Category Archives: Media & Entertainment

GoPro Camera

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As far back as Taxicab Confessions I remember wondering what sort of little cameras they used to get the candid video. Not GoPro cameras. In-car video has become common (Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee, Carpool Karaoke, etc) but I’d be surprised if they were using these tiny, inexpensive cameras.

I thought it might be fun to keep one of these in the Land Rover. (Don’t ask me why. If I knew when I hit the buy button it has escaped me now.) I’ve always been impressed by the quality of the videos folks got with these and propping up my iPhone never worked the well for me. The GoPro is well designed for this task.

These are really pretty amazing. I can control the camera with an app on my iPhone or even configure for voice commands. In the next few days I want to try the looping feature which is — I assume — how people get all the insane dash-cam videos.

A few people have pointed out the camera angle is too low. No doubt. The Land Rover will have many more placement options.

Land Rover restoration – Part 1

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The video above is the first in a series of 24 (?) chronicling the restoration of a Series IIa Land Rover. The gent doing the restoration — Maximus Ironthumper — describes himself as “a blacksmith living off the grid.”

Let me say up front, I don’t expect anyone to watch these. The series is just a good example of something I think we’ve come to take for granted. In a pre-YouTube world we would never have been able to watch this amazing process. No cable channel would have produced something this… real. This gritty and honest. YouTube has become my go-to source for entertainment and information.

With cable and network television, someone else decides what you get to watch. On YouTube, you decide.

The world was running out of cassette tape

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Although the birth and growth of audio cassettes began in the 1960s, its cultural moment took place during the 1970s and 1980s as a more effective, convenient and portable way of listening to music.

By the time I started working at KBOA in 1972, portable cassette players were finally starting to get affordable. Instead of having to coax people into a studio to do an interview we could not take a cassette recorder into “the field” and get the interview with “nat(ural) sound.” It was wonderful.

Cassette audio tapes were a part of my life for the next 30 years. During my years at the station and later — at a regional news network company — we bought a lot of audio tape cartridges from a company in Springfield, Missouri, called National Audio Company. A former coworker sent me the story below. A few excerpts:

Nobody has made audio cassette tape in this country since about 1983 or 1984. […] National Audio is set to begin production this month, having rescued a 62-foot tape-coating line weighing 20 tons from obscurity. Its former owner had converted it into a machine for making credit-card strips. […] Soon, the tape coater will be back to its original purpose, after many months of reassembly and testing. It will crank out 20,000 feet of tape per minute.

If you have (as I do) fond memories of audio cassette tapes, I think you’ll find this story worth a read.

Annihilation

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Based on Jeff VanderMeer’s best-selling Southern Reach Trilogy. I read the first book in the trilogy and found it… disturbing. Didn’t feel a pull to read the other two. The film is directed by Alex Garland who did Ex Machina, 28 Days Later, two films I enjoyed very much (if one can claim to enjoy 28 Days Later).

News is bad for you

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“News items are bubbles popping on the surface of a deeper world.” I’m one week away from one full year without TV/Cable news. It stopped being an experiment a while back. It has been satisfying in ways I can’t really explain. This article takes a shot at it:

The daily repetition of news about things we can’t act upon makes us passive. […] Out of the approximately 10,000 news stories you have read in the last 12 months, name one that – because you consumed it – allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life, your career or your business.

News is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don’t really concern our lives and don’t require thinking. That’s why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, which are bright-coloured candies for the mind.

Most news consumers – even if they used to be avid book readers – have lost the ability to absorb lengthy articles or books. After four, five pages they get tired, their concentration vanishes, they become restless. It’s not because they got older or their schedules became more onerous. It’s because the physical structure of their brains has changed.