Chris Bevan Archive

Classic Japan 2014

My photos from the Classic Japan 2014 event held today at South Yarra’s Como Park.

Accessing hybrid/data CDs under Mac OS X

Clearing out some old magazines, I recently found a pile of cover CDs that I thought I would check out before discarding.

Despite knowing that each disc had a combination of music tracks and data files, I could not find a way to get the CDs to mount as anything other than an Audio CD.

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Motorclassica 2014

Some photos taken on Saturday at this year’s Motorclassica event.

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Boosting my Jekyll rebuild times

For a while now I’d been using the jekyll-flickr plugin for adding Flickr images to posts on this here site.

All you need is the Flickr photo ID and size you want to use. When rebuilding my Jekyll site, the plugin would cleverly use Flickr’s API to reach out, grab the raw image URL for the choosen size, before replacing the short-and-sweet plugin code for the long-form HTML markup required to properly display my Flickr image.

For example, I add this to my post:

{% flickr_photo 11804351333 "Medium 640" %}

Then each time my site was rebuilt, my slightly customised flickr_photo.rb would output the following into my generated static page:

<div class="photo-holder" style="max-width:62.5em;">
    <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisbevan/11804351333/">
        <img class="photo pure-img" src="https://farm3.staticflickr.com/2874/11804351333_f60d27348c_b.jpg" title="Ugly" alt="Ugly" />
    </a>
</div>

As you can imagine, this looked like a good idea at the time. Unfortunately, and as I found out, there were a few significant pitfalls.

Rebuilding my site now required an internet connection. No connection, jekyll build would throw a fit.

When I had a connection, the time required to rebuild was heavily contingent on the quality of my internet connection.

Even with a blazingly fast connection, all those API round-trips started adding up pretty quickly.

Which left me with the following indicative time for rebuilding (time jekyll build) all 817 entries containing 124 individual Flickr images (generated on my current and frankly terrible 3.4Mbs ADSL+ connection):

real    3m46.577s
user    2m23.729s
sys     0m1.891s

After stripping out all those handy liquid tags and replacing them with old-school image tags, then deleting the flickr_photo.rb plugin file, my generation times are now down to this:

real    0m16.786s
user    0m14.381s
sys     0m2.372s

Quite a difference.

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Building 3D with IKEA ▶︎

Kirsty Parkin for The Computer Graphics Society:

“Every year, CGSociety goes to SIGGRAPH, one of the premier conferences on innovation for the computer graphics and VFX industries in the world. In 2012, we watched as Martin Enthed, the IT Manager for the in-house communication agency of IKEA, gave a short presentation. He told us how their visualisation team had evolved from the use of traditional photography for the IKEA catalogue to a system today, where the bulk of its imagery is CG.”

Hard to argue with the flexibility that moving to CG allows, especially when it looks as good as it does.

via Michael Tsai

How Melbourne Found its Laneways ▶︎

Forward thinking urban planning:

“The real strength in the policy was that the state government took a long-term view, setting requirements for a 30 per cent active frontage on all new-build or major renovation projects in the retail core of the city. This was a game changer for the city centre: the active street frontage policy encouraged relatively small tenancies.”

Props too for Crown Casino and one Jeff Kennett.

Yarra Valley (VIC)

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Getting Started with Things ▶︎

A great little primer for using Things, still my personal choice of to-do app.

Gunnamatta Beach (VIC)

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East Coast (TAS)

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Launceston (TAS)

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Sound and fury ▶︎

F1 photographer Darren Heath nails it:

“The slate-wiping revolution that’s swept through F1 has reminded everyone of just why our sport is so special. Just think of what the teams have achieved in such an incredibly short time. Brazil 2013 marked the end of a prehistoric age for the sport, the ancient ‘technology’ employed to propel the cars finally being consigned to the trash. Five short months later completely new engines, ERS, electrics, turbos, braking, aero et al practiced, qualified and raced hard around Melbourne’s Albert Park circuit.”

Day 48: Dismantling

Made the fateful decision back on on 18 Nov (48 days ago) to take the 2002 off the road and start the restoration that had to happen.

Activity so far has been about taking as much off the car as possible in an orderly manner. Aim is to get the body shell all set for an overhaul, some new panels and some new paint.

Rear suspension is off, working to remove the rear subframe. Interior is just about stripped, lots of tidying of the under dash wiring loom needs to be done.

Very aware that lots of these projects get off the ground only to falter, leaving nothing more than a collection of boxed parts.

Wish me luck.

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A 137-Mile 'Cycling Utopia' Floating Above London's Rail Lines ▶︎

Foster + Partners’ smash it out of the park with their proposal for building a network of cycling corridors around/above London:

“SkyCycle is a lateral approach to finding space in a congested city,” says Foster. “By using the corridors above the suburban railways, we could create a world-class network of safe, car-free cycle routes that are ideally located for commuters.”

Brilliant.

via Twitter/tmkoo1