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I really enjoy doing the outdoor streams, I’d love to do more actually but the only real time that is available for me to do them is early on a Saturday morning, when the family is still asleep. So I’ve taken to doing a cycle and running stream, which fits in with my Parkrun at 9am. However, running and streaming at the same time is a challenging idea, so my options have always been limited.

I’ve been using a Go Pro strapped to my head, broadcasting wirelessly to a hotspot in my pocket and then onto the internet via Twitch. To be fair, it doesn’t work too badly but when it goes wrong, it goes very wrong and there is no automatic way to fix itself.

However, I’d seen other streamers trying a software and hardware combo called Belabox (developed by an IRL streamer) – and so I thought I’d give it a try. I’ve spend just over £200 on equipment, so it’s not value for money, but its been a fun little DIY project for me to complete over the past few weeks. However it is a lot cheaper than the commercial options on the market.

OK so what is it. Essentially the heart of the system a single board computer, think Raspberry Pi with better graphics, which encodes the picture from the camera and sends it to the internet. The one I selected was called Orange Pi 5+ and I had to order it from China. Essentially it does a few different things:-

• Takes the raw HDMI signal from the gopro
• Encodes the video stream using H265 – which is a codec that uses half the amount as the previous option (H264) for the same quality
• Sends the signal to a cloud server using up to 4 different modems, which is bonds together to produce a robust signal. I’m using 2 modems, my old hotspot and my iphone
• Provides provides an app that allows you to start and restart the signal, change the quality, tweak various setting
• You can also use a USB port for an external microphone, I haven’t done that yet. I was hoping I could avoid that by dealing with the audio of the camera using AI noise cancellation, but that seems not to work too well – but a wireless lavalier mic is £200

However, it came with a big metal case, that wasn’t ideal for me to carry in my backback, so I had to 3d print a much lighter weight option. This took a while, I went through 4 different options before I found one that fit properly.

The main benefits for me are that the signal is better and that we can quickly recover if things go wrong, rather than the ridiculous dance of battery changes and server resets that I used to have to do. I also get a 1080p signal instead of 720p which should make the stream look clearer.

However there are some disadvantages over the previous system, mostly linked to the main disadvantage – the weight!!!

The kit is about 1.2kg, compared to the old solution that was roughly half that. This is because I have 2 extra things to carry – battery and encoder, whereas before I could run off internal batteries. For the most part, this is not a big problem, but when I’m actually running I need the kit to be as small as possible. I believe I can get the weight down to maybe around 900g, by getting a smaller battery, optimising the wires and simply carrying less stuff, but it’s still a challenge that I’m not sure will work.

Because of the need to reduce weight, the whole system is not waterproof, so presently I can’t use it if there is any rain at all. In future, I might carry some waterproof covers, so it’s at least feasible for the non running parts of the stream, but I can’t see how I can record a wet run.

The whole system is also now wired, this, in a way, has made it a lot more robust. No longer am I a wireless hotspot, but a completely wired solution, meaning that there are far fewer dropouts due to wifi/ bluetooth being weird. However, this also means that I have 4 different wires attached to me, which could get pulled out, or tripped or similar, and they all add a little bit of weight (there are about 200g of wires). It also means that if I want to run with a headcam, then I need to have a wire attached to my head and down my body, again not ideal – I haven’t tried that yet.

The other disadvantage of the wires is that I feel that I look a lot more techy when I’m walking about, whereas the previous solution was almost unnoticeable. It remains to be seen as to whether that is a real issue, or just my nerves with new equipment.

Finally, the GoPro itself ends up being an issue. When I first bought it, it was the only real option, however, in order to enable HDMI, I have to use the GoPro Media Mod, which adds 55g of weight, makes it bigger and makes it very hard to change the battery in the field. Therefore if I wanted to go back to the old solution for any reason, it would be a big faff, probably about 5 minutes of switching things over, which is not ideal on stream. These days people buy the DJI version (the OSMO action 4) – I might in the future but that is another £400 to spend.

