Quick trip to South Kensington

 ...to see two things - the Fashioning Masculinities exhibition at the V&A, which is finishing on 6 November, and a 72-foot rocket that is temporarily outside the Science Museum.

Simple and elegant, 18th century

Amusing little film danced by men in underwear

In "Spitfire", "choreographer Sir Matthew Bourne OBE ... takes an affectionate look at male vanity and the world of men's underwear advertisements"

Also visible is Aitor Throup's translucent "Ensemble"

Conspicuous consumption of fine fabric in India

"The finer the muslin, the more fabric could be gathered in a 

jama's skirt and ruched in its sleeves"

West meets East in two dragon robes, one made into a jacket

The rocket tucks under the wing of a converted 747  (you can just about see it in the final photo). During air launch to orbit the plane points upward to get LauncherOne at the best angle, and when it's released the plane lurches. (I feel seasick just thinking about it.) It will be launched from the UK soon, from Spaceport Cornwall, Newquay. So far, LauncherOne has delivered cubesats to low earth orbit.

???! - photos etc

The day started well, though somewhat early, as I stitched away on this, that, and the other fabric pot, assembling a merry crew to take to the studio for dipping. The quiet of the morning was a good time to watch the BBC's three programmes on Scandinavian art, to see a few old paintings and some modern landscape etc from Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, and to hear a few stories about the painters and places.

All well and good - it got this far -

 At which point I made some more coffee and some toast, and got distracted by starting to clean the breadbox, and discovered that it has a label on the bottom -

It had been used at Tony's for several years - we found it at a car boot sale. I can't remember what we used before that ... or what I'd been using before it came back to the flat with me. Ahhhhh yes - early in his carpentry career,Tom had made a long narrow box, and I gave it a green undercoat and some silver gilding over that, looked quite nice! But this folksy breadbox is a more practical shape.

Somehow the faffing around with the breadbox led to faffing around with various plants, following on from a big repotting session a few days ago. It's a delight to see the tidy window ledge and the foliferous window boxes. Some calibrachoa from last year have seeded themselves - also known as Million Bells, they're a prolific bloomer and look like tiny petunias - there's a dark pink bloom on the right. They're not the ones with the blotchy leaves, haven't found out what those are yet, but they too appeared spontaneously -

One distraction led to another, until the best part of four hours had been spent on trying to get the phone to back up yesterday's google photos to The Cloud, so that I can access them from the computer (rather than phone) and use them on this blog. At some point in the morning - while I was blogging a quite different topic - the backup stopped -- result: much confusion! Now, having researched this extensively andhaving tried all the easy, non-threatening things, I seem to need to reboot the google app. Which, after all the coffee consumed in the interim, I'm not in a fit state to do. (It's probably really straightforward....??)

While deleting about 100 photos - space is getting low - I had a scare about whether the pix also deleted themselves from Instagram, as they weren't there when I checked ... but what had happened was, they hadn't been put there in the first place! Whatever the reason, that sort of experience can knock your confidence, so further improvements will have to wait. (If you're having the a similar problem, here's a site with step by step instructions on how to free up space on an android phone.)

Archiving all the photos seems like a no-brainer and will free up 70GB ... but I want to know more about how to access the archive.  Gosh, a "digital native" would just do it and worry about the rest if they need to - they'll trust that it will all be fine. For some of us, a lifetime of caution has set those habits in stone.

A few pix did get backed up (and are on Instagram, sorry to be repetitious) - landscapes made of pots. They look quite good in the various colours...

... and will look quite different in white with a touch of black. Eventually.

More than one way to ...

... cross London by Underground - eg from Waterloo to King's Cross -

tfl tracked signals from mobile phones trying to connect to wi-fi, in a pilot study working towards providing live information on which routes are busiest, or easiest. 

As this article explains, data were obtained "by logging the individual Media Access Control (MAC) address numbers that all smartphones emit when trying to connect to a local Wi-Fi hotspot, and by logging each point where a smartphone tried to connect to the Wi-Fi service".

