The Lure of a Walk to a Walk

The Lure of a Walk to a Walk

Byrichard

There is a good chance that tomorrow I will go for a walk along the Toblerones from Prangins to the lake side and on to Nyon. For this walk I have the luxury that I can walk to the starting point before doing the group walk.

The issue is that the walk to the starting point is about 8km which will take at least an hour and a half or more so I need to set off at least an hour and a half early if not more. Due to the activity starting at 1300 that’s quite easy to do, with a relaxed morning.

The train ride takes three minutes, once I have walked 20 minutes to the train station, so really it takes 23 minutes, every half hour. In contrast the walk takes one hour and 20 minutes. The train will cost about 4CHF whereas walking costs time.

The loop, if I walk the entire thing, will be about 14-20km, so a good day of walking. Due to the walk being linear, starting in Gland and heading to Nyon it doesn’t make sense to drive to Gland because I would then have to walk back to get the car. I could take the train but it seems absurd to spend so much on such a small journey. Having said this, if I drove there and back I would spend 4 CHF in petrol. 😉

There are two things to consider. The first is that this is a tame walk. For the most part walking from Nyon to Gland, and Gland to Nyon is relatively flat. The second consideration is that i like to walk loops rather than linear walks. By walking the loop I get to experience new portions of road that I have previously cycled rather than walked along.

From Nyon to Gland I would walk along the top of Nyon, and then head down towards the road that runs from Prangins to the aerodrome, and from there either to the left through the industrial zone or to the right down to the bowling, climbing gym and then up to the train station where I would wait for people. I would then walk the “toblerone” walk back to Nyon and from there home.

And Finally

If the experiment is a success then I will have a new, ambitious walking route that I could enjoy on Sunday, without the need for a car. I have walked from Nyon to Coppet and up towards Crassier but I have barely done any walking beyond the East of Nyon. This is a good opporunity to range.

Walking in Linear Circles
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Walking in Linear Circles

Byrichard

My walks are more often than not circular. I walk in a clearly defined loop across several villages before heading home. On weekends, and days such as yesterday my habit of walking in loops is scuppered by the habit of normal people to walk with dogs. I wouldn’t mind so much, if they kept their dogs under control, and if I was not walking alone. When I walk alone I’m the only distraction so dogs will investigate me, which I hate.

During the walk up to the Creux Du Van I saw two large dogs that I had to walk by. I waited until other people walked by those dogs before walking by them at the same time. In so doing the dogs didn’t have any interest in me so I felt safe. If I had been alone I would not have enjoyed passing those dogs. I might have turned back, or found another route.

I am so used to walking the same loops, that the idea of backtracking vanished until recently. Until recently I would always walk my loops. Walking those loops fatigued me. I think that’s why traffic, and encounters with dogs felt more negative than they had, beforehand.

There is value in changing walking patterns. By changing the pattern I walk along routes that I had not walked for a while. I also noticed that the “long loops” I walked are not longer than the “short” loops I walk. It’s just that the GPS track is different.

The other difference is that I am running again. By running I am making a bigger effort over a shorter time so I can devote less time to my “daily walk”.

And Finally

Although during the week I will walk the usual routes in solitude, on weekends I will resume group activities. The pandemic will not end, so I can be social by doing outdoor things. I have no desire to be indoors.

Self-Hosted Problem

Self-Hosted Problem

Byrichard

Yesterday I was already out when I noticed that I forgot to restart the audiobookshelf instance on my server before the run. I could either go home, start the server, and run, or I could just go for my run and use the normal app instead.

By normal app I mean using Audible’s app rather than Audiobookshelf. Luckily I have books that I am reading on both apps so I can listen to either one or the other, without having to sync the player to the right place.

One of the issues that I come across, after installing the apps on so many instances is that I do some things so that it boots with every boot on one system but not the next. The result is that if I reboot to move the Pi from one place to another I need to restart the services. If I had not moved the app I would have no issue. Starting audiobookshelf takes a few seconds. It’s just a matter of remembering.

On the other side of things I was worried that playing books or podcasts via Audiobookshelf would be complicated by the lack of a car app but this isn’t the case. If you’re parked somewhere with a phone or wifi signal you can queue the podcast or book you want to listen to, press play and it will play through the sound system. It’s more fiddly than using a car play app, but not by much.

