Cycling over short distances can be a challenge especially when that short distance takes you from the foot of the Jura to the top over 12 kilometres at a 6-10% grade. Cycling up to La Barillette is an endurance test. Perseverance is key.
You can start the climb either from Cheserex or Gingins. The climb starts sharply and takes you up in to the forest. As you climb you follow the winding road by a stone block where old road rules are written. The stone dates from the 19th century and speaks of the regulations which were in effect.
The path takes you up some one way and two way roads. At every kilometre as you climb some plaques tell you the gradient for the next kilometre as well as the gradient. As you progress these are welcome. They let you know how much further you have to go.
The first 9 kilometres are the hardest. For 9 kilometres you will be struggling to keep your forward momentum and there is a chance that on the first two or three attempts you will give up, especially if you use as heavy a bike as I use. Once you have reached the 9 kilometre mark the path flattens out at around 1000 metres and it is just a matter of cycling for a further 3.7km.
When you get to the top you have a beautiful vista of the Lac Leman. You can see from Villeneuve all the way to Geneva. You can see the Alps in their full glory and you can see the Canton de Vaud. You can see Lausanne, Morges, Nyon, Cheserex and many of the villages below. It’s a great opportunity to spot peaks and get to know them. There is a map showing you the name of the peak and it’s shape.
If you train over the coming month and see that you have a good time on Strava then you could join the VTT race and see how you compare with others.
In summer months from Wednesday to Sunday the restaurant de la Barillette is open. It has a great view of the landscape which you can enjoy while eating an entrecôte or fondue.
Yesterday I went for a run despite the rain. I was going down to run along one road that I usually avoid because of dog walkers. I ran along it before spotting someone walking with a dog. I couldn’t tell whether he was walking towards me or away from me so I turned around. I ran along a difficult bit of grass, trying to avoid the drivers in cars who have no empathy for people on foot.
To the left there is a massive field of mud. It used to be an agricultural field but the Swiss turned that field into a field of mud that fills with water when it rains. There is a dirt road but that dirt road is behind a fence. It can’t be accessed on foot.
I was running towards an agricultural road where I would be off the road once again. Once on the road I appreciated the metalled surface but I heard barking so I turned to look to the right and saw a cage with what appeared to be a dog or more barking so I continued running. I then spotted that two dogs were running along a road, on a course to intercept me. I count this as a dog attack because I turned around and ran back towards the road with traffic. In the end I cut across a fallow field but the fallow field was filled with deep puddles of water which I tried to avoid stepping in.
My feet ended up ankle deep in water several times and the effort of running was far greater than if I had been able to follow the path I wanted to run initially. The problem is that I had to overcome my fear of dogs to enjoy that route.
Over the pandemic, and ever since then I have found walking routes that keep me away from people, and away from their dogs. The habit that I picked up during the pandemic never ended, because COVID denialism replaced pandemic awareness. I walk by people sometimes, but if I can avoid them I do.
Over the last five years I have walked locally almost every single day and I have found routes that I enjoy walking along. Now I have an eight kilometre loop that I walk either clockwise or anti-clockwise. I had more routes but because of how cars behave towards me I decided to abandon certain walking roads.
When I hear a car I often step into the wet grass and the mud, because I know that they never slow down for me. Buses don’t slow down, delivery trucks don’t slow down. Motorbikes don’t slow down, and bikes don’t even bother to give me a safe space. The result is that I step into the wet grass and mud, and they wave to thank me. I’m not getting out of their way out of courtesy, unless they’re tractors or trucks. I’m getting out of their way because I am so tired of them passing me way too fast, way too close. It was easier to change my walking route.
For a long time I walked with waterproof shoes but I stopped, because waterproof shoes have good tread, and good tread is excellent at trapping mud. The problem with shoes that are great at trapping mud is that they require half an hour to clean at the end of every walk. It’s easier to wear shoes that have little to no tread. These shoes are not waterproof, so my feet get soaked.
