Dall-E generated image of a heron taking off from a bridge with trees on either side

A Good Run

Byrichard
Reading Time: 2 minutes

It’s good to vary between walking, cycling and running. I even threw in skateboarding but I am not confident at that sport yet. The beauty of walking, cycling and running is that these are sports that you can do straight from home, without getting into a car, and without having to put up with other drivers. The one drawback is that dangerous drivers endanger you on every outing, but that’s another topic.

Comfortable

Although I was worried that I would regret running with barefoot shoes, after wearing them for over six hundred kilometres I can say that they were the right choice. The reason for which they were the right choice is that now, rather than run two kilometres before my knees hurt I can run for five kilometres and reach the goal I wanted to achieve. I wanted to be able to run five kilometres comfortably, and I can.

No Extra baggage

For this run I took no backpack, no lumbar bag or any other form of bag. I had my phone, some cars in case, and my house keys. I don’t usually run so light. I didn’t expect rain. I didn’t expect to feel thirsty, and I didn’t expect to need the external battery pack, to recharge the phone. I didn’t even take earphones.

The Route

Originally I was thinking of running the usual route, to avoid being near homicidal car drivers but I noticed that there was a village party, which I didn’t want to run through. I changed my routing and it had me run up a steep road for several hundred meters before turning left and heading down towards the lake, and then turning right along the motorway. That’s not really the point. The point is that I routed it perfectly, so that I stopped running just as I got to a busy road where I sometimes have to wait for cars to pass.

Quiet

It was quiet on this run. I saw one or two walkers and one runner. In a different age, and time, I might have said hello, but in this day and age it is better not to. She was doing interval running, but when she had a rest interval she took the rest part more seriously than I do. When I’m told to rest I walk at full speed. That is my rest pace.

It was busy with dogs and walkers on another route but I always avoid routes where I expect to meet dog walkers. I don’t want dogs to jump on me, and force me to overcome my desire to run away.

And Finally

Running allows you to experience the same route as you would walk, in half the time. It’s a way of enjoying the outdoors, without devoting the same amount of time. I would not replace walking with running, because I like taking the time to walk that route. By walking you can read a lot of audio books, but you also take a break from sitting and being indoors.

By running I am forced to look at where I’m going, as well as to think of how my feet are hitting the ground. I consider the route. Today I surprised a heron that hid behind some trees. It saw me and flew away.

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Playing With Garmin Coach

Playing With Garmin Coach

Byrichard

Today I began playing with Garmin Coach. I decided to try one of the running programs. It’s the first of January, first day of the year, and I have already been for two walks and a run. The run was a calibration run so I ran too fast and too hard so I burned out on the first task. I ran at 16km/h and 230 steps per minute for a short burst before tiring and slowing a bit.


In the end I did not reach the 5 minute mark, but only by 45 seconds or so. With a different gradient I probably would have made the five minute mark, as well as with a more rational pace. I was tricked. I read that I was meant to do a hard run to the maximum of my ability so I tried.


When I got home I saw that it said “a moderate pace” so I think I pushed too hard for the first run. Now I feel physically tired. That’s due to the sound of fireworks for hours over the new year.



When you do a workout on the Garmin Instinct, without audio queues the watch asks “Do workout, you select yes, and it gives you the visual queues for when to warm up, run and rest. It then ends the workout but does not stop the track. This means that if you have to walk the rest of the way home, or to a car, you can, and it will be included in the workout.


That the watch displays workout information like this is practical because you don’t need to count “from 0 to 2 minutes I do this, then from 2 to 5 I do that, etc. You simply say yes to the workout and that’s enough. Next time I need to check audio queues from the watch, and another time, audio queues from the phone via earphones.


As I am just one workout in I have not formed a concrete opinion on the workout.

Replacing a WD Thunderbolt Duo Drive with an ICY BOX

Replacing a WD Thunderbolt Duo Drive with an ICY BOX

Byrichard

While consolidating all of my files and deleting triplicates of files I came across my thunderbolt Duo Drive. The issue is that the drive uses thunderbolt two ports and these are nowhere to be found. To be more specific it’s seen as a DVI display port by everyone but Apple for a brief period of time. The result is that I was stuck with data on a drive that I couldn’t retrieve. The solution was to transport the Duo to an old mac book pro with the right ports, transfer the data, and then think about what to do with the two drives within.

Thunderbolt Adaptor Expensive and Not Guaranteed to Work

For a while I considered buying a Thunderbolt 3 to USB-C adaptor but I didn’t know whether it would work for data transfer and it costs 49 CHF depending on when you look. That’s without counting the thunderblot cable to go with it. I calculated that I would have to spend 80 CHF to have access to the drives within this case.

Cheap RAID System

As I shopped around for hard drive enclosures I came across the ICY BOX IB-RD3621U3 for 69 CHF so I ordered that instead. The advantage I gain by buying this case is that I can use any drive I want to with it. With the Western Digitial Thunderbolt Duo they want WD Red drives to be used. With the Mybook NAS solution they want WD Green drives. With the ICYBOX solution I can have any drives I want.

Quick Setting at the Back

The added feature, which I have not tested yet is that you can have the case in single mode, where each drive is indepdent, big, where both drives count as a single volume, raid 1 where the data is mirrored or RAID 0 where the data is split between both drives. The advantage of raid 0 is that it writes data faster as it writes to both drives at once but it’s scary because if one drive fails all data is lost. I don’t remember if raid 0 or a single disk is considered scary RAID.

