One treat of being in Spain is that some people do wear masks when walking outdoors. You are normal for wearing a mask.
In Switzerland you are looked at as if you are eccentric or absurd. It is nice not to be looked at as a curiousity. It is nice to have the security of a mask without feeling like a freak.
A paradox of mask wearing in Spain is that it’s hot. In theory this would make it less appealing to wear a mask but it has no effect. People still want to be safe.
This weekend I went on a two day hike. It was a combination of a Summit Foundation themed hike and a Wehike event. The hike was over two days and two nights. We arrived on Gryon on Friday night and stayed at the Chalet Martin. This is a nice relaxed backpacker hostel with a trampoline, bunkbed rooms, optional breakfast and more. It is located within easy walking distance of the train station and is easy to find. I slept well.
First Day
Gryon is an interesting village with some old chalets. Two of these Chalets are hundreds of years old and listed as national monuments. They are side by side with a short description explaining why they are significant. You hike through the village for a short distance before climbing through some woods before getting to a large parking. From the large parking you continue uphill towards Chaux Ronde. You walk along the road for part of the way with some segments where you walk to the side of ski pistes, through some woods and up some pistes. If this was done as a day hike it would be easy to moderate.
For about one to two hundred metres you walk along an Arête which some people might feel uncomfortable doing. You have a steep drop off on either side so being sure footed and self assured are useful.
This is the most exposed parts of the hike. If you want to continue prepare yourself for such moments. If you’re used to the Tour D’Aï or the Rocher de Naye this segment will be pleasant, especially since you can see the Tour D’Aï from here. This is one of my favourite aspects of this two day hikes.
This was one of the most beautiful passages of the hike. You have nice green fields with great potential for numerous flowers. You see Switzerland in all of it’s beauty. The path from this point on is easier going and offers some great views.
When we arrived at this portion of the hike both the clouds and the light were playing with the rock formations so I kept looking right and behind me to see how they had changed, waiting for some interesting lighting to take pictures. If you’re on a photowalk then I would recommend finding a good place to wait for the light to be just right for a nice image. In the wrong light they may look dull.
When the light and mountains play nicely together you get a real separation between the grassy meadows, the cliffs, the sky and more. You get a sense of scale and contour. The rest of the hike down was through trees and then along a road. As I was carrying enough equipment for two days I felt exhausted by the time we arrived in Villars where we had a good meal at a restaurant. Almost everyone had Röesti.
The primary focus of this hike was to pick up rubbish left by skiers, snowboarders and other sports enthusiasts over the winter months. We picked up plastic, cigarette butts, gloves and more. Some of us were less passionate about it. If you’re on a hike and you drop rubbish think of the effort that you’re making with a simple hike. By hiking and picking up rubbish the effort is greater. You bend down and get back up frequently. It’s an alternative to burpees.
The Sigg Travel Mug Miracle Black flask has a mediocre name but a good niche. Drinking hot, or cold drinks, whilst driving, without worrying about it spilling, and as a bonus, the ability to open it one handed. This is especially relevant in a car, small enough not to have cup holders built in.
If you stand the Sigg Eddy+ 600ML next to the Sigg Travel mug Miracle 0.47ml they are the same size so if you can fit one into your hiking bag you can fit both. On one side you have your water, on the other you have your hot tea, coffee or other.
Today I tried drinking hot tea from it and the experience was good. I would warn against pressing the safety button straight after pouring steaming hot water into it. The button will purge hot steam onto your finger. You do feel heat, around the top after pouring in hot liquid, so it can help you guauge whether it has cooled enough for you to drink from.
Unlike the Camelbak Forge, that I liked using for years, and the Camelbak hot cap, that I was not overly enthusiastic about drinks do not spill to either side of your face. With both the camelbak forge and the hot cap I found that you would tilt too much sometimes, and it would spill down the sides of your face. With the Sigg TMMB 0.47 (I’m too tired of typing the full name each time) you get the fluid right where you want it.
