Why the old GoPro-from-a-bike bumps videos aren't coming back; and why there's less wurbling than you might hope

Every now and again someone tells me, or tells the world, that things were better in the good old days, when I did breathless following-on-the-bank GoPro videos on my bike.

And in one key respect things were indeed better in those days: I was younger :-)

In case you're too young to remember, Mays 2022, Saturday M1 is a good example of the genre. And who could forget those wonderful "pick up" moments when you got to see the towpath and my front wheel.

That video also illustrates a minor problem: CUCBC aren't happy with people filming. Technically, as not a member of the university, I'm not bound by their rules. But as a law-abiding (cough) citizen rule-breaking does distress me a little.

But the real problem is the inevitability, at some point, of something terrible happening. Particularly on wet days the tow-path becomes sloppy; and people's dogs jump out randomly; and people jump out randomly; and bank parties stop in the path or clear badly when bumps happen; and one day I was just going to fail to take a corner and cycle straight into the river. Or something. I had dreams about it.

Quite arguably, the drones - even with my top-quality wurbling - aren't as thrilling, even on the rare occasions when my thumb slips on the height control and I nearly take someone's head off. But they do offer much better race coverage; the ability to go back and forth is particularly good, or so I think.

Wurbling

People often say they prefer the videos with my smooth authoritative manly tones explaining that I haven't a clue what is going on, compared to the silent ones. Those are done by screen-recording my phone, so the video appears at whatever-rez-my-phone-is, which appears to be 1080 by the time it makes it to Youtube. The silent ones are direct-to-SD on the drone, and max at 1440 on Youtube. You can easily see that the silent ones are better quality. They also take up lots of storage space: about 4G for 5 minutes and - or so I suspect - they actually need double this "in flight"; in that I think they get written to system space as they're taken, then copied into file space when finished; so it is not uncommon for it to say "failed to save recording" if I let it go on too long. I could just do a voice-recording instead, but then syncing that to the video would be pain. Also, although from my suave unhurried confident tone you might not think it, adding voice is extra stress, and my poor old mind can only just about cope with the drone controls.

Notes

The date of this post - 2005 - is of course wrong. It is actually from 2025, and written in response to that Rowbridge. The reason I backdated it - or so I assume; I've actually forgotten my thought processes but I'm reasoning by analogy with stuff I've done elsewhere - is to push the post away from the top of the stack so that "regular readers" don't see it in the stream. Another example is the about me post. I think I push all "undated" posts into 2005. I've actually started doing some prehistory, and intend to do more "when I get a moment", so there is for example a post about 1989.