Technology – Page 49 – Brian Micklethwait's New Blog

Wartime Encryption for Pigeons

As a Blackadder fan, I have long known about the use of pigeons during World War 1, to send messages. Pigeons like the one in this photo:

Twitter caption:

War Pigeons were very effectively deployed in the First World War. For instance, they carried messages, like the one being attached to a pigeon by Austro-Hungarian soldiers on the Isonzo Front, which can be seen in this picture.

Quite so. But what made me decide to post the above photo here was this exchange, in the comments.

“Liagson”:

Were they normally encrypted?

Wayne Meyer:

They used WEP. Wartime Encryption for Pigeons. It was a very early wireless standard.

Blog and learn. Not only did I just discover that pigeon messages were – of course, they’d have to have been – encrypted. I also learned that you can link directly to individual Twitter comments.

And what better way could there to learn about the activities of birds than via Twitter?

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

South Kensington roof clutter

Yes, some truly exceptional roof clutter, photoed by me today, just as it was starting to get dark. The buildings all so polite and proper looking, but then on the roof, they go mental:

There is even a bridge in there. That aerial with its big long arms is bizarre. Was with others so had no time to check out what all this stuff was on the roof of.

My thanks to the tree, at the front, for not having stupid leaves all over it, and thus not blocking out this wondrous view.

I find myself in the South Kensington are quite a lot these days, because that’s where I often go to see and hear GodDaughter2 and her RCM pals performing. This time it was two Bach Cantatas. Very good, especially the absurdly young and talented tenor soloist. A first year undergrad, apparently.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

My new FZ150

No, I’ve not bought yet another camera. I refer to the new Panasonic Lumix FZ150 that I bought myself, as a late Christmas present, in January 2012. When I look back through my photo-archives it becomes clearer and clearer that this was the moment when my photos really started looking pretty.

On February 1st 2012, I posted nine of the photos I had taken on January 30th, of my fellow digital photographers. Here are nine more photos of photoers, that I took on that same expedition:

In these photos, we observe some dedicated photographers, with their SLRs, some hobbyists with what are still only cheap cameras, and, inexorably on the rise, smartphones.

One more for luck, an example of a genre I grow ever more fond of, the perhaps rather (in this case very) blurry bird, in flight:

I cropped the original, to hide the photoer’s face.

Yes, I picked nine good ones to show you, back in February 2012. Now I can easily show nine more just as good, and then another that I only now noticed.

That was the change that new camera brought with it. Before it, I took the occasional good photo, and many bad ones. When the FZ150 arrived, I took quite a lot of good photos, and as many bad ones as ever.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Small Lego buildings and small 3D printed buildings

One of the photos illustrating this report:

Can we please have a Lego London?

I just typed “lego london” into google, not expecting anything helpful. A Lego cow in London. Lego shops in London. General Legonic activity of all kinds, in London. I did not expect to be told, right at the top of the list, about making London in miniature, out of Lego. But, I was immediately shown this:

Cancel my request for Lego London. It already exists, and it is very bad. Indeed, I would say that using Lego to mimic a very particular looking thing on a tiny scale is the very essence of what Lego is bad at doing, and the fact that Lego seems to spend so much of its time and trouble and focus and resources doing this exact thing spells its long-term doom. The whole point of Lego, surely, is that you can make everything – everything, that is to say, that you can make out of it – with a few generic shaped objects. Just like the Meccano of my youth, in other words, but architectural rather than mechanical. A big Tower Bridge, yes, good idea. A big Big Ben, not bad. But tiny versions of these, stupid and totally unrealistic? See above. Stupid.

For that, what you need is a 3D printer. And the smaller you make your small buildings, the more of them you can have in one spread.

A subset of them could be made to be exactly the right size for making buildings to attach to miniature railway layouts. So, do railway modellers use 3D printers, to make, not trains, but train layout appendages? It would make sense.

I just image googled railway modelling 3d printer, and got mostly 3D printed trains and train bits, rather than architecture.

Could making such models be the domestically owned 3D printer killer app? Because so far, a domestically owned 3D printer killer app has been conspicuous by its total absence, and any company which has tried to make its fortune making domestically owned 3D printers has gone bust. Such modelling – trains and houses and mountains and stuff – was all the rage when I was a kid, but all that has since been replaced by computer games. But might not those computer games in their turn come to seem rather dated? As is not the making of things now returning to the rich countries again, now that the computer guys are applying their wizardry to stuff-making? Conceivably, toys may some time soon become three dimensional and material again, with swarms of robot cars and lorries replacing the trains.

Probably not, because things seldom just come back into style like that, any more than dance bands ever did or ever will. More likely, the kid’s games of the future will involve some variation on virtual reality, which is to say they’ll be computer games only more so. If so, we might see a further reduction in the crime rate (see below).

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Piano being played at Tottenham Court Road tube station

I am not well, so blogging here today will be perfunctory:

See what I mean. Photoed by me at Tottenham Court Road Tube Station, last Thursday.

Investigate this further, if you want to.