My immediate, horrified reaction was, if someone was concerned about "being tracked", they would need to turn off their phone so that it doesn't try, unasked, to connect. My phone sends me messages about "wi-fi networks are available", and now I realise that there's a MAC address number available to ... someone ... or everyone ...

Not that I'm paranoid about this, just trying to figure out how this 21st century world works! There are people who only turn their phone on when they need to use it, which might make some sense.

All this makes me wonder, what useful things does one have to give up (or see as trade-offs) in order to be part of the modern world?

Fortunately the article goes on to explain that the data were double-scrambled to anonymise and then put through an irreversible encryption code. But "Whether [the systems used here to allay privacy concerns] will survive the government’s current desire to weaken data encryption though, that’s the big issue that could cause a privacy headache in the future."

Techno-frustration

Do you make pacts with yourself? Does that work - do you stick to it? And if not, what happens next?

At some point during the weekend at the CQ Summer School I sort of decided to start using my new computer for "everyday stuff" ... so, bright and early this morning, I started to try out this new resolution. 

It has Photoshop and Indesign, which I need for newsletter etc layout. But on the tiny screen of the Surface Pro, the writing on the menu bars is suitable only for ants! Spend half an hour trying to find if this can be fixed - first, figuring out what words to use to describe the situation - and discover that Adobe isn't going to fix it, ever ... then find this fix but it involves changing the registry, which I'm not brave enough to do, not before breakfast at any rate, despite the clear instructions and the enthusiastic testimonials from dozens of people. 

I pretend I'm an ant, and give Photoshop a try - what I want to do is change the huge dimensions (and large file size) of my photos to 600x480 pixels at 72dpi for using in blog posts. 

You need a mouse to do this, and my "cheap" one, says the Son, isn't Bluetooth ... so he brings his, and it says "it takes a minute to connect."

Son also tells me, somewhat impatiently, about why yesterday's photos (taken on phone) haven't appeared in Google Photos - I need to go to the phone to back them up. This takes quite some time; perhaps a hint not to take so many photos?

I lose patience with the phone, and with the new computer, and here I am back on the old one. Two screens, two keyboards, two mouses ...

... and a photo uploaded straight from the phone, unedited, to find out, via someone else's computer, if the file or the photo is huge. Though actually a bit of research shows this is no longer a problem - you get 15GB storage:

Blogger usually doesn't have any limit for the storage as the images the you upload will be stored in Google Photos of your Google account.

You can check your Google account's storage usage by using this link.

Son and I had a conversation that started "you don't need photoshop Mum, you can do all that with the photo software in the phone" - er, no: not correct keystoning, not doing Levels to get the contrast etc right. Editing is more than just cropping, especially editing photos that will be printed in newsletters etc.

But to a large extent he's right. I need to move with the times, and with the improved software.

So my next challenge is to find out how to use "the photo software on my phone" for ordinary purposes. One quick way to improve matters is to take a little more time when snapping the pix in the first place!

To end, the photo that's on the new screen - unedited -

and trying to get the light right (with a little cropping along the way) -

Nope, can't get the light ... it was much more sombre, despite the sunlight. These huge old conifers are in the beautiful, varied Licky Hill Country Park, near Longbridge (my Summer School experience included long walks before breakfast) - look hard on the left, there's a man with a dog to give you an idea of how big these trees are.  

As for that pact with myself, I'll give it another go later. Much as I love the familiary old computer, it gets so hot when it runs, can't be good. It needs a rest.

Left to my own devices?

The new computer arrived in a lovely box, nearly two weeks ago.

The new phone was a mothers' day present - it has "dash charging" (very fast!)

and the camera can be turned on quickly: you draw a circle on the dark screen and hey presto, it's a camera -

On the phone, I'm having issues with the "improved" keyboard, especially the autocorrect, and with minor things like being able to answer the phone before it cuts over to voicemail, but that's a matter of getting the In-House Tech Trainer to please patiently explain it again, slowly ... and having a chance to practice.

A major change is the way that photos taken on the phone appear, without downloading, in google photos, on my old computer as well as the new one.

