It's been a long time since I posted on here -- my last post (before today's posts) was July 17 when I had to self isolate. A lot has happened since then, so this post will be a bit of an update list
I had to take my dad into hospital for a prostrate operation (this was planned before I had to self-isolate) -- he already had a PCR test and was cleared. My LFT was also clear, but I still had to self isolate. This was before the self-isolation changes happened. The operation was successful, but he needed to be held a few more days to see an ENT specialist due to them finding lumps in his throat. The concern was that they might be cancerous, but turns out it was just irritation so they gave him some Gaviscon to take after means and soothe the throat. Both my dad and I are prone to post-meal throat irritation so it might mean I might be subject to the same thing later in life.
I got a ticket after driving my dad to the hospital for taking a left turn when I was not supposed do, due to badly signposted roads. My appeal was rejected on the grounds I had paid the ticket. This is how the council screws you over -- if you pay the fine to avoid the 100% charge, they will claim that admits guilt. If you don't, they delay the response until after the 2-week window so you then have to pay the 100% charge.
I finally decided to upgrade my phone and went for a OnePlus 9 Pro. The phone is classed as a "Phablet" and much bigger than the Samsung Galaxy S5 I have been using for years:
The case on the left is for the OnePlus, the case on the right for my S5
I had problems activating the new SIM and eventually Three had to send me a new one, and soon after I got that new one, I got a message saying Three were going to be doing works on the mast in my area and ever since then I have had horrendously bad speeds at home. By bad, I mean speeds of < 1Mbps and even down to 0.2Mbps. Using 3G band sometimes helps, but only marginally.
I've taken my complaint up to the Ombudsman but Three are still refusing to do anything about it -- even charging me to leave contract early.
I've been with Three many years but I will not be recommending them going forward. I will be checking other providers when my contract expires.
We've started to go back to the office. My team is doing three days a week in the office, and you pick which three days as long as there are a max of 8 people in the office (due to some office reorganisation, we only have 8 seats for the entire team).
Surprisingly many people have left jobs during and post lockdown (some might have been nudged due to the lockdown, and not just in my office, but generally.)
I won a Twitter completion by Curve for a swag bag. Just had to tweet them three images of their different adverts -- all of which showed up on the same station, so that wasn't too difficult.
Then we had the annoying as heck "Panic at the Pumps" causing shortages.
This video from my dashcam shows the queue of traffic. This is the queue leading into the Alperton Sainsbury's. I was there at around 5am and it took me 30 minutes to clear the queue even with less people in the queue. This queue will probably take 90 minutes to clear, assuming the fuel was not gone by the time they got to the front of the queue
This video, also from my dashcam shows the queues that built up outside the petrol stations -- this Esso I actually went into at 4:30am that morning and they were not open, even though there were staff in the shop (so maybe they were waiting for delivery?)
You'll get people tooting impatiently and even people cutting the queue and then blocking the lane for the people behind (they must be luxury car drivers)
My house purchase has progressed and we have moved on and are now ready to exchange. However, one of the two sellers is unable to complete his purchase (he's part of a chain and needs to complete his purchase before he can complete the sale on the current house).
Finally, I got a letter from Principia Law who are the ones trying to claim money back from the drunk driver who wrecked my previous car.
They want me to release my bank records for the period of time I had the hire car. But everyone I have discussed this with seems confused as to why this is required since the accident is a "no-fault" claim on my part, so they should not even need my bank details.
I asked them to call me today to discuss this. I may also speak to the office legal team for their thoughts.
Whilst I’m no vigilante, I do strongly believe bad drivers should not be on the road. There was a website mentioned on the article and on the report Police Witness. It sells, and offers dashcams for sale. Some appear to be pretty good , albeit pricey - maybe even better than mine (which is a DOD LS300W)
Which reminds me, I must report a littering Merc and a crazy female BMW driver.
I bought a dashboard camera a few years ago, and have since upgraded to a better one. I’ve caught a few things during that time, but never thought I would catch this….
All of these photos took place in one second, and were taken driving down Whetstone High Road, North London. Photos were extracted using VLC and by slowing down the video to about 0.03x-0.06x speed then taking snapshots. I would have used mencoder or ffmpeg, but I’m not running Linux, and have no admin rights to install new programs on my box at work.
Two days this week I’ve driven to work in the early hours (~6am) and both days I’ve encountered some really dangerous behaviour.
