A Storm Alert Despite Nice Weather
Good Walking weather despite the storm warning. The weather is stable. We should have sun tomorrow.
Hiking from Grächen to Zermatt via the longest Suspension bridge is an interesting two-day hike. It provides you with views of glaciers, boulder fields, scree slopes and more. It also provides you with the opportunity to cross a suspension bridge that takes six minutes.
The hike up from Grächen takes you up through a forest. You go through a forest and there is a stream to your left and the nice landscape to your right. The hike up is easy.
As I hike with a water filter I like to get water straight from glaciers when I can. I gathered water from the glacier. It tastes good and it’s fresh. Gathering water from this point is easy.
From this cirque you climb up through some more trees and eventually you get to a nice view point from which you can see the landscape. This provides a good point for a snack and rest.
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Use mouse to look around image above. (360 image)
Many years ago the glacier reached down into the valley below. You can clearly see the depth of the former glacier. At this point you are above the tree line. You begin to walk on bare rock. The slopes get steeper and you are more exposed.
One segment of this hike crosses a zone of active rock falls. When we were walking here we heard a loud noise that sounded like thunder or a jet. After a few seconds we saw large rocks falling down the slope and bouncing. Where they hit the ground clouds of dirt and dust erupted. It was too far away for me to get good video footage. At this moment we were more attentive. If you look up you see that massive rocks get loose and fall. Look at the contrast between the sign post and the boulders. You need to scramble and climb over rocks and navigate your way towards safety.
The dangerous zone takes a few minutes to cross and there are big rocks behind which you could try to shelter during a rock fall but the best option is to spend as little time as possible in the dangerous section. Rock falls are usually due to hikers, rain and ice formation. When rock falls are common you see that there is no moss and no trees grow. Later we crossed over boulder fields where trees and moss were growing. The Europahütte is built in an old boulder field overlooking the bridge.
In one of the Coastline documentaries I watched a while ago, they said that if you measure the coastline to within one metre you get one distance and if you measure the same coastline to within 30 centimetres or less you would get a much higher figure. During the last few kilometres, this was clearly evident. On the GPS the two or three kilometres were the last two or three kilometres for a long time. The terrain undulates quite a bit and there are many nooks and crannies. In a straight line the distance was 1.6km but in real terms, the distance was closer to three or four kilometres.
Until this hike, I was used to circular rather than linear hikes. Most of the hikes start in one point and go around to another. When you look at the route track for both days of hiking they go in a relatively straight line.
For three years I did not cycle. For one year it was because I broke my arm while cycling, The second year it was because we were in the first wave of this never-ending pandemic so I preferred not to stray too far from home. The third year it was because the pandemic was still not over, but it felt as if we had a chance. This year is different. This year we know that the Swiss government doesn’t care either way. For the Swiss the pandemic is over, whether that is true, or false.
In light of this we could continue to self-isolate and to avoid doing anything away from home but cycling is one of the rare things that we can do that doesn’t A) Require a car and B) Doesn’t require being indoors with others. For both of these reasons cycling is a good sport to practice when Covid denialism is government policy.
For this bike ride I intentionally went into France, to explore a little. Usually I forget the passport or other documents but not this time. It feels good to explore the old places, once more. Despite the never-ending pandemic, at least solitary cycling can range further afield.
My mental health would do a lot better if I knew that various European countries were working towards Covid-Zero, but as has become the tradition now, European countries are pretending the pandemic is over, so that there is another Autumn and Winter wave. This has become the new normal. The new normal is not moral. There is little we can do about this as private individuals except self-isolate.
Over the last day or two I have taken a break from JavaScript to look at Ruby. It feels like a very different type of language so it’s good to see how things work in another programming language. So far I am struggling with transposing the knowledge with some things, but others are clear. I decided to write the JS equivalent name in my notes, to help with comparing the two. I might continue in this line for the weekend, and resume my regular studying on Monday.
When the weather is cold and grey as it is today people are not tempted by a walk in the mountains. Chamois at la Dôle are more relaxed, especially up at La Dôle. They are hidden by the clouds and if humans are coming then they will smell them long before we get to see them.
On Friday of last week we were lucky. With a friend we decided that we would eat lunch at La Barillette after going for a short walk up from the radio mast to the Sky Guide facilities above.
There was a light drizzle and the clouds were playing. At moments we could see the top and at other moments it was hidden by clouds. We walked up the path and saw a few cows spread about the landscape.