Hurrah no cord needed for downloading: select a photo and use Shift+D to download - it takes a while to open in Photoshop, individually. Downloading a group puts them in a zip file and how to deal with that will take some investigating. Mr Google, when asked in words of few syllables, did not find a comprehensible answer to what I thought I was asking; perhaps the In-House Tech Trainer will be easier to communicate with, if I choose my words carefully and the moment of asking equally carefully.

My new computer is remarkably similar to the one the IHTT has had for some months, and is happy with. My new phone is identical to his. Strange, that? No: "if it works, do it some more" - my thinking is "it's going to be easier to get an explanation from someone who's used the product than to try to look it up and fluff about all the time"; his thinking might well be is along the lines of "this is an easy device to use, she'll be able to figure it out herself". In fact he said, "This is exactly like your old phone, Mum, except this button is on the other side and that button is here and the one that was there is a slider here"; and he also said, "what's really good is you draw a circle and that opens the camera right away" - which makes all the difference to me. Then we were into setting up fingerprint identification (which works about 33.3% of the time for me) and instructions like "just play with it, there's nothing you can break".

But I'm still using the old computer almost entirely - because it has Photoshop and because I still use the camera most of the time, rather than the phone; because I have a routine with downloading and processing the photos; because I have files set up (by month, and for a couple of dozen subjects) for organising the photos. Because the old computer still works (despite fears to the contrary) and it's still sitting on the desk, and I like the feel of the keyboard, and it's my friend ... whereas the new one is an interloper, to be dealt with warily, even though it aims to please and lets you stroke its [smooth, shiny, and rather repulsive] screen. The pen that you point and click, instead of the nice fat red mouse that's on the desk, attaches itself magnetically so as not to get lost. The new computer weighs about the same as my ipad and thus could travel easily ... and fits into my/our not-large backpack -

Hers ... and his ... "if it works, do it some more"

It's "just" a matter of getting used to doing the same old things in a slightly different way on a new device. It hurts at first! In a little while I hope to be wondering why there was a problem. But not just yet.

Art surveillance

"Hope you enjoyed Hockney" said the email from Tate, sent 24 hours after I visited the exhibition. And that alienated me, to the point of wanting to cancel my new membership - which is probably over-reaction.

Of course the gallery is keeping track of visitors when it scans the barcode on the card as you show it to enter the exhibition. So why shouldn't it "add value" and/or "niche market" by telling individual visitors that they can find further info about the exhibition/artist on p44 of their magazine?

Because some of us still want to think - or I do, however mistakenly - that barcode-scanning surveillance is about getting attendance statistics, rather than getting data on individuals. Anyone under 35 will tell you that this is foolish misconception, "no point in worrying about it". But I wonder who will eventually see such individualised data, and to what purpose.

We've had a precedent for this in the matter of library books, way back when. Librarians refused to reveal who had borrowed certain books, and good for them. Machines won't have such scruples, and I'd rather that the people who program those machines and collect the data observe the same principles.

Is contacting me about my actions infringing my privacy or civil liberties? I don't know ... but it feels like the thin, sharp, end of the wedge.

"Visually similar results"

As if pinterest wasn't already a black hole where time disappears into, here's a feature that will keep you amused for even longer!

From a google search [on Sessai Hattori, more of which later perhaps] I opened the page and found myself in pinterest. Often I add "-pinterest" when searching, so as to get straight to the source of images, but this time...

Thinking it would enlarge the picture, I clicked on the little icon at top right of the image - and this is what it did -

 It brought up oodles of "visually similar results" for the highlighted area.

Moving the highlighted area gets you other results -

 It's a bit magical. Well, no - it's all done be algorithms or other programming, but it does feel like magic.

And you can change the size of the area, could be useful?

Endlessly fascinating... yet more time disappears into that black hole ...

Defrag & all that stuff

Turning on the computer after a weekend with it off, during which I managed a bit of drawing-class research and preparation, once again the orange box with "Critical Error" that "Start menu and Cortana are not working" came up. When it happened before, I fixed it (myself!) by googling the phrase, watching a succinct video, writing down the steps, and doing exactly as they said. But this time, those instructions didn't work. Which meant I had to spend some time relying on the ipad for email and not being able to download pix or access Word files or InDesign... leaving a window of opportunity for doing the xmas shopping, and some house cleaning ...