Now to focus on the setup itself (look at the photo below). We have the Orange Pi decoder as the heart of the setup – the white box. Connected to that as the input we have the GoPro with Media mod – connected via HDMI. And then we output via the two modems, in this case my hotspot and my iphone. The whole thing is then powered by the battery. In walking mode. All this is connected to my running backpack, and the GoPro is clipped onto my lapel. It’s reasonably stable like that.

Even more stable will be the bike version, because most the ‘kit’ can go in the waterproof bike bag, with just the phone and GoPro on my handlebars.

To put the kit on my head, I will get a smaller battery, and use only 1 modem, and just hope things work out!

A couple of embellishments I hope to add are the heart rate monitor, I think that can be done via my watch with no additional expenditure, I think that would be an interesting additions. I also would like to have audio chat – broadcasting to my bone conducting headset, this removes the need to always be looking at my phone, which is not great while riding or running.

I took the kit out for a proper test for my Saturday running stream. The setup is a bit quicker than the old one. However, I had some HDMI and GoPro setting problems at the start which took me a few minutes to sort out, but the signal was good after that. I also struggled to get the clip that holds the GoPro into a good position, this is partly because I probably need a different HDMI cable, as the current one gets in the way, but there may be a workaround.

I had one ‘black screen’ moment for a couple of seconds. I imagine this is to do with weak signal. However, I went to a few places where the signal is usually bad (inside of Macdonalds) but it worked great, so I guess that issue is solved.

Sadly at the last moment it started to rain, so I only got 1 hour of stream done, but I was glad to do a short test. I’ll do some more tests this week but hopefully everything will work out better next week.

Was it all worth it – well I’ve had a lot of fun doing it. However, I need to test a few more times to see if this works out as the long term solution for running. I definitely think I’ll use it on the bike.

OK, so diet progress, so far so good. kinda.

I’ve not followed and proper kind of diet plan. It’s hard to do with a family, as they all have different needs. I’ve kind of just made it up as I go along. I read a thing about soup being a good idea, so I’ve got the old pressure cooker out and have been making a bowl of soup per day. It seems to work out for that to be lunch. For the rest of it, on the first day I went out for breakfast with Mrs Rad and just had a bowl of fruit, so I’ve been sticking with that. Then a proper meal in the evening, but with yogurt and fruit afterwards.

For drinks, I’ve been having just water, as much as I can. I get offered a few sugary drinks and that has generally been fine.

So how has it been going. Generally fine. I’ve definitely got into a pattern and been mostly sticking to it so I can feel some progress. Until today. Which was a lesson learned. I felt quite hungry in the morning, but then came IKEA.

So we ordered some bits from IKEA that were supposed to go with the bed that we had bought a few weeks back. They had been out of stock so Mrs Rad tried to order them online. And we waited in all day yesterday for them. But did they come? No. Why? That took 3 phone calls to find out, and it seems to be possibly the packaging label was damaged so they didn’t know where to send it.

But all was not lost, I could see online that they might have one of the things in stock at IKEA, so I thought I’d ride the bike over to get it. Well it’s 10 miles each way, not too hard on the electric bike but it was windy. And that probably burnt too many calories. So this evening I just got too hungry and I’ve been eating everything.

So lesson learnt – don’t let yourself get too hungry.

And did they have the thing in IKEA. Of course not.

Dreadfully.

Honestly, it’s been a struggle. I’m definitely massively overweight. It kind of started before lockdown, but got a lot worse during and I haven’t been able to shift it with exercise. I looked particularly large during my Christmas stream. So I decided this year was going to be the year for my diet and it hasn’t worked out at all.

Firstly, January does not seem to be the right month for me. We ended up going out on multiple post Christmas do’s and birthdays, and that meant eating and eating and eating. And I’ve found that once my body is in the mood for eating, I just continue to eat like a horse. Is that a phrase. I’m not sure. Horses do eat though, and they are bigger than me. Maybe a pig.

