INTVL is a new game that you play by running, cycling, or both. The concept is simple. Every time you go for a run you capture “territory” from others and every time others go for a run they do the same thing. For this game you don’t need to stare at your phone. You simply walk, run, or cycle.

I write walk but it’s counted as running by the game. I also speak about walking because with Ingress the concept of fielding is similar, except that you need to capture portals, and then walk between portals and link them, before creating fields. Some fields are huge, because people use bikes, trains, cars, planes or trains, and others are small because local portals make it easier.

In the last two or three weeks I have been re-reading A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch and I barely remembered any of it. I had read it two or three decades ago and I read it again recently. The first thought this time, after reading Gulag by Applebaum, and other history books, is that it’s quite tame compared to other books. The other thing I noted is that it ends with him thinking that he has had a good day.

It’s worth noting that after my historical post was deleted from a group chat I aborted my run with that group. The reasons were rational, rather than emotional. Something else came up and by the time that something was over the run had started. I also expected it to rain very heavily and storm.

Yesterday the forecast was similar but I chose not to just sit at home and miss out. I could see that a storm was coming for 18:50 and again a few minutes later. I thought “If I wait too long it will be cancelled and I will have had a second day in a row without sports. That’s why I got dressed and cycled to the shop. I said “I expect the ride is cancelled”, and it was.

When I go out to cycle, run, and do other things I take photos and when I come home I sync them to photoprism on one laptop and immich on a separate Raspberry Pi. I use photosync to sync to Photoprism.

Once images are ingested I usually run a script almost daily. Rather than give you the lines of shell script I’ll explain what it does. It checks that the photos SD card is mounted, as well as the backup drive before using rsync to synchronise between the primary and backup locations and then from the laptop running photoprism to the Pi running a second instance of Immich.

Yesterday, spontaneously I joined a group for a ride to the Tour de France Femme via Strava. The day before that I meant one group via Meetup for a bike ride from Geneva, and a second via Strava for a run. The meetup group, to the best of my knowledge has no strava group.

Every single other group I know does and I find this intolerably frustrating but let’s focus on the positive first. The positive is that I had no runs for the first time in weeks, so I decided to revert to the cycling staple. In so doing I had a pleasant, quiet morning ride to Geneva with barely any cars, before having a group ride to Crans.

On Saturday morning, for the first time in weeks I had no running plans so I decided to cycle to Geneva for the 8am relaxed ride to Crans. Since I live near Nyon I set off at 06:50 and cycled towards Geneva, arriving with plenty of time to spare. I then cycled with the group towards Crans. It’s at this point that I saw that I had half an hour before a second group ride.

On the Fediverse you can follow everyone on an instance, or you can follow the people that you want to follow. Hypothetically you can follow key words, and with time follow more people, and eventually find a community.

On Threads, BlueSky, X, Instagram and TikTok what you see is selected by algorithms, so you don’t need to follow anyone because every time you scroll or refresh you will be fed something new.

Today there was a post about someone filming people with Meta Glasses without permission and someone was offended by the fact that someone would record people without permission so I pointed to the need for talent release forms and more in order to share content showing other people.

One troll said the common “Oh, you obviously didn’t read the article” to which my answer was “of course not” because the comment was written and phrased in a hostile manner, rather than a sociable one. I didn’t read the article before comment to a human being because I spent five years studying the topic at two universities so my answer is based on university level studies, rather than RTFA. (Read the ducking (intentional spelling) article)

A few days ago I think I ran and then swam. While waiting for lunch I noticed that the Garmin Forerunner 570 had a bit of plastic sticking out of it so I pulled on it, to see if it came loose. It didn’t. It stayed put. It appeared to come from between the case, and the screen. I suspect that it is part of the o-ring or adhesive mateerial that keeps the screen attached to the body of the watch that came loose.

It’s worth considering a new rating system for AI generated content such as books. According to an article in The Atlantic AI written slop in the form of Daggermouth is best selling AI fiction and my first thought is that this is awful. It’s awful because AI can generate books far faster than we can read them, but it also means that we have a highly wasteful way of generating books.