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A Ten Kilometre Sunday Ingress Walk

Byrichard
Reading Time: 2 minutes

I was going to take the scooter but it was stuck by three SUVs so I had no option but to lazily give up and go on a 10 kilometre Sunday Ingress walk. I couldn’t be bothered running up to the second floor, getting the car keys, moving the car, getting the scooter out and then moving the car back. This is especially true since it’s going to rain tomorrow.

I do have the goal of having at least one day a week without using an internal combustion engine so by the neighbours each having jeeps/SUVs I reduced my own carbon footprint. Days without internal combustion are always good.

Ingress Screengrab of missions.

My goal was to complete the Nyon by night set of missions. It’s the top line in the screengrab above. It’s a quick set of missions to complete with just a hack but portal for six portals. As the servers were not acting up or slow the time it took to do the walk was enough to complete the six missions. In the process, I captured a few portals and established a few more fields over the city.

While on this walk I listened to the You’re Dead to Me podcast by the BBC. It’s a podcast that explores history in a light-hearted manner. It has a comedian, an expert on the topic of the episode and the presenter. In the episode I listened to they were discussing Harriet Tubman, It’s the little brother of the In Our Time Podcast.

When I was playing Ingress a few years ago I didn’t track the walk with a GPS. I tracked it for this walk. You see that rather than be a large circular hike without overlaps you have the opposite. You see that I walked over certain streets in Nyon two or three times. You also see that there are thorns where I walk to the right or left of my course to get a portal or other.

It’s especially around the Centre of Nyon that you see that I walk through many more streets than usual. On a normal walk, I’d walk from A to B choosing the most direct route. In this case, I go up and down certain streets two or three times.

If you do this without trying to complete a mission it will be even more chaotic as you walk from portal to portal to hack, capture, up, field or other.

During the lull between summer sports and winter sports Ingress is a good way for some people to get out and be physically active without necessarily driving for hours.

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Bookcrossing and A November Walk

Bookcrossing and A November Walk

Byrichard

Today I went for a slight variant and came across a book dating back to 1930 so of course I picked it up. I like the look and feel of old books. I also like that they carry history. The book is 91, almost 92 years old and it has been passed on from generation to generation for almost six generations. I looked in the book and at first I just ignored the scribbles at the front of the book, not thinking much of it. Now that I looked closer I noticed the BCID so I looked up bookcrossing.com and logged that I found the book.


Now that I know about this project I feel that I should add books that I own to that database, for people to find and share them. One book has 601 hops, and the next only 198. That is how many times books have been passed on from person to person.


I see that the project is still new but it will soon reach two million members (bookcrossers) and approaching 14 million books. It is present in 132 countries, and what is impressive is that this is only since April 2021, so the site is still new. Registering a book is quick and easy. Note the ISBN, Double check the info, write a comment, create the book, and then add the BCID to the inner cover and a new book is logged. It takes seconds.


I believe that this is a great project because if you think that the use case for cars, is bad, due to how much time they spend sitting around, then imagine how bad it is for books. They spend years, even decades on shelves collecting dust, without being read more than once. With a website like Bookcrossing those dormant books are given the opportunity to travel, to be read, to be discussed and to be shared, over and over again. A book is no longer read by one person but dozens, or even hundreds. It works like a library, but the library is the world, and everyone can be a curator.


I could now create an entry for The Unbearable Lightness of Being and other favourite books of mine, and over time I could follow as they are shared, commented on, and as their locations move either west or east, south, or north. It would show how interconnected the world is.


I will participate in this project. I like the opportunities that I think it opens up.

PhotoPrism, Walks in Cold Weather and Migrating to Linux

PhotoPrism, Walks in Cold Weather and Migrating to Linux

Byrichard

A Cold Walk

Yesterday I went out for my daily walk but within minutes I noticed that my legs felt cold and that I really did need the scarf that I wore. It’s exceptional for me to wear a scarf. My fleece and my inner coat both have neck protection built in so I usually feel fine. Yesterday was unusually cold so I was happy to add the scarf to really keep my neck warmer. I removed it for a few minutes because it felt itchy but I soon put it back on.

PhotoPrism is Still Indexing

In the meantime PhotoPrism has been chugging away, indexing tens of thousands of files and adding location information as well as other metadata. It has indexed 60,000 files of which 20,000 are videos. Most of the video files are junk though, stuff I saved that has no personal value. I’m marking the video files as private and I will probably delete them as they take teraybtes of space without having much value.

Migrating to a Linux Machine

I also experimented with migrating my blog writing from this mac to a Linux machine. I managed to gh clone the blog files from github to my local linux machine but struggled a little with uploading the test file from the linux machine to the web server. While writing this blog post I was reminded of the solution that should work.

My mac is old and I suspect that at some point the battery will fail and I will lose access to it. I already had to swap the battery once and soon it will die again, and that’s when I will stop using it.
I considered swapping the battery a second time but I saw that Apple is about to stop support for it. If I can use a Linux machine instead, then I save money.

And Finally

Walking in challenging weather is good. It requires us to equip ourselves better, to remain comfortable, whether it’s cold, rainy, windy, or a heatwave. By migrating from Google Photos to PhotoPrism I can keep photos and videos locally rather than in the cloud, and access them with ease, as well as slide from the cheapest service to the cheapest service without investing days or weeks in the effort.

Sliding from Mac to Linux is about learning, and cutting costs, but mainly about experimentation and learing about a different OS. It’s good to be comfortable on Windows, Linux and Mac. At least now if, and when, the mac fails I will be ready to slide from one device to the other.

The Phone Box library Walk
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The Phone Box library Walk

Byrichard

If you’re looking for a reason to walk from one village to another the practise of using old phone boxes as free libraries are common in Switzerland. This means that if you’re shopping around for books in Switzerland you can either go to the shops and buy them with the car or you can go for a walk and see if any of the nearby villages have the books you’re looking for.


Former phone box used for sharing books
Former phone box used for sharing books


In Gingins, Grens, Eysins, Nyon and other towns, you can swap books. In Gingins you can get books from the recycling centre where instead of recycling books they re-share them. You can also get them from where the old post office was. In Grens and Eysins they have book sharing as well. These are open twenty-four hours a day.


In Grens it is especially amusing because they have labels for French, English, German, Italian and other language books. If you’re learning a language you can get books to read for free.


Instead of walking from one village to another for a coffee or to play on the swings (if you’re accompanied by children) you can walk and see if you find interesting books.


They have children’s books, cookery books, fiction and factual. If your bag is large enough, and if you have enough energy you could even pick up some of the heavier books. I found one about North African cooking, two about avalanches and others that are about dinosaurs and other topics.


I think that it’s a great way to share books. Instead of throwing books away or letting them sit on a shelf after they have been read you can place them in these phone boxes and the next reader can pick them up and read them in turn. By walking from village to village it helps you keep fit. By walking in towns and going to the different book sharing points the same benefit is present.


The beauty of phone boxes is that they are often protected from the weather so instead of having one library in a building to serve several villages each community shares books internally.


Goodreads, or some other reading sharing app, should add functionality to the app so that people with their app on their phone could catalogue which books are in which village. If other users of the app are looking for a book they can see if there is any book sharing point with this book. Books would then be read and shared more easily.

More Cowbell

More Cowbell

Byrichard

A rusty cow bell bell


Tomorrow I will be driving for twelve hours and I hope that I find it as relaxing as the last drive but I doubt that I will be that lucky. We will see how traffic and other conditions are.


I hope that I have a good two or three audiobooks to listen to, so that I may be entertained and focused. We will see.


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