On Monday, outside Wembley Central station (http://goo.gl/maps/AFHp0), a cyclist cycled along the pavement, then dives into the road without looking back or signalling. I’ve said it before, and I’ve said it again. Road users on two wheels complain about not getting respect on the road. If you behave like this, how can you expect respect from other road users? I have more gripes with motorcyclists than pedal cyclists, but the majority of my complains about the two-wheeled road users are the same: lack of signalling, darting in and out of traffic, jumping red lights, riding too close to car users then complaining when they are hit by wing mirrors.
On Tuesday, I’m at the junction between the A504 Finchley Lane and the A1 Great North Way (http://goo.gl/maps/2HFBT). The A504 is a black spot for queue jumping, and I had a VWqueue jump me at the junction - violating road markings in the lane which indicate it is right-turn only. Then, if that wasn’t bad enough, further along, at the junction with the A504 Church Road/B552 Parson Street/A502 Brent Street (http://goo.gl/maps/MYemg), this same car then jumps the red lights.
Oh, and both were caught on my dashcam. Will be passing these onto the police. Whereas there’s little they can do about the cyclist, they can at least take the VW off the road, or at least put some points on his/her license (I hope)
A selection of three clips showing a really dangerous BMW driver.
First clip, the driver cut in front of me at high speed with no signal and with not much space between myself and the car in the lane next to me. Then jumps from the fast lane, to the slow lane, then back to the fast lane in order to over take cars. I caught up to the driver and you can see their number plate.
Second clip, the driver almost causes an accident by undertaking the car in front whilst a car is change from the slow lane to the middle lane.
Third clip, the driver again undertakes (in the distance), then does exactly the same manoeuvre as in the first clip. The irony? Even with all their moves, I still overtook them. :-)
Can you please remember to signal in good time before turning. It gives other people notice of what you’re trying to do. Suddenly braking, signalling and turning all at the same time will only cause an accident. And if I catch you on camera, you’re going to be named and shamed.
I’ve been cracking my head trying to figure out how to concatenate my dashcam videos, which get chopped by my dashcam into 15 minutes chunks. The most obvious one is ffmpeg, where I would use this:
What this does is concatenates all of the videos with a date stamp of April 2nd (the “apr \ \ 2”), sticks a “|” between then, and pipes them to ffmpeg as a parameter:
However, here’s where linux version matters. On Fedora 18, I have ffmpeg V1.0.5:
$ ffmpeg -version
ffmpeg version 1.0.5
On Lubuntu 13.10 (Raring Ringtail), I have ffmpeg/avconv V0.8.6:
$ ffmpeg -version
ffmpeg version 0.8.6-6:0.8.6-0ubuntu0.12.10.1, Copyright (c) 2000-2013 the Libav developers
built on Apr 2 2013 17:07:34 with gcc 4.7.2
*** THIS PROGRAM IS DEPRECATED ***
This program is only provided for compatibility and will be removed in a future release. Please use avconv instead.
$ avconv -version
avconv version 0.8.6-6:0.8.6-0ubuntu0.12.10.1, Copyright (c) 2000-2013 the Libav developers
built on Apr 2 2013 17:07:34 with gcc 4.7.2
avconv 0.8.6-6:0.8.6-0ubuntu0.12.10.1
As a consequence, this is what happens when I run this the ffmpeg line on Lubuntu:
$ ffmpeg -i “concat:ls -l | egrep -i "apr\ \ 2" | awk 'BEGIN {ORS="|"} { print $9 }'” -c copy output.AVI
ffmpeg version 0.8.6-6:0.8.6-0ubuntu0.12.10.1, Copyright (c) 2000-2013 the Libav developers
built on Apr 2 2013 17:07:34 with gcc 4.7.2
*** THIS PROGRAM IS DEPRECATED ***
This program is only provided for compatibility and will be removed in a future release. Please use avconv instead.
