Banning Traffic from Cornavin

Byrichard

Although this article is two years old La Tribune de Genève wrote again about it and it appeared in my Google Newsfeed. I am not opposed to making cities pedestrian because I love to walk more than I like buses, trains, or other forms of transport.


I actually do like trains. When I lived in London I liked to take the tube everywhere. I wish someone had encouraged me to try cycling in London because I would have used a bike to get everywhere. I already walked instead of using buses.


If the square in front of Cornavin becomes pedestrian then this will be great for when we walk in Geneva because it means that it will no longer be one of the rare places where we really have to stop and wait for the light for pedestrians to turn green. On frequent Geneva walks it’s one of the most frustrating places. I often skipped the lights by going underground through the galleries. I’m sneaky when it comes to such things.


One of my reservations about blocking traffic through Cornavin is that it is one of the rare routes from Vaud towards Place Plainpalais without getting stuck on the Autoroute de Contournement. It will reduce traffic through the centre of Geneva but force a traffic increase on other roads.


I rarely go to the other side of the lake by car because of how terrible traffic is and I’d be even less likely to go to the area around Plainpalais after that route is blocked.


In my opinion, if you want to dissuade people from using cars, and if you want to reduce traffic the best method is to make public transport more appealing. I use the scooter and walk rather than taking the bus because buses are once an hour and the walk is 20 minutes whatever the departure time from my village to Nyon.


If we take the car to Geneva one of the best routes, depending on the time of day, is via Cornavin, and if that route is removed then the time it takes to get into Geneva will be even longer, and so will the time to get out. When I walked around. Geneva’s centre I saw that even more cinemas have been closed down. Only small cinemas remain, and even some of those are closed down.


After spending around three and a half weeks in Geneva I came to the conclusion that I wanted to have the scooter, not because I was too lazy to walk from Paquis to Meyrin or from Paquis to Carouge but because if you’re shopping for food and you want to get things to the fridge within 15 minutes walking speed is sub-optimal. I also believe that shops in the centre of Geneva have a mediocre selection of products and that because of this people are forced to range further, with a car or other form of transport, to avoid exceeding the 15 minute time between shop fridge to home fridge.


If you want to reduce car use you need to make everything available within a 15-minute walk. Beyond fifteen minutes the duration is too long. I don’t trust buses and trams so I used the scooter.


The last time I cycled with shopping I fell and broke my arm so I’m less inclined to do that again. I was using an old bike and I think the brake jammed, but it demonstrated why it might be safer for me to keep using the scooter. I think a cheap bag with side bags would be just as effective.


I went off topic but I think that making squares pedestrian is not enough. Geneva needs to ensure that people no longer need cars to get from A to B. Cycling needs to be made safer and finally public transport, and especially trains, should be increased so that you never have to wait 20 minutes or more for a train to get in or out of Geneva. I think that placing a pedestrian square there is illogical unless you pedestrianise the streets from the lakeside to Cornavin. Imagine walking from Cornavin to Perle Du Lac without stopping at a traffic light, or from Cornavin to Place Des Nations or Place Plainpalais. That would make taking the train into Geneva appealing if it was possible every ten minutes.

Looking Back In Time
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Looking Back In Time

Byrichard

For a few days now I’ve been looking through thousands of pictures to make sure that they’re synced from iCloud to the Photo app before they’re deleted. In so doing I noticed how far in front of a group I was hiking a few years ago. Instead of hiking with the group I was so far in front that I could get group shots without trying. Eventually, they did pose, as if it had been intentional rather than my walking habit.


What you see in the pictures is that I did stop and I was with the group a lot, waiting for people to catch up, take pictures as they did, and then go fast again. During a more recent hike I found that I was fast until 3000m and then I slowed down to become one of the slowest. I don’t know whether it was lack of energy, which it could be, or that I’m not used to being at altitude. This will be especially true this summer after two summers spent at low altitude.


If I was an extrovert I wouldn’t be walking at the front of the group taking pictures. I’d be in the middle having conversations, and if I was having conversations then, then I wouldn’t be writing so many blog posts now.


