A temptation to go diving.
It makes me want to go diving again. Now that summer is over the lakes should be better. Visibility should have improved.
Goodreads was independent, once upon a time, and then Amazon bought it and it became part of the Amazon universe. At that point Goodreads stopped being an interesting option because we were helping a billion dollar company rather than an indipendent project.
Bookmory and storygraph are two alternative projects. Bookmory imports the goodreads csv faster but Storygraph provides more analytical data after the fact. Storygraph simplifies importing the book CSV from Goodreads to Storygraph but once I got the Goodreads CSV I could migrate my data to both services with ease.
The difference in price is 31 CHF per year for Bookmory and 39 Euros per year for Storygraph.
I started using both yesterday so I haven’t made up my mind about which I prefer. I do like that I can track my reading streak via StoryGraph rather than via the Kindle app, Apple Books or other apps.
I’m still playing with trendio and I’ve had a nice increase over the past week with the stock value. It’s not monetary but I have finally started to make some “profit”. It’s gone up by 16 percent in a week.
I need to keep it increasing more so I need to keep watching to see which are the best words to get.
Yesterday I spent some time looking through Apple Health Data Sources. I see that there are plenty of data sources. These are the Apple watch, the iphone, Alltrails, move, connect, stepsapp, pacer, Suunto, Ingress and three more that are marked as inactive.
Move is the app that gets data from some Casio watches. Connect is Garmin connect and gets step data from Garmin devices. If I take steps and they are logged with a casio or a garmin device they do not count in iOS apps but if I take steps with Garmin and Casio devices without also wearing the Apple watch the same steps are not counted.
The Apple Fitness and Health apps have access to all the same data. Everything goes to a central database on the iPhone. It’s from the iphone that the data is not shared transparently between all other apps.
In practice whether you have a suunto, Garmin, Apple Watch or other fitness tracker each device should feed, or retrieve data from Apple health, and each should display that data, regardless of which device you wear.
Whether I wear my Garmin, Suunto or Apple watch I would like all three to access health data transparently so that I can choose which individual watch I want to wear on a specific day. I don’t want to have to wear all three of them. Not that I do. I only have two wrists. 😉 I can only wear two at once.
The privacy argument is moot, because each app can be granted access to Apple Health, and Apple Health can be granted access to each app. This means that all the data is already transiting both ways for all apps.
When you buy a Casio or other watch the battery is expected to last from three years to ten years, and you are expected to replace the battery when it dies. With the Apple watch, now that it is four years old, the next step would be to swap the battery. The Apple watch is now at 70 percent. The battery costs 79 CHF to replace.
When the Suunto battery got low on the Ambit 3 I got a Spartan, but when I replaced the Spartan I went for a Garmin, so I lost the ability to keep my old log going, and had to migrate to the Garmin app. With the Apple Watch we’re on yet another silo. Every brand has a silo. With the Apple watch it’s worse, because you have the fitness app, but then you have all the third party apps. Everything would break at once if you stop using the Apple Watch.
I would love for Garmin, Suunto and Apple wath to allow the free flow of tracking data in both directions, so that I could choose the best device to wear, and the best app to fiddle around with. Strava is the giant in the room, but I don’t want to use an app where I have to pay a premium for added functionality.
Recently my Social Media Life has become dormant. I do visit Facebook every so often but I ignore Instagram, barely touch Mastodon or the fediverse, and in general have stopped looking at social media for a social life. It’s not that my life offline has become vibrant. It’s that online is empty of meaningful engagement, especially in winter.
From the nineties right up to around 2018 or so social media was a place to meet and be social. It’s during the pandemic that social media seemed to die. I think that social media relies on meeting people in the physical world to have value. People on the social web use it when they’re on the toilet, or waiting for something else to happen. They’re just filling small gaps in their schedule.
The other reason is more positive. I have terabytes of storage spread across twenty two drives, or more and I am re-organising everything in order to see how much space I have free. I have at least twenty terabytes of data storage. I might have as much as fourty two terabytes of storage but due to file duplications I don’t have much space that is free.
That’s frustrating, especially if you want to take video and can generate up to 64 gigabytes of data at a time. 64 gigabytes, because my Sxs cards have that amount of storage. The drone could have up to 512 gigabytes of storage if I put the right SD card into the camera.
I can’t delete data from cloud storage solutions because I haven’t consolidated all of my photo and video files from iCloud, Flickr, Google Photos and one or two other services. If all of my files are organised chronologically then I can migrate from cloud storage solutions without worrying about losing images that might have been backed up only to iCloud, or Google Photos, or another solution.