The vessel itself looks and feels slender compared to other thermally insulated drinking vessels. I like the form factor. The lid is simple on the outside. You have the locking button, and the hole to drink from. The trigger button is opposite the drinking hole, easy to use.
If you flip the cap and look at the mechanism then it is made of two parts and three springs. You remove the mechanism by pressing both sides at once and it pulls out quite easily. You can then wash every component. There is also a sillicon cap that is used to provide a proper seal when you are not drinking from the vessel.
Based on first impressions I think that this will fit my desires and needs perfectly and I would even toy with the idea of getting the 0.27ml version for take away coffee or hot chocolate. I am happy with it so far.
For 40 CHF you can buy a Tapo or Xiaomi webcam and it is almost ready to be used as a webcam. You take it out of the box, plug it in, add an SD card, download the app, pair it with the phone and let the phone connect it to wifi and then it detects motion, can take video, photos and more, with ease. In such an environment it’s easy to forget about what we called “Plug and pray” back in the day.
Back in the geeky old days of computing there was a lot of trial and error to get things to work. You would try one thing, and see if it worked, and then another, and then a third, and then a fourth, and eventually you would either find a solution, or give up. One of the reasons I switched to Apple, rather than Linux, in 2003, is that I wanted to be able to connect to the university’s wifi with ease. I expected that if I used a linux machine I would struggle with wifi.
Apple is the leader in making everything work so flawlessly, as long as they want you to do things, that trial and error is part of history. Apple controls everything, to ensure that it works “flawlessly”. I put “flawlessly in quotation marks because my phone crashes or hangs on almost every one of my walks. I rebooted it today and yesterday, while walking. If I take photos during a walk the phone acts up and freezes, and stops the podcast I’m listening to.
I’m being distracted. The point is that Apple, until recently, was known for producing reliable devices. Windows is also known for dumbing down their devices more and more. They try to make it so that users just click install, and the computer does the rest. Usually webcams, printers and more are plug and play.
With Linux you’re using a tinkerer’s OS so things can be simple, if you buy a generic webcam and plug it in. I tried to set an android phone up as a webcam and it worked within minutes. Integration with Home Assistant was smooth and efficient.
With a Raspberry Pi 3b and a Raspberry Pi zero 2 W I have struggled for three or four hours trying to get the camera to work. You have to do A, and then you need to do B and then you need to do C. You also need to wire the camera into the board the right way.
As you’re doing this from a CLI you’re not seeing whether the webcam is giving a picture or not. I tried to take pictures and it appeared to take them but when I tried to get motion to work with the camera to stream to a device with a web browser I just see nothing. I get an error message about the camera not being available.
I know that the right camera is detected because I see it in the output. I just haven’t taken the time to see if the images generated correspond to what I expect them to be. The subtle art of of trial and error is about having a goal and tweaking and experimenting until you get the result you want to get.
The first error is that I wired the camera the wrong way. The second error is that I don’t need to use the legacy camera option with this camera. The third error is that I’m trying to get a Pi and camera module to work as a webcam before I get it to work within its own device.
I am so used to Windows, MacOS and dedicated hardware being so reliable that I forget about the trial and error part of computing that was once so familiar to those of us geeky enough to spend hours of our free time playing with computers. When computers just work it’s easy for everyone to be a geek, because turning it off and on again is easy. So is plugging in a USB device.
My aim is not to build a CinePi.My aim is to setup a webcam that I can see via Home Assistant. I can then add motion detection and more features when I achieve the initial goal of building a Raspberry pi webcam server in minutes“. The instructions are for the V2 module, or a logitech device, and I’m using the V3 module, so the instructions need to be updated. That’s why I’m struggling, and that’s why it’s interesting to do these projects.
I came across this challenge when following programming courses that were over a year old. Sometimes I had to look for the new way of doing things to get the code to behave as it was expected to. Sometimes ChatGPT, Bard and Bing are helpful to find the up to date way of doing things. It is also a case of Reading the Fabulous Manual (RTFM).
