If you use this app on Android, like I do, you might be interested to know you can rip the audio from the game very easily. The audio is stored on the sdcard which you can access using ADB or plugging your device into your computer and browsing to

/Android/obb/com.sixtostart.zombiesrun

In this folder are two files:

ZR track here

Whoo! Nearly hit 100% on this run, and it was a long run too. I had ONE blip in this run near the end of the Green Zone, which took the 2% off, and I pre-empted the 5-minute mark by starting to slow-jog at the Blue Zone, even though I can walk it.

Day 16’s image isn’t available, not sure why, even though I synced my pacer. Most likely it’s because I ended up running a workout that was deleted.

Related articles

• Half Marathon Training - Day 16 (blenderfox.com)

ZR track here

Trying to use the ASICS application was a nightmare. There’s no audio and no indicator to tell you when you are too fast or too slow compared to the guideline pace. There’s no way to even know whether you have HIT the guideline pace either. Used it for about 2 minutes before giving up on it. I’ve logged a suggestion to ASICS about that.

I’ve switched back to miCoach training, but since I stopped the place, I’ve had to restitch my plan from where I left off, and for some reason, the plan won’t sync up properly with the previous runs, so now I’m continuing with workout # 19 (Saturday) instead of 17.

I’ve just found out that ASICS (whom all my running gear is from) also have a mobile app and training plans, including plans for various distances and paces. And yes, Half Marathon is included in them.

I’m going to switch off miCoach for a bit and try out the ASICS plan. They have structured the plan into phases to add variety to the plan and I like that because you can see exactly what phase you are in and keep yourself motivated. Unlike the training I was doing via miCoach, this one, like most mobile/web training plans, is pace-oriented.

1. Pre-Conditioning - The Pre-Conditioning Phase is an important one to get your body ready to train for the half Marathon distance. There is lots of jogging in this phase so enjoy this pace and don't be tempted to speed up, you will have plenty time later to train harder.
2. Balanced Training - The Balanced Training phase mixes fast paces and extended distances, creating a well rounded set of endurance and speed exercises to prime your body for the more focused phases later in the plan.
3. Getting Faster - The Getting Faster Phase uses a variety of speed focused training sessions to boost your running pace. These are first around 10km long and build in length as the weeks go by. They will gradually allow you to build speed for long distances.
4. Going Further - During this phase you will continue the high pace training done in the last phase but you'll extend the distance the pace must be maintained for. This phase will help to build your leg strength and stamina.
5. Race simulation - This phase has practical training for the race. You should try to complete the fast paced sessions wearing the gear you intend to use on race day. This phase will prepare specifically for the physical and mental demands of race day.
6. Tapering Off - The Tapering Off Phase is all about bringing your body into peak condition. Both the mileage and intensity of training is reduced to allow your body to recover and overcompensate. Race pace training is added to keep your body accustomed to the pace required on race day.
7. Recovery - Having reached your goal, take the next 2 weeks easy to let yourself recover. Take plenty of rest and then try Jogging and Comfortable runs to ease back into running. Judge how fit you feel with the faster paced runs at the end of this phase. Then you're ready for the next challenge!

I have been wanting to upgrade my laptop for a long while but have been putting off. Now my decision has somewhat been pushed. I’ll need to upgrade it to handle some of my work from the office and the software I need to use is really going to struggle on my current hardware.

Grive is an open source command-line-based sync tool to synchronise a directory with your Google Drive. Grive is not in the Fedora repositories, although it is undergoing review for addition into the repositories.

In the meantime, if you want to use it, I’ve written a script that should pick the latest version from the russianfedora website. Bitbucket repository is here.

Direct link to script: here

Once you install the application, create a blank folder (this will be the sync folder), then run grive -a to request an authentication URL. Go to that URL, log into Google if you need to, and you’ll get a response string you need to copy back into the console window. If the authentication was successful, Grive will sync your files into the folder. Each subsequent time you run Grive, it will download and/or upload files to/from your Google Drive.

There is only one limitation that I’m aware of. Documents created from within Google Drive won’t sync, but if you convert them to odt or doc files, they will sync.

An interesting use for Blender

vimeo.com/63821475

ZR track here

Threshold run. This was really difficult today, for some reason. I couldn’t get my heart rate up to yellow zone, even though I was pushing myself.

Gah, I really hate corporate firewalls. They block so many sites it’s sometimes impossible to do any work. I have Cloud Storage accounts with various sites, and can’t access:

• Box
• MediaFire
• DropBox
• JustCloud
• JungleDisk (No account)
• SpiderOak (No account)
• SugarSync (No account)
• Bicasa (No account)
• Wuala (No account)

• Google Drive
• MiMedia
• Mozy (No account)
• Ubuntu One

Behind my draconian corporate firewall the only one I can effectively use is Google Drive since they haven’t blocked Google, and I doubt they will since it’s probably the de facto search engine for most of the Internet users (although I prefer a metasearch engine like IXQuick.

