Parisian moments
There is more video to come but I need to wait for seesmic to recognise and promote the files before I link to them.
The first time I climbed up to La Barillette on a bike it took me two and a half hours. This time it took one hour and sixteen minutes. I was going so slowly that I had to work to keep the bike upright. Since then I have gone from a mountain bike with tyres that weren’t pumped enough and soft suspension to the same bike with slick tires, hardened suspension and higher pressure in the tyres. I then swapped that bike two or three years later and tried the same climb. I struggled with the road bike as well. I had to stop at least two or three times. I also found that clipped in pedals on such steep gradients are a hindrance because you can’t stop until the flatter bits.
This time I wore normal shoes and I set off from around Nyon. I cycled up to the start of the climb and i just started climbing. Above Cheserex I already had to stand on the bike to get enough thrust, then sit down, and then repeat. As I went up I saw two or three groups. One group set off just as I was getting to them and the second stopped where the first had been.
I like having a group in front of me. The group in front gives me a goal. It gives me a pace. I want at the minimum to keep up with them and ideally to overtake them. The person I used for pacing gave up within the first four to six kilometres. I then continued at my own pace as the other people were now a long distance away.
As I go up this hill I often daydream and my mind wanders to something completely different. It’s the closest I’d get to meditation. You’re making a physical effort but the body is so used to it that the mind has time to think of other things. I don’t remember what I was daydreaming about.
I’m used to doing this climb in the heat of summer when it’s 37°c or more. This time it was no more than 20 or so. I didn’t need to take two litres of water with me but I would have been happy with a rain coat and a third layer. The reason for this is that the beautiful weather I set off in turned overcast and cold.
As I got closer to the top I could feel the temperature begin to drop, and i felt the need to close the zips, to preserve heat. I even thought of putting my spare layer on. I continued.
When you’re climbing you know what your previous times were and during this time I got to a certain point where i saw that I was going to beat my previous best times by a nice margin so it encouraged me to keep going, but also not to stop and rest, and not to wait for two cars to figure out how to pass each other. I cycled through the grass to overtake them.
When I finally got to the top I saw people get out of their cars, smoke cigarettes and talk loudly. I had two Balistos and then headed back down. The view was so bad that I didn’t take any pictures.
As much as you think you suffer during the way up, which I didn’t this time, going down is the difficult bit. When you’re going back down you’re cold and you’re not doing much. You’re letting gravity undo the work that you just spent an hour doing.
My tyres have over 4000km in them so as i went down the hill I was slower than I needed to be. The surface was also wet and therefore could be slippy. I was holding the brakes for a good portion of the descent, to such an extent that I thought this was a good finger strengthening exercise.
Just before I got to the pond my rear tyre suffered a puncture. I can see two marks where I think a thorn or some other object punctured the tyre and deflated it within seconds. It didn’t matter as I had a spare tyre with me.
This winter I changed tyres frequently for the indoor trainer so the process has become automatic. What I especially enjoyed about changing a tyre on the side of a mountain slope is that you don’t have to worry about getting the floor dirty. Within minutes the tyre was changed and I could continue the descent.
This ride is unique because the night before I decided to do this climb we were discussing a via ferrata with two friends but they don’t have the equipment. The compromise was going to climb indoors but I didn’t feel like doing that because 1. the weather was nice and because 2. there are free sports to be enjoyed. I woke up that morning, opened the blinds and because of what a beautiful and warm day I saw it would be I decided to go for a bike ride and enjoy it. It felt so good to get on the bike after several days, or even weeks of not riding.
I was fully within the moment yesterday. I profited from the good weather, I set a goal and I achieved it, and I lived in the now, rather than later. This is rare for me. This ride, despite it’s physical nature, was relaxing.
If you’re looking for a reason to walk from one village to another the practise of using old phone boxes as free libraries are common in Switzerland. This means that if you’re shopping around for books in Switzerland you can either go to the shops and buy them with the car or you can go for a walk and see if any of the nearby villages have the books you’re looking for.
In Gingins, Grens, Eysins, Nyon and other towns, you can swap books. In Gingins you can get books from the recycling centre where instead of recycling books they re-share them. You can also get them from where the old post office was. In Grens and Eysins they have book sharing as well. These are open twenty-four hours a day.
In Grens it is especially amusing because they have labels for French, English, German, Italian and other language books. If you’re learning a language you can get books to read for free.
Instead of walking from one village to another for a coffee or to play on the swings (if you’re accompanied by children) you can walk and see if you find interesting books.
They have children’s books, cookery books, fiction and factual. If your bag is large enough, and if you have enough energy you could even pick up some of the heavier books. I found one about North African cooking, two about avalanches and others that are about dinosaurs and other topics.
I think that it’s a great way to share books. Instead of throwing books away or letting them sit on a shelf after they have been read you can place them in these phone boxes and the next reader can pick them up and read them in turn. By walking from village to village it helps you keep fit. By walking in towns and going to the different book sharing points the same benefit is present.
The beauty of phone boxes is that they are often protected from the weather so instead of having one library in a building to serve several villages each community shares books internally.
Goodreads, or some other reading sharing app, should add functionality to the app so that people with their app on their phone could catalogue which books are in which village. If other users of the app are looking for a book they can see if there is any book sharing point with this book. Books would then be read and shared more easily.
In the last three days I have been for two walks with hiking sticks and a short run. On Sunday the walk was a ten kilometre loop that took me across several villages. During the walk I noticed that a barn’s roof was generating about 8000 watts of energy despite the day being overcast. If more farmers placed solar panels on their roofs we would have less need for high tension lines across the entirety of Europe ruining natural landscapes as power distribution would be local.