Anyway, to add injury to insult, we did parkrun on the 30th December and I slipped over in a puddle. I got straight back up and kept running and after a couple of minutes I didn’t feels so bad. However, when I was half way around one of the volunteers asked if I was ok. When I got home I had to do a lot of cleaning of my injust and I’ve got a big wound on my knee. Perhaps moreso was the foot pain too – that went off after a couple of days, but I’ve needed to protect it. So the upshot is that I haven’t been able to do my normal exercise for a couple of weeks.

I’ve gone out on the bike a few times, and we did a slow parkrun each weekend but it’s not the same amount of calorie burn as it would be if I was actually training normally.

So that’s the bad news, but also the good news. Because I was struggling with this it motivated me to try and sort things out. At least from Monday morning this week, so I’ve hopefully come up with a sustainable plan to improve my diet. I’m having fruit in the morning, home-made soup of various kinds at lunchtime and then a proper meal in the evenings. It seems to be going quite well so far, but it’s obviously not been long enough to lose any actual weight, so we’ll see if I can keep it up for a decent length of time.

I also gave up coffee and tea at the end of last year. Which has made the world seem really sad. However that does seem to have sorted my body out a bit too.

So, all is not lost we can be healthy by next Christmas, we are just at the very start and need motivation!

So it’s that time of year again. The second week of January, where some of us spend the week watching people play video games. Awesome Games Done quick is week long charity event on Twitch, where people try to speedrun old games. It can be very entertaining.

So there we were, maybe 10 years ago, at Mrs Rad’s family home, just watching some random stuff on Youtube. Honestly, I can’t really remember what we were watching, but suddenly we were watching youtube videos of speedruns. This seemed ridiculous to me at the time. Who watches someone else play videogames, instead of playing them themselves. However, I particularly remember them speedrunning one of the Zelda titles, I think it was Twilight Princess. I did clock the logo in the corner though Awesome Games Done Quick, and I wondered what it was. Mrs Rad’s brother explained that people donated money as they were speedrunning the games. This seemed even more wild to me. Why would people donate money to someone playing a video game?

However, when I went home, I decided to look this Twitch thing up. I wondered whether there were people who could speedrun my favourite game – Legend of Zelda – Ocarina of time. Sure enough there were a few.

At this point we had very young children, one was 3 the other was 1. And they really struggled to sleep. They liked to have us in the room, to keep them safe. So every evening I would sit there for an hour or two in the dark, trying to help them sleep.

So one night I got my phone out and found Twitch again. I would sit there watching people doing run after run, just as a bit of eye candy whilst I sat there. I didn’t really understand the chat thing, that seemed super scary to me, how could I write something in that? So I didn’t. In fact, for 3 years I didn’t have an account.

But gradually I got to understand the thing. I got to know some of the speed runners and I had some favourites that I liked and I would often come back to watch them every night. I saw that it was more about the community than just being like a TV programme to watch. And I saw why people paid money, even though I didn’t myself.

I never really thought much about streaming myself, until I started to branch out to watch some different speedruns. And once the kids were old enough to not need their hands held every night – I decided to give it a try myself.

My son decided that for his birthday, he wanted a Red Velvet cake. I don’t know if you know what that is, but a red velvet cake is a chocolate cake, but red in colour. But it’s not red in colour because of some mysterious ingredient, it’s red because you add so much red colouring that it overpowers the natural dark brown of the chocolate.

It does however, have some different ingredients. First – buttermilk. So I had to find this in the supermarket, but where, would it be buy the butter, or would it be by the milk. At first I thought butter, but obviously it was milk. And it turns out it’s not a particularly weird product, it was just in a bottle next to the other milks – and quite cheap. It turns out to be sort of a richer version of milk.

I also needed to find the red dye. But it can’t just be any red dye, it had to be red gel. Apparently, if I just use normal liquid food colouring then it will make the red cake green. The first supermarket I went in had every colour of gel except for red. I grabbed purple just in case but I ended up cycling over town late an night in the cold to grab the red gel from the other supermarket.