Fortunately "my computer guy" was able to come this morning to sort the machine out, and as you can see I can now blog again, and will be able do a few other things like finish preparing the January CQ newsletter. Still, it was nice to have a bit of a "holiday" - I baked cookies!

Sifting through 326,440 files, no wonder it's taking hours!

When the computer-fixer left, he left defrag running ... and oh my it had a lot of red squares, ie fragmented files, probably more red than green (not fragmented; pale blue is free space). When I returned from an afternoon drawing session [to be reported next Tuesday] the "status" was 67%, after 4 hours of work; 1.5 hours later, it's 75%, which means the rate of progress is slowing down (from roughly 16% an hour to about 6%).

Here is evidence that supports a silly theory I have developed over the years: namely, that when you're working on a project, two-thirds of the way through is when the going gets tough and any sense of progress is lost. But you just have to keep going... just like the defrag program. I find with the project, it seems to pick up speed again - wonder if the defragger will? Hmm, during the few minutes it's taken to write these two paragraphs it has done 2%, so maybe it is!

I did check online whether it was ok to use the computer during defrag, and found a lot of opinion that defragging does no good at all, and may shorten the life of the disk if done too often. Hah, I'm safe from that - it's definitely not something I do every week, indeed once a year is probably too often.

Fortunately I had recently backed up the all-important files, but even so the computer problem was a worry. Making a laptop also makes 114 kilos of waste; I'd rather keep this one going than have a shiny new one, thanks.

Techy ... or tetchy?

After successfully writing one post with Blogsy, I have suffered a setback - failure to repeat the feat. Or failure to follow instructions? I managed to turn the ipad into a truculent, uncooperative piece of technology, and sent it off to its room to sulk.

Creative tracing - making pretty patterns based on photos - has been proceeding. Latest discovery: when drawing with thin lines, zoom in till the line is wider than your finger.

This short post is brought to. you by the limited facilities of Safari.

It's felting, Jim, but not as we know it

Having missed the textile graduates in week 1 of New Designers, I determined to get to the Royal College of Art show, heat or no heat, and had a good look at the printed, constructed, and cutting-edge MA projects; for the curious, each student has a profile and photographs here.

Then a quick walk-through of the Design sections - and this set-up caught my interest -

A carpentry tool as part of a knitting machine? Well, almost. It's a programmable needle felting machine, hacked from a jigsaw so it has PUNCH. The fabric samples were of considerable thickness, and the patterning can be subtle and precise.

Adam Blencowe describes his work:

Fuzzy Logic

A new technique that brings felting and digital technology together.

Using a hacked tool in combination with CNC, textiles can be bonded together by matting the fibres from one cloth into the other with a precision not typically found in felting. The marks created in the bonding process become patterns and pockets that enrich the surface of the fabric but also present the opportunity to make the material three-dimensional.

(CNC = computer numerical control)

In the felting, two layers of fabric are joined without stitch, by this busy little machine - see it at work on Adam's website. There are many design possibilities, of course, but what of the practical application, the resulting product? That is still in development. (I suggested using the fabric for absorption of sound from hard bare walls - the patterning would be striking in modern environments.) My feeling is that anyone who can think of combining plaster and ice to make molds out of frozen objects - the project is called "Thaw" - will come up with further new developments.

Strategic use of cable ties to position the computer-controlled punching needle

Fabric samples

Subtlety of design (via)

And this, the magic board, contains the history of the work of the machine - it's the foam into which the needle punches, so the marks are its tracings in making the fabrics -

Tracked

By any other name...

The sewing machines in the window of the branch of All Saints near Friedrichstrasse station aren't exactly easy to photograph - So many reflections... They're displayed end-on, so what you see from across the road is a series of wheels. Close to, they have names we rarely see in England (apart from Singer and Frister-Rossmann). 

You do wonder about their history... these look to be 20s-30s, from the decorative details; were they long-desired by their first proud owners, did they get much use, did the machines have annoying quirks, did the operator get frustrated with tangled bobbin threads or whatever...