Normally I’d look at the images and I’d enjoy them, and that would be it. As tomorrow is the day for Valentine’s Day content I can squeeze this post in. It’s because I saw a woman smile at the camera in so many images that I wish I had been closer, rather than at a distance. I am thinking of the opportunity I had but didn’t consolidate.


It’s a cruel paradox of life that we will see the same individuals for years of sporting activities without fail and yet when we’re interested we only see them at three or four events. I often joke “everyone I appreciate leaves”.


Not that it isn’t fun to pretend that I care about Valentine’s day for the commercial reason I actually care about the day because back in 2003 I got my driving licence and that was the start of me having the freedom to drive myself without having a passenger. Yes, there is a pun in there. My first drive was to drink hot chocolate with a girlfriend and a best friend, who was also female. That day was special. The freedom of driving a car, the freedom of the open road, the freedom not to wait for a train or a bus. The freedom to have all of the adventures that I write about in this blog.


I could write more but I think it’s time for me to go for a virtual bike ride as it’s windy and rainy out in the real world.

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Suunto and Wear OS

Byrichard

Suunto and Wear OS is a cultural shame. I like Suunto because it’s a European company with a European OS developed in Europe. It’s nice to buy their products because they’re reliable and hardly ever let me down. They’re also great because it’s European tech developers working together to create something interesting and reliable.


It’s not that I don’t like Google as a company. I do. I have liked Google since I first learned about them on my website’s visitor log. I only went from Android to iOS because DJI hated the Sony Xperia that I was using at the time. Without DJI I would still be an Android user.


Suunto devices have batteries that can last for weeks depending on how you use them. With the Suunto Spartan, I have now I charge it every few days and I can do a number of activities before I need to charge it. With the Apple Watch, I need to charge it every night. With the Suunto 7 the battery life is meant to last up to 48hrs. That’s down from 30 days with the previous OS on Spartan and Ambit 3 watches. The Suunto Device is yet another device that you need to charge every day.


What I like about Suunto’s own OS, what I like about a Sports tracker, rather than a smartwatch, is that you can use it for sports and choose which GPS precision you want for the battery to last for hours or even a day and a half of sports tracking.


By making Suunto 7 a smartwatch rather than a sports tracker you’re adding features that you don’t need. You don’t need to read e-mails, play music and other features. For that, you have Apple Watches and other city optimised smartwatches.


Suunto, with this move to WearOS, is going from a niche product maker with a core of dedicated users like me to a generalist company running as a “Haluamme tulla mukaan” (We want to be included in Finnish, according to Google Translate.)


Now to be a Google Fanboy. I prefer Google’s activity tracking via Android than Apple’s Move tracking. I like having a map of everywhere I’ve been and how much I’ve walked in a year. I also like that images I take are automatically geo-located in Google Photos. We’ll see how well the Suunto 7 plays with Google Fit.


I have had my Suunto Spartan Sport HR Baro since 2018 so I may upgrade in 2021 if I see a development that justifies upgrading. Currently, Suunto 7 is not an upgrade for me. It’s a lateral move simply to play with Google fit and a different map display. No support for external sensors in WearOS makes it uninteresting for cycling. For more information check this blog post.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BQ5nbmGtYA


The Apple Watch series 5 sells for 522 CHF whereas the Suunto 7 sells for 529 CHF so the difference in price is just 7 CHF at the moment of writing. If you need something that will survive real sports then I’d go for the Suunto 7. Both the Apple Watch Series 3 and Series 4 have scratches on them despite me not rock climbing and enjoying via ferrata with them as enthusiastically as with the Suunto Ambit 3.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CiGF1qBGKw


This advert mentions heat maps and there is one heat map that I haven’t been able to find yet. A walking/hiking heatmap. It would be great in countries where there is a culture of walking, to see where people walk most. We could look at the heatmap and find routes that we never thought of exploring.