Yesterday I was dressed for running, so I was warm when I was running. Because of the two detours I took, along wet fields the humidity wicked up from my socks to my trousers, and from my cap down to my t-shirt. This is despite wearing waterproof trousers and a rain coat (with no hood).
I have a route that I run and walk every day, whether clockwise, or anti-clockwise. Because of the rain I thought there would be no dog walkers, and that I could enjoy my rainy route. Due to the dog walker I couldn’t, so I deviated, and that deviation eventually got me soaked.
I achieved my running goal nonetheless. I would have enjoyed it more without the challenge of overcoming my fear of dogs. My fear of dogs is recent, growing over the last two or three years. Before that I didn’t bother about seeing dogs. The problem is that a dog ran and barked very aggressively along one fence, near Crassier. Two or three times I encountered that dog with nothing to hold it back so I ran into a field, and waited for it to leave me alone. Another time a dog ran towards me and barked aggressively near a forest, and I climbed onto a fallen down tree to have a slight height advantage. Yet another time I encountered a dog in a forest, where I shielded behind a tree until it left me alone.
The one that radicalised my fear of dogs was near the motorway. I stood still waiting for the owner to put in on a leash so that I could past. Eventually it charged me, ready to attack. I turned to run, and then turned to face it. I really thought that this would result in me being mauled. I walked away with no physical harm, but traumatised by the experience. The only time I decided not to avoid a dog walker I ended up being charged.
Since then I always avoid dogs when I’m alone.
Without dog walkers and cars on agricultural roads I would love my daily local walks. The pandemic showed me the euphoria of walking without cars and I really miss how quiet and pleasant the world was, when cars were rare. I call it the lock down honeymoon. For people who enjoy local walks it was fantastic.
There was a time when I would automatically get into a car to go for a walk. There was also a time when I would not consider going for a walk, or run, in the rain. Those days are gone. Now I go for my daily walk, or run, whatever the weather. I planned to be out for about half an hour yesterday, but because of the deviations I ended up going through wet fields. If I had run my usual route I would have remained relatively dry.
The rain is falling again today, so once again I will get wet, but this time I am walking so I can wear waterproof shoes, maybe.
I have ascended the Alpe de Zwift 5 times since i started using Zwift. My first climb took about one and a half hours, and then about one hour and sixteen minutes and finally just 57 minutes. I managed to get down to 57 minutes because I participated in Stage 6 of the Tour De Zwift event.
On previous rides I had ridden up the Alpe de Zwift alone. The first time I took it slow. My goal was simply to get to the top without worrying about how fast I did it. When that goal was achieved I went up once more alone and managed.
I participated in the Revo Climbers events twice and because we stopped several times to wait for people to catch up I was not going to get a personal best.
With the Tour de Zwift event things were different. This wasn’t a race but at the same time this wasn’t a group ride in which we had to stop and wait for people.
I rode slowly from the start of the TDZ event to the base of the Alpe De Zwift and then as we started to climb I started to pedal harder. I got one star, and then another, and then another. Eventually I started to feel tired and slowed down for half a segment before boosting again. I pedalled with a power of between 160-200 watts for most of the climb. I sometimes went up to 220 watts or more.
One of the great things about climbing up the Alpe de Zwift event is that you’re cycling with a group that is so spread out that you constantly have the opportunity to leapfrog from one group to a second, and then to a third and eventually you see that you’re at 800 metres and that you only have about three hundred metres to climb and you think “I can start to rest a little” but you don’t because you see that your time is faster than usual. You think to yourself “if I don’t push on to the end I will have wasted a lot of energy without getting a personal record so you push harder.
How hard did I push? Hard enough for a leap in FTP from 202 watts to 218 watts and I shaved 9 minutes off of my previous personal best. I got 22/22 stars for this climb and now I’m going to regret it because I will need to work on getting my ability to put out 230-240 watts for an hour. I have an interesting fitness challenge ahead of me.
If I continue at this rate then by this Spring or Summer when I have the opportunity to ride up the real thing (Alpe D’Huez) I will have a good time. My riding around Switzerland and its cols will also benefit.
