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Fearless is a documentary produced by Netflix, exploring the life of bull riders that come from Brazil, to the US to compete in 26 competitions to see who is the best bull rider. This documentary is interesting because, for the most part it is in Portuguese with English subtitles.

Big in Brazil

In Brasil there is an event Barretoswhere 900,000 people, at the time the documentaries were made, go to watch bull riders compete against each other. Bull riding is a unique sport because a person tries to hold on to a bucking bull as it tries to throw the rider off. The rider gets point for style, but so does the bull. If the bull throws the rider off within eight seconds then the rider gets zero points. If the rider stays on then they can get up to 90 points.

I like to experiment with Bard and chatGPT. I like to see what their limits are, but with time and effort I like to get beyond their limits and get them to do what I want, without failing too often.

DJI and other brands have had self-editing options for years now, so the idea that software would edit the footage taken by the brand’s devices is not new. What is new is the desire people have to let AI replace their own creativity, and inspiration, to give the AI’s creative vision rather than their own.

I started writing a post, but felt that it was too negative so I stopped, and now I’m writing this one. I want to explore the way in which Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and Reddit are still front and foremost on The Guardian Website, as well as many others.

As I write this Twitter has become x.com. Reddit has had several weeks of protests and Facebook reached over three billion users. The paradox, with Facebook is that it’s the most unpleasant “social network” I know. I find Facebook and Instagram deeply unpleasant to use.

For two days I have been trying to understand how to use Jekyll, a Ruby version of Hugo. It is a Static website generator that is similar to Hugo but rather than being written in Go, it is written in Ruby. I find that it renders sites faster than Hugo, but that it has less assistance for creating pages, giving them layouts and the rest. That’s why I experimented with YQ

With the change in name from Twitter to X, and with the destruction of a recognisable brand mentioned in tens of thousands of podcasts, podcasts, episodes and millions of web pages I was curious to see how Twitter was, with the new logo. It took more than 24 hours to change the favicon, and whilst x.com does redirect to Twitter, it does not do anything else than redirect to Twitter.com. You can’t see your x posts there.

Yesterday Twitter decided to re-brand as X. X.com redirects to Twitter.com. Within the next few days, weeks, months twitter will change its name and brand, and the URLs will be wrong. All twitter links, all embedded tweets, everything will become dead links. When we look for something on Twitter, we will be redirected to X.

The Podcast Legacy

Every single website, every single CMS, every Static Website, everything, will have to be re-written to point to the new domain name. Plenty of content will not be updated and will be a reminder of the past.

Yesterday just as I was telling the Garmin Instinct to start tracking I noticed that I had 20 or less percent of battery left so I considered turning around, to swap to another device. I didn’t, and I just went for a 12km walk. During the walk I was more focused on keeping the watch face facing into the sun, to keep the sun powering the watch and it worked. I really expected the watch to die. I had about 20 percent battery and that is what is used during a usual walk. I think that the strong sun, as well as me actively trying to keep my wrist facing into the sun helped give the watch enough power not to die.

Filmin is a Spanish video streaming site that offers old films, documentaries and television series. It provides an alternative to Netflix, Amazon Prime and other video streaming services that provide mainly mainstream films and television series.

For a while I was watching Northern Exposure, a series that has not been broadcast for a while on English language platforms. it’s an interesting series that is still relevant today.

I also watched Nanook of the North and I found this to be a pleasant documentary. It’s observational, observing the inuit people as they go through an “ordinary day”. It was criticised because of how the igloo scenes and others were setup, but I still think it has value, despite this. They didn’t have the technology that we have today, to shoot in low light conditions.

It’s interesting that we can stop using a website that is so integral to our lives for years. During the pandemic I quit facebook because I was flamed and trolled at a time when I needed friendship and support. Facebook has been known to make people depressed. During lockdown I decided to quit Facebook and Instagram.

Quitting FB and IG

I quit them for two reasons. The first is that I no longer got anything positive out of them. I saw plenty of junk, I felt isolated, and they were promoting things that polarised my sense of missing out. It was healthier just to quit both. I wouldn’t be reminded of my pandemic solitude if I wasn’t seeing pictures of people with their families and friends whilst I was keeping safe from COVID.

Two days ago I was given access to Google Bard and since then I have been experimenting. The key feature that sets Google Bard apart from ChatGPT is that it can answer questions about what is happening at the moment, rather than before September 2021. By being current you can ask it about yesterday’s news or the upcoming weather for a location, and it will give a useful answer. This is useful for time sensitive questions.