Author: richard

  • Of Casio and Smart Watches

    Reading Time: 2 minutesOver the last five and a half years I have tracked every walk that I have been on, and I have tracked about five and a half million steps per year. That’s a lot of steps and a lot of going around in clrcles. Going around in clrcles makes tracking walks with…

  • The Day of Snow Poles and Mastodon

    The Day of Snow Poles and Mastodon

    Reading Time: 2 minutesToday during the walk I saw an orange van moving by the side of the road slowly. It was stopping regularly. I crossed the road and looked towards it. I saw an open door and a person placing traffic snow poles into the bollards at the side of the road. Winter is…

  • On Engagement and Leaving Social Media Platforms

    On Engagement and Leaving Social Media Platforms

    Reading Time: 2 minutesI used to like Facebook and Instagram because they were extensions of my social life. I left both of them when I saw that only two or three people reacted to my posts. Although social media platforms had started as being solitary, they had become social with time, and then lonely again,…

  • A Call for More Cycling and Walking Paths

    A Call for More Cycling and Walking Paths

    Reading Time: 3 minutesI walk or cycle almost every day across five or six villages per walk, and more on bikes. During these walks and bike rides I see that there is a chronic lack of safe walking and cycling routes, if you want to go for any distance. Almost every village has five, six…

  • Twitter is Dead, Long Live Social Media

    Reading Time: 2 minutesLe Roi est Mort, longue vie au Roi (article) is a popular phrase in French. It signifies that if the king died royalty would continue and he would quickly be succeeded. Social media has just entered a new age, I believe. Twitter, Facebook and other giants have grown too big, and algorithms…

  • Playing with Vim and Laravel

    Reading Time: 2 minutesI love using Atom because it’s light and fast, even on a six year old machine like mine. Github is soon going to archive atom. I will lose my favourite editor. That’s why I played with VS Code, Sublime Text and other solutions. Vim is the winner for now. Vim is on…

  • Laravel and Chirper

    Reading Time: 2 minutesToday I used Laravel to code a Twitter clone called Chirper via the tutorial you can find here. The tutorial took about two hours before I got the notifications section of the tutorial. The tutorial is easy to follow and with my contextual knowledge I was able to write most of the…

  • Learning About Laravel and PHP

    Learning About Laravel and PHP

    Reading Time: < 1 minuteToday I started to follow a course where someone turns a static html page into a Laravel blog. I experimented with home.blade and one or two other features and I got two pages to load, and the login to work, without more than that. What makes today’s learning and experimenting interesting…

  • Moving Sugar Beet

    Reading Time: 2 minutesFor a few weeks you see piles of sugar beet at one end, or another of fields. They stay that way for a while, until it rains for some reason. When it rains those piles of beet are loaded into hundreds of tractor trailer loads and transported to the train yard. The…

  • Velux Fractal Season

    Velux Fractal Season

    Reading Time: 2 minutesWhen the conditions are just right fractals form on veluxes and they are beautiful. It requires the air to be cool enough for ice to form, but as thin layers, rather than thick. If the wind is just right then you end up with patterns such as the one below. This morning…