What’s especially nice about this is that I didn’t really suffer. I didn’t doubt that I could make it to the top and my heart rate didn’t increase too much. I could have continued riding around Zwift but as my challenge was to get up during the event I was happy to let gravity drag me back down to the gate where everyone who has called it a day stops.
I went from the iPhone SE to the iPhone 8 plus to the iPhone SE (2020) because the 2016 iPhone was an excellent low budget iphone that did everything you needed, in a small package. I switched to the iPhone 8 Plus purely to use the bigger phone screen with a drone. If you can see what you’re doing then a big screen is worthwhile. Eventually I crashed the drone and the need for such a large screen degraded, and that’s why I eventually settled for the iPhone SE(2020).
Crosscall Core S4 – Good for hiking, climbing, via ferrata etc.
At first I considered a feature phone as a backup phone so I got the Crosscall Core S4 because I was curious to see whether a feature phone could replace a smartphone for twitter, facebook, web browsing and more. It can’t. KaiOS should go for text only website displays but it doesn’t. It is slow and clunky. The one good thing is that you can drop it in a puddle and not worry about a thing.
Low End Androids
I was then tempted by cheap android solutions for 200 CHF but the issue with these is that they’re usually low end android phones that are slow, laggy, and give the same experience of a feature phone, but without the small screen but with added fragility.
Fairphone
I then considered Fairphone, and with its price point it is close to the iPhone, but with a deal-breaker flaw for me. A big screen. The problem with big screen phones is that they’re heavy, bulky and annoying to cycle or run with. They are also hard to hold and use with one hand. I also worry that with Fairphone the OS, camera and general user experience will be mediocre.
The Car
Although idiotic one of the reasons for which I decided to stick with iOS is that the car plays well with car play and when I tried to play with Android’s equivalent I had no luck. If you can’t use your phone for in-car navigation then the car’s software version costs about 300 CHF per map or more. For that price, it’s worth sticking with iOS for now.
Context
We are now in 2022 and mobile phones have reached a plateau in terms of features, apps and more. Now it is a question of iterative changes rather than revolutionary changes. As I wrote this blog post I read the specs for the SE and the 8Plus and they are practically the same phone, except for the processors. In light of this buying a 1200 CHF phone will not give you a huge advantage over a cheaper phone. The SE and 8 plus are similar, but the SE is small and light.
For around 500 Francs you can get the iphone SE, whereas for the flaship iPhone 13 Max, with better specs you’d be paying two to three times more, for something that could drop out of your pocket and break. I’d rather spend 1300 CHF on a laptop or camera, than on a phone.
The Advantages
Small phones are easy to hold, easy to carry, fit into most pockets and they’re light. The phone ways 60 grams less, but when you consider the difference that a case would make then the difference can be more than a hundred grams. When you consider that you carry your phone everywhere all day long, it’s worth having something small and light.
And Finally
This isn’t meant to be a phone review. This is a demonstration of the thought process that you may go through before choosing a new phone. It isn’t simply a matter of getting the flagship device, or the cheapest device, or the smallest device. It’s about finding the device that fills the niche that you want to fill at that moment in time. At this moment in time I needed a new phone with a healthy battery and a smaller size. KaiOS doesn’t fill that need, and I don’t trust cheap androids to fill a niche. That I could not automatically use android’s car features with ease, sealed the decision. This was a thought-out decision, rather than an impulse purchase.
Last night I installed Immich on an HP laptop with ease. The issue I came up against is that laptops sleep and hibernate after a few minutes unless you are actively using them. This means that you need to use them whilst files are being transferred if you do not want tasks to be interrupted. That’s why, this morning I decided to try installing immich on two different raspberry Pi devices. The first is the one running Nextcloud.
Trial and Error Installation
I struggled with this install because first I had to download the right docker packages and then I had to unpack them and then I needed to check that docker was up and running and then I had to try to get Immich to launch but I encountered an error message. “no matching manifest for linux/arm/v8 in the manifest list entries”. After a quick search of the web I found that version of Linux and ARM processor are not supported via this instance so I searched for whether Jammy Jellyfish is. It is and that’s when I tried to install on my other Raspberry Pi 4 device. This time was a success so I have Photoprism and Immich running on one Pi and Nextcloud running on the second.
