enigmatic
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Posts posted by enigmatic
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2 minutes ago, IanD said:
All you need for verification is a face-on photo of the side of the boat showing the name and number -- it's not a pretty boat-in-canal-landscape photo, it's one taken specifically to prove where you are. Character recognition is trivial in this case, even phones do it all the time.
To improve security further, you also get the app to verify that the phone taking the photo belongs to the boat owner by having it registered to them in the system -- this is what all two-factor authentication systems routinely do nowadays. Software to do all this already exists and is relatively cheap to buy, which is why so many banks and online merchants use it. There's absolutely no reason CART couldn't do the same, and it wouldn't cost the fortune you're suggesting.
Far mode difficult authorisation/verification problems than this are solved millions of times per day by a vast number of businesses... 😉
Sure, my point was that coming up with a digital chain of custody solution for CRT isn't really a hobby project like a photolog is, and Andy Russell signwriting isn't optimised for OCR!
And whilst the components may just be libraries stitched together, anybody that pitches CRT a custom app to save them the job of hiring several enforcement officers for less than £xxx,xxx per annum is underselling themselves, and has vastly underestimated the number of meetings they'll have to sit through to deliver it
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18 minutes ago, Arthur Marshall said:
They could carry portable welding units and weld one onto every boat not showing a licence...
I did actually meet a couple of Irish chaps whose job was to surreptitiously attach transponders to trucks they suspected were carrying cargo places it shouldn't be taken.
A lot of the time they just chucked a cheap mobile phone in the back
13 minutes ago, IanD said:Have you actually looked into what AI image generation can do nowadays?
I got StableDiffusion to draw me some narrowboats recently
It's stopped weirdly fusing them with narrowbodied aircraft, but the results still aren't going to pass for actual narrowboats, never mind NB Kingfisher near Bridge 34 on the Popular and Busy Canal, what3words location boat.wasn't.there
13 minutes ago, IanD said:I was proposing that an app like this could make it no longer necessary to have manual boat spotters roaming the system, or trying to recognise where photos were taken, so the money saved could be spent on better things like fixing locks. That means using modern image recognition technology (yes, AI again!) to match the photo with a stored database for that boat, and read the registration number. No manual intervention needed except in the case of a dispute, which would be only a tiny fraction of cases -- for the vast majority of CCers software can check and verify their travels.
I think once OCR and digital chain-of-custody is introduced into the app it becomes a £xxx,xxx per annum contracted thing licensed to CRT rather than an interesting side project! Not sure how good OCR is at handling number plates at oblique angles through windows or fancy signwriting either
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35 minutes ago, IanD said:
If it's being used to verify where the boat has been (e.g. for CCers "satisfying the board") this is a *very* bad idea, if there's any way to import photos (rather than the app taking/logging them) it makes faking where the boat has been far too easy. I can imagine a "CMers black market" swapping photos of different locations with edited geotagged data to prove their boats have been roaming round the system when they haven't moved at all... 😞
If you're determined to fake the geotags for your images you can do it with images imported individually as well as in bulk.
If I import 500 pictures of my boat with accurate EXIF data in different locations (which also overlap with where CRT thinks I was), the chances of that being down to me being a Photoshop wizard are pretty slim
I can't imagine images of someone else's boats in completely different parts of the system from the ones their enforcement team recorded you in being a more successful strategy than excuses, never mind enough to warrant a black market. If you've obviously faked cruising, that'd make court enforcement more of a rubber stamp process too...
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Is it any good on surface scratches that T-cut doesn't do enough for?
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5 hours ago, David Mack said:
The app could also be used by boaters taking part in the IWA Silver Propeller scheme or on the BCN Marathon Challenge and similar events, or indeed boaters who just want a personal online log of their travels, rather than keeping a paper version.
This is a really good idea
One thing I considered building for myself was a little map that showed places I'd been on the waterways. The ability to generate that from image location tags would be really cool (as would the ability to export the data in a format that could be embedded on a web page)
Can also imagine the IWA liking the idea of people recording their Silver Propeller destinations on an app that encouraged them to visit more, and they do of course have a few members to suggest apps to!
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@Tasemu does your app have the [planned] ability to bulk upload photos selected from the phone's album
I'd be interested in seeing/testing the results of that for the last 3 years
(though my cruising days will be coming to an end shortly, so not sure how much help I'll be long term)
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On 25/07/2023 at 23:34, Ronaldo47 said:
I would think that H&S would have a fit these days about the lockie opening one of the lower mitre gates and then striding across the gap onto the still-closed other gate to open it. Not that I would ever do anything like that myself....
They'd be even more upset by his lack of lifejacket! I wonder if modern volockiess respond to "Abracadabra, Superglue, open the gates and let us through!"
I prefer the Peppa Pig solution of pushing one lock gate and the one on the far side other automatically opening or closing with it. Need the CRT to install some of them
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Never mind Rosie and Jim and Peppa Pig, Alan Partridge was written by someone who truly understood boating, which is why he talks about toilets...
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4 hours ago, Tacet said:
CRT allow ccers 14 days - and there is a degree of implication in the 1995 Act that it is indeed approved.
