It's no surprise that there are thousands and thousands of short films on Youtube. These are everything from professional productions to amateur films shot on phone cameras by teenagers.
You wouldn't believe what's underneath many of the world's cities. Large systems of tunnels, unused railways, sewer systems from centuries ago.
There's people out there who want to (illegally) enter these places and film them for us for our entertainment.
Undercity is the best of this type in my opinion. It follows Steve Duncan as he explores an old railway and sewer underneath New York City and climbs to the top of the Williamsburg Bridge.
Another similar type of Youtube genre that caught my eye was the people who explore abandoned buildings.
The Proper People have been exploring all sorts of buildings, from derelict schools, hospitals and factories to military bases, weapons facilities and even deactivated nuclear power plants.
It's fascinating to watch their "documentaries" (great photography and drone footage) and quite thrilling when they are avoiding security and the authorities, like the episode where they actually got sealed into one of the locations.
Some of the damage is from minor accidents, but many are from major accidents including roll overs, where in most other countries the car would have been written off and never gone back on the road.
In fact in some of the cars he has shown, there has been stickers on the window from US auctions. So someone in Lithuania has bought the car from the US brought it over and had Arthur make it look like new again.
His most famous repair was a luxury BMW 7 series which had major damage, but Arthur pulled metal straight, replaced major sections of the body with used parts removed from cars that must have been in an even worse state.
The video of this repair went "viral" making Arthur a bit of a superstar, but some members of the US crash repair industry reacted with disgust about how this car should never have gone back on the road, and saying that although Arthur showed great skills using the equipment he had available, that he was using outdated techniques and tools.
Regardless of what you think, and whether you have an interest in cars or not, it's amazing to watch how Arthur pulls and hammers metal straight, cuts and joins it, and makes a car which does not have one single straight panel remaining look brand new again.
I love Bootstrap v4 and now that it is finally in Beta can start to use it in new projects. But I miss the online customizer that was available for Bootstrap v3.
Last September I was assigned a 4 day story for Sunset magazine that involved covering the Cascade Hwy along with a few spots in Mazama and Winthrop. As is often the case with travel assignments, this shoot wouldn’t see print for almost a full year. So I was pleased to find out recently that one of the images landed the July cover! The photograph above was taken high above Lake Ann on the Heather Meadows 7 mile loop trail. I’ve done my fair bit of hiking over the years, and this hike makes it onto my top 3 list simply because the entire 7-8 miles is amazing. You’re not waiting for the big reward after a lot of climbing. There are vistas, lakes, wildlife, etc just moments after hitting the trail.
The opening spread of the feature is a landscape image of Blue Lake. It looks like a daily simple photo, but I assure you that getting to this vantage point took some work. The trail ends right at the mouth of the Lake, so my assistant and I essentially went bouldering for 3 more miles to find this view.
I’m a huge fan of ‘weather’, but when your assignment calls for ‘summery’ images, you really are just hoping for some clear skies.
The overlook atop the pass. The only thought running through my mind when looking down at the road was that the next time I’m here I’ll be on my bike with a good group of friends descending towards Mazama. Hoping to do that this summer.
The Mazama store is a definite pit stop. The store is owned by the same family that run’s Husky’s Deli in my neighborhood in W Seattle. They carry Huskies Ice Cream, make delicious pizzas, they bake their own bread, and they pull good espresso.
I had always wanted to stay here, so it was a big treat and a restful place to relax after long days on the road and trails.
I was attempting to use window reflection to show the landscape. It’s always a good challenge shooting interiors of extremely narrow/small spaces.
The Heather Pass hike was the first of three hikes on our list. This is Lake Ann (the one from the cover). The day was completely overcast aside form rare cloud breaks. We waited roughly 90 minutes for 20 seconds of blue sky for this frame.
Gunther happens to be an Art Director who has worked at Vanity Fair UK and Vogue UK. He was on vacation traveling the world in search of unique swimming holes. While framing up the image of Lake Ann, we heard someone banging sticks together. Shortly after, Gunther scrambled up the rocks to where I was set up. He has a great German accent and he asked my assistant and I if we could tell the difference between a Grizzly and a black bear. He then pulled out his camera and showed us the back of his screen. Immediately, Luke and I said ‘Grizzly!’ He had just come across a good size Grizzly about 200 yards from where we were set up. From that point on, Gunther stayed with us until we reached the summit where he fixed himself some tea and rested his legs.
We also came across a family with 3 boys that basically sprinted the whole hike. When I asked the parents what the secret was, the dad showed me his GPS. They were playing geotag, and it definitely kept the kids interested the whole journey.
Two hikers down below for scale. This image reminds me of how lucky I am to have great clients who appreciate my work. I’m super lucky to get to make photographs for a living.
This is a minor release which simply updates the Raspberry Pi firmware on the image. This should mean that the Pi 3 is supported, but I don't have one to test that!
It's come to my attention that I have way too many projects on the go. This post is going to summarize what needs to be done to each of them in a kind of semi-apology for why things you are waiting for might take a while...
It's also worth remembering I can only work on some of these projects in certain locations. DreamPi stuff must happen at home where I have a Dreamcast and a DreamPi set up. Electronics stuff needs to happen near electronics kit, SDL 2 needs a PC with a Dreamcast emulator, access to a Dreamcast and KallisitiOS which I only have at home. Most of my computer time happens on the train, so... yeah.
The DreamPi software image has been a huge success. pcwzrd13 of Dreamcast Live recently reported the most active online Dreamcast game session ever as a result of more people getting their Dreamcast connected. Even though the software works, here's a list of things that are still left to do:
Hanging up and reconnecting every 5 minutes or so when generating the dial-tone to workaround the modem apparently going to sleep
Connected, but separate, Dreamcast Now has become a useful tool, here are the things I'd like to fix:
Add Dreamcast Live and Dreamcast-talk versions of the listing so that those sites can iframe them in
This is working amazingly well considering I hammered it out in a few hours. Still left to do though:
I'd like to design and manufacture these, but this is on hold until I have some line voltage inducers made. The whole process for making a PCB is pretty time consuming so don't expect this stuff soon!
I have 3 prototype PCBs. I need to manually hot-plate solder the components, and then 3D print cases for them. At that point I can decide whether I have the time to sell them and whether it's worth it. This can only be done when I'm at my work's electronics club which unfortunately I can only make occasionally. Don't expect these any time soon either :(
Also, I need to fix some bugs in Fritzing (the PCB software) to make these PCBs export correctly without me manually fixing up the Gerber export files.
This is about 70% done. It needs testing and fixing. I'll get around to this when I start porting my game engine to the Dreamcast....
As you can see, I have a lot going on, and that's ignoring all the support requests / questions I get about the Dreampi and all the other things I'm helping individuals with. It also ignores the non-Dreamcast related stuff that I already have out there.
So, if you are waiting for something, I apologise, but all of my code is open source, I'd appreciate the help if you can contribute!
I'm excited to announce that an experimental replacement server for Dreamarena is now online and as a result, Toy Racer is back online for everyone, even if you don't have a BBA!
DreamPi users have this support right now, just try it! Anyone else on dial-up will need to point their DNS at 46.101.91.123 to use the new server.
As I said, this server is HIGHLY EXPERIMENTAL. It will likely crash, not work, behave weirdly etc. the server will keep improving as I gain more understanding of the authentication protocol.