Edible flowers

A beautiful anniversary gift, and also very tasty. Many thanks!

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Woman ‘detained’ for filming police search launches high court challenge

Supervising police is one of our most important civic duties. They are (mostly) trustworthy, and we need to keep it that way.

It becomes important to maintain and exercise public rights. Otherwise the idea may take hold that for example “it’s illegal to photograph British police“. That is only true in very limited circumstances of anti-terrorism activities. However, if the right to photograph them is not exercised, the police may start to believe the story that filming them is illegal. If they believe it (or maybe even if they don’t), they will act as if it is true, and that will effectively make it true.

The cameraman here may not think of himself as a public servant, but he is performing an important civic duty.

So it is vital to support and applaud this young lady for standing up for her rights.

That alternative leads to something like what we have been seeing in Iran.

A warm day in Dallas

We heard there was a heatwave in England today with temperatures over 30C (86F) so I had to post this.

Dallas Iran solidarity event

A few hundred people outside the Dallas Federal Courthouse standing with signs and morphing into a candlelit vigil as the sun went down.

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Mobile YouTube on N95 phone

Trying to play video clips with the YouTube application on my Nokia N95 phone, I have repeatedly received the message “could not connect to video streaming server”. Yesterday I upgraded the N95 firmware and decided to have another try with YouTube.

A useful review on the Nokia Users site explains some aspects and shortcomings of the application.

I eventually solved the problem by changing settings in Real Player: via path Realplayer > Options > Settings > Streaming > Network > Default access point to set the Real Player streaming network connection to be via the mobile provider.

The YouTube application uses two separate network accesses, one for the search application and one for Real Player. Both must be defined. I can set the application access to my WLAN or mobile provider, but the Real Player will only work with the mobile provider, and not over the WLAN. The restricted data rate makes for an unappealing rendering of the video content.

Once the video player is operating, two other important limitations become glaringly apparent.

The video has no sound unless the active profile has warning tones set On. As I don’t want to have my life interrupted constantly by warning tones, I need to have a special profile just for use with YouTube, and remember to reactivate the normal one later.

The application will reorient to landscape mode, but this unhelpfully reduces the area used by the video frame.

Overall, as the application won’t work over the WLAN, it doesn’t really fulfill its promise without a 3G connection.

Tulips in the sun

I bought flowers yesterday, and they opened up in the sun this morning. Beautiful!

How to keep a hotel humid

Have a huge water feature in the atrium.

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Now illegal to photograph British police

Anybody who thinks there’s no need to video-record police might want to look at the Huffington Post’s Top 5 Police Brutality Videos or remember this incident. For more examples, there’s always Google.

The Guardian says the new law will not help in calling the police to account.

Maybe the lawmakers felt that incidents such as the one described here might somehow be a threat?

Use of mobile crane

Slideshow illustrates use of a mobile crane to remove an empty portable storage container.

A Chicago building in the late afternoon sun

The bad news: a two hour ‘air traffic delay’.
The good news: getting to see this ruli building captured from O’Hare while waiting to take off.