Playing with a Roomba

Byrichard

While I was cat sitting I spent time playing with a Roomba. Most people set the roomba, and let it clean. I don’t. I watch it and I observe how it works, how it goes from place to place and how it navigates, and gets trapped, and procrastinates in one corner or part of an apartment/studio. Roombas are glamourised but I think they are flawed.


Their flaw is that they start from their dock, back and go beep beep beep beep, then they rotate and they start cleaning. So far so good. The issue comes when they hit an object. They start from the top right of a room and they go diagonally to the other side of the room and they hit an object and they turn right.


How they turn right changes. Sometimes they turn right and start circling clockwise, and then counterclockwise. Other times they hit an object and go they go across to the other side of the room. Their programming sees them pass by the same corner dozens of times whilst ignoring other parts of the room.


Form and function from Objectified by Gary Hustwit


I tried using shoes and other objects to control how big an area they focus on. I tried a bathroom, a small kitchen and a living room. In each case they go over and over the same spot.


I think Roomba should have been programmed to do a search pattern instead. When you’re mowing the lawn as a pattern you start from one side of the garden and you go back and forth, turning 180 degrees when you get to the other side and do a line right next to where you’ve been. In so doing you cut the grass in a short amount of time.


If Roomba simplified the programming they would be more efficient. They would not need to learn the room, they would not need to be “smart”. They could clean a room of any size within minutes rather than tens of minutes.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FSUtSurqA4


The video above shows that smart vacuum cleaners take an artistic and inefficient approach to cleaning. They waste a lot of energy going over parts of the room they have already cleaned whilst missing some spots.


The brush at the front also has a habit of flinging dust and larger forms of dirt away from themselves and into a part that was just cleaned. As a result, they may spread some dirt. There should be a way of preventing this.


Due to their programming flaw, Roombas are more fun to play and experiment with than use as a replacement to manually vacuuming a room. A simple tweak in their software would make them more efficient. At the moment they behave like toddlers with a vacuum cleaner rather than teenagers with a lawnmower.

Infomaniak K Drive, Swisscom Mycloud, Apple Icloud and Google Drive

Infomaniak K Drive, Swisscom Mycloud, Apple Icloud and Google Drive

Byrichard

Over the last two days, I have been playing with Infomaniak K Drive, Swisscom MyCloud, Apple iCloud and Google Drive. I settled for Swisscom Mycloud because backing up pictures is free with my current contract and it’s cheaper than two terabytes with Apple iCloud. It’s free.


Infomaniak K drive is interesting because you can back up images automatically but when you have over ten thousand images on your phone like I do it cannot work through the backlog without timing out. The only way for me to update would be to keep the app alive for several hours as it uploads images and videos.


Swisscom Mycloud has the same issue but I invested yesterday getting all the images to upload from my phone. With patience, I might be able to upload all the videos but this may take several weeks. Both services have the flaw that when the app goes to sleep they stop uploading, and as video files are large it takes more time to determine which files still need to upload than to start uploading again.


Flickr also has this issue but as Flickr raises their yearly fees every year, and makes downloading files a messy and painful experience I am happy to find alternatives.


Both iCloud and Google Photos do not have this issue either because I’ve been synching as I go along or because they have the right privileges to work through the backlog.


Infomaniak K Drive is around 65 CHF per year, Google Drive and iCloud are around 100 to 120 CHF per year.


With Swisscom Mycloud I have “free” unlimited storage for photos and videos as well as 250 gigabytes for online backup of other files. I can then look at these photos via Swisscom TV, not that I do.


Swisscom Mycloud could be made more interesting by adding duplicate detection as well as the ability to upload from two or three devices at once.


Features I would like


Duplicate detection, so that I could upload images from several sources at once


Multidevice support, so that I can upload from the desktop, the phone, and other devices.


Background uploading, when on WiFi. Video files are heavy and the app times out on iOS devices before the upload is complete.


Select by day, because pictures from one day may be of a specific event. When you have more than five images selecting images individually takes too much time.