And Finally

Audiobookshelf is a great app that I like to use daily, for podcasts and audiobooks. Once it is set up it works very well. It’s great that it keeps track of what we have listened to and downloads recent podcasts. It doesn’t have a way to automate the importing of books but that will come with time.

SuperDuper, Carbon Copy Cloner and Others

SuperDuper, Carbon Copy Cloner and Others

Byrichard

In 2007 I bought a copy of SuperDuper that I used to backup my laptops for a while. I bought the licence for fourteen GBP in 2007 and it is still valid to this day. That’s less than a GBP per year of use. The tool is simple. It allows you to backup your mac’s system disk or other drives and make them bootable when relevant. This means that you can run your laptop or desktop either from your local drive or an external drive.

Superduper

If the internal drive fails you can switch to the backup drive within seconds. Just hold option at boot, select the backup drive, and boot into your external hard drive. Continue working. The same licence now costs 27 CHF but since this is a lifetime licence it’s worth having.

Carbon Copy Cloner

I heard about Carbon Copy Cloner regularly through various podcasts, and work, so I decided to play with that backup solution but it requires you to pay for an upgrade every few years. It’s 50 CHF now, to buy for the current version, and half off for the next version. I stopped using Carbon Copy Cloner around 2017 or so because MacOS changed to APFS and broke backup solutions. At this point we had to switch back to slow and clunky Time Machine.

The issue with apps today is that they’re built on the ‘pay yearly’ and ‘pay monthly’ model, which both makes sense, and makes no sense. It makes sense that in the age of incremental upgrades we would pay constantly to have apps updated but at the same time this constant paying for apps becomes expensive.

Apps are Expensive

For a long time I would download a dozen or more apps per week from the iOS app, to play with, and enjoy. Over time every single app began to cost 27 CHF per year or more. At this point a dozen apps at 27 CHF per year comes to 324 CHF per year. This is too expensive. It’s good for Apple but awful for users. The worst thing about paying per year is that the companies that are charging are not even making enough to survive, so we’re paying for nothing. Apple benefits but we, and developers, just pay through the nose, just to exist.

And Finally

I am grateful to Shirt Pocket, the company behind SuperDuper for updating the app and allowing us to use it for over a decade without having to pay a yearly upgrade fee. Paradoxically they thanked me too, in their aknowledgements too. If you’re looking for an affordable bootable system disk backup solution then I would still recommend them today.

Creux Du Van Xero Xcursion Test
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Creux Du Van Xero Xcursion Test

Byrichard

During the 30,000 step walk at the Creux Du Van on Sunday I was wearing the Xero Xcursion shoes. For almost the entire walk they felt comfortalbe. These are light, thin soled shoes that are minimal. This means that you feel more of the ground, and the soles will take the shape of the floor beneath your feet. Step on a root and you will have your toes putting pressure and the rest of the foot adapting around the route.

Fine for Uphill Walking

With most barefoot shoes I feel the heel smash into the ground so I don’t like wearing them because I don’t like harming myself incidentally. With the Trail Glove Seven and the Xero Xcursion shoes I can walk normally and not feel my heel smashing into the floor with every step. These shoes were fine for the walk up. I didn’t feel any regret in wearing them. On the flat part I didn’t feel any regret either.

Not Wet in Mud

I walked through several muddy parts without caring because I knew that by the time I got back to the care the mud would have dried up and fallen off. It fell off during the walk down so when I did check for mud there was none. The other thing that surprised me is that when I walked in muddy patches water did not make its way into the shoes so my feet remained dry. Mud is not the same as heavy rain. These shoes are fine in mud.

Slight Disomfort Going Downhill

It’s on the way down the hill that I noticed slight discomfort. It wasn’t serious discomfort. I could just feel my feet sliding and putting pressure on the inside of the shoe. I have no blisters after the fact so it was just a sentiment. I might wear proper hiking socks just to be safe.

Of Note

I have been wearing “barefoot shoes for months by now so my walking style has adapted to “being barefoot” with the Trail Gloves. Vapor Gloves, Trail Glove six and the Merrel barefoot shoes I have are not comfortable for long walks. I only find the Trail Glove 7 and Xero Xcursion shoes comfortable. Experiment with shorter walks and normal walks, before doing a 16km hike.