I ran just 2.5km before walking the rest of the way. I wasn’t using the 105 CHF On Running cyclon shoes as I need to return those. Instead I was running with the 110 CHF trail glove shoes. I ran a short distance because I haven’t been running for a while so I don’t want to overload my system. I also wanted to make sure that I didn’t feel that my heels had hit the ground too harshly.
I walked for five minutes and then I ran for one minute, and then I ran for one minute, and then I walked for a minute, and then I ran until the bottom of a slope and then I walked up the other side, and then I ran for the flat bit up to the tunnel and then I stopped the running track. I could have been more ambitious but it’s easy to fall into the trap of pushing more than we need to, just for it to look normal or good on strava, Garmin or other places. I am a walker, not a runner. I can walk one and a half hours to two hours per day, every single day, with ease.
I could get to that level of fitness with running but at the moment I need to work on building a good base, and then I can push further. It’s also a way of breaking the walking routine. if I run I can go out for a shorter period of time but get a better cardio workout.
I started walking with hiking sticks, first because I have a minimal shield if unleashed dogs decide to attack me again, and secondly because it uses my upper body. By the end of the walk on Sunday I could feel that some arm muscles were not used enough in normal walking.
It’s amusing to look at cadence when walking with hiking sticks because for a big portion of the walk my steps per minute was zero. When I use walking sticks I make them long. I take two to three steps between stick movements so it counts as if I am either not walking, or taking a third as many steps as normal. That’s why my step count after a 10km walk is just 8000 for the whole day, rather than 17,000 as it would have been if the step counter had been in a pocket or somewhere else.
For the first time in a while I went for a walk without a bag. Usually I always have a bag with me, whether it’s empty, which it usually is, or not. I don’t know whether it impacts my running comfort but I will try to run without a bag for a few runs, to see if I feel a change.
For 40 CHF you can buy a Tapo or Xiaomi webcam and it is almost ready to be used as a webcam. You take it out of the box, plug it in, add an SD card, download the app, pair it with the phone and let the phone connect it to wifi and then it detects motion, can take video, photos and more, with ease. In such an environment it’s easy to forget about what we called “Plug and pray” back in the day.
Back in the geeky old days of computing there was a lot of trial and error to get things to work. You would try one thing, and see if it worked, and then another, and then a third, and then a fourth, and eventually you would either find a solution, or give up. One of the reasons I switched to Apple, rather than Linux, in 2003, is that I wanted to be able to connect to the university’s wifi with ease. I expected that if I used a linux machine I would struggle with wifi.
Apple is the leader in making everything work so flawlessly, as long as they want you to do things, that trial and error is part of history. Apple controls everything, to ensure that it works “flawlessly”. I put “flawlessly in quotation marks because my phone crashes or hangs on almost every one of my walks. I rebooted it today and yesterday, while walking. If I take photos during a walk the phone acts up and freezes, and stops the podcast I’m listening to.
I’m being distracted. The point is that Apple, until recently, was known for producing reliable devices. Windows is also known for dumbing down their devices more and more. They try to make it so that users just click install, and the computer does the rest. Usually webcams, printers and more are plug and play.
With Linux you’re using a tinkerer’s OS so things can be simple, if you buy a generic webcam and plug it in. I tried to set an android phone up as a webcam and it worked within minutes. Integration with Home Assistant was smooth and efficient.
With a Raspberry Pi 3b and a Raspberry Pi zero 2 W I have struggled for three or four hours trying to get the camera to work. You have to do A, and then you need to do B and then you need to do C. You also need to wire the camera into the board the right way.
As you’re doing this from a CLI you’re not seeing whether the webcam is giving a picture or not. I tried to take pictures and it appeared to take them but when I tried to get motion to work with the camera to stream to a device with a web browser I just see nothing. I get an error message about the camera not being available.
I know that the right camera is detected because I see it in the output. I just haven’t taken the time to see if the images generated correspond to what I expect them to be. The subtle art of of trial and error is about having a goal and tweaking and experimenting until you get the result you want to get.
The first error is that I wired the camera the wrong way. The second error is that I don’t need to use the legacy camera option with this camera. The third error is that I’m trying to get a Pi and camera module to work as a webcam before I get it to work within its own device.
I am so used to Windows, MacOS and dedicated hardware being so reliable that I forget about the trial and error part of computing that was once so familiar to those of us geeky enough to spend hours of our free time playing with computers. When computers just work it’s easy for everyone to be a geek, because turning it off and on again is easy. So is plugging in a USB device.
My aim is not to build a CinePi.My aim is to setup a webcam that I can see via Home Assistant. I can then add motion detection and more features when I achieve the initial goal of building a Raspberry pi webcam server in minutes“. The instructions are for the V2 module, or a logitech device, and I’m using the V3 module, so the instructions need to be updated. That’s why I’m struggling, and that’s why it’s interesting to do these projects.
I came across this challenge when following programming courses that were over a year old. Sometimes I had to look for the new way of doing things to get the code to behave as it was expected to. Sometimes ChatGPT, Bard and Bing are helpful to find the up to date way of doing things. It is also a case of Reading the Fabulous Manual (RTFM).
There are at least ten Home Assistant Camera integrations to experiment with, so if the method I have been experimenting with doesn’t work I still have 9 other solutions to experiment with. The FFMPEG option looks interesting.
I call it the subtle art of trial and error because the art lies in learning a methodology by which to come up against an issue and to develop a system by which to resolve the issue in an increasingly short amount of time. The point isn’t in knowing how to do things. It’s in knowing where to look for help. It used to be called Google Fu.
I could easily buy a webcam for 12-30 CHF now but by experimenting with various “integrations” I invest my time in learning new skills and that has value. If I get FFMPEG to work, then I can potentially build my own camera systems. Instead of reverting to film like some, I could go the other way, and experiment with concepts similar to the Cinepi.