Category: Revelation

Video camera battery life sucks, and this is what I did about it

Most action cameras I’ve looked at (GoPro, VIRB, etc) all have battery life somewhere between an hour and an hour and a half. Unfortunately, most of my kayak races are somewhere between 1:40 and 2:00 hours long, and plus you have to start the camera before you get in your boat, so you end up either rushing back to shore to start it after your warm-up, or you start it before your warm up and miss the last half hour or more of the race.

This is the Polaroid XS100.xs100 It’s a very nice action camera, except just like the others it has lousy battery life. I got one for a present, and was very impressed with the picture quality. It’s not as light as a GoPro, so I didn’t think I’d want to wear it on a headstrap, but mounted on the boat it did well recording some of the shorter races. But the battery ran out on the Canadian Surfski Champs, which is a bit longer race. So I decided to do something about it.

This is the cover on the back.IMG_0868. It covers the back of the camera where the USB charging port and the SD card slot live.

Here is the back without the cover. IMG_0869.

Note the curious bump on the cover that fits into the USB port. I have no idea why they put it there, but it’s kind of handy for my purposes.

The first thing I did was buy a second cover from Polaroid. I wasn’t sure if this was going to work, and I didn’t want a useless camera if it didn’t. The second thing I did was buy some waterproof USB batteries and some Sugru. Sugru is amazing stuff – it’s like plasticine, but it hardens into a waterproof rubber.

The next thing I did was drill out that bump I mentioned, and a bit more, so I could slide a USB charging cable through the hole. I “Sugru-ed” around the hole to seal it up. I did the same with the cap on one of the waterproof batteries.IMG_0870IMG_0871.

If I’m really careful, I can wiggle the cap and cover back on without disturbing the Sugru and wrecking the seal.IMG_0872IMG_0873 The battery is now semi-permanently zip tied to the side of the camera. The camera is on a Panavise suction cup mount which I can move from boat to boat. I tested it and I get more than 5 hours video with a 32GB microSD card. More than enough for any race I plan to do.

Surfski 2015 Year In Review

Since I’m sick I probably won’t paddle more than once more this year, here is my end of year summary.
This year:
Paddling distances:

  • Epic V10 Sport: 985.1 km
  • Epic V12: 469.5 km
  • WSBS Thunderbolt: 351.3 km

For a grand total of 1,805.9 km (1122.1 miles). I also managed to get in 1649.4 km on bikes, 19:21 on the erg, and 5:03 on a stationary bike. I don’t think I kept full stats in previous years but this seems a lot more than previous years. My plan for next year is to maybe slightly reduce the number of hours on cardio and work on muscle strength and speed more.

At the beginning of the year, I posted my racing goals for the year. I didn’t stick with it 100% – I missed Ride The Bull and Lighthouse to Lighthouse was cancelled.
Races:

This of course doesn’t include the Wednesday night time trail races at BayCreek. I didn’t beat my personal best at all this year, although I got pretty close once or twice. Surprisingly, I was faster in the V10 Sport than the V12, which just goes to prove that you can’t put down full power if you’re not feeling stable.

I’m actually a bit surprised at making 351 km on the Thunderbolt, because basically after Round The Mountain in May I put it away and didn’t use it again. Even in the cold fall weather I’ve been using a ski because I can remount a ski.

The highlight of the year of course was going to BC for the Canadians. I wasn’t quite last, but I wasn’t far off it – but then again I don’t get to train in the ocean much either. I did better against many of the same people on a flatter and shorter course the Tuesday before.

I was disappointed in DNFing at the Blackburn Challenge, but lots of people with a lot more experience than I also DNFed so I’ll try not to feel bad about it.

Next year I’m hoping to go to the Gorge Downwind Festival (recently renamed to “Gorge Downwind Champs”, which seems like a mistake to me because it’s de-emphasizing the 6 days of downwind shuttles and fun in favour of the two race days), and maybe manage to come a few days early to make the Canadian Champs again (providing I can find a rental car that allows you to cross the border). Unfortunately that would mean missing a chance to conquer the Blackburn under more normal conditions, but hey, 6 days of downwind shuttles!