Can you please remember to signal in good time before turning. It gives other people notice of what you’re trying to do. Suddenly braking, signalling and turning all at the same time will only cause an accident. And if I catch you on camera, you’re going to be named and shamed.

ZR track here

85% today, so a reasonable run, but surprisingly, it took a long time for my heart rate to reach Green Zone.

Looks like it wasn’t just me that was having trouble with the BB service.

Report on Sunday’s Outage

They mention a webcrawler caused the problem. I wonder which one it was? ¬_¬

I have two Half-Marathons I’m setting my eyes on:

Ealing Half Marathon (29th September 2013)

Royal Parks Foundation Half Marathon (6th October 2013)

I’ve been cracking my head trying to figure out how to concatenate my dashcam videos, which get chopped by my dashcam into 15 minutes chunks. The most obvious one is ffmpeg, where I would use this:

$ ffmpeg -i “concat:<a class="zem_slink" title="Ls" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ls" target="_blank" rel="wikipedia">ls -l</a> | <a class="zem_slink" title="Grep" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grep" target="_blank" rel="wikipedia">egrep</a> -i "apr\ \ 2" | awk 'BEGIN {ORS="|"} { print $9 }'” -c copy output.AVI

What this does is concatenates all of the videos with a date stamp of April 2nd (the “apr \ \ 2”), sticks a “|” between then, and pipes them to ffmpeg as a parameter:

$ echo ffmpeg -i “concat:ls -l | egrep -i "apr\ \ 2" | awk 'BEGIN {ORS="|"} { print $9 }'” -c copy output.AVI ffmpeg -i concat:PICT0001.AVI|PICT0002.AVI|PICT0003.AVI|PICT0004.AVI|PICT0005.AVI|PICT0006.AVI|PICT0007.AVI|PICT0008.AVI|PICT0009.AVI|PICT0010.AVI| -c copy output.AVI

However, here’s where linux version matters. On Fedora 18, I have ffmpeg V1.0.5:

$ ffmpeg -version ffmpeg version 1.0.5

On Lubuntu 13.10 (Raring Ringtail), I have ffmpeg/avconv V0.8.6:

$ ffmpeg -version ffmpeg version 0.8.6-6:0.8.6-0ubuntu0.12.10.1, Copyright (c) 2000-2013 the Libav developers built on Apr 2 2013 17:07:34 with gcc 4.7.2 *** THIS PROGRAM IS DEPRECATED *** This program is only provided for compatibility and will be removed in a future release. Please use avconv instead.

$ avconv -version avconv version 0.8.6-6:0.8.6-0ubuntu0.12.10.1, Copyright (c) 2000-2013 the Libav developers built on Apr 2 2013 17:07:34 with gcc 4.7.2 avconv 0.8.6-6:0.8.6-0ubuntu0.12.10.1

As a consequence, this is what happens when I run this the ffmpeg line on Lubuntu:

$ ffmpeg -i “concat:ls -l | egrep -i "apr\ \ 2" | awk 'BEGIN {ORS="|"} { print $9 }'” -c copy output.AVI ffmpeg version 0.8.6-6:0.8.6-0ubuntu0.12.10.1, Copyright (c) 2000-2013 the Libav developers built on Apr 2 2013 17:07:34 with gcc 4.7.2 *** THIS PROGRAM IS DEPRECATED *** This program is only provided for compatibility and will be removed in a future release. Please use avconv instead. [avi @ 0x8a8cf80] non-interleaved AVI Input #0, avi, from ‘concat:PICT0001.AVI|PICT0002.AVI|PICT0003.AVI|PICT0004.AVI|PICT0005.AVI|PICT0006.AVI|PICT0007.AVI|PICT0008.AVI|PICT0009.AVI|PICT0010.AVI|': Duration: 00:14:59.96, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 88466 kb/s Stream #0.0: Video: mjpeg, yuvj422p, 1280x720, 30 tbr, 30 tbn, 30 tbc Stream #0.1: Audio: adpcm_ima_wav, 16000 Hz, 1 channels, s16, 64 kb/s Unrecognized option ‘c’ Failed to set value ‘copy’ for option ‘c’

Not to worry, I can always explicitly say what I want to do with the streams:

$ ffmpeg -i “concat:ls -l | egrep -i "apr\ \ 2" | awk 'BEGIN {ORS="|"} { print $9 }'” -vcodec copy -acodec copy output.AVI ffmpeg version 0.8.6-6:0.8.6-0ubuntu0.12.10.1, Copyright (c) 2000-2013 the Libav developers built on Apr 2 2013 17:07:34 with gcc 4.7.2 *** THIS PROGRAM IS DEPRECATED *** This program is only provided for compatibility and will be removed in a future release. Please use avconv instead. [avi @ 0x9561f80] non-interleaved AVI Input #0, avi, from ‘concat:PICT0001.AVI|PICT0002.AVI|PICT0003.AVI|PICT0004.AVI|PICT0005.AVI|PICT0006.AVI|PICT0007.AVI|PICT0008.AVI|PICT0009.AVI|PICT0010.AVI|': Duration: 00:14:59.96, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 88466 kb/s Stream #0.0: Video: mjpeg, yuvj422p, 1280x720, 30 tbr, 30 tbn, 30 tbc Stream #0.1: Audio: adpcm_ima_wav, 16000 Hz, 1 channels, s16, 64 kb/s Output #0, avi, to ‘output.AVI’: Metadata: ISFT : Lavf53.21.1 Stream #0.0: Video: mjpeg, yuvj422p, 1280x720, q=2-31, 30 tbn, 30 tbc Stream #0.1: Audio: adpcm_ima_wav, 16000 Hz, 1 channels, 64 kb/s Stream mapping: Stream #0.0 -> #0.0 Stream #0.1 -> #0.1 Press ctrl-c to stop encoding [avi @ 0x9579d40] Application provided invalid, non monotonically increasing dts to muxer in stream 1: 4551 >= 4551 av_interleaved_write_frame(): Invalid argument

Oh, I guess that didn’t work either. Okay, if ffmpeg isn’t an option, then mencoder is the next option:

$ mencoder -oac copy -ovc copy -idx -o output.AVI ls -l | egrep -i "apr\ \ 2" | awk 'BEGIN {ORS=" "} { print $9 }' MEncoder svn r34540 (Ubuntu), built with gcc-4.7 (C) 2000-2012 MPlayer Team success: format: 0 data: 0x0 - 0x3f4a3440 libavformat version 53.21.1 (external) Mismatching header version 53.19.0 AVI file format detected. [aviheader] Video stream found, -vid 0 [aviheader] Audio stream found, -aid 1 Detected NON-INTERLEAVED AVI file format. VIDEO: [MJPG] 1280x720 24bpp 30.000 fps 12399.9 kbps (1513.7 kbyte/s) [V] filefmt:3 fourcc:0x47504A4D size:1280x720 fps:30.000 ftime:=0.0333 videocodec: framecopy (1280x720 24bpp fourcc=47504a4d) audiocodec: framecopy (format=11 chans=1 rate=16000 bits=4 B/s=8110 sample-256) Writing header… ODML: Aspect information not (yet?) available or unspecified, not writing vprp header. Writing header… ODML: Aspect information not (yet?) available or unspecified, not writing vprp header. ^CPos: 692.7s 20782f (72%) 298.78fps Trem: 0min 1343mb A-V:0.000 [11759:64] Writing index… Writing header… ODML: Aspect information not (yet?) available or unspecified, not writing vprp header.

I cancelled the run, but it seems to work. Strange that ffmpeg is so far behind on Ubuntu. So far behind, in fact, that the -c command fails. But on the plus side, at least mencoder works

ZR track here

30-minute run. Surprisingly, burned out pretty quickly. But I guess that’s what happens when you don’t have a decent lunch…

My run was later than normal because of training at the office which delayed me, not to mention an accident at the Brent Cross junction with the North Circular Road….

ZR track here

Shorter run today, and scored pretty well – got 95% and I think this is probably because I actually pre-empted the start of the Green Zone.

Up until know, I’ve been following tutorials on modelling in Blender and they all use box modelling. However, I wonder if I could take a modular approach instead, and model parts of the character separately, then merge them together. The only reference images I have (short of drawing my own) are three-quarter views, which are a lot harder to model from a face or side view. So, if I model say the leg and foot independently, I can clone it and attach it to the torso.

Going to branch my Bitbucket repo and give this a go.

I’ve worked as both a user and as an IT engineer, so I know how true this is…. :P

vimeo.com/62986805

ZR Track here

Reasonable run today. Only scored 81% though. I used the larger, steeper lap this time, but managed to keep my pace more consistent.

I finally have had an opportunity to process my dashcam videos for this week and here’s one from Tuesday.

Mercedes drivers have a bad rep and this guy isn’t helping by first jumping 5 cars in the queue in front of him (including me), forcing cars going the other way to stop, and then jumping the red light at the roadworks.

The clock on this footage was one hour behind (it was actually 16:11, not 15:11)

It should be noted that I caught up with him about five minutes down the road where he got caught behind another queue of traffic. Moral of the story, don’t jump the queue. It’s not smart, it’s not cool, and just proves you are more of a dick than you already are…

vimeo.com/63463193

ZR Track here

Scored 90% today. Did a longer lap of my local park this time, which had the steeper incline. Harder work, but better for pacing.

I’ve finally started building on Project 5Ds.

Progress image