Today I went for an Ingress Photo Walk before the rain and I eventually did have to go home because the phone was starting to get wet and there was no urgency to continue playing the game and walking.
I did spot a few things that were slightly out of the ordinary. The first thing was the mushroom beneath. I have spotted a few of these but this one did not have a bite taken out of it. They’re large and flat and you can see the corrugation, or whatever the correct term is, beneath. They have had enough moisture to grow over the last few days.
Mushroom with the Alps in the background
The next unusual site was this burned-out house. It appears to be fresh. I could see a ladder going to the first-floor window.
Burnt out house
The next unusual sighting was fountains with the sign “fountain stopped due to lack of water. You don’t often see this type of sign but due to the lack of rain of this summer, this might not be surprising. It might also be due to a lot of water being used to extinguish the fire, but I have not checked.
Fountain without water due to lack of water
The final and most interesting sight is this one. It takes us back in time to when rural meant agricultural. We see nice wooden doors, aged with time and reflecting a different age. We also see plenty of fresh firewood above as well as the small boxes below. I don’t know whether these were for charcoal or tools.
Without Ingress, I have cycled, walked and driven through this village plenty of times without exploring the small side streets. This time I did and I spotted some unusual sights. What is also of interest is that despite this village being quite small it has a lot of portals.
Initially, I thought of posting these pictures to Instagram but chose not too because I’d rather provide you with the images and their context. We need to go back to writing blog posts and sharing content from our own websites.
Last night I came across the Infomaniak Mail App and began to play with it. It’s a simple app that allows you to read infomaniak mails from their own mail app rather than others. The one thing that I miss is swiping right or left to go to the next or previous messages, but aside from that it work like I would expect an app to work.
The app can be blue or pink, according to your preference. I tried both, and I’m fine with either. It allows you to have a compact, normal or large thread density, to see e-mails more efficiently, or more clearly.
It automatically logged me into two of my three infomaniak e-mails which is practical.
App lock is offered. This allows you to require a thumb or pin to acess e-mails.
You have the option of defining what swipe actions do, in the thread view.
The e-mail client only supports Infomaniak accounts, for now.
To choose between reading all e-mails or just unread e-mails you have the toggle on the top right corner with “99+ unread e-mails”.
I tried sending an e-mail with an image but that failed and then I tried sending an e-mail without an e-mail and that succeeded.
And Finally
It’s nice that after so many years they finally decided to create an e-mail client. It works just as I would expect an e-mail client to work. It provides us with an in-house solution for checking e-mails, rather than relying on Spark and other e-mail clients. Login is also simplified, because infomaniak knows how it deals with it’s own e-mail servers.
The app is now at version 1.0.4, as of four days ago. It was released a month ago.
I often hiked with a Sigg one litre water bottle and it has served me well. It has been with me for rock climbing, via ferrata, hiking and more. I like it because it is light, easy to use and maintain. I liked the one litre version enough to get a smaller 600ml version for conferences and work.
Recently I noticed that the mouth of both bottles seems slightly discouloured. I don’t know whether they’re chipped or whether it’s oxydation from sitting around for so many months during the pandemic. I will probably still use them, once the world decides that Zero-Covid is the right strategy.
My other solution was a 750ml camelbak waterbottle and I find that this is a good solution too. I found that it was too large for home use, and everyday use so I’m now playing with a 600 ml water bottle and I prefer this form factor. It’s better for carrying on daily walks.
When I was studying about water filtering solutions I often came across the mention of nalgene bottles and after over a year of hearing about them, but having no curiousity in them I bought one a few days ago. I like that it has a graduated system on the side although I don’t usually need to ration water.
The wide mouth and it’s cap are suboptimal for drinking, especially if you’re walking. The advantage of nalgene wide mouths is that they helped to set the standard, at least according to one or two articles I read. This means that you can take most camelbak tops and put it on a nalgene bottle and vice versa. This increases drinking comfort.
There is no need to buy specialist tools or brushes, or cleaning tablettes etc.
In the last three days I have been for two walks with hiking sticks and a short run. On Sunday the walk was a ten kilometre loop that took me across several villages. During the walk I noticed that a barn’s roof was generating about 8000 watts of energy despite the day being overcast. If more farmers placed solar panels on their roofs we would have less need for high tension lines across the entirety of Europe ruining natural landscapes as power distribution would be local.
A short Run
I ran just 2.5km before walking the rest of the way. I wasn’t using the 105 CHF On Running cyclon shoes as I need to return those. Instead I was running with the 110 CHF trail glove shoes. I ran a short distance because I haven’t been running for a while so I don’t want to overload my system. I also wanted to make sure that I didn’t feel that my heels had hit the ground too harshly.
Interval Training
I walked for five minutes and then I ran for one minute, and then I ran for one minute, and then I walked for a minute, and then I ran until the bottom of a slope and then I walked up the other side, and then I ran for the flat bit up to the tunnel and then I stopped the running track. I could have been more ambitious but it’s easy to fall into the trap of pushing more than we need to, just for it to look normal or good on strava, Garmin or other places. I am a walker, not a runner. I can walk one and a half hours to two hours per day, every single day, with ease.
I could get to that level of fitness with running but at the moment I need to work on building a good base, and then I can push further. It’s also a way of breaking the walking routine. if I run I can go out for a shorter period of time but get a better cardio workout.
Not Quite Nordic Walking
I started walking with hiking sticks, first because I have a minimal shield if unleashed dogs decide to attack me again, and secondly because it uses my upper body. By the end of the walk on Sunday I could feel that some arm muscles were not used enough in normal walking.