Speaking of switching

A few days ago, I got our long awaited new internet service from Greenlight Networks. This is fiber to the home, and I got the top tier, which advertises 1000Mbps down and 100Mbps up. I’m not getting quite that advertised speed, but what I am getting is pretty amazing.

This is on my very busy home network, no attempt to shut down anything using the net heavily to increase the speed. At other times I’ve seen downloads over 450Mbps and uploads closer to 80Mbps.

I worked hard to get this network in our neighborhood, talking it up to anybody I could (and emphasizing that “fast internet speeds will help your resale value” with people who don’t care about fast internet speeds for themselves) and distributing flyers. One day I put flyers on every since door on Windemere Road.

The connection so far seems a little “bursty” – sometimes it will take a few seconds to make a connection, but once it’s connected everything is fast as hell. I was a little disappointed that my favorite 4K YouTube video didn’t play without interruption until I installed a plugin to get more buffer before it started playing. I think that’s a symptom of the burstiness – the extra buffer gets me over the few seconds of slowness before the fast bit starts up again.

Also, because the upload speed is go good, I’m moving some of the web sites I was hosting for free off my colo box back to my home. At the time I made that decision, I thought “hey, I’m paying $80/month for that colo box, that will almost completely offset the cost of GreenLight right there”. But as I was moving stuff, I looked through my bill paying software and couldn’t find any record of my paying for the colo box since last November. And then I checked my email archive, and discovered that several months after the colo facility got bought by Earthlink IT (yeah, I was surprised that Earthlink still exists too) they cancelled the automatic Paypal payment, and when I emailed their support email address to find out why, they bounced my mail because my email address wasn’t in their ticketing system as a valid customer. I guess I was going to wait for them to start billing me, and they never did. So now I’m wondering how I can get that computer back from their colo facility, and if I’m going to be hit with a bill for a year of service if I do so. The thing is, I’m pretty sure I’ve visited the facility to reboot my box when it’s frozen up at least once since the transition to Earthlink started, but I’m not sure if that was before or after they stopped billing me. The box probably has a resale value around half of what I owe them, but on the other hand, I did get the services they haven’t billed me for. Sigh. I should probably do the right thing and contact them to get my billing up to date and the account properly closed out. I anticipate massive headaches.

Switching

Currently, my daily desktop is a big Linux tower. It has two video cards (GT 430 and GT 620) driving three monitors, a 28″ 4K (Acer B286HK) and 2 21″ 1080p Dells. I also have a MacBook Pro (MBP) which is almost as powerful as the Linux tower (same i7 processor, same 16Gb of RAM, bigger SSD).

Some of the weirdness-es of Linux are driving me up the wall, and I’m thinking of switching to using the MBP as my daily machine. I’ve verified that the MBP will drive the 4K monitor through a mini-DisplayPort cable (which plugs into one of the Thunderbolt ports) while driving one of the 21″ Dells through HDMI. I could drop the Linux box down to one of the 21″ Dells (and maybe also a ViewSonic 21″ monitor which is just gathering dust in the corner) and still be able to use it.

There are only a couple of reasons I haven’t done it yet:

  1. I need another keyboard and mouse for the Linux box. I had a junk-box clearing out a year or two ago and I don’t have any spare keyboards or mice right now.
  2. I’d have to move a bunch of hardware around to make room for everything the way I want it, and if it doesn’t work out, I’d have to move it all back.
  3. Every time I needed to take my MBP on work trips, I’d have to disconnect a forest of cables (MiniDP, Ethernet, USB Hub, USB external drive[1], HDMI) and reconnect it all when I got home.
  4. Last time I tried hooking up the 4K to the MBP, every time the display went to sleep it regathered all the windows into the top left corner like it forgot the display was bigger than the built-in and moved them to where they would be on the built-in. I *think* I found a solution for that, but I don’t recall.

If this works out, I will be getting rid of the biggest annoyances of Linux (like the fact that Chrome will play videos on one screen but not on another, or that Youtube will support 4K display in the “default” Flash player but will only support 720p in HTML5) but on the other hand I’ll be losing the biggest advantages of Linux – like “focus follows mouse” (I’m not sure most people would consider it an advantage, but I love it). So I’m not sure if this is 100% going to make me happy, but it’s something I want to at least try.