I’m off to an early bed.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

A twentieth century bank robber gets a nagging from the cashier he is robbing

I still get cheques through the post, and then I insert these cheques into my bank account by going physically to my local physical branch of my unlocal bank and by handing the cheques over to a cashier. My bank, however, doesn’t like this. Just like Tesco, they want me to do the work. In Tesco’s case they now demand that I become my own check-out person and operate their computers for them. So, it’s Sainsbury’s and Waitrose for me, from now on. Bye bye Tesco. In the bank’s case, they want me to do their work for them while I sit at home. But, I like the exercise. In the huge bank queue, I get to read a book concentratedly, because there is nothing else to do. Good.

All of which is a preamble to the fact that when I came across this, I LedOL:

“Are you aware that you can now do all of this online?”

Genius. K. J. Lamb, well done.

One of the many techniques they use to put you off actually going to the physical local branch of your Big Bank is to keep changing the people behind the bars. And these total strangers are constantly, and insultingly, asking you to prove that you are who you are. Well, madam, I’ve been banking with your bank for the last half century. Who the hell are you? Please could you give me proof that you actually do work here?

Someone should make a movie about a twenty first century bank robbery, where the robbers, who are disgruntled ex-employees of the Big Bank that owns the bank branch they bust into, bust into the bank branch, overpower the witless bunch of newbies who happen to be running the place that day, and park them all in a back room for the day with tape over their months, and then the robbers run the bank all day long, while one of their number hacks into the mainframe computer of the Big Bank that owns everything, and sucks all the money out of it. The point is: none of the customers who visit the branch while all this is happening would find it in the slightest bit odd to be confronted by a bunch of total strangers. That would ring no alarm bells at all, because this happens all the time.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

But they didn’t mean this thing to look like a penis

You wait nearly thirteen years at BMdotcom for a giant penis photo, and then, out of the blue, two come along. That one, in the post before last yesterday, and this one:

Crikey, blimey, etc.. Or as we Brits also used to say: Well I’m blowed.

Fox News, so also “other creatures”.

You Had One Job calls this an “unfortunate helicopter shot”. But I bet the photoer could hardly believe his extreme good fortune.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

A selfie in the Warwick Way gymnasium front window

I like to take sneaky selfies, with other amusing things. I have a file full of such selfies with other amusing things, from which I extracted the photo below. This sneaky selfie has something very amusing in it, besides me. So much so that I rather suspect I was photoing it (back in March 2010), and that I only got in the picture by accident.

Why I like to take sneaky selfies will have to wait. My concern now is the other amusing thing, the gymnasium I was photoing, through its big front window. This was in Warwick Way, where another doomed enterprise, Blockbuster Video, used once to be.

The particularly amusing thing, to me, about this gymnasium was that throughout the few short months of its woebegone existence, I never once, despite going past it every time I ever shopped in either my local Sainsbury’s or my local Tesco, ever, saw anyone in it. Nobody exercising. Nobody doing anything.

My theory is that the big front window put people right off the idea of doing what for spectators would have been dance routines. Besides which, Warwick Way is not really a gymnasium sort of locality. People in the Warwick Way area get their exercise by doing such things as going to their preferred supermarket and then lugging their numerous carefully chosen purchases, maybe to their cars, but more probably straight to their homes, in big bags. Special places set aside for taking exercise happen only in places where life itself does not supply enough exercise to all those present, or so goes my theory.

LATER: It now occurs to me, eight years later, that maybe this was not a gymnasium, but rather a place for selling gymnasium equipment. But whatever, I never saw anyone in their, either exercising, or trying out exercising equipment with a view to purchasing it.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Everyone can now do beautiful “art” with one click

The relationship between, and influence of, photography on artistic painting has always been intimate, and profound.

I can remember when landscape and figurative painting was everywhere. That would be about fifty years ago and more. But now? Do any “important” artists do this any more? Not many, is my distinct impression. If there is any “realism” involved, it is usually realism with a twist, and often some kind of violation or distortion. That guy, who was perfectly capable of terrific realistic painting, was one of the leaders of art out of mere realism. “Psychological”, instead of literal, truth.

A big part of why this trend out of realism happened is to be found in pictures like this one, of a fire, done recently by 6k. 6k didn’t even have his “camera” with him, when he photoed this. But, says he, “my phone did ok”. More than ok, I’d say:

I recall speculating along these lines recently, at a party. Painters don’t do the “beauty” of the “real world” any more (I said), in fact (I said) they don’t really do “beauty” at all any more, because now everyone can do great pictures, just by going click with their phones, and everyone now has a phone.

My companion illustrated my point for me by immediately taking out his “phone” and showing me some amazing landscape photos on it that he had taken that very day. They were stunning. His point, and mine, is that this required no very great skill on his part, just a half decent and half alert eye for something worth photoing.

So it is that “art” has not so much “advanced” into its various alternative realities of abstraction and conceptualisation, but rather has retreated into these things. Chased out of doing beautiful recreations of reality by technology.