Parapente race
Something out of the ordinary.
Due to the pandemic I almost never go to Nyon. If I do I often wear a mask and avoid walking around too much. Most people think the pandemic is over. I see, from the data, that it is not, and I want to stay true to previous ethics and morality.
I am happier walking in the countryside where there are fewer people, and where it is easy to avoid them. I have no problem wearing a mask, but others do not approve of mask wearing, so I prefer to be a lunatic in the countryside, than in town. I also feel better, emotionally, when I am not reminded that others are living normally despite the pandemic.
On a related note I reached 24,000 steps today. I walked six kilometres in Nyon, this morning, before going for a lunch time run, and finally an afternoon walk. During the afternoon walk I counted 24 people walking along a small stretch of rural road. That’s a lot of people. That’s why I avoid that stretch of road. I prefer empty roads. I prefer solitary walks.
The lake too is exceptionally clear but I don’t dive at the moment, so I won’t take advantage of the excellent visibility. Maybe in the near future I will resume diving. I may start again, when I find job security, and a good group of people to dive with, given the fragility of safety when diving.
For years I have enjoyed watching the Tour De France and often call it the French Landscape program. In this case we start with Vittorio Brumotti cycling with his team before becoming distracted and going to enjoy some mountain bike trails, some balancing on barriers, floating in a swimming pool, enjoying a running carpet and more. It shows the area of Livigno and what it has to offer in summer.
You might remember him for a video from earlier this year or last year. I like that road cycling teams have athletes who can show their balancing and other skills. It makes the sport more entertaining to watch. Remember when he cycled in the plane graveyard and on that barrier?
Yesterday I was experimenting with the Static folder in Hugo. Hugo and other static site generators has a folder where you can usually put content that you don’t want to have changed. You can add php, css, js and more. By making this an option it is possible to have your blog as markdown files that are updated and published every time you make changes while other files remain intact.
I spent time converting Roman civilisation content to PHP, as well as the geography section. Now that I have invested that time in learning to use PHP in production I don’t want to lose that content by adding it as markdown pages. With PHP and HTML pages I have full creative control on how content looks and behaves.
Back in the 90s and the Zeros (2000s, but I like saying zeros), we would share photos of an event by creating a gallery and sharing that. These galleries are simple html with a page for each image, and plenty of pages to update and navigate between. These pages can be brought into the 21st century but by parking them in the static folder in Hugo we keep access to them, until we have written the json or other file type to display these photo galleries as a single page app.
There is an explanation of what Hugo does to Static files. When files and folders are added to the static folder they are added to the watch list, if Hugo is running. This means that static content will automatically be updated and available on the local instance.
When you add static files to a Hugo sight Hugo will track changes and show them via the web server but they are not added to the public folder. It is up to us, to make sure that the files that are static are updated and uploaded to the server if and when we make changes to them.
That static files are not added to the publish folder is useful. I was worried that by adding thousands of files to the static folder thousands of files would be uploaded every time I wrote a blog post and published it. This isn’t the case. I do not need to take a break from blogging with Hugo, whilst I experiment with the static part, and prepare a new folder architecture.
To avoid confusion, as I experiment I put all the static files in a sub-folder. In so doing I avoid the risk of duplicate file names or file names with the same names, but different extensions, confusing Hugo. I aim to keep it clean, until I have decided on what I want to achieve with my experimentation.
I have been struggling with Eleventy and Hugo whilst it’s easy to setup one stream of content, it is not easy to have two or more in parallel. For this reason using the Static folder allows me to keep the part that already works, separate from the part that I am still working on. It enables me to put my experiment into production sooner, and to stop going around in circles.
[flickr-gallery mode=”photoset” photoset=”72157635047444443″]
Images as I drove home from the gym.
I have been an audible member for years at this point and in that time I have “bought” hundreds of books. I write “bought” because I payed for a Platinum account for years and got credits and got the books with those credits. Over the years I have collected more books than I can read in a year.
That library lived in the cloud, rather than my devices, for years. I would download the books I was listening to but not those that I had finished, or would read later. That’s because laptops and mobile phones have smaller hard drives than I require for my books.
The first step when backing up audible books is to download them. The second is to strip them of DRM, and before you tell me off for being like a pirate I will correct you. I bought an MP3 player but because it doesn’t support AAX files I had to find a way to make the content that I own, legally, playable on a cheap mp3 player. In the process I stripped the DRM because I had no way of playing the audio files otherwise.
It’s because Apple, Audible and Sandisk do not play nicely that I had to strip the DRM. If they played nicely I would not have stripped files of DRM.
AudioBookShelf serves as a site/service that makes it easy to catalogue your books and listen to them from your phone, laptop, desktop tablet or other. An Android App exists, but the iOS app is only available via Testflight.
The app can be installed as a docker container within minutes, and then you can point it to the folder where you store all your audiobooks. I write audio books, rather than Audible, because you can download audio books or podcasts and add them to your instance of audiobookshelf, to listen to files, streamed, or downloaded.
As you listen to books with this app you get to see how many minutes you listened per session, as well as which book, and for how long. If you use the app for more than a year you get the summary of previous years of listening.
The app gives you the option of looking for book cover art from a number of different audible libraries, depending on language and country, but also from open library and other sources.
You can add as many accounts as you like with this app. The admin account can also create libraries either for individuals or to make it easier to differentiate between open audio books, audible, or other providers.
If you have a spouse, or children, or both, or live with others you can share access to this library. You can choose whether people can read, download, upload and more. This enables people to add the books that they want to have available via this website.
The app supports podcasts. If you add the OPML file of your podcasts it will automatically retrieve the latest ones, for you to listen to. I have yet to test this feature.
So far I have listened to an hour of audiobooks via this website/instance and it works well. I tested it via firefox on iOS and via the web browser on the laptop and it works very well. As you listen on the phone you can see the progress bar update on the laptop and vice versa. You can seamlessly switch between devices.
The advantage of such an app is that you can share books, without giving people the files. They can then listen to audio books and their progress is kept between devices.
One of the key nuissances with audio players is that they do not usually keep track of progress. With this app you do, so you can switch between books and it will remember where you are.
The other advantage is that each listener is independent so you get listening stats for yourself, but not others.
So far I am happy with my experience.