But you'll be hard pushed to find unequivocal legal (i.e. statutory) authority.
yeah.
That's a limit to how long you can stay in a general area (CRT have had that interpretation upheld in court) whilst still considered to be cruising, so it doesn't even imply that CRT need to permit 14 day [free] moorings on any individual site, never mind every section of towpath.
in practice, CRT allows 14 days free mooring for all boaters in most places and it really wouldn't be in their interests to change that, but as far as I can see that's completely permissive including for continuous cruisers; closest thing we've got to a legal basis for assuming the right to free 14 day towpath moorings is the "contract"...
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4 hours ago, MtB said:
Why not just cruise in the areas of the water without thick reeds?
Or is there so little moving traffic on the GU nowadays that the canal is choked with them all across?
It's the Northampton Arm, it's narrow, ultra shallow, only used by boaters with Gold Licences and the weeds do go all across.
I saw three boats on the flight when I was doing it, and thought that was as busy as I've seen it!
(plus the guy moored between 14 and 15 people are complaining about who did, tbf, check that it was weeds and not depth that was meaning I was struggling to pass him)
The weeds are mostly soft stuff that can actually be removed with bare hands as well as anything remotely sharp (but also accumulates so slowly and layers itself so putting it into reverse doesn't do much). Your prop still rotates, but sometimes it's better not to have to rev like you're on a river to achieve tickover speed.
Nothing like as bad as the Middle Level last year though..
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4 hours ago, waterworks said:
Long term moorers don't pay for the facilities as such, like you said many have none, they pay for not having to move, winter moorings are exactly that.
Weird that all these people are paying for the right not to move, on a variable scale based on the attractiveness of the location of the mooring and any facilities it may be associated with and whether they're allowed to live there, when according to your own arguments they have the legal right nominate any place a boat may be lawfully kept they like and then spend the rest of the year living on their favourite 2 day visitor mooring or water point.
Even weirder that they're paying this money for a space CRT apparently is powerless to stop me mooring at and preventing them from using!
The 1995 Act makes it quite clear that mooring in a particular location is definitely amongst the things BW/CRT may exercise control over and levy charges for and determine which boats may use. Nothing in the 1995 Act suggests that can't include visitor moorings in popular places on their waters (or unpopular places if it sees fit!)
4 hours ago, waterworks said:If they had this unilateral and overarching power why did they seek something like 10 more acts of parliament post 1962. And the 1995 act to set out the specific terms and conditions for licences , if they could have made licencing at their discretion under the 62 act they could now have a civil licence contract with all their own rules, issued at their own discretion and instant revocation with no legal redress, something they would love to have no doubt?
Why are you assuming the 1995 Act (and all post-1962 Acts) were passed purely for the "power" of British Waterways, which was a public benefit entity?
The Act granted BW land access rights to banks it didn't own and oversight of mooring structures attached to land it didn't own which was a pretty big clarification in its favour, it tweaked the 1971 regulations granting pleasure boats the right to navigate somewhat in boaters' favour not least by permitting "continuous cruising", it classified the River Weaver.
But it did absolutely nothing to give boaters a statutory right to moor free of charge in any particular place, least of all a place with a sign indicating a time limit and a charge for exceeding that
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There are obviously well established legal principles that moorings are facilities that can be restricted and charged for; indeed that's implicit in the 1995 Act as well as the thousands of boaters paying mooring fees to moor on a particular spot, some of them towpath-side online moorings managed by CRT. If the Act was intended to have the effect of making the towpath to be a free-for-all for license payers, references to places boats may be lawfully kept or cruising patterns would be superfluous.
The fact that statutory conditions to grant licences exist (both framed in ways which gives the Board substantial freedom to not be satisfied that the boat is making a continuous journey or availing itself of a place where the boat may be lawfully kept if they persistently moor where signs indicate they should not be moored...) doesn't mean that the CRT has no power to levy other charges or restrictions on the use of its facilities.
Nor can it be argued (successfully) that the "the 95 act in regards of licensing makes the 62 act superceded" (which sounds suspiciously like arguing that it abolished the quoted bit granting them the right to set conditions or charges to me...) as the Act is quite specific about which parts of which Acts it did supersede, and updating the 1971 licensing conditions did not in any way affect their ability to restrict or charge for other services, including mooring.
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8 minutes ago, waterworks said:
The boat lift is a complex and expenive to maintain service, no argument, a visitor mooring usually has no services other than mooring rings or bollards , some dont even have that, so calling that a service is an interpretation that can indeed be argued.
It can indeed be argued, but you have no reason to believe that your argument will succeed.
There is no legal reason to believe that CRT's right to set charges and conditions for the use of their facilities is bound to how much they pay to maintain them.
I'm glad you have now accepted that your claim that the 1995 Act abolished the right to set any conditions on waterways use or charge for services was incorrect though.
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3 hours ago, Paul C said:
I don't see how a future act repeals a previous act, unless it specifically says that it repeals that act. The terms and conditions they might wish to impose on some facilities are different to the detail of the 1995 act so they don't oppose anyway.
