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Idle Lumber Empire – Thoughts
Many weeks ago I was encouraged to download Idle Lumber, but for weeks I didn’t bother to play the game. I don’t like new games, because I’m old, and I liked games where we bought the game, and then we could play for hours, with no instructions, unless we read the fabulous manual. With modern games they force you to RTFM rather than play and experiment.
Luckily this game isn’t awful, in this respect, so I have played it for two or three days and upgraded to new factories several times. I think the game play is good. It has just the right amount of actions to render it addictive. Until you take an overnight break and find that you need to tell the lumber trucks to go and pick up lumber every few minutes, and then you see that it’s a pay to win game.
You have a set number of actions you can do, and then you need to do boring, repetitive tasks, over and over, for hours. That’s why the game feels unhealthy, and addictive, rather than an actual game. I want games that allow you to do new things, to progress, and not to need to pay a few francs here, and a few more there. I want games where you play, without having to pay to progress.
Pay and It Plays for 10 Hours
There is an option where you can pay 10 CHF and it will play for ten hours, so you’re not stuck staring at a screen for hours in a row. In theory the game autoplays for two hours. If you log in every two hours the game requires less of your attention to be played.
The Premise of the Game
The concept of the game is simple. You cut down trees, and plant new ones. You debark the trees you cut down and then you buy machines to cut them into rough logs, then bigger blocks, before turning them into planks and sanding them. As you progress you upgrade each machine but at some point you need specific “staff members” to be able to upgrade that machine, and that’s where another aspect of the pay to win game comes in. Clash of Clans makers SuperCell made millions taking advantage of business men with money to blow on such games.
Defeating Themselves
We have all given in to the desire to pay, to win, and then found that by paying, we saved a few minutes or a few hours. Within seconds of game play we hit another wall. It’s that wall that makes it easy to resist paying for pay to win games. Get burned once, and you’ll never be careless loading the oven of pay to win games. (I might be comparing pay to win games to oven cooked food).
And Finally
If you have watched Big Timber, or are going to watch Big Timber then I recommend playing both at the same time. One easily complements the other. It’s a fun game, despite becoming repetitive after being played for too many hours in a row. In effect that’s a feature, because it makes it easy to stop playing for countless hours in a row, too often.
Switzerland, Fitness centres and the mountains
For three years I was a fitness club member. I loved going to the gym up to three times a week when possible. I loved training so much that I bought apps and devices to track my progress. Any time that I could not spend three sessions a week at the gym I felt disappointed. That passion, when you are in full time work can be hard to keep active.
I tried going to the gym at 6am and I tried going after work but the habit never picked up. In Switzerland fitness memberships can vary from 700-900 CHF per year to over 1200 CHF per year depending on the membership perks you take. If you go to the gym 52 times a year that’s 23 CHF per session. If you go twice a week it’s reduced to just 11 CHF per week. If you go three times a week it’s 7 CHF per session.
In theory this is a reasonable price. It’s less than a week’s pay for most professionals. In practice you want to justify the expense. You want to go to the gym when you have time. This means weekends, evenings and on public holidays. I was often frustrated to have free time but for the gym to be closed.
I would love to see gyms that take your outdoor sporting passions in to account. Running and cycling are already somewhat covered in the lac Léman region of Switzerland. What I would like to see next are ski days, via ferrata excursions and canyoning within the club.
During week days and when the weather is bad you would train in the fitness centre. As soon as summer weekends and holidays would allow then as a fitness centre you would enjoy the great outdoors. I see through Glocals and facebook groups that the interest to do activities in groups is there. Fitness centres could attract a younger demographic to join.
I love physical fitness and I love exercise. If I lived in a city like London or Paris I’d be happy to sit in a gym and train. I’d have filtered air and less traffic to contend with. As I live in the Swiss countryside though I want to take full advantage of what nature has to offer. When I find a fitness club that offers discounted canyoning, waterskiing and other activities, and subsidised via ferrata and ski days then I will rejoin.
Of Blogging and Substacking
A month or two ago we had the chance to jump on the Substack wagon while it was hot and to ride the wave of new followers and experience a growing community. I could have joined in. I could have become one of those “I’m one of you people” but I didn’t.
Substack Life
Substack went from being a newsletter to almost becoming a community of writers. I say “almost”, because for me to consider a community a community it has to behave like a community. It has to be a network of friends of friends, and it has to be about individuals connecting with other individuals, through their community.
With Substack it went from “Wow, notes look great” to “My follower numbers have exploded”, “oh so have mine”, and that’s when I disengaged. People behaved the same way on Twitter and the community was degraded into a network of strangers following each other and fighting for attention. Within the space of hours the network that it could have become was degraded to a popularity contest. I have no interest in these. If I wanted to join one I could socialise in the physical world of bars and other places.
