On the Prospect of Re-confinement

Byrichard

Today let’s comment on the prospect of Re-confinement. Plenty of people, when lockdown ended, decided that now was the time to start doing group activities, without masks, and without waiting for the transmission rate to get down to zero. As a prize they had a relatively normal summer, with good memories, stories and pictures to share.


Some of us were short-sighted and silly. We thought “Oh, if we wait another month then life will be back to normal and that’s when we can have an ordinary summer, rather than a summer running on fumes.


That decision resulted in us spending a summer in solitude, which in turn means that we never de-confined. We never went back to socialising and we never did things with people. We never shook hands, never gave hugs, never did group activites outside of our family circles, and even those interactions were limited.


Since March I have been in a car with someone without masks just once. That’s seven months of privation.


Others are protesting at the thought of being confined again, of not being able to go to the bar after 2200 or 0000. They’re complaining because they can’t meet in groups of more than five, or even ten.


I haven’t been in a group of more than five since the pandemic started.


If everyone had sacrificed their social lives from March to the first of August in Switzerland then we would be out of the pandemic now because the virus would have run out of people to infect.


By resuming life as normal we have gone from a low of eleven cases per day to 5950+ yesterday. In the Swiss press they’re writing about us being back to the same situation as we were in March, with hospitals in some cantons, very close to capacity, and in others getting there by Mid-November.


The challenge faced by governments is that they must respect people’s rights, but on the flipside people do not respect their responsibilities towards society. Governments are begging people to “wear the mask, this includes over your nose” and “maintain one and a half meters between yourself and others.” We see how little this is respected by how many new cases are emerging on a daily basis. People do not take their responsibility not to be a disease vector seriously enough so the pandemic that could have been over within two months, is now seven months old, with no prospect for an end.


People are appalled at the prospect of being reconfined but it is their actions that ensured that we would be reconfined. It is because they did not take a break from socialising during the pandemic, that the pandemic could last so long.


People keep saying that pandemics are complicated and complex, which they are, but they’re also simple. If people restrict their interactions to the bare minimum then the virus will not infect seven hundred people in a single day. There walk talk of one person infecting 115 in Switzerland. In a podcast, about another country, one person infected 6000.


Pandemics are unpleasant to live through, and it is for this reason that we should sacrifice all non-essential social interactions until the pandemic is over. The more seriously we take self-confinement, the less opportunities the virus has to spread, and the less opportunities it has to spread, the sooner the pandemic is over, and life can resume.


People want the pandemic to be over, but they’re expecting others to sacrifice, while they continue having their fun and socialising. Pandemics don’t work like that. Everyone must sacrifice, for life to return to normal, and for jobs to return.


The rules, during this pandemic are few, and simple.


  • wear a mask
  • wash your hands
  • Avoid hugs, kisses and handshakes
  • avoid groups of more than five
  • stay one and a half meters from people not in your household.


Are these rules so hard to obey, that they’d rather risk re-confinement than obey them? These are easy rules to obey. It would be a shame to be re-confined because these simple instructions were not accepted.


We go back to a question I was asked a few months ago. “Don’t you worry about being confined for two weeks?” “No, because for as long as the pandemic lasts I am self-confined anyway.” For me nothing changes, until the pandemic ends.

Forced to Wear Mask Outdoors

Forced to Wear Mask Outdoors

Byrichard

Switzerland is currently toying with the idea of forcing people to wear masks outdoors but it’s not clear whether this would be for cities or whether it would be for villages and even rural walks. If the obligation to wear a mask at all times is enacted then I have two reactions.


The first is that I never leave the house without a mask and that I wear it when I am forced to walk within a few meters of people. Since the end of March I have been staying as far away from people as possible, which is how I discovered all my new walks.


The second reaction is that wearing a mask outdoors in a city makes sense. It doesn’t make sense when you’re out for a two to three hour walk along main roads where you rarely cross paths with anyone. To be forced to wear a mask even when we are kilometres from any other human would really suck. I know it’s not a scientific term, but that’s a step too far.


No one had to say “Don’t socialise, don’t meet friends, don’t go to restaurants, don’t go to pubs, bars or nightclubs.” No one had to say “Walk along rural paths where no one else walks to avoid any and all human contact”. These are things I did of my own free will. It’s not easy, but the documentaries I have watched and the books and articles I have read make this logical.


If I have to wear a mask for the entirety of my three hour walks where my exposure to others may last half a minute or less then I will be quite disappointed. The reason for that disappointment is that we would never breath fresh air if this rule was enacted. We would always breath mask air. We will suffer from Vitamin D as a result of not getting any exposure to sunlight and we will fall sick, for a new reason.


From what I understand in the Le Temps article this will not include my cherished quiet walking routes, luckily. I will have to keep hoping for rain as the only valid reason for indoor training. 😉 (I know an ascii wink is not good form, but I want you to know this is meant to be taken as a joke.)