And Finally

The advantage of minimal/barefoot shoes is that they’re very light. They are not rigid so your foot can adapt to the ground beneath with ease, rather than balancing. For the most part they were so comfortable that I forgot that I wore them. The fact that I could descend with such ease is good. This was a proper test. 30,000 steps and with 900 meters of climbing and 860 meters of descent. I didn’t push through snow because I wasn’t worried about mud. If I had walked in snow I probably would have wet my socks. That’s why I had a spare pair in the car, in case. I would hike again in the Xero shoes.

Creux Du Van Meetup

Creux Du Van Meetup

Byrichard

It has been at least four or five years since my last meetup. A few years ago I went to meetups with people from Geneva and before that to Glocals events with people from Lausanne and Geneva. I stopped meeting people from Lausanne because I was working night shifts as a deicer and I stopped going to meetups with the Geneva meetup groups because of my broken arm. The pandemic then happened and I went for years without going to meetups.

COVID Isolation

Since then people have chosen to live with the risk of COVID rather than masking and getting to COVID zero so I have had no choice but to compromise on my values by doing things with people in the physical world once again. Of course I will only do outdoor things. I am not going to go indoors when there are constant flare ups of COVID, especially when the pandemic is not tracked, to sell the lie that the pandemic is not over.

Having said this going to a meetup event, to be with people, after five years of social isolation felt good. I didn’t feel any different than when I was being social in person two to three days a week for years in the pre-deicing and pandemic days. I couldn’t be social when working as a deicer because I was working night shifts and people were heading out just as I tried to go to sleep before waking at 2am for a 4am shift start.

Creux Du Van

I arrived half an hour early, and had time to park with ease, and wait for the group. In the process I heard church bells ringing for many minutes before eventually stopping. The group arrived in one or two cars, and a train. We did the walk but it was far busier than when I did it solo. When I did it solo it was almost rainy and foggy. I walked up and reached the clearing and saw bouquetins.

The conditions were overcast and rain threatened but did not fall. We had plenty of wind instead. The views were slightly less spectacular than the last time I went, because of the clouds and lack of contrast.

I spotted some yellow rock where a recent rock fall had happened. I don’t know how recent it was. The beauty of the Creux Du Van is that it’s a semi-circular cliff. You walk up from one side and then you walk along it. As you walk you see different portions of the cliff. Both times I have been I have done the walk from the same direction. Next time I would like to do this walk in the reverse direction, and I would like to walk to the base of the cliff.

When I walked this walk alone I didn’t go down to the Gorge de L’Areuse because I was worried that it would add too much distance to the walk when I was already tired. In reality I think it’s the same distance via both routes.

The Stats

According to the Suunto Peak 5 this was a 5hr44 walk covering a distance of 16.9km, made up of 27,380 steps, for me. We ascended 906m and descended 873. It was 2hrs 20 of climb and 1hr58 of descent, with time for a snack at the top. My recovery time is about 26hrs. I am down to 7hrs left, to recover, now.

And Finally

I like this walk and I will do it again.

Five Hundred and One Days Later

Five Hundred and One Days Later

Byrichard

I have written a blog post a day for five hundred and one days. My legs are achy from a twenty minute run yesterday and I am writing this from a 2016 Mac Book Pro running Ubuntu 24.04 on an external SSD. I am running it this way because I wanted to test whether the OS bothers me, encouraging me to return to MacOS or whether it is stable enough for me to use this browser seriously.

Creux Du Van

Tomorrow I am going to the Creux Du Van for the first time in nine years. I went nine years ago alone, and now I’m going with a group of people. It’s my first group activity since the World sXR Forum in 2019, or maybe the last was the Black Movie Film Festival in Geneva in January 2020. In either case this is a big step. The pandemic never ended so I never resumed being normal.

Yesterday I was sent a message asking if I would like to cancel my participation tomorrow. I saw it this morning. The cruel paradox is that I hesitted. I’m an introvert. I feel that someone would enjoy doing the group activity more than me so I would leave them my place.

Four Year

It’s four years since I did something with a goup. If I like it “tant mieux” and if I don’t “tant pis”. I could be like the others and catch trains and buses but that would add an hour to the travel time, and I love that my lungs have been COVID free so far. I don’t want that to change.