Hero and Zetina

Elmas

Zenith

Eser

Ozaltin

Petromax

Solingen

That said, I've not looked closely at the names of the machines used in the windows of All Saints' UK  shops.

The Russians are coming

An alarming increase in page views on this blog - into the thousands - sent me looking for the possible source -

Traffic sources

What triggered this bot-attack? Was it the word "model", used about wax models (and in many posts about life drawing etc in the past) - surely not. However yesterday's post does contain the word amazin' [cleverly disguised here to fend off a repeat-attack] next to the m-word.

Well, that's speculation - but one feels unclean, unsafe. A digital native wouldn't turn a hair - "just ignore it".

A day without internet

...is a day of frustration! Yesterday the "new internet" was installed, fibreoptic, fast and of course wireless. Lots of furniture had to be moved, revealing the need to clean seldom-revealed areas of floor and, because full drawers are heavy and best removed before the furniture is moved, providing the opportunity to sort their contents.

But those domestic delights were to come. First the engineer spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get the wireless in a state that my computer would receive it. In the end we needed to use an ethernet cable; not ideal.

But "for that money it should work" said my son - and spent an inordinate amount of time on the internet (via his phone, which had no problem connecting, as was the case for my phone and ipad, and his laptop) trying to figure out why it wasn't working for my laptop. This seems to be the problem that even the techy forums don't discuss ........... because there seems to be no answer.

Now a stretch of cable connects this computer to the net. At least the furniture is back in place, hidden areas of floor are squeaky-clean, and lots of paper has gone into recycling.

Just one drawer left to sort. Note the blue cable!

Even before that saga started, some clangy noises on the street at 8am signalled that the road repair team had arrived to fill the pothole that makes the house quiver and shake. Or rather, the admirably-frequent buses, travelling at speed late at night and hitting the pothole, do that. Kudos to Islington Council, who responded the very next day to my email about the situation!

Patch upon patch upon patch

It can be the simple thing

Do you have one of these?

It's a "secure key" for logging on with internet banking. I've recently had a LOT of practice with it, trying to make an extra payment on my credit card.

First I was puzzled by having to enter my secure PIN (this turned out to be my "usual" PIN), and along the way messed up with entering it correctly - honestly, four numbers, how difficult can that be?

Then I mistyped the number it generated, or my password - or both! - and it was back to Square One. Several times.

Then, working from the account and reference details given by the card company, I got as far as thinking the payment was made ... only to be redirected to Square Two by a message saying the account was already set up, go back and make it through that channel.

Having found the right card from a sequence of drop-down lists, I followed the instructions and got as far as verifying the payment - using the Secure Key. And that's where the fun started.

No matter how carefully I entered the (long) password on screen - or the 4-digit code on the Key, error messages abounded - so many times that a phonecall to the bank was needed. And they are very helpful and patient there - back and forth to technical support, and after all the usual things failed and a rogue screen full of html appeared and couldn't be got rid of, I got to talk to the tech support person myself.

She took me back to absolute basics [humiliating? maybe...] and we logged off and logged on again, etc etc...

But you know there's going to be A Moment Of Revelation ... it came with the 4-digit code needed for the Key. Reading "reference" in the instructions - and having a bank reference number - well, I used that. But right next to the word reference was "/card number" ... and, you guessed it, I should have been typing in the last four digits of my credit card number, to which the payment was headed. DUH!

The take-home message ... should you find yourself in a loop of escalating frustration like this ... really is: start all over again. Re-read all the instruction - pay attention!

A tip that might come in handy, if you're using this payment system: if the payment goes to an individual, ie into their bank account, it's the account number that's the "reference number". If the payment goes to a card, it's the card number. Simple - isn't it.

Monday miscellany

Charming quilts by Ulva Ugerup, who lives in Sweden but is part of a Danish group called QuilteQunstnerne. This is "Sisters in Crime" -

See more of Ulva's quilts at www.quiltequnstnerne.dk/ulvaugerup.html - don't miss "The Angels of Wrath" - it's the dark pointy one!