What I don’t like about Substack, and social media in general, is that it’s about users creating content for the owners of the social network, and then making money off of our backs, without giving us anything in exchange. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and other networks have all made this move.
On Blogging
With tools like WordPress, among many others we have the freedom to generate content, and choose whether to pay for our own hosting, and manage our own websites and attempt to monetise them, or jump onto Wordpress.com and other solutions. and just create content for the pleasure of it.
I mention pleasure, because with blogs we write because we have inspiration. Either we have done something that we want to share, or we have an opinion on something, that we want to get out of our minds, by putting it on screen, and then forgetting about it.
I prefer to blog because although it could be e-mailed to someone it is usually just one post, in a timeline, among many others. People can look at it, think “this is dull and boring” and move on. With blogs there is no obligation to read any post. It’s all about whims.
With Substack the opposite is true. You write a post, you e-mail it, and people have to swipe to it, keep it on screen until it’s marked as read, before moving on.
I like e-mail for private conversations, but feel that newsletters et al would be better served by being blog posts that we can opt in to reading. or skip and ignore.
And Finally
I prefer blogging to Substack Newsletter writing for two reasons. The first is that I want to write about anything, rather than on a specific theme. The second reason is that I don’t want to generate content that someone else will benefit from, more than I will. I don’t want to be used and exploited. With blogs I do not feel that way. With Substack I do., I went from being a person to a statistic within hours of Substack Notes being created.
Lac De Divonne
It’s a lake that was dug out when they built the A1 motorway. The quarry that was left behind became a lake. For a long time cars could drive around the lake.
The loop around the lake is good for walking, cycling, rollerblading and more. It is around 3.6km long and there are plenty of parking spaces beside it. If you want there is another option.
That option is the Voie Verte as it is called in France. There used to be a train line from Nyon to Divonne but it was destroyed to make way for the motorway. Some of the tracks were pulled up and it went wild.
Eventually they cut all the overgrowth, tarmaced the road, and gave it to cyclists, walkers and more. It’s a way to go from Crassier to Divonne without putting up with cars.
The advantage of this lake is that it is a flat loop. You can use it to run, cycle or rollerblade laps. You can use it to run a specific distance without having to invent a route along roadsides and more. It’s a way of working on endurance without the challenge of undulating terrain.
Aside from the lake there is a model solar system that is to a scale you can walk along. It gives you an idea of how much space is between the planets in the solar system as well as the relative size.
On the opposite side of the lake you have a reconstructed aqueduct for children to see how water was taken from Divonne to Nyon at the times of the Romans when Nyon was Julia Equestrius.
The lake is a tame simple walk that can be used for a number of things. It also has the advantage of being tarmaced. This means that even people like me can go for a walk without getting muddy shoes.
Amersports and Sports tracker
Today Amer Sports announced that it has bought Sports tracker. Sports Tracker is an application that I have been using since I had the Nokia N95 8GB. I used it on symbian, iOS and Android devices over the years. What I love about this app is the way it displays information about the work out. It gives you several screens while you are exercising with the option to select which information you want to see most.
Once you arrive home and synchronise the workout with the web interface you can see the information displayed above. You can choose whether there is a topographic map, a normal map or satellite imagery. It is simple and intuitive to read.
Suunto make devices that I like using. I have used the Suunto D9 diving computer, the Suunto D4i diving computer, the Suunto Ambit 2 and the Suunto Ambit3. Suunto dive computers are small diving computers that you can wear in day to day life. When you are passionate about diving this is nice.
The Suunto Ambit family are more interesting for people who do land based sports. I used the Suunto Ambit 2 and 3 when doing via ferrata, hiking, cycling and other sports. The advantage of these fitness watches is that they have long battery life. This means that you can be active for two or three days before worrying about the battery dying. In this respect they are far better than mobile phones for fitness activity tracking.
Suunto products and Sports tracker do not communicate natively. Suunto products synchronise with movescount. From movescount you need to export the GPX workout files and import them to Sports tracker. I would like to see Suunto devices communicate directly with Sports tracker. In my eyes the best option would have been for Sports tracker to buy movescount and for them to take over the web interface for Suunto. They both provide interesting web interfaces and combining the two would have been mutually beneficial.
Time will show whether Amer Sports with links to sports tracker, precor and Suunto will come out with an interesting amalgamation of the three products/services. I look forward to finding out.
Replacing a WD Thunderbolt Duo Drive with an ICY BOX
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.