Which brings me to the other part of this. I ended up making this cake in the middle of the night and it took a couple of hours, I was exhausted. The recipes for red velvet cake on the internet were variable, lots of them had 1 start reviews, and more had four star averages but I could only find 1 star reviews. I finally settled on one of the 4 star reviews, where the one star seemed to say that there wasn’t enough chocolate in it. That seemed to be in the recipe so I was good to go.

The biggest problem was that it said it would cook in half an hour, but the mixture was barely done by the point, so I added another 15 minutes, and then another 5 – and finally it was complete.

Actually it turned out to be delicious. Mrs Rad iced it this morning and we just scoffed it down now.

This is not a how-to guide, but one of the things I’ve enjoyed about the streaming experience is to be able to write a few songs.

I don’t really have any formal training in how to write a song, but I was quite musical as a child. I sang in a choir for quite a long time, and I played recorder and drums, and had some piano lessons. But I wasn’t really any good at anything.

Thanks to streaming, and weirdly the DMCA music thing that happened a few years back, I decided to pick the piano up again. I’d tried a few times over the years but I never really got anywhere. But finally, I managed to get to a position where I could make 4 chords sound kind of ok. If you do want a tip, there’s plenty of Youtube videos that kind of teach this method, although its one of those things that suddenly ‘clicks’ in you mind that gets you going.

I still can’t really play tunes, but instead I sing them, which kinda works for me, and that quickly brought me on to wondering whether I could write my own songs. This time, I didn’t use Youtube much, I just kind of went for it, using some classic chord sequences and a lot of online thesaurus and rhyming apps. I did google ‘how to compose a song’ but there’s loads I don’t understand there and it worries me. So I’m ignoring it.

What is great though is to have the outlet through the stream where I can try out this stuff with friends, but maybe without too much risk. I’ve really appreciated that, and I love that I’m able to at least add something.

One thing that does seem to be needed with song writing is a bit of inspiration. And the stream has given me that. I wrote one song for the sky anniversary, another for the ‘your favourite sky creature challenge’, but I think the most special was the one I got to write after my character from Sandrock had a torrid love affair with Pen – an NPC. It’s called Everything Wrong.

Well, I fell over when I was doing parkrun a couple of weeks back, so I’ve been laying off the running for a bit, to help me heal. Which means I’m back into the cycling. So today I picked possibly the coldest day of the winter to do a long bike ride. It’s not really the fact that it is zero degrees but also that it is humid and there was quite a wind.

However, the electric bike does a good job of dealing with some of that. It’s great fun to ride and I can get quite far without feeling I’ve put too much effort in. If people could feel what I feel when I ride, they would be so much more popular. I’m also glad that the battery seems to work ok in the cold. I did at least 15 miles and used 60% of the battery, so not great, but ok.

Also there’s a few things that I wanted to try out. I bought an attachment arm for the gopro, so that maybe you would be able to see my face when I am riding the bike. It kinda works, but the audio is bad, so I think it’s just for a quick look really. There’s some nice footage though.

The other thing was that there has been a problem with the handlebars a bit, and I was able to take them apart a bit today to diagnose the problem. Now I know what it is I can fix it. Basically, one of the bits that is supposed to have ridges has gone smooth so needs replacing. Its cheap so thats good.

Hopefully we will be back to some bike streams soon

The winter here has been mild so far, some nice warm days, some rainy days. But today it suddenly turned a lot colder. I wore 2 hoodies beneath my coat and it was still cold. They said it would snow (yay) but it didn’t really (boo).

And it was in that context that my ipad decided to break. It was crashing with a purple stream. Initially just a couple of times a day, but by yesterday I couldn’t even type my passcode without it breaking.

So I trundled along to the Apple Store to see what was up. Of course, it seemed to work absolutely fine while I was in there. No sign of a problem, which kinda turned out to be a good thing. Maybe – I’m still not sure if it was a scam.

They said that there was no real way to fix ipads, so the best might be to get a refurbished unit or something. However, they said the best bet might be for me to trade in the existing model and get a new one, and that would probably work out cheaper. Fortunately, they had found nothing wrong with the existing model so this seemed like an opportunity.