I call it the subtle art of trial and error because the art lies in learning a methodology by which to come up against an issue and to develop a system by which to resolve the issue in an increasingly short amount of time. The point isn’t in knowing how to do things. It’s in knowing where to look for help. It used to be called Google Fu.
I could easily buy a webcam for 12-30 CHF now but by experimenting with various “integrations” I invest my time in learning new skills and that has value. If I get FFMPEG to work, then I can potentially build my own camera systems. Instead of reverting to film like some, I could go the other way, and experiment with concepts similar to the Cinepi.
First things First, I have had a lot of fun at festivals, and I have volunteered for a few. What I object to is the noise pollution. In the 21st century we could avoid that noise pollution, so we should.
And now for the rant, now that I have told you I like festivals, when they don’t get in the way of other peoples’ desire for silence, for sleep.
As I write this I am in a sleep deprived state because I was unable to sleep according to my circadian rhythm due to a music festival. The sound engineers that work at music festivals are pretty dumb, so they build powerful stacks of speakers that are so loud that you need hearing protection at the music festival, and the surrounding countryside is filled with noise pollution.
I Know, I Know, They Don’t Care.
I know, I shouldn’t insult an entire profession for taking no pride in their work, and not taking any responsibility for the harm they do to the surrounding countryside. They can’t help it. They’re just not very bright.
I write this for catharsis, because for five hours yesterday the music festival upwind from where I live was noisy from 1900 to 0100. I felt like going to sleep earlier as I knew I had to get up early. In the end I failed to get to sleep until an hour or two after the noise pollution ended.
Highly Polluting
Blocked cycle lane, for a music festival
In the 21st century, and given the audience, you would expect music festivals to be environmentally friendly. They boast about “compostable cups” and recycling and more. They then encourage columns of cars to park on crop fields, where, if it rains, or if vehicles are leaking oil, the ground becomes polluted with festival goer hydrocarbons from cars.
The noise pollution is a serious problem. Near Nyon there are two big festivals. Caribama, which is taking place now, and Paléo, next month. Both festivals are filled with altermondalistes who want a greender planet, corporations to be socially responsible, and yet for a week each, these festivals make noise pollution several nights in a row from 1900 until 2 or 3am. For those weeks it becomes challenging to sleep.
Yesterday I had two fans going, at full power and I couldn’t block out the thudding from the bass that the music festival was pumping out. If I had wanted to, I could have listened to the festival for free.
FOMO
Although governments, the Far Right and the media they control have said that the pandemic is over it isn’t. Music festivals were a source of psychological torture because they reminded us that whilst we were self-isolating and trying to avoid long COVID the alcoholics, and less intellectually bright, were getting drunk and enjoying themselves, with no thought or consideration for the impact the substances, sleep deprivation, and long COVID could have on their health.
I Have Volunteered at These Events
I am not against these events, as such. I used to enjoy them as a young adult. It’s as a middle aged “grumpy” man that I hate them. I don’t hate them for what they are, but for their disregard for people’s intimate sphere. I dislike them for their invasion of the private sphere, through noise pollution.
In the 21st century, in the age where we can’t mow lawns between 1230 and 1330, where we can’t vacuum on Sundays and more, why is it socially acceptable to allow such noise pollution until two or three am for a week at a time?
I thought that festival goers wanted a fairer, greener, more responsible world, and yet they pollute fields with parked cars, make it impossible to sleep and more.
Do festival goers not realise the paradox of wanting a fairer world, despite their own selfish behaviour?
Let us sleep. Lower the volume. Be kind and considerate of those that are not participating in your event. Show empathy.
Today I got an e-mail which, if I agreed to would open a door to a number of events. I went for a fourty minute walk to think about things and my interior monologue brought me to the conclusion that by being stubborn I would gain nothing but regret whilst by agreeing to a small thing I would win back a freedom.
I enjoyed the student life and for a moment by freedom was not as great threfore I found other occupations. Today I was at a comedy night and it was really amusing. I really enjoyed the evening. It’s great to watch comedians bring out the funny things in life for us to laugh at.
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