As we started up the steep path and arrived to where the path flattens we could see two or three chamois in the distance. I thought at first that it was just the mother I had seen several months earlier with her young one. As we approached and as the wind blew away some clouds we saw a full herd.
This was excellent. It is rare to see so many of them so close together like that and from such a short distance. At moments we were just metres away from them. It was a rare and welcome privilege.
Setting up a drive to be available via Samba is a relatively simple thing to do. The drawback is that you have files that are as organised as the media asset manager. It can be quite chaotic unless you have someone trained as a media asset manager, archivist, or other, to help order photos videos and more. To some degree Nextcloud is just as disorganised, initially.
I have spent more than five minutes experimenting with Nextcloud through several iterations and I have finally set things up as I want them. I have Nextcloud running on a Raspberry Pi 8GB. I chose this device because it’s the highest spec pi available at the moment without months of waiting. I could have used an HP Elite Book from several years ago but I want a machine that can be on permanently.
The first sync is slow. Twenty hours ago I started with over 19,000 photographs and videos and now I still have 6400 remaining. I activated recognize, an AI solution that recognises music genre, objects, human movement in video, people, bodies of water and more. I also have a tool running that maps photographs to show where they were taken.
The beauty of Nextcloud for photo storage is that it allows you to sync from your phone via the app, but it also allows you to upload photos via a web interface, or if you’re so inclined via file transfers on the back end. I have yet to test the latter. The idea is simple. If you have terabyte drives filled with photos that you have already organised by year, month, day, location, and topic, then that file structure should be recognised by Nextcloud. The work that you have done to organise media assets is already done. It’s just a matter of letting Nextcloud see them, and it will take care of mapping, and recognising objects, monuments, images with people and more.
With time it recognises faces and the faces are just given a number. You can then provide them with a name. I added my name to the collection of photos of me. It needs 120 faces before it starts to recognise individuals. As the model is self-hosted this data stays local to your system
I noticed that it recognises water, alpine landscapes, signs, boat, bridge, flower, furniture, historic, information and more. The Pi is still working hard to ingest the remaining 5600 photos but when that is done it will have plenty of time to recognise what is in pictures.
When you work as a media asset manager it takes time to tag images, and to add location data. If AI can provide some of this information automatically then it saves a lot of human time. Time that humans can spend adding images to the right folders.
As a best practice you should always use folders with year-date-country-event-name-photographer-initials. If Nextcloud is up and running you can rely on Nextcloud but if for some reason Nextcloud crashes, or you can’t use a web browser or app, you want to be able to find things according to year, month date, photographer, and topic. Nextcloud should be an embellishment but good Media Asset Management practices should be prioritised.
To some degree the iOS app can help with this, as long as you set things up properly ahead of ingesting all the photographs. I haven’t seen how to set it up yet, but for now I’m still testing the proof of concept, for mobile phone image backup.
What I am doing with the Pi is experimenting with a Google Photo and iCloud replacement. What I plan to do with the linux laptop is use the full power of a normal computer to serve as a media asset manager for when the machine can be turned off, and on, when not in use. The aim of Nextcloud on the laptop will be to provide me with a one terabyte NAS where I can experiment with what Nextcloud really has to offer.
Tensorflow WASM mode
WASM mode was activated automatically, because your machine does not support native TensorFlow operation:
Your server does not support AVX instructions
Your server does not have an x86 64-bit CPU
When you use the Pi it does not have the required the required x86 64-bit cpu. For that I need to use the Intel machine. It also has GPU acceleration, which I cannot use on the Pi. The Pi is good because it can be on 24 hours a day, as a quick backup tool for your phone, but an Intel NUC machine can be a Nextcloud server with the required hardware to do things much faster.
iCloud and Google Photos are great for backing up when you’re out and about. They’re less great when you want to recover your photos. This is because if you remove photos from iCloud they are removed from everywhere so it’s dangerous to clear photos to make space.
With Google Photos the issue is that their cloud backup solution is 34 CHF more than Infomaniak’s cloud storage solution. It is for this reason that I wanted to have a local backup of my Google Photos and iCloud photos. When I setup the Intel machine and ensure that all my photos are backed up from Google Photos I will be able to purge Google photos and downgrade my Google One plan.
My aim is not to eliminate Google Photos, but to reduce the plan I’m using. I have access to two terabytes but I never use it, and Infomaniak is cheaper, so I prefer to have a single plan. The Intel will be the main backup, and kdrive would be the offsite backup.
In the time it took to write this blog post I went from 6400 images to backup, down to 3800.