360 image and video support. Content on my phone is of spherical images and videos


Features I like


Placing images on a map. It’s fun to look for images by location. As you zoom in you can see everywhere you’ve taken pictures. This uses Exif data rather than location information based on where your phone has been, as with Google Maps.



Unlimited free storage of images and video. Since mobile phones aggregate pictures and videos from 360 devices, cameras, and other gadgets it’s nice to have as much data as we need for the storage of these images. It gives us an offsite backup in case we lose or break our phones.


It’s fast. Uploading new images is fast. Within seconds of taking a picture, it is backed up. Accessing images is also fast.


Smooth Integration With Swisscom TV. As soon as images are uploaded to Mycloud they can be viewed via Swisscom TV on the screen of your choice. This is interesting for videos and images that are worth seeing on a big screen.


Easy sharing of images and image folders. I like how easy it is to share images and folders and to allow other people to add images. What I would like to see on top of this is the ability to allow specific people to see the content. It would be nice to restrict access to chosen phone numbers, e-mail addresses and more. I would also like to password protect folders as I am not comfortable sharing certain images openly.


Select All and download, Should you desire to download all images at once this is possible. Select one image, then choose “select all”, press “download” and theoretically, you will be able to download all images at once. I say theoretically because I selected over 10,000 files which included videos and photographs. Google Drive is limited to 500 images per zip file and when I tried downloading from Flickr I found the process clunky and messy. Flickr strips all EXIF data so you’re left with a mess of images. (A media asset manager’s nightmare because of the volume of work, but a dream, because of the hours of work) 😉



Why The Interest?


iPhones, iPads and Android devices now have 120 or more gigabytes of storage each and with this amount of data, it is easy to reach the 200-gigabyte wall beyond which you pay ten CHF per month for storage. A “free” option like Swisscom MyCloud Standard is interesting for those on the right contracts because it’s free. This means that no matter how much storage their phone has their images are backed up. It also means that as time advances and they gather more and more images it can expand.



Apple and iPhoto want you to believe that they are the best integrated, slickest option. When you’re in a situation like this they say “You have 30 days to download your photos in the photo app”. There is no “select all and download” option. There also seems to be a limit of how much bandwidth you can use in a single day.


And Finally


The reason for which MyCloud, Google Photos, and other solutions are so interesting is that we have moved to a laptop-based workflow and as a result, the hard drive on our laptop is as big as the one on our phone so backing images up locally requires an external hard drive.


I had Firewire 400, 800 USB 2, 3 and USB C drives. Apple loves to de-standardise ports and so hard drives that were once convenient to use become problematic. With increasing bandwidth and online storage solutions we can stop worrying about external hard drives on a daily basis and use them when we need to “desaturate our drives”. I apologise for the diving term.


With online storage, we’re backing up when we’re hiking, cycling, climbing, doing via Ferrata, traveling and more. We don’t need to worry about our box of cables, adaptors, or which drive what material is stored. As a media asset manager, I can help you consolidate your media assets into a single location, along with backup solutions.


I hope that this blog post helps you understand this topic and provides you with solutions.

Avoiding User Generated Content With Adverts
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Avoiding User Generated Content With Adverts

Byrichard

Instagram has become user-generated content with adverts every fifth post. We went from following friends and their life to following personalities within our field of passions. I follow climbers, photographers, and friends. By following strangers, the timeline has become less relevant. This is especially true about following influencers.


Influencers don’t share their life. They share adverts. They share an illusion, a dream, an ideal. In so doing their posts lose value because they are no different from adverts. They are cold and devoid of character. They are impersonal. They’re a waste of time.


“but social media is a waste of time ;-)”, some would argue. Today it is, but for a long time socialising on the world wide web was about people connecting with other people and establishing friendships. The more time you devoted to forums, discussion groups and bulletin boards, the stronger the connection was.


This wouldn’t be an issue if Instagram was not profitable. This wouldn’t be a problem if our time-wasting wasn’t profitable to a third party. The problem is that we’re out on our daily activities capturing images and sharing them to a network where no one will see our posts, and where our addiction is making someone else money.


