotent. To do that we are going to mark an account as charged after we have taken their money.

if (accountMissedPayment.date + two_weeks <= today) {
    chargeLateFees(accountDetails)
    markAccountAsCharged(accountDetails) // mark record in db
}

We will also modify the original function that fetches a list of accounts to be processed to only return uncharged accounts.

todaysAccounts = getTodaysUnchargedAccounts()

The whole implementation would look like this:

// pseudo code
lateFeesDailyJob() {
  todaysAccounts = getTodaysUnchargedAccounts()

  todaysAccounts.forEach(account => {
    accountDetails = fetchAccountDetails(account)
    accountMissedPayment = getMissedPayment(accountDetails)

    if (accountMissedPayment) {
      // is it time to charge a late fee?
      if (accountMissedPayment.date + two_weeks <= today) {
        chargeLateFees(accountDetails)
        markAccountAsCharged(accountDetails)
      }
    }
  })
}

This way a given account can only be charged once doesn't matter how often you retry this job on the day.

You might also want to combine this approach with atomicity - to make sure that charging late fees and marking an account is reflecting the success of the charge.

result = chargeLateFees(accountDetails)
if (result === SUCCESS) {
    markAccountAsCharged(accountDetails)
}

At this point, we are in a pretty good place. A cronjob can now be safely restarted multiple times on failure, and each account would only get processed once. A job is well done as I call it.

This is the most common scenario when someone would remember atomicity. However, this is one of the core concepts which is incredibly useful when implementing fault-tolerant systems. It's good to keep it handy and use when reviewing pull requests. In some cases, it might also be very hard to plan ahead.

What is atomicity?

Atom is a definition of the smallest indivisible particle. An atomic operation should perform as a whole or not perform at all.

Why this is useful?

In the real world, things tend to fail most unpredictably. Both software and hardware can fail. If you have dependencies to 3rd party services - or utilise the network in any capacity - that can of course fail. When you are persisting data to a local file or a remote bucket, or reading/writing to a database - any of those operations can fail.

It's generally a good idea to fail predictably, with good logs, alerts and least effect to end-users. It's also nice to have an option to recover from failure. This is not always possible. But when you are limiting ways how a system could fail, recovery becomes a much easier task.

The atomic approach is especially useful when you are implementing jobs processing large batches of data. In this case, you are risking thousands (if not millions) corrupted records when something fails.

Example

Let's say we have a job that validates and processes records in a database. Each record is read, validated using a 3rd party, and then written to 2 different tables depending on the result of that validation. We also mark each original record as "read" so that we could skip it from processing next time.

Our pseudocode would look something like this:

originalRecords = readFromDb()

markAsRead(originalRecords)

[validRecords, invalidRecords] = validateWith3rdParty(originalRecords)

writeToTableA(validRecords)
writeToTableB(invalidRecords)

Technically there is nothing wrong with this implementation. It will be fine in most cases. We can have proper logging and alerts around it.

However, when that 3rd party service goes down, we will find ourselves in a heap of trouble. Not only we will fail to perform the operation, but also by the time of the fail, a record currently being processes is already marked as "read" on the original record. This means it will fail to process, and will be skipped the next time this job runs.

Even worst - all of the records in the original batch are already (quite optimistically) marked as "read" - meaning the whole batch would not be retried next time when a 3rd party service might be back up.

Identifying weak links

Anything can fail, but the likelihood will vary. It is safe to assume that any 3rd party service could go down at any moment, and your service should be able to recover from this. It is also not productive to expect anything to fail at any moment.

Personal top of things that are likely to fail:

1. 3rd party services
2. Our services that rely on 3rd party services
3. Unexpected input data
4. Data persistence (database or a cloud bucket)
5. Data read from a database

Things are more likely to fail under an increased load or with a significantly larger batch size than you would usually expect.

Improving atomicity

Batch processing is a good concept for fault tolerance. When a given batch fails, you can restart and try again. In this example, we could be even more granular and implement an atomic operation on a record level.

An improved implementation could look something like this.

originalRecords = readFromDb()

originalRecords.forEach(record => {
  validationResult = validateWith3rdParty(record)

  markAsRead(record)

  if (validationResult)
    writeToTableA(record)
  else
    writeToTableB(record)
})

This way we are processing one record at a time. We have also moved a call to the 3rd part service to the very top. This way if it fails, nothing else will be executed. A record would not be marked as read, which means next time when this job runs, it will be automatically retried.

Can we improve this even further? Yes - we could move markAsRead() to the very bottom of the loop. This way we are making sure that a record is marked as read only when all of the operations are successful. A nice atomic approach.

More thinking

Atomicity is a concept, but you can apply it in any situation when a state of a system is involved. It will allow you to gracefully recover from failures and have a more predictable state of your system. Which is good, because the code we write makes a lot of assumptions about the environment.

NASA likes to say that failure is not an option. For the rest of us, failure has to be an option, but it should happen predictably when we can keep the rest of the system from breaking, and be able to easily recover.