Basically, its a fairly simple argument: if rings or bank improvement is provided (a service), then CRT can limit it to 48hrs (terms and conditions imposed).
Yep.
Or to put it another way, when the 1995 Act introduced a licence requirement and charge which you were obliged to pay regardless of how much or how little you used their facilities, I don't think the intention was to abolish all other rules and charges so licence-holders could self-operate the Anderton Boat lift free of charge, stay for free on CRT-owned permanent mooring sites or indeed stay for free on a mooring the CRT has designated as costing £25 a night for stays beyond the first 48 hours.
I'm more inclined to believe the other argument attributed to Nigel which Alan posted on the previous page: that the 14 day stays (or longer than break-your-journey-overnight stays) tolerated on towpaths elsewhere aren't any sort of legal right, just an established custom which CRT have decided to permit licence holders to follow...
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56 minutes ago, nicknorman said:
On a related subject, what is the situation with proposed Bedford to MK waterway? Seems to have gone very quiet.
If you read the sign near the lock, it's from about 20 years ago, when building new waterways was still in fashion!
There's still a trust, now perhaps more focused on running community boats, and it's still in long term framework regional plans for the area, but unless the developers of all the new towns planned for the area get forced to pay for it...
I think the only development that's happened since the idea was conceived in 1995 is the mooring at Kempston
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No boats at all in Bedford is unusual, but it's usually mostly empty; I haven't seen it as full as in that photo. I guess it's possible the EA actually enforces the 48hr moorings to keep the continuous moorers at bay
You have a lot of rowers acting like they own that stretch too. That might put some of the local boaters off, as does the bridge a lot of the larger cruisers can't fit under, and the fact it's not a weekend so they're not on their boat
Also it's Bedford, looks beautiful from the river but in terms of reputation as a destination it's on a par with somewhere like Nuneaton
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I've given up shy of the railway bridge (clear it was going to be tight... and it had rained recently and I didn't fancy spending the next week upstream of the railway bridge!) before but made it through and up to the pictured mooring in Kempston the second time. What looks like a winding hole there isn't really a winding hole for anything approaching narrowboat depth, but about 250 yards downstream the wide part is a lot deeper
Wouldn't consider that last stretch worth damaging cratch boards, solar panels or other roof protrusions for, though it's a pleasant enough extension to a trip otherwise
Not sure if the lovely village after St Ives was the Hemingfords (with the mooring) or Houghton (with the lock), but make sure you pop into the other one on the way back!
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You're coming up to the best bit of the river
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34 minutes ago, BilgePump said:
It's not about not being able to use it, but why be forced to use a Microsoft product? Writing something quite simple in old school HTML4 produces a document that can be viewed in any web browser, and nobody has to pay a license fee.
Probably because they want people filing in their standard report template in Microsoft Word rather than receiving collections of custom webpage layouts with separate images, or royally buggered up layouts in OpenOffice documents or scans of well informed but completely illegible retired engineer scribbling...
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Tbh the only 48hr moorings where it's actually likely to be a significant problem are non CRT private ones run by town councils who might have the motivation to actually try to collect fines for overstays.
I think that noncompliance with 48hr limits elsewhere is sometimes a bit inconsiderate, but not when staying for a hospital appointment!
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1 hour ago, cuthound said:
I've always said that crossing the Pontycyssllte Aqueduct is the nearest that you can get to flying in a narrowboat
I dunno, when both my ecofans are going it's practically a helicopter!
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2 minutes ago, Bargebuilder said:
That's nothing compared to Buttercup the cow who swam a mile through the Foulridge Tunnel and was rescued at the other end.
I hope she sounded her horn and extinguished all lights except the pilot light
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I think the reality is you will end up in queues at locks on the Llangollen, but you're not in a car stuck on the A30, you're on a boat when you can make a pot of tea and sandwiches and step outside to have a look around and chat with other boaters
It's slow going at the very pretty bit at the end too, but again, who cares... boats aren't fast!
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I'm told when it comes to inflatables, the advantage of a £10 lilo from B&M is that when you hit something underwater you only lose £10. And possibly your dignity, I guess.
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15 minutes ago, Ronaldo47 said:
The occasional bloated dead sheep were the usual type of floating body we used to encounter. On one occasion we found a live lamb that must have got past the barbed wire fence that edged its field on the non-towpath side where the ground sloped gently into the canal, and had then managed to swim over to the towpath side where it couldn't get out due to the Armco edging. We pulled it out, dried it off with a towel, and put it back in the field.
Reminds me of encountering a cow that was somewhere between mournful and irate after being for a swim and getting lost between bridges
(I didn't try to dry it out or put it back in the field, but I did warn some towpath walkers!)
Drift Diary: An app for Continuous Cruisers to log and prove their distance travelled
in General Boating
Posted
I agree with this bit
Chuck a wad of cash in my direction and I'll throw in a lawyer who can prove if a boat was or wasn't where the photo claims it was using satellite imagery (reason number 99 why spoofing wouldn't work if CRT were remotely suspicious) and lessons learned from hideously expensive and ludicrously simple apps used in fishing regulation...