It’s amusing to look at cadence when walking with hiking sticks because for a big portion of the walk my steps per minute was zero. When I use walking sticks I make them long. I take two to three steps between stick movements so it counts as if I am either not walking, or taking a third as many steps as normal. That’s why my step count after a 10km walk is just 8000 for the whole day, rather than 17,000 as it would have been if the step counter had been in a pocket or somewhere else.
And Finally
For the first time in a while I went for a walk without a bag. Usually I always have a bag with me, whether it’s empty, which it usually is, or not. I don’t know whether it impacts my running comfort but I will try to run without a bag for a few runs, to see if I feel a change.
Some of us are confined by freedom. By this I mean that as society is opened up, as people are told that they don’t need to wear masks, that they don’t need to self-isolate and that they don’t need to show covid passes, so the freedom of others is taken away. During a pandemic there are two types of people. Those that hear the word pandemic and think “I need to self-isolate, wear a mask, and vaccinate.” and the others who think “Why should I do what the state tells me to do? I am my own person.”
Quarantines have already been shortened so people who could be contagious are allowed to move through society freely. At the same time there is discussion about not requiring people to wear masks, returning to work and not requiring covid passes.
If this was in a vacuum we could say “well, let’s see what happens.” except that we are not. We see that Denmark has gone from the BA-1 wave to the BA-2 wave. We see that in England, France, Switzerland and the US the number of sick children is going up. We also see that hospitalisations are increasing. If we look at a map of Europe now with levels of spread of the virus then the whole of Europe is dark red with serious Covid outbreaks.
This is the worst possible time to reopen society, because the virus is already virulent, and governments are not trying to contain it. All of the indicators above show that we have a choice to make for this spring and summer. Do we self-isolate and spend a third summer in solitude, or do we play pandemic roulette, hope for the best, and see whether we fall sick? I would prefer not to play pandemic roulette personally, so, for now, the summer will be solitary.
Nextcloud is an open source file sharing solution that has iOS, MacOS, Android, Windows and Linux apps. You can install it via a docker container, natively or via a number of other solutions. For my experiment I installed via Docker on Windows but haven’t done anything with it, and with [Nextcloudpi](https://nextcloudpi.com/). The latter is an ISO image that you can download and install to an SD card using the Raspberry Pi Imager.
Transfer screen
Use Case
It’s easy to take dozens, or even hundreds of pictures in a single day on the mobile phone but it’s a nuissance to download them all locally so you usually use iCloud, Google Photos or some other solution. This is great, for as long as you have enough space on your phone. The moment iOS or Android stops offloading your photos from your device you’re in an annoying situation. Uploading photos to cloud services is painless. Retrieving them is a nightmare, for two reasons. The first reason is that you need to have enough storage locally to download all those files. When you’re on a laptop storage is at a premium.
You could use an external hard drive but it may take days, or even weeks to download all of your files. This means that you need to keep your machine plugged in and downloading for as long as it takes to download those files. That’s where Nextcloud comes in. When it’s working correctly it will download files from your phone, either as you take them, or when you choose to upload them.
What it does
It allows you to store and share photos, including encoding and decoding of video files, as well as preparing preview files, reading RAW image files and more. It allows you to have contexts, calendar, time tracker, apps like GpxPod, Tasks and more. It also provides you with an RSS reader, video player, and audio player.
With the photo app you can use facial recognition and other AI tools. As images are added to the galleries it checks for their location and adds them to a map as you would with Google Photos and iCloud. It also gives you the option of adding an exif reader to get more info from your saved files. With the GpxPod app you can download walks, hikes, runs, bike rides and planned routes and view them on the screen. I have yet to play with it properly.
How to Break Things
– upload 19,000 images at once. It will overheat the device
– reboot the machine. Having a different ip will get nextcloudpi.local to fail.
– ensure that your machine is called nextcloudpi.local
– use “sudo nano /var/www/nextcloud/config/config.php” to enter the config file and ensure that the ip address is listed. It needs to see that the current IP is a trusted one.
– Go from one wifi access point to another. I found that if I go from the living room wifi to the bedroom wifi it loses sight of the server and fails.
– Allow the Pi to Overheat. If the Pi reaches above a certain temperature the Pi will begin to fail. You need a fan if you’re playing with Nextcloud on a pi, especially when synchronising tens of thousands of pictures.
Why This Solution is Interesting
The system is new to me so I’m micromanaging it as it tries to get through thousands of files. Once it’s up and running it will be invisible and that’s the beauty of such a system. Once the Pi has its own fan it will no longer overheat and if I provide it with WiFi and Lan it should be accessible locally whether on one wifi network or the other.
With some network storage solutions you have the disks and the LAN interface within the same box, and if one fails you might lose access to the drives. With this solution you can attach an SSD or other hard drive to the Pi. If the Pi fails you just replace it. Once everything is running smoothly I would have two drives. The primary drive would be in constant use, and the second drive would serve as a backup.
It’s also low cost. A raspberry pi is cheap, and so are micro SD cards. Mobile phones are usually 128, 256 or 500 gigabytes. With a single SD card you can backup your phone every time you get home, as it syncs the most recent files.
And Finally
If I was not synchronising a huge backlog of photographs this solution would be up and running. It’s because I’m trying to backup the images that are on my phone that there are teething problems. I edited the config file to recognise nextcloudpi4.local and the two ip addresses the device is currently on. I have it on wifi and lan because I want to see if I can access it from either wifi. If that is the case then I have succeeded and the last step will be to have the Pi in a case with a fan.
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