An Autumn walk at the foot of the Jura.
An Autumn walk at the foot of the Jura. It was earlier today as I was doing the later shift.
[flickr-gallery mode=”photoset” photoset=”72157627857326021″]While playing with Nextcloud I saw that the raspberry pi was overheating so I played with a fan for people to cool the device. It worked well, except that when you’re holding a fan you’re stuck holding a fan. I looked at various Raspberry pi cases and decided to get a Joy-IT case with an integrated fan.
The case is simple. It consists of a base plate, a middle block, and a top plate. You put the pi, with the card inside. You then plug the fan to some of the GPIO pins and the fan starts to spin and cool the Raspberry pi beneath. The Raspberry pi went from 50-70°c to 38°c so it works, but it’s noisy. It seems paradoxical that something as small as a Raspberry Pi could end up with such a noisy fan. It’s as noisy as an old laptop or an old external hard drive.
This does not mean that I don’t like the case. I do. I think it’s great that it is so simple. You don’t need screws. You just put the card into the Pi’s card slot, put the pi on the base plate, put the middle sandwich part over the USB and ethernet adaptor, you then plug in the fan to the GPIO pins, and put the top on.
In my case I found that the fan seemed to be blocked so I improvised a solution to keep the fan from hitting the Pi and now it’s happilly spinning and cooling the Raspberry Pi. For 11-12 CHF you don’t expect it to be as silent as newer mac book pro.
As I write this post I’m playing with the time tracker app in Nextcloud. With the app you can provide project names, and then you can specify the task that you’re currently doing. I created an IT project, and a blogging project. Now I’m tracking the daily blog post time spent, and when the post is finished I can stop the timer, and see how I have spent the morning.
I think the fan on this case is so noisy that it would fit right into an air conditioned server room, but it’s too noisy for a living room or bedroom. I need to place it where it won’t be so disruptive.
On Saturday I went with a Glocals group up to Vex in the Valais for a short hike. We passed by the thermal pools before heading up to a village where we had some lunch. after that we kept going up towards another village before catching a bus back down.
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I’m active on the web, spending thousands of hours a year connected to the web. As a result I have to log into a lot of sites often. I don’t like logging in though. That’s why I would love for big name publishers like the WSJ, NYTimes and others to sign an aggrement with Facebook so that I may log into their service without having to remember my account details.
It would actually serve them better. Facebook knows who my friends are, where I studied, what stories I recommend and in some cases why. It’s also a reflection of the times that are coming.
I went on a blog commenting spree last week and almost all blogs ask for three things, name, e-mail and website url. When I have to input the data I think twice about leaving a comment, and may recommend the story and write a comment in friendfeed instead. Too bad the publisher loses that bit of interactivity.
For those publishers that want me to subscribe to your website you can forget it. There’s no way I’m going to subscribe to a website I visit less than once a month. It’s just too much effort and too much additional information to remember.
What I love are blogs that use Disqus. That’s because when I leave a comment I can find them all in one place at the end of the day. If someone answers my comment then I can see what they wrote. It means it’s an automated attention solution. Anything where I can spend time looking at new content is appreciated. It’s especially true now that web forums have become extro verted rather than introverted.
You’ve probably noticed it too. How many forums are you still part of? In my case none. I prefer the friendfeed and feedly method of doing things, where I actively seek information and get it sent to a central point from which other people converge to comment, and head back out once they’re done. I love the web in it’s current form as a result.
Switzerland is currently toying with the idea of forcing people to wear masks outdoors but it’s not clear whether this would be for cities or whether it would be for villages and even rural walks. If the obligation to wear a mask at all times is enacted then I have two reactions.
The first is that I never leave the house without a mask and that I wear it when I am forced to walk within a few meters of people. Since the end of March I have been staying as far away from people as possible, which is how I discovered all my new walks.
The second reaction is that wearing a mask outdoors in a city makes sense. It doesn’t make sense when you’re out for a two to three hour walk along main roads where you rarely cross paths with anyone. To be forced to wear a mask even when we are kilometres from any other human would really suck. I know it’s not a scientific term, but that’s a step too far.
No one had to say “Don’t socialise, don’t meet friends, don’t go to restaurants, don’t go to pubs, bars or nightclubs.” No one had to say “Walk along rural paths where no one else walks to avoid any and all human contact”. These are things I did of my own free will. It’s not easy, but the documentaries I have watched and the books and articles I have read make this logical.
If I have to wear a mask for the entirety of my three hour walks where my exposure to others may last half a minute or less then I will be quite disappointed. The reason for that disappointment is that we would never breath fresh air if this rule was enacted. We would always breath mask air. We will suffer from Vitamin D as a result of not getting any exposure to sunlight and we will fall sick, for a new reason.
From what I understand in the Le Temps article this will not include my cherished quiet walking routes, luckily. I will have to keep hoping for rain as the only valid reason for indoor training. 😉 (I know an ascii wink is not good form, but I want you to know this is meant to be taken as a joke.)
For Context Switzerland, yesterday, became world leader in highest percentage increase in the number of new cases. “C’est en tout cas le pays qui compte la plus forte augmentation de nouveaux cas de Covid-19 ces 7 jours: +106%,” Within this context Switzerland must take rapid and immediate action to get the number of new cases per day back in control.
For those who understand French this article presents the situation.
The three points of the article are:
For months I have been saying that people need to take responsibility and that everyone has to do everything possible to reduce the risk of propagation of this virus, and as we see from the current crop of articles the scientific and medical communities say the same thing.
It’s a shame that ordinary people need to be confined for a pandemic to be controlled and then contained. It’s a shame that people can’t take a one or two month break from socialising during a pandemic to get life to return to normal as soon as possible.
The Guardian Article: Inside the Airline Industry Meltdown is an interesting article that looks at the growing number of planes that are being mothballed until better times come, about the removal from service of 30 aircrafts from a single airline etc.
Switzerland got down to 11 new cases per day in June. Yesterday there were 6600 new cases.
The amplitude of the second wave is much greater than the first as we can see from the graph above.