Best for 360 Photos
The biggest difference I noticed with Immich is that it supports 360 photos. If you’re the type of person to take spherical photographs you will be happy with this version. Another strength is that the app is free. It gives you the option of uploading in the foreground or the background, and on or off wifi.
With this experiment I am uploading the photos from a secondary iphone that I retired from outdoor use due to the battery getting old. I am now uploading 19,000 images and videos from that device to Immich to see how it copes. With the laptop it struggled against the device’s desire to sleep. Now it should run until it’s done on the Pi.
Jobs Status
If you look at the administration page you will see job status for a few jobs. These are: Generate thumbnail, extract metadata, library, sidecar metadata, tag objects, smart search, recognise faces, transcode video, storage template migration and migration.
With this instance you see that each job has “active”, “waiting”, “clear” and pause.
Server Stats
The server stats aren’t as complete as Nextcloud. These stats tell you about total usage in terms of photos, videos, storage as well as info by user about photos, videos and size of photo gallery.
Image Tagging
Image tagging is off by default in settings. It uses microsoft/resnet-50 as the image classification model.
Video Transcoding
Immich gives quite a bit of control for video encoding. It gives you options to control Constant rate factor, preset for how quick or slow an encode is, audio codec, video codec, whether h.264, hevc or vp9. You can also select video encoding from 480p to 4k.
It gives you control over max bit rate, threads used, transcode policy, tone mapping, two pass encoding hardware encoding and more.
The Phone App
The phone app has four tabs. Photos, search, sharing, and library. Photos shows all photos that the app is allowed to see, as well as clouds next to the images that have been synced and clouds with a line for images that are yet to be synced. The library tab shows you the albums that are on the device.
The backup icon at the top allows you to select which albums you want to include or exclude, as well as the total number of images, the number of images backed up and the remainder.
The uploading file info gives you the file name, creation date and id info for immich.
It’s in the backup settings that you can choose automatic foreground backup, for when you open the app and want to sync, automatic background backup if you want background options as the nuance to only upload when charging.
With Photoprism and Immich I noticed that you have the option not to backup iCloud images. Immich and Photoprism indicate when they are downloading images from iCloud to the phone, and uploading from the phone to themselves.
Geeking Out
When files are uploaded from the phone or other device they are moved to the uploads folder and from there Immich reads their metadata and sorts them into folders by year, and then by individual days of the year. The format is year-date-day. The images are then stored with their default name.
Export from Google Photos – Takeout
Yesterday I came across Immich-Go which is a tool that can, among other things import from zipped archives without prior extraction. This is great, considering the eight hundred or more zip files from Google Takout, containing all my photos. With this tool I can save a lot of time and effort but it does come with two disclaimers:
?? This an early version, not yet extensively tested
?? Keep a backup copy of your files for safety
Immich comes with the same warning: “The project is under very active development. Expect bugs and changes. Do not use it as the only way to store your photos and videos!”
Since I have Nextcloud, Photoprism and now Immich running I think I’m spreading the risk of all three failing at once.
Why use PhotoPrism, NextCloud and Immich?
iCloud, Picasa and other tools were great for storing photos on our laptops until we lost the ability to swap out the default drive with a bigger drive. Now that we the same storage on our mobile phones, as on our laptops we need external devices to back up images. If we use hard drives then we need to plug them in before each sync and this takes time, and limits mobility. NAS storage solutions are interesting but if the NAS driver fails then we have hard drives that we can no longer access. The beauty of using Raspberry Pi, thin clients and Bare bone PCs is that we have redundancy.
If a Pi dies we just remove the SD card and within seconds our photo gallery is restored by inserting it into a second device. We could start with a 256 gigabyte SDXC card and move up to a 500 gig sd card before moving up to a two terabyte card.
For more resiliency I would use a USB drive connected to the Pi to really increase storage capacity from half a terabyte up to 120 terabytes, in theory, with certain multidisk storage solutions.