If I like the group then I would do more activities with that group, and if I don’t then I can do things with others. I could even organise things, as I used to, for a few events, a few years ago.

Spring and Summer are coming back, and the pandemic will never end.

Pestered by the Trackpad

As I write this with the Mac Book Pro running Ubuntu 24.04 I find that I keep clicking the mouse every so often and moving the cursor to where I do not want it to be. When I was getting used to this laptop I had this problem and now I seem to have the same issue with the new OS.

Nextcloud and Photoprism

I installed Nextcloud and Photoprism on this machine, as part of the experiment. I want to see how different the experience is with a higher spec machine than a Raspberry Pi. Photoprism seems much faster. When I get used to using Ubuntu on this machine I will install it on the local drive.

And Finally

The light is yellow today, due to sahelian sand being in the clouds. I noticed that the wind felt warm yesterday and today we see evidence that the warm wind came from the Sahelian region. Things will be covered in sand by the end of the day.

Migrating Audiobookshelf From Instance to Instance
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Migrating Audiobookshelf From Instance to Instance

Byrichard

Yesterday I switched from Ubuntu on the Pi5 to Raspberry Pi’s version of Debian. I experimented this because I had just moved the data from one file system to another so it seemed like the right time to switch from one OS to another.

ExFat to Ext4

The first step was to move my data from an Exfat volume to an Ext4 volume. The next was to mount the drive and connect both Photoprism and Audiobookshelf to their new volumes. I also copied the audiobookshelf folder from the system drive for the old OS to the system on the new OS. I then adapted the docker-compose files with the correct information and started both Photoprism and Audiobookshelf.

Photoprism

Photoprism is now reindexing all photographs from the photos folder. Once that is done I will migrate the photos from the import folder. I am not doing that yet, because I don’t want it to confuse which files are already in the archive, and which ones are duplicates during the upcoming import. I expect this to take several days.

Audiobookshelf

With Audiobookshelf I was able to copy over the books with ease but I need to add some new books that I bought since the last update. I did not migrate podcasts. Although I enjoy using Audiobookshelf to listen to podcasts I find that it is quite fiddly. You need to login as the admin to add podcast series, and configure how many podcasts to download and how often to check.

If there was an app for iOS for Audiobookshelf then I would really enjoy using the service. It’s easier to use the default apps. If I listen to podcasts on two to three apps I need to mark them as read in one or two other places and that’s work. For now I will keep audiobookshelf for books and the most recent podcasts from one or two podcasteers.

And Finally

Although the server changed from one OS to another, the hard drive where files are stored changed the applications behave as if nothing had changed. This means that I do not need to login to services yet again. This also means that I can now start duplicating a server setup between machines once I understand how to synchronise changes.

ExFat Stability Issues
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ExFat Stability Issues

Byrichard

Yesterday a drive failed to mount so Photoprism and Audiobookshelf failed to work. The server was up and running but the files were not accessible. For this reason two of my services have been unusable for several hours. I believe that the issue came from using an ExFAT drive rather than EXT4 or another journalled file system.

The reason for which journalling is important is that Pis and other systems crash, and when they crash, read write cycles are not completed. The consequence of this is that the drive that had been fine before the crash becomes corrupted after the crash and needs to be fixed. Most of the time this is quite easy. I use disk utility two to three times, and eventually the problem is fixed long enough to backup the data.

Why This Matters

The rational thing to do is to think, “I’m using these drives for something that NAS drives are designed for so it’s normal that external drives would fail.” The reality is that the file system has a bigger role to play than the drive type. If the drive keeps track of what it was doing, and what was interrupted then it can quickly resume from where it left off. Without a journal the drive just sees missing data and asks for repairs to be done. By “asks for repairs to be done” I mean that it fails to mount until the issue is resolved.

Looking Forward

From now on I will use ExFAT as a temporary solution for when I move data from one OS to another but once the move is finished I will use APFS for mac, EXT4 for Linux systems and NTSF or equivalent for windows when flexibility is not needed. It’s easy to format a drive to a more resilient file system.

And Finally

Once I have backed up the data I will reformat the drive to EXT4 and copy the data back. This should make the drive more resilient.