Instagram is compulsive. We go, we scroll and see posts by influences, but the posts by those that are important to us are gone. Is it because the algorithms are hiding them or is it that people are now dormant? The compulsion to check the timeline wasn’t strong enough so quantum posts were added as stories. As soon as you see them they cease to exist. IGTV is there too, trying to hook us. We watch videos but we can’t scrub through them. We’re forced to watch from the start of one video to the end. We’re then given tabloid rubbish as a suggestion for the next video to watch.


Today I posted my fiftieth photo on my WordPress photo blog. The audience is tiny, and it will take time for it to gain traction, but at least if and when it does gain traction WordPress and I can profit from it. I’d rather play with WordPress, a decentralized blogging platform for the sharing of videos, photos, and ideas than be stuck in algorithm-driven timelines where I see adverts rather than content.

13 Minutes to the Moon

Byrichard

13 Minutes to the Moon is an interesting podcast dedicated to the Lunar Landings. This podcast, along with audiobooks, is interesting because they allow us not just to read the dialogues that took place but to hear what the controllers and astronauts heard.


At one point in Episode two, you hear two communications loops at once. It’s a shame that they didn’t balance the audio so that loop 1 was in one ear and loop 2 in the other. If they had done this then we could have heard the audio as mission controllers had heard.


The podcast is also interesting because it’s divided into twelve 50 minute podcasts so each topic is explored in depth. There is some overlap with the books I have read. For enthusiasts, this overlap is interesting as it allows them to fill in gaps in their knowledge.


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What I learned after three weeks with a cat

Byrichard

What I learned after three weeks with a cat is that they’re easy to take care of. Cleaning up the litter tray takes seconds and providing them with food two to three times a day is simple. It’s also simple to keep them entertained. A ball of string on a string and a laser pointer are great toys. They also enjoy shredding rolls of toilet paper so it’s good to be careful.


They like to go on a balcony and watch birds and they like to sit and “watch” a pipe. Don’t be tricked though. They are not watching the pipe. They are listening to the noises as people open and close taps, and as the pressure changes within the pipes make noise. I know because I tapped on the pipe and saw the cat stare intently at the source of the noise at his eye level.


If you’re planning to do anything then it’s a good idea to lock the balcony door. If he gets out he will stare at birds on rooftops for hours. As he’s happy to do this for hours at a time you may find yourself procrastinating for much longer than you would like.


Paradoxically this same cat will then nap during the afternoon and evening. He likes to go on the shelf where I have my clothes. He likes to investigate every bag and he is curious about everything he can find.


He loves investigating the lights that he sees on the ceilings during the day and night. I don’t mean incandescent bulbs. I mean the reflection that comes from cars, trucks and other vehicles as their windshields reflect light. He also likes the lights from these vehicles at night. He will sprint after, and try to catch them if they are in range.


Cats are independent and they don’t need your company for long. They’d be just as happy to see you for 20 minutes as you bring them food and then disappear, as to see you every few hours. If you spend too much time with a cat he will no longer care.


Keeping a window open so that the car can go onto the balcony and come back is unpleasant in cold weather, and those hours of exploration will result in you wearing clothes as if you were sitting outdoors for hours.


He comes in to have a drink of water and then he goes back out to explore. After a few more minutes he comes back in, meows and has some food before heading back outside again. This goes on for hours until it’s time for the next nap or you decide that it’s time for the human to go out.


I know that you can’t compare taking care of a toddler and a cat but I’d say that taking care of a toddler is more rewarding despite being much messier. You can play with a toddler and you can teach them new things. When you speak to them you see that they understand what you’re saying.


After three weeks of cat sitting I know two things. The first is that I am able to serve and it will live normally. The second is that they’re so independent that if you’re looking for an empathetic being you’re better served by being an uncle.


On Tuesday evening I go back to my normal life and we will see whether I miss having the company and responsibility of a cat. It’s easy to look after a cat. They take care of themselves. Being woken at 6-7 in the morning is fine.