With this setup if the Pi fails you just swap out the Pi.
And Finally
I reconfigured my Pis around. Now I have one Pi with photoprism and Immich. I have another with Homeassistant, a third with Nextcloud and a fourth running Pi-Hole. By swapping cards between Pis I got to see whether installations were easily transferred between devices. Home Assistant was, but the Pi-Hole wasn’t happy. Until this experiment I had just copied and pasted instructions. With Immich I did this too, but because I saw that I had to download specific packages to get docker to work I practiced using curl, and then replacing version numbers for an unpack command.
I encountered an error that meant that one setup woudln’t work, but instead of destroying a Pi configuration that I had a added to another one and it worked. It’s easier to start from scratch and get things to work, especially if they have a Pi image, like Photoprism does. Photoprism and Immich run on docker, so they both need the same base setup, which is why they work in parallel.
To conclude, with Docker you could install Nextcloud, Immich and Photoprism on the same Pi and have the three of them running on the same system. Each one uses a different port so they do not clash. You could even add a splash page so that when people browse to this device they are given the choice of all three storage solutions.
Recently I have been toying with the idea of removing Google Ads from my site and adding a donation option instead. This escalated, when, yesterday I was seeing ads in the admin panel of my wordpress blog. Ads are disruptive enough for users, with full screen invasive ads that require you to acknowledge the ads, as well as others that take up the lower third of the screen.
These ads bother me so much because they’re impossible to see subconsciously. They’re not passive. They’re invasive. On quite a few sites the ads are so invasive that it interrupts your browsing experience. What makes this so bad is that we choose to give free reign to place ads as Google sees fit, but rather than place discrete ads that are noticed subconsciously they want ads that stop us in our tracks.
Initially ads would be inserted in the blog feed so that every few paragraphs or every few posts you’d see an ad. Now they interrupt your browsing experience on every single page load. Not only do these ads disrupt the browsing experience, and encourage people to browse away from our pages, losing views and interest but they don’t generate any income anyway. We’re bugging people for nothing.
Google is getting the long tail income from all those disruptive ads, and we’re providing a bad user experience to those that browse to our site, rather than read what we write, in feed readers.
Recover Revenue From Ad Blockers
It gets worse. Not only does Google Adsense spam us in our admin panel but it wants us to pester people to turn off ad blockers. People turn ad blockers off in the first place because of how obnoxious they are. If an ad fills your entire screen you’re likely to turn ad blockers on. If ads take up almost all the screen you’re likely to turn ad blockers on.
I used ad blockers on YouTube because I didn’t want to see a minute of adverts before watching a video for ten seconds before deciding that it’s crap.
A Need for Better Adverts
When I use Twitter I block every advertiser I see. Anyone that advertises on Twitter deserves to be blocked. I hardly use ad blockers because I do want websites to benefit from my visits.
iOS App ads
When I use several iOS games I sometimes watch ads to speed up game progress but in so doing I get frustrated that the ads last for thirty seconds to a minute, and that they’re for spam games, rather than fun games. I call spam games those that require you to watch crappy adverts to progress, and that pay for ads for you to play games that are so awful that they need ads, rather than word of mouth to gain users. Ads are barely ever for something useful or desired, despite “we want to show you personalised ads”.
Looking for Advertisers
I currently write blog posts every single day about a diversity of topics. That I have written daily for 317 days or more should be a selling argument for encouraging brands to pay me directly for placing ads on my blog, rather than taking the easy “Google Adsense” route. If my blog was niche I could target specific brands or companies, but because it varies from day to day I could find a number of advertisers, or ask for donations. It depends on how pro-active, or passive I want to be. Google Adsense was a good option but now it has lost steam.
And Finally
With what I have learned over the last few years I could take control of how Google ads are displayed on my site, to make them less disruptive. It’s simply a matter of taking the time to tweak the layout to display ads in a way that I am content with. If I switch my blog to Hugo then the change is very easy to make. With Wordpress it will take a little more time.
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