Pete's Eats

Woods & Wellies

Originally uploaded by Pete Barr-Watson

Summer’s drawing to a close, the woods were very autumnal today…

Oh my…

Cappuccino, Intelligentsia from Department of the 4th Dimension on Vimeo.

Previously: Syphon, Intelligentsia & Espresso, Intelligentsia…

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
by Haruki Murakami. This book is part biography, focusing on the parts of Murakami’s life that affected his running or indeed were affected by his running, and part contemplation on the act of running and thinking. Truly inspirational. It’s my favourite in this list.

Born to Run: The Hidden Tribe, the Ultra-Runners, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen
by Christopher McDougall. I got into the concept of barefoot running having picked this book up at an airport some time ago. I’m a heavy runner and very injury-prone so the idea of changing how I run was pretty attractive. About the same time I found out about Newton Running in Boulder and I’ve not looked back since – I run faster and further than since I was 21 and injuries are a thing of the past.

Training lactate pulse rate
by Peter Janssen (Out of print – used copies available). This book is very much a science manual kind of thing, but if you’re interested in using your heart rate to inform your training then you could do worse than learn the science behind it. This book will give you a very solid and excellent grounding in cardiovascular training theory including VO2 Max testing etc.

Ultramarathon Man
by Dean Karnazes. It’s a cheesy book in places, but you can’t ignore the sheer mental strength displayed by ultra-runners and Karnazes is pretty good at getting the emotions down on paper. An easy read, but also pretty inspiring too.

Survival of the Fittest: Anatomy of Peak Physical Performance
by Mike Stroud. As Ran Fiennes expedition partner Stroud was well placed to study the physical effects of ultra distance on the physical body. The book swings from a hypothetical tribe from the earliest of times to real world events that Stroud has taken part in, and it does a great job of explaining the science behind why man is capable of such endurance and perhaps why we quickly (relatively) evolved into what we are today. Read about the Eco-Challenge in the early days, self-supported expeditions to the poles, the Marathon des Sables just to name a few.

See you on the trail

John Moore’s photo of Arlington Cemetery (at 05:03) is really powerful. I can empathise with Jonathan Klein completely about it haunting you afterwards too. Have a read of John Moore’s blog post about the image too, it adds even more weight to the image if that’s even possible.

(cheers to Dave Stone for the original link)

If you want to glimpse what the internet could look like in the UK given the latest attempt by the governing classes to protect big business at all costs (I’m talking about the Digital Economy Act 2010) then you should try and use the internet for general use at a David Lloyd establishment. For those who don’t know, David Lloyd is a UK wide network of health and fitness clubs (and to be fair they do health and fitness really well) that generally have lounges where you can access the internet via installed pc’s or via wifi on your own laptop etc. Pretty great, but not really because they have one of the most aggressive url filtering policies out there and generally block anything that involves media sharing (like Flickr for instance). The only way to complain is to fill in an actual complaint card and hand it into the reception of your club – how quaint.

Anyway, I really needed to access something on Evernote just now and I found that this is now being blocked too. I thought it might be an idea to start compiling a list of sites that they block so that the site owners as well as their users can keep a check on how they might be affected.

Here’s a few but if this affects you then please add sites to the comments section (or hit me up on Twitter: @petebw) as you come across them:

I’ll add more as I come across them…

Note: it’s also worth noting that even your Google search results are filtered and tagged ‘ALLOWED’, ‘BLOCKED’ or ‘UNKNOWN’. Given that you have to log in using specific and personal credentials you may want to self-censor any searches or activity that you’d rather wasn’t tracked (and I’m not just talking about pr0n!) as it’s unclear what data is collected and what it might be used for at a later stage (and yes, this could be said to be true of almost any public access point but if David Lloyd are organised enough to block specific url’s then who knows…).

Note2: I know it’s their prerogative to do this btw, but it’s annoying to come across something which is blocked but you actually would like to access whilst there. Hence this list…

Justice will not be done, no doubt.

The whole US military should be deeply ashamed. Really deeply ashamed; for both the event and the aftermath.

Wishing this was like next week or something but I suppose all good things come to those who wait (until 26th – 29th Sept 2010).

The line-up is looking excellent (as usual) and if last year’s event is anything to go by it’s possible that the line-up will pale in comparison to the event as a whole. Turns out that John and the team at FOTB really, seriously know how to put on an event properly… Not kidding.

Close friends will know that I’m very sceptical of industry conferences generally but FOTB is one of the very few exceptions. Whatever the ticket price when you go to buy yours, well it’s worth it. In fact it’s worth double the price or more.

Things that FOTB changes for me about conferences:

I could go on. I won’t though. Just go grab your ticket (when they go on sale in just over a week’s time) you genuinely won’t regret it.

Oh, and it’s in Brighton which makes it even better.

Here’s a short slideshow of some photo’s I’ve taken in previous years:

Amblight & HTML5 Video Player

Ambilight for web video via the HTML5 player, such a simple concept but so brilliant. I’m pretty sure I’ve wondered about this being possible in the past, but of course with all great ideas the beauty is in the execution not conception.

Check out the developer’s guide (original in Russian) on how he did it (English translation).

I think we’ll be rolling this idea into our plugin roster for Storyplanet…

Iydea

Originally uploaded by Pete Barr-Watson

With the Brighton Flickr group’s very own Jason Lupi too…

It seems that the café photo thing is gaining ground somewhat. Have something in the pipeline which I’ll post here pretty soon…

In the meantime, if you’re in Brighton or planning a visit and like fast wifi and great food then you could do a lot worse than popping into Iydea

A simply gorgeous and inspiring set of videos made using a couple of Canon EOS’s in the Himalayas by a couple of guys on a climbing/mountaineering expedition (renan ozturk on Vimeo). Here’s the first despatch:

TAWOCHE 2K10 dispatches #1 from renan ozturk on Vimeo.

If you like mountains and/or gorgeous camerawork then it’s very much worth checking out the other four videos from the trip on Vimeo too.