[avi @ 0x8a8cf80] non-interleaved AVI
Input #0, avi, from ‘concat:PICT0001.AVI|PICT0002.AVI|PICT0003.AVI|PICT0004.AVI|PICT0005.AVI|PICT0006.AVI|PICT0007.AVI|PICT0008.AVI|PICT0009.AVI|PICT0010.AVI|':
Duration: 00:14:59.96, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 88466 kb/s
Stream #0.0: Video: mjpeg, yuvj422p, 1280x720, 30 tbr, 30 tbn, 30 tbc
Stream #0.1: Audio: adpcm_ima_wav, 16000 Hz, 1 channels, s16, 64 kb/s
Unrecognized option ‘c’ Failed to set value ‘copy’ for option ‘c’
Not to worry, I can always explicitly say what I want to do with the streams:
$ ffmpeg -i “concat:ls -l | egrep -i "apr\ \ 2" | awk 'BEGIN {ORS="|"} { print $9 }'” -vcodec copy -acodec copy output.AVI
ffmpeg version 0.8.6-6:0.8.6-0ubuntu0.12.10.1, Copyright (c) 2000-2013 the Libav developers
built on Apr 2 2013 17:07:34 with gcc 4.7.2
*** THIS PROGRAM IS DEPRECATED ***
This program is only provided for compatibility and will be removed in a future release. Please use avconv instead.
[avi @ 0x9561f80] non-interleaved AVI
Input #0, avi, from ‘concat:PICT0001.AVI|PICT0002.AVI|PICT0003.AVI|PICT0004.AVI|PICT0005.AVI|PICT0006.AVI|PICT0007.AVI|PICT0008.AVI|PICT0009.AVI|PICT0010.AVI|':
Duration: 00:14:59.96, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 88466 kb/s
Stream #0.0: Video: mjpeg, yuvj422p, 1280x720, 30 tbr, 30 tbn, 30 tbc
Stream #0.1: Audio: adpcm_ima_wav, 16000 Hz, 1 channels, s16, 64 kb/s
Output #0, avi, to ‘output.AVI’:
Metadata:
ISFT : Lavf53.21.1
Stream #0.0: Video: mjpeg, yuvj422p, 1280x720, q=2-31, 30 tbn, 30 tbc
Stream #0.1: Audio: adpcm_ima_wav, 16000 Hz, 1 channels, 64 kb/s
Stream mapping:
Stream #0.0 -> #0.0
Stream #0.1 -> #0.1
Press ctrl-c to stop encoding
[avi @ 0x9579d40] Application provided invalid, non monotonically increasing dts to muxer in stream 1: 4551 >= 4551
av_interleaved_write_frame(): Invalid argument
Oh, I guess that didn’t work either. Okay, if ffmpeg isn’t an option, then mencoder is the next option:
$ mencoder -oac copy -ovc copy -idx -o output.AVI ls -l | egrep -i "apr\ \ 2" | awk 'BEGIN {ORS=" "} { print $9 }'MEncoder svn r34540 (Ubuntu), built with gcc-4.7 (C) 2000-2012 MPlayer Team
success: format: 0 data: 0x0 - 0x3f4a3440
libavformat version 53.21.1 (external)
Mismatching header version 53.19.0
AVI file format detected.
[aviheader] Video stream found, -vid 0
[aviheader] Audio stream found, -aid 1
Detected NON-INTERLEAVED AVI file format.
VIDEO: [MJPG] 1280x720 24bpp 30.000 fps 12399.9 kbps (1513.7 kbyte/s)
[V] filefmt:3 fourcc:0x47504A4D size:1280x720 fps:30.000 ftime:=0.0333
videocodec: framecopy (1280x720 24bpp fourcc=47504a4d)
audiocodec: framecopy (format=11 chans=1 rate=16000 bits=4 B/s=8110 sample-256)
Writing header…
ODML: Aspect information not (yet?) available or unspecified, not writing vprp header.
Writing header…
ODML: Aspect information not (yet?) available or unspecified, not writing vprp header.
^CPos: 692.7s 20782f (72%) 298.78fps Trem: 0min 1343mb A-V:0.000 [11759:64]
Writing index…
Writing header…
ODML: Aspect information not (yet?) available or unspecified, not writing vprp header.
I cancelled the run, but it seems to work. Strange that ffmpeg is so far behind on Ubuntu. So far behind, in fact, that the -c command fails. But on the plus side, at least mencoder works
I finally have had an opportunity to process my dashcam videos for this week and here’s one from Tuesday.
Mercedes drivers have a bad rep and this guy isn’t helping by first jumping 5 cars in the queue in front of him (including me), forcing cars going the other way to stop, and then jumping the red light at the roadworks.
The clock on this footage was one hour behind (it was actually 16:11, not 15:11)
It should be noted that I caught up with him about five minutes down the road where he got caught behind another queue of traffic. Moral of the story, don’t jump the queue. It’s not smart, it’s not cool, and just proves you are more of a dick than you already are…