And then it went a bit weird. He got the kit so he could start doing the photos for the trade in. I took the screen protector off and he said on the very bottom of the screen their might be a light scratch, and that he would go and get a screen cleaning kit, to get rid of it.

And then nothing. For a long time. I just sat there. I started looking around eventually and a manger type finally came up to me and said that they guy who had dealt with me had been coughing and introduced me to a different guy that was going to help.

Now I’m not saying that this was suspicious, but the new guy was very much ‘I’m here to help you with your trade in’ and didn’t mention the broken ipad at all. So I don’t know if there was some shenanigans going on. Anyway, hopefully the guy recovered from his coughing fit.

It was all plain sailing from there. Except it wasn’t. having taken all the photos of my old ipad and had them AI’d – the system decided that it was in very poor condition and offered me £0 for trade in. Fortunately the guy decided that this was a mistake and went through it again.

And so, a lot of money down the drain (I will spare you the details), and I now have a new working ipad. Very similar to the old one. Almost not different. Apparently its a bit faster.

Happy days.

Woah! I’m exhausted. Been super busy in the house all day.

First thing this morning I got up and realised I had to take the Christmas Tree down. We usually take it down on the 6th January, but we were out last night until late, so I just fell asleep when I got back home. So this morning it was still up. Apparently that’s unlucky, so Mrs Rad had unplugged the lights so that it wasn’t too unlucky.

Anyway, an hours hard work and I had got the Christmas decorations down before Mrs Rad awoke – Hurrah. The next thing is that there is a ring at the doorbell and the delivery from our Ikea visit on Thursday arrived. To be honest, I’d totally forgotten what we had bought, so it was like a second Christmas going through all the things this morning.

We immediately got on with sorting out the shelving – discovering that our sitting room has a tilt of 2 degrees near to the wall! So we had to set the height adjusters on things to some pretty crazy angles. Then we spent some times building all the drawer inserts and it was done. It looks a whole lot better than before.

We nipped to a little independent pizza place for a quick lunch and also stocked up on chocolate and then we got back to work.

We have bought the eldest Radling a loft bed. It’s kind of like a bunk bed but with only the top bunk. The Internet said it would take 4 hours to build it, so we knew we were in for a long slog. There were many many bolts to put in and the instructions were somewhat unclear. The allen keys also had a habit on pinging away when we were trying to build, which was not ideal. Finally we had it done. I think we made it in 3 and a half hours to be fair. The kids are really pleased and spent some time ‘having a go’.

We still had a few more little things to build in the living room, so we went back and did that, but I think we are finally done with the building.

It’s still not tidy. I don’t know if it will ever be. Watch this space to find out.

So we all know all the tropes. You always end up spending more than you thought you would, you always buy things that you don’t need, it’s really boring. I’m here to tell you, all these things about Ikea are true.

Mrs Rad got up early for work this morning, so we met her in town after she finished, so we ended up on the 10am train to Ikea which is like an hour away from here. And we went round all the fake rooms and took photos of ourselves. There’s a photo of the Radlings pretending to work in a coffee shop, and another of them having a business meeting.

I always want all the things they don’t sell. I totally want a fake window for my kitchen and some fake stairs for the living room. And a fake garden area.

Anyway with all this excitement we decided to get lunch, and stand in a 20 minute queue for meatballs – I had the fish instead though, plus a salad to ‘make it healthy’.

The best way to do ikea is to make a list of what you want beforehand and stick to that. However, in the history of time, nobody has ever done that. Instead we turned up with a vague idea of the things that we wanted, and randomly collected them. And then you ge to the kitchen section, where suddenly the need to replace every kitchen item is overwhelming.

And then we wondered whether we could carry everything we had bought, but decided that we couldn’t, so we decided we would pay for a delivery. And then so we went back and got a load of heavy stuff that we had ‘missed’.

And that’s how you spend £800 on nothing that you need.

Well we have bought a load of storage for the kitchen and replaced the kids beds + the obligatory kitchen stuff.

So that was my day. Exhausting.