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A 16th century book that can be read six ways - see it in action here

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"Cosmos" is back - the 1980s documentary series created and hosted by Carl Sagan has been revived, hosted by the director of the American Museum of Natural History's planetarium, and will be shown in 170 countries and 45 languages. Coming soon to a small screen near you - and the old series is available on youtube.

"In the [new] show's first epidsode," says the NY Times digest, "we get to hop along a cosmic calendar in which the 13.8-billion-year history of the universe has been compressed to 365 days, and it's now midnight on New Year's Eve.

"On this scale, the sun was born on August 31, and the dinosaurs died esterday. Everybody you ever heard of lived in the last 14 seconds. Jesus was born five seconds ago ... in the last second we began to do science."

Sartorial note: in the 80s, dress code for television presenters seems to have been suit-and-tie, even for scientists out in the wild -

Sagan presents "Cosmos"

From the trailers, it seems not much has changed -

Tyson presents "Cosmos"

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Dartford Crossing (over the lower Thames) - from the top of a bus (via)

It's the Year of the Bus in London - hurrah for those buses! Read 20 things about going around the periphery of London by bus here - the journey took 12 hours, not counting waiting time; it's unlikely you could do it all in one day.
And - "Hurrah for London bus drivers. They rattle repeatedly through the streets, they negotiate awkward traffic situations, they deal with stroppy and bemused passengers, and they still get us to where we want to be in one piece and generally in good time."

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More transport - this time the Underground - pix from a little video, Secrets of the Victoria Line. It's the only tube line in London that's completely underground, and each station has different tiles - this is at Blackhorse Road -

and these, at Seven Sisters, are the seven elm trees planted on the green nearby -

Next station along is my local -

The murals were installed a few years after I moved here - I well remember how they brightened up the place. They were designed by Annabel Grey, and her budget included £15,000 for the gold mosaic tiles. See all five here.

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So modern! and yet it's 3000 years old! (via)

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Navigate your way through Victorian London - "The Museum of London has posted 35 of JohnTallis’s West End elevations on its website, with similar navigation to Google Street View. Shown above, for example, is Rathbone Place. Some of the buildings are linked up to annotations (orange boxes), which provide more details about the business at that address." (More info here, thanks to The Londonist.)

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Does simply adding a link near a quote (as above) negate a charge of plagiarism? (I added the quotes and the name of the source in addition to the "here", just to be on the safe side.) Read about why people plagiarise at theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/21/rise-plagiarism-internet-shia-labeouf. 

Determining ownership of chunks of text, images (especially photographs), logos, etc is no small matter, nor is it black and white. Are these issues killing creativity? They certainly seem to be making people secretive.

 A few short quotes from the article:

"These searches [by online plagiarism checkers] aren't restricted to words; content-based image retrieval – ie, searching for images using the image itself – has been crucial in exposing cases of photographic plagiarism. Nearly every professional photographer has a story about their copyright being violated, but that violation can also blur into plagiaristic acts, where photographers simply pretend that other people's work is theirs. "

"For millennia we have absorbed information, mentally processed it, stored it, retrieved it and passed it on in a slightly altered form and context; now, our unprecedented exposure to that information makes it convenient to take short cuts.  ... There's a lot to take on board about being in the digital world ... it comes with a heck of a lot of issues ... including how we delineate between our own ideas and other people's, whether we should be bothered about it."

"The evils of plagiarism may be drilled into university students, with threats that their work will be checked by that all-seeing-eye of academic fraud, turnitin.com. But... the learning process itself is also being radically reshaped, to a point where the notion of plagiarism is becoming foggier, and not one that's automatically synonymous with cheating. "Students don't need to store information in their brains any more," [Vicky Beeching] says. "I recently read someone refer to the internet as our 'outboard brain', and now it's surely a question of making a difference in the world by applying that pool of resources.""

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If you missed the 2014 Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize Exhibition (the prize is £15K), you can see all the works at lynnpainterstainersprize.org.uk/exhibition/ and read a considered view of the show here, which includes a video. Below are my favourites.