Not Hot Swappable

To the best of my knowledge the drives are not hot swappable, especially in RAID 0 and Big drive mode. It also requires a smaller screw driver that I have on a bike tool, rather than the Swiss knife. It took a few seconds for me to get into the drive but once I did everything went well.

Why Not A NAS?

In theory it could have been interesting to get a NAS rather than a simple HD enclosure but there is a 100 CHF difference in price. If I do want to use it as a NAS I can place one of my Raspberry Pi in front, install NextCloud or Samba and setup my own NAS within a few minutes. The other consideration is that NAS drives cost a lot more because they have to cope with being on for thousands of hours at a time.

One of my ideas is to use this box with PhotoPrism and Nextcloud in RAID 1 configuration. The reason for this is that if one drive fails I can swap the one that failed and then it will rebuild from the one that survived. The other reason is that having two or three drives plugged into a PI takes USB ports, power and space. If I have a single box it will be tidier.

Looking Forward

At the moment I have two terabyte drives acting as a four terabyte drive in Raid 0. Once I have backed up the data from this drive confidently I can either have them as a mirrored raid so that if one drive fails I do not lose all my data or eventually I can upgrade the hard drives to increase storage capacity.

And Finally

There are two advantages to getting such an ICYBOX. The first is that now if I have a DUO drive with ports that are no longer common I can simply swap them from one enclosure to another and use the drive with ease. I am no longer concerned with hardware ports. The second advantage is that it’s easy for me to swap drive pairs so I can upgrade when required but I can also quickly access data from another drive pair with ease.

In conclusion, although the automatic reflex is to an adaptor to get data off of a duo drive it makes more sense to open the Duo drive, remove the drives, put them in a new enclosure, backup the data and put the old case in storage. Within a year or two you can buy two new higher capacity drives and use them instead.

The Wastefulness of Mobile First Design

The Wastefulness of Mobile First Design

Byrichard

For a few years now I have noticed a worrying trend, one that sees content become so sparse on a web page that you see one tweet or facebook post per screen height. 


Before mobile first design, and the proliferation of React websites you would find pages that had twenty to thirty tweets per page. The same is true of Facebook. Now it’s barely one post per screen height. This means that you see one tweet, facebook post, instagram image and more. 


I really dislike this trend because Twitter, Facebook and other content heavy websites show one bit of information at a time. You’re forced to look at content individually, before moving on to the next, and the next. We might be in a single page app world, but it’s also a single piece of content. I miss the old way of displaying content, where you could see ten to twenty articles, and choose the one that you find most interesting. 


YouTube now shows 6 videos per screen height, compared to 20-30 videos at a time before. This means that if you’re browsing you’re doing so more slowly. 


It seems paradoxical that a time when we worry about the energy spent on light or dark screens, we are wasting an enormous amount of power, relatively, to display just one tweet, one post, 6 videos at a time. We are wasting time and energy by designing for mobile phones, without considering that people are browsing on desktops. 


It does get worse. Mobile phone screens are huge now, so when you design for mobile first you’re designing to display one tweet on an a 5.5 inch screen. We see less, in 2023 than we did in 2007. We’re wasting space.


Of course there is a clear reason for being so wasteful. It means that people see one advert or influencer post at a time. We’re guaranteed to be forced to see individual pieces of content. 


We need to correct this error. We need to provide more content per page, once more. I’m using Day One to type this blog post and this use of screen space is better. We need to design websites so that we see ten more more articles once again. I’m typing this blog post in Day One and I see 30 or more lines of text.


We should see 15-20 tweets and posts per page. Even 8 would be an improvement. A post or tweet should only take up the entire screen when we select it. 


And Finally


If people’s attention is measured by how little information you show on a single screen height then Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are awful. Their users are as distracted as kittens on a hike, discovering life outside of an apartment for the first time. We need to stop being so wasteful with website and content design. We need to return to using space more effectively.  What is the point of having a screen in dark mode if we display one tweet per screen, before we need to scroll? 

Playing Wordle

Playing Wordle

Byrichard

I saw the little boxes, and then I saw that the New York Times had an article on the distraction so I read about it. It’s a game some people were playing via whatsapp during the lockdown, spread to friends, and then it spread wider and wider. Boiled down Wordle is hangman for people who no longer feel comfortable with capital punishment even in game form.


I read an article seasons, or even years ago about how schools were having to rethink the game of hangman because it no longer reflected the sensibilities of people of the current age. Wordle is a good solution.


At the same time I think that Wordle is an interesting way of practicing thinking of words by yourself, before playing scrabble with others. The faster you can find the word in Wordle, the better prepared you will be for playing wordle.


I anticipate that Wordle could become addictive for three reasons. The first is that you have one problem to resolve per 24 hours, and you only have five tries before you need to wait for another problem. I find it unpleasant, but in such a small dose, that I could go back daily, until I am addicted, like so many are.


There are more interesting challenges. Crosswords are one. At least with crosswords you are entertained for an hour or two, until you get better. If you learn a new language you could be entertained for 770 days in a row before finally finding the need to try something different. Finally, I think that learning to code, or reading books may be more enjoyable.


On the topic of coding, I would like to write an app, where if I give letters and their positions in a word, that it comes up with suggestions. I don’t want to cheat at scrabble or Wordle. I think it could be a way of designing crosswords, for example. The game is to find which word it is, by the letters that it has, and by their position. My aim would be to use that thought process, for a different context.


And Finally


I can see how Wordle would be a good game for children, writers, and people with five minutes spare. It is a quick and possibly entertaining word to expand one’s vocabulary and think laterally.

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