For Context Switzerland, yesterday, became world leader in highest percentage increase in the number of new cases. “C’est en tout cas le pays qui compte la plus forte augmentation de nouveaux cas de Covid-19 ces 7 jours: +106%,” Within this context Switzerland must take rapid and immediate action to get the number of new cases per day back in control.


“Reduce your contacts by half”


For those who understand French this article presents the situation.


The three points of the article are:


  • The situation is similar to how it was on the 16th of March.
  • only semi-confinement helped to reduce the number of new cases.
  • If the measures were taken today it would take three to four weeks for things to get back under control.


For months I have been saying that people need to take responsibility and that everyone has to do everything possible to reduce the risk of propagation of this virus, and as we see from the current crop of articles the scientific and medical communities say the same thing.


It’s a shame that ordinary people need to be confined for a pandemic to be controlled and then contained. It’s a shame that people can’t take a one or two month break from socialising during a pandemic to get life to return to normal as soon as possible.


The Guardian Article: Inside the Airline Industry Meltdown is an interesting article that looks at the growing number of planes that are being mothballed until better times come, about the removal from service of 30 aircrafts from a single airline etc.


source: https://www.corona-data.ch/ accessed on 24/10/2020


Switzerland got down to 11 new cases per day in June. Yesterday there were 6600 new cases.


Daily Percentage of Positive Tests and Daily Tests per 10’000 (Last 7 Days)
Source: https://www.corona-data.ch/ accessed on 24/10/2020


Newly Reported Cases per Canton
Source: https://www.corona-data.ch/ accessed on 24/10/2020


The amplitude of the second wave is much greater than the first as we can see from the graph above.

Timetrap – A Command Line Time Tracking App

Byrichard

Today I played with Timetrap, a command line time tracking app. It allows you to track the time you spend doing specific tasks with ease. To install the app you can run the command. 


gem install timetrap


To create a timesheet you type: 


t sheet blogging


and it will create/switch to that timesheet. Type this to start the timer.


t in


And to stop the timer


t out


t list will show a list of timesheets, t display will show the timed sessions for that document and more.


I was playing with a time tracking app that is integrated to the OS and web browsers but found that when studying courses with videos or other types of content it did not time the entirety of the time I spent on a task.


With this app I can type “t sheet study-german” and then “t in” and it will log the time I spend studying German. When I finish I type “t out”. I can then switch to “t sheet blogging” and it will switch to the blogging timesheet. I can then start that timer.


The advantage of using the command line is that it’s quick and clean and it provides me with a way of tracking time without spending 70 or more CHF a year for something that can be tracked in a simple manner.


With people currently working from home time tracking apps and features become interesting because it allows for people to show that they spent time on specific tasks, especially in contexts where people are paid per hour, rather than per project or result.


It has CSV and iCal functionality so although the raw information is text you can export the data to present it in a visual manner. You could keep track of how long you spend coding, blogging, studying languages and a multitude of other tasks.


You can integrate the data that is created through this app to SQLlite3. Such flexibility means that this project can be adapted to a number of uses and projects. If you understand python then you can contribute to the project and add the features that you find useful.


How To Block Twitter and Facebook Using The Hosts File On A Mac.

Byrichard

If we’re not learning every day then we’re wasting our time. If we’re not up to mischief every day then we’re likely to become unhappy. In light of both of these things let me give you a quick tip for blocking Twitter and Facebook.


My motivation for doing this is the following. Twitter doesn’t trust us with the retweet button so we can take a three or four week break from them. Facebook is dormant, so experimenting with them will have little effect.


The first step is to type “sudo nano /private/etc/hosts”. The Hosts file is a file that the computer uses as a DNS lookup. It is useful to tell computers on a local network where to find the intranet site, or to give IP addresses for sites or servers that do not have a human readable address.


127.0.01 is the localhost default address. So is ::1. The long one is IPV4 and the short one, ironically is IPV6.


By adding a line like 192.168.1.1 Twitter.com we are telling the computer that the URL www.twitter.com’s IP address is 192.168.1.1 which is wrong. On plenty of networks this is the wifi router. The result is that twitter will no longer load. For additional fun I decided to make www.facebook.com resolve to 20.20.10.21. The IP address was arrived at through the highly scientific process of thinking “What is today’s date, let’s use that.”


The last step is “dscacheutil -flushcache” to ensure that DNS addresses address according to the latest host file.


www.facebook.com now resolves to the wrong IP address.


For a while i was trying to think of ways to block myself from accessing these websites. I tried one website blocking plugin but it blocked access to an entire range of websites that I still wanted access to.


A more serious look at how to modify hosts files.