By consolidating the data offline, I can manage data in the cloud with ease.
For data to be safe you need to have two local copies, and one offsite backup. If you have a dozen, or two dozen drives then that data is like shrodinger’s cat. You don’t know whether it’s backed up (living) or a single copy (dead). Delete the wrong file and you might end up losing a few days, or a few months of data. By having a centralised main storage your small satellite drives become working drives. You use them while you’re working on a project, and once the project is over you move it to the main storage solution and either wipe and reuse that drive, or keep it as a backup. Shrodinger’s cat has left the storage device.
Years ago I bought an eight terabyte drive because I planned to consolidate my personal video and photo files but I never got around to it. This morning I finished moving the junk I had on that drive to other drives and I have now started to backup the video and photo data that I had temporarily kept on a five terabyte drive. I realised that I have more data than would fit on a five terabyte drive, but it also failed to mount at least once.
For years I had the same data on five to six drives but in my move towards centralising, and then backing up my data I made myself unsafe. I was left with just one copy of data. Now that I am backing up the four terabytes of data I have from the five terabyte drive to the 8 terabyte drive I have a little margin of safety.
When moving files from the 5tb drive to the 8tb drive the process is simple. Move the video folde to the video folder, photo to photo, and documents to documents. It’s when I start moving the secondary drives to the main drive to consolidate my photos and videos that the value is generated because this is when I detect duplicate folders, videos and photos. This is when the value comes in.
Moving four terabytes of data takes hours, but once that data is moved, and as I consolidate data from six or seven other drives I will copy only the files that do not exist on the main volume. I will then move the files that I have checked into a zz-backed-up folder.
When I was trying to free space on drives I deleted the files from the drive as soon as they were copied over. Now I am moving them to zz-backed-up as a scruffy backup. The aim is to be able to recover files if the 8tb volume fails, but these are a stop gap. The next step is to backup the 8 tb volume.
Nothing is backed up until you have at least two copies locally, and a third off-site copy. The next step is to copy the files from an older volume to a newer volume. Old drives fail, so having files on older volumes is a risk. When I finish consolidating files to the eight terabyte volume I will then duplicate it to a newer 8TB volume.
As a side project, once I have two or more drives that are free of data I could experiment with setting up a raid system.
Today is an unusual day. Originally I had planed to walk over one thousand meters up the Jura, before realising that I had too little sleep, so I decided to sleep a little more, do laundry, write a blog post and then eat lunch.
After lunch I didn’t feel like going for a walk, still. That’s highly unusual for me. I don’t know whether it’s because I am tired from a mediocre night of sleep or whether it’s because of the heat that hasn’t left yet. It’s the 9th of September and it’s still 29 to 30°c. I feel slightly under the weather so I’m skipping the walk.
Part of my reason for skipping the daily walk is that I noticed that the air has been polluted for several days in a row. According to the air2G2 app the air is highly polluted at the moment. It’s especially Ozone. This is due to the heat, the lack of wind, and people’s overreliance on polluting cars.
To have 30°c at this time of year is rare. If it was cooler I wouldn’t hesitate so much to go for a walk, but there is the nuisance of dog walkers that is back. Every time I go for a walk I need to adjust my route to avoid the dog walkers. Dog walkers like to walk with their dogs off leash, and dogs like to approach and theaten. Overnight I counted that I have had at least 4-6 dog attacks in the last few years, so if my fear of dogs is getting worse, it’s because I am being harrassed by dogs more regularly.
Another reason for saving my energy today could be for an entirely different reason. Tomorrow I will probably be riding with electric bikes, and although I can comfortably keep up, I do burn a lot of energy. If I save my energy today I should have some, spare, for tomorrow.
If I was walking by myself, and then cycling by myself, and then walking by myself, and living according to my own rythmn then I’d be fine, but since I can knacker myself, and then be pushed beyond my limits the next day, it makes sense to take rest days. The Swiss Weather forecast wrote a blog post about the current anticyclone and air pollution. I seem to be thinking like the weather people at the moment.
Yahoo live is an interesting live video conferencing tool still in it’s early days. It allows you to stream video live from your webcam and watch up to four other streams at the same time. There’s a chatroom and you can see all the participants at once and select which ones you want in vision and which you’d prefer out of vision.
There are a few bugs at the moment. I haven’t found sound that easy to deal with, especially since there’s a five to ten second delay. Chatting with Msiou he told me that what he had done is use skype conference calls to keep the conversation going. Of course this is a makeshift solution and some better interaction should come.