The Last Post

Well, this is it, the final post on this weblog.

This blog is now closed and there will be no further postings appearing after this one.

The contents of this weblog and the weblog itself will remain as there is much material on here which seems, by the continuing stream of visitors, to remain a useful resource for people, no further comments will be replied to.

This weblog was started a number of years ago when I was starting to train for my Tour de France ride which is why it has the name it has. Since that time I have developed other interests and the blog title no longer seems appropriate so this was one reason I decided to call time.

I will still be writing a weblog but I have moved platforms and I have also migrated pretty much all the material on this weblog over to the new platform. The reason for moving was that I have become  a heavy user of Evernote and I wanted to use the new platform, Postach.io, which works seamlessly with Evernote.

The new platform makes it easier to maintain my personal journal and then to publish excerpts from it directly to my weblog, it also means I don't have to shift from one system to another when I wish to produce a weblog posting and I hate cutting and pasting if I can avoid it.

Above all, this new arrangement means that my posts and information are all stored permanently on my own computer, on my laptop and on my iPad where they are all searchable and available for use in many other ways. I had become tired of my posts and material only being available to me as a cumbersome extract file from Google which was not even readable by a human. I also didn't like the way Google+ was infiltrating everything, I wanted my material to be just that, MY material.

On top of the above the new platform offers me convenient ways of embedding video, still images, slideshows, audio files and playlists, tweets and many more elements which makes it ideal for pulling information together under one virtual roof.

All that remains is to thank those who have read this weblog, supported it and commented on it over the years, it's popularity continues to surprise me! Now that I have moved home you are of course more than welcome to join me in my new abode where I am sure updates will be far more frequent, here is my new address:

http://qfieldboden.postach.io

Au revoir!

Today's vJournal

Just a quiet day on the home front but trying to keep the journal going!

For Sale - or not for sale? :-)

Just had to laugh at this one. Depending on which side of the sign you look at you get a completely different story!

Today's vJournal

Continuing to experiment with using the iPad video camera and iMovie for iPad as a convenient way of keeping a short daily vJournal. Decided to try to continue with it for a little while longer to see if I can make it a habit because this does seem like a great way of supplementing my Evernote diary with a movie record. Once published to YouTube the link gets dropped automatically into the correct Evernote diary page using IFTTT, working really well so far. The key is to keep, as far as possible, each clip to less than five seconds, a thought borrowed from my experiments with Vine.

Ice Bucket Challenge - Rebecca & Francesca

Got to admit it these two are damned good sports, I sure as hell won't be having cold water chucked over me any time soon :-)

vJournals - iPad - iMovie

Been thinking for a while now how to make a convenient vJournal by shooting short clips during the day and then pulling them all together into a short memory-jogging movie. Anyway, I tried Vine but to be honest the quality of the video was so poor I really didn't want to use it as a long term record so I looked around a little more.

I was surprised to find that there is a version of iMovie for the iPad and I have no idea why I hadn't played around with this before, maybe because I have done very little video recording with the iPad until now.

Well, I think this will work for me. I'm recording a series of short clips, each one maybe 6-10 seconds long on the iPad as the day passes. Later in the day I pull them together on the iPad using iMovie which has some basic editing features and then upload directly from the iPad to YouTube and share from there if required.

Once this is done I am then deleting the video clips and the project from the iPad to avoid chewing through the available device space and then repeat the process on another day. It may be that the best thing to do will be to do say a week's worth of clips at a time but at the moment I'm just getting used to the tools so experience will dictate what I do in the future.

Lorena's Ice Bucket Challenge

Well, I told her it wouldn't be any fun but she would insist on doing this so of course I had to oblige and chuck the water over her. I think it was colder than perhaps she had been expecting :-)