If for some reason one day you are unable to access a website after typing in the URL you can resolve the issue by the following:


  1. Check www.google.com or some other URL to see whether the problem is with just one site or whether it is widespread.
  2. Open terminal on a mac and ping the website that is not loading. If you see an IP address that does not look right then you can check the hosts file with the sudo command mentioned above. If you know that an IP address for a URL is wrong then you simply delete the line, save, flush the cache and then reload.


Opening the cache, modifying the file, saving it, checking that it works, reopening the file, removing the change takes seconds per manipulation.

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The Roman Civilisation On Twitter

Byrichard

The Roman Civilisation is being tweeted about on Twitter. There are accounts that tweet about ongoing archeological digs, museum opening times and more. They also share images and videos, providing people with a visual way of learning about the Romans.


One of these twitter accounts is Roman Britain. They tweet original content as well as retweet content written by other accounts. It is an interesting way to learn more about Roman Britain. Such accounts are interesting because they open our eyes to lesser known sites that may go unnoticed. It also provides us with a glimpse of locations that may be nearby that we were not yet aware of.


You can also follow hashtags to see tweets about specific aspects of the Romans. For example if you look for Mithras you can follow tweets about Mithraism. When I was learning about the Romans we needed to go to books and find chapters about the topics we wanted to learn about. Today, with twitter information can be found within seconds from a variety of sources, whether wikipedia, newspaper articles, new research papers, content on documentary streaming sites or more.


With a hashtag like archeology you can see news and tweets about ongoing archeological digs and even find opportunities to comment on or discuss current findings with the archeologists as they research the topics they are studying or exploring.


Although history is about the past, this does not mean that research and new findings are not emerging. We have often been to recent archeological digs and seen fresh finds. When you visit Pompei or Herculaneo you see sites that are so large that they take lifetimes to excavate.


History is not just limited to books and old websites that are rarely updated. It is dynamic, so if you know children, or students encourage them to look up resources that provide them with constantly updated sources of new sites, knowledge and more.

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Thoughts on The Google IT Support Course

Byrichard

I am currently studying the Google IT Support Course. I am familiar with many of the topics and I have used many of the tools discussed. What the course offers, and the reason for which it has so much value, is that fills my knowledge gaps.


One example of this is the TCP/IP model. Until I studied the networking module I never thought about the five layers. I never thought about the complexity of getting packets from one machine on one network to another machine three or more hops across on another network.


Before I studied this course I was familiar with adding an IP address and Gateway address but did not understand how subnetting works. In the process I learned to count in binary. It is a simple concept to understand once you have played with examples a number of times.


One of the strengths of this course is that it tests you at the end of the chapter to ensure that you remember what you learned. In some cases it took more than three attempts to pass certain quizzes and I had to wait twenty four hours before I could continue. I like that there are these challenges. It encourages you to do some background research to ensure that you understand the topics that are making you struggle.


I also like the practical tests where you have to either SSH or RDP into remote clients and accomplish tasks using what you have just learned. You can fail here too, and that is where you invest more time in ensuring that you have really learned the topic.


One exercise I liked is SSHing into a test server, fixing a file name, checking that the page loaded, and then SSHing into the production server and doing the same. I had often seen SSH mentioned but until recently I had not had the curiousity to accomplish tasks with it.


On Linkedin Learning I studied AWS Provisioning And Deploying before I took the Google IT Support Course and I was able to get through the course and understand most of the concepts and tasks, but the Google IT support Course really added to my knowledge and understanding of the entire workflow and environment.


Yesterday I was learning about the opportunity to record actions in terminal and if I had known about this earlier then I could have written scripts to deploy and breakdown instances that I was required to install for projects.


When studying web development I had to install Ruby, Ruby on Rails, NPM, Angular, React and more and they sometimes interfered with each other. If I had the knowledge I have now then I could have had a clean install for each, and I could have configured and used virtual machines.


I started the course with knowledge of how to use computers. Now my knowledge is well founded, with many of the gaps in knowledge and understanding filled.


Playing with Fire(fox Developer Edition)

Playing with Fire(fox Developer Edition)

Byrichard

Google Chrome was misbehaving recently so I started to explore other browsers. By explore I mean try browsers that I had used plenty of times in the past. As I did this I came across Firefox Developer Edition.


Firefox Developer Edition is fun because it allows you to see everything that’s going on. If you’re studying HTTP headers then you can watch that traffic. If you’re trying to evaluate which parts of a page are loading slowly you can see that. If you want to look at media items loading that is possible too.


Network traffic for Tribune De Genève.


The advantage of this browser is that it allows you to play around and experiment as you work on your websites and get answers efficiently and effectively. It’s a one stop solution to getting plenty of answers without using a collection of websites and tools. It is now my default browser.


You can read a more comprehensive description of the browser’s features on their webpage.


The next step would be to follow a new web development course online, and as I experiment and learn about using frameworks I will be able to determine how useful this tool is.


So far I like it.