365 Days of Still Standing

Today is New Year’s Eve, and I have done my 365th standstill of the year. I began my year-long #StillStanding project on 1 January this year, and I am happy to report that I managed to conclude the project as planned! A few days were more challenging than others, but I am pleased I made recordings every day. I wrote a blog post after the first 100 days and a video of the first half year....

December 31, 2023 · 3 min · 634 words · ARJ

Making image parts transparent in Python

As part of my year-long StillStanding project, I post an average image of the spherical video recordings on Mastodon daily. Average images The average image is similar to an “open shutter” technique in photography; it overlays all the frames in a video. The result is an image that shows the most prominent parts of the video recording. This is ideal for my StillStanding recordings, because the technique effectively “removes” objects that appear in the recording for a short period of time....

August 7, 2023 · 2 min · 377 words · ARJ

Half a year of standing still

Today, I am halfway through my year-long #StillStanding project. Not so much has changed since I summed up the first 100 days. I still enjoy the experience, and there are new things to learn every day. Here is a 10-minute video I have recorded that presents the project, explains its rationale, and reflects upon some experiences so far: The biggest challenge moving forward is finding new spaces every day. I have already stood in the most accessible spaces, so I need to spend more time looking for unexplored rooms both at the university and close to my home....

July 1, 2023 · 1 min · 108 words · ARJ

Running a Jupyter Notebook in Conda Environment

I have been running Python-based Jupyter Notebooks for some time but never thought about using environments before quite recently. I have heard people talking about environments, but I didn’t understand why I would need it. Two days ago, I tried to upgrade to the latest version of the Musical Gestures Toolbox for Python and got stuck in a dependency nightmare. I tried to upgrade one of the packages that choked, but that only led to other packages breaking....

June 12, 2023 · 4 min · 813 words · ARJ

Oddly ticking clock

Today, I stood still in a meeting room with an oddly ticking clock. This was part of my annual #StillStanding project which is documented on my Mastodon channel. There was nothing special about today’s session but the clock. The meeting room was furnished with a large table in the middle, a screen on the wall, and glass walls on both sides. The large ventilation system led to a noticeable low-frequency “hum” dominating the soundscape....

June 8, 2023 · 2 min · 341 words · ARJ

100 Days and Still Standing

Today marks the 100th day of my annual #StillStanding project. In this blog post, I summarize some of my experiences so far. Endurance Some people questioned whether I would be able to stand still every single day for an entire year. But, hey, it is only ten minutes (out of 1440) per day, and even though my life as a centre director is busy, it is always possible to find time for a standstill sometime during the day....

April 10, 2023 · 11 min · 2240 words · ARJ

Making 2D Images from 360-degree Videos

For my annual Still Standing project, I am recording 360 videos with audio and sensor data while standing still for 10 minutes. I have started exploring how to visualize the sensor data best. Today, I am looking into visualization strategies for 360-degree images. I have written about how to pre-process 360-degree videos from Garmin VIRB and Ricoh Theta cameras previously. The Theta records in a dual fisheye format like this:...

April 1, 2023 · 2 min · 241 words · ARJ

Testing Mobile Phone Motion Sensors

For my annual Still Standing project, I am recording sensor data from my mobile phone while standing still for 10 minutes at a time. This is a highly curiosity-driven and data-based project, and part of the exploration is to figure out what I can get out of the sensors. I have started sharing graphs of the linear acceleration of my sessions with the tag #StillStanding on Mastodon. However, I wondered if this is the sensor data that best represents the motion....

January 3, 2023 · 5 min · 965 words · ARJ

2023, A Year of Still Standing

Yesterday, I completed my 365 Sound Actions project, during which I recorded one sound action per day as part of preparing for the launch of my book Sound Actions. Today, on 1 January 2023, I start this year’s project: recording myself standing still 10 minutes every day. You can follow the progress on Mastodon. Starting up AMBIENT Although I am happy about completing my sound actions project, I have enjoyed the ritual of doing something every day....

January 1, 2023 · 4 min · 686 words · ARJ

Adding Title and Author to PDFs exported from Jupyter Notebook

I am doing some end of the year cleaning on my hard drive and just uploaded the Jupyter Notebook I used in the analysis of a mobile phone lying still earlier this year. For some future studies, I thought it would be interesting to explore the PDF export functionality from Jupyter. That worked very well except for that I didn’t get any title or author name on top: Then I found a solution on Stack Overflow....

December 30, 2022 · 1 min · 127 words · ARJ