richard

On Cancelling On-Running Cyclon membership

Byrichard 20 March 2024

On-Running, is ideal, in theory, but sub-optimal in reality. The biggest issue I found with On-Running CloudNeo shoes is that they are seasonal running shoes. If it’s icy or wet you’re going to slip and slide all over the place. If you’re a former snowboarder and cyclist you will recover, but if you’re not used to slipping and sliding you will fall. As a result of this I got shoes a month or two ago but never used them because it was either rainy, or cold.

Imagine having a pair of shoes that you pay 35 CHF per month for, but that can’t be used for 4-6 months per year. That’s a lot of money for shoes that are dormant due to not being well suited to the running environment.

My second grudge with on-running is that they encourage you to think “Oh, you should, but you don’t have to return the shoes that are warn out”. The cost if you don’t return shoes is 100 CHF. If you have warn out shoes with the sole peeling off with the first pair then that is appalling customer service. If a shoe is degrading 100 CHF is very expensive for an unusable pair of shoes.

Comfort

The shoes were comfortable when running, at first but eventually they began to feel like crap. The shoes lasted three months with my use before starting to fall apart. The sole fell off. I felt that the toe box was uncomfortable when wearing them after several weeks of use, especially with walking. I find that on-running shoes in general are not comfortable walking shoes.

Cancellation process

I cancelled my subscription today. I haven’t used the replacement shoes at all, due to the unfriendly weather and badly suited grip for winter Switzerland. As a result I am stuck with a connundrum. Do I return shoes that are perfectly fine, to be recycled, to avoid paying 100 CHF on top of the 35 CHF per month I paid for several months, or do I pay 100 CHF? I think the answer is obvious. Return the shoes.

Idealisticly

Idealisticly, once you cancel the membership you should be given the option of running the shoes until they need to be recycled, and return them then. The first pair I had were worth the 105 CHF I paid. The second pair were worthless due to snow, ice and wet roads making the second pair unusuable for months. They’re still new. I haven’t removed any of the packaging from the shoes yet. I could use them for three months, and then send them to be recycled out of contract. I have paid for them. I just never got to use them due to them not being designed for a Swiss winter, despite being Swiss shoes.

And Finally

I really like the idea of a shoe subscription where shoes are recycled after their useful life is over. I liked running in them and during the summer months they were a pleasure to use, for running. For walking they’re sub-optimal, especially for longer walks.

What I would like with the Cyclon program is an option to suspend the plan while the conditions are not good for the shoes. When it’s raining, snowing, and the ground is frozen these shoes are dangerous. When it’s warm and sunny the shoes are great. Sending them back is easy, and the process is convenient.

In my opinion on-running need to make Cloudneo shoes that are usable in winter, and comfortable for walking, and I will renew my subscription.

observation | tech related

Looking through a Seagate Drive at Lightroom

Byrichard 19 March 2024

Recently I got a new drive and as I registered it I saw that I could play with lightroom for free for a month. For free, after spending more than ten francs on a hard drive. I have no intention of using Lightroom after the one month Adobe trial period for a simple reason. Paying 10 CHF per month, when you pay for one app, exceptionally, is affordable. Paying 10-20 CHF per app per month becomes exhorbitant.

What did catch my interest is that there is a one terabyte tier for data storage in the cloud. The issue I have with this plan is that it’s 149 CHF per year, when two terabytes with Infomaniak is 67 CHF per year, and 100 CHF per year with Google Photos. That’s 49 CHF more than Google and 80+CHF more than Kdrive. That difference in price doesn’t justify Lightroom’s added functionality.

No Light Room Equivalent for Video

I looked at the Adobe Creative Suite Apps. There is no Media Asset Management tool for video. You have lightroom, for photos. There is a stock footage app but a stock footage app is not a personal Digital Asset Management tool. That’s a nice that Adobe should get into, as it is guaranteed that users of the Adobe Creative Suite needd a solution for photos, and videos.

Video is Supported

Video is supported. You can’t search by videos and there is no mention of video except when you look through assets.

And Finally

I do not plan to be seduced by Adobe Lightroom or other tools. We have plenty of free or open source solutions to pick from. I have Final Cut Pro Studio, Final Cut Pro X, DaVinci Resolve and KDEnlive to play with for video editing, and Immich and PhotoPrism as Lightroom equivalent tools.

tech related

Playing with Nextcloud Ambitiously and Crashing Immich

Byrichard 18 March 2024

Last night I decided to play with Nextcloud more ambitiously. I set up four synchronisations, one for documents, one for photos, one for downloads and one for desktop. I did it this way because if I went to my root user account and backed everything up I would backup files that are not critical.

It makes sense to backup the documents, downloads and desktop folders because that’s where the most useful things are. In theory I should backup photos too, and I did set that with one Pi but not the other. The reason is simple. Photos are already backed up by Immich, PhotoPrism and Kdrive, so to backup that folder makes little sense, especially since photos are usually taken with the phone, so that’s where the backup should take place.

Twin Experiment with Pi4 and Pi5

On the topic of Immich I do have Immich and Nextcloud running on a Pi4 and on a Pi5. The Pi4 has either crashed, or slowed down to a crawl due to overheating several times, wheras the Pi5 seems to be coping with my backing up of files from the laptop I am using to Nextcloud.

My goal of running the Pi4 with Immich and Nextcloud was mainly to see if Immich worked faster than Photoprism but so far that is not the case. Immich appears to be crashing or slowing down the Pi4 to a crawl consistently. Photoprism on the Pi5 is stable but slow. For weeks, or even months I have been waiting for Photoprism to finish indexing all of the photos that are on that system.

New Files Show Up on Immich

On the positive side at least new files that are uploaded to Immich show up, so even if it takes a while for the back catalogue to be archived the current images and videos do show up and are playable, in the brief windows when the system has not crashed. I am of the impression that these crashes are due to using the desktop version on a Pi4, rather than because of Nextcloud and Immich.

External Volume Not Showing Up on Nextcloud

I used the plugin to allow for external volumes to be used from within Nextcloud but they are not visible when using the desktop sync tool. I will setup a 1tb SD card to run Nextcloud from the Pi4 with a server version of Raspbian or Ubuntu and see how well that works. The desktop is nice to have, but not essential, especially if it is the source of crashes.

Replacing the Wired Time Machine Backup

I am currently using two old drives as Time Machine backups. They need to be plugged in either every day, or on alternative days to backup the system. The issue is that when they are plugged in I cannot move the machine until I eject the disks. I use Nextcloud to sync files that change regularly. Time Machine then becomes a secondary backup tool.

And Finally

For two or three months I have been playing with backing up photos and videos from the phone to photoprism and Kdrive and those systems work well. What I like about photoprism is that it backs up in the evening when I am sleeping. Kdrive backs up almost as soon as I take photos. Kdrive also has the advantage of allowing me to retrieve photos with ease. they’re organised by year and month so moving them around is very easy.

With Nextcloud backing up document files, desktop files and downloads I am synching/backing up files constantly.

Swiss walks | Switzerland

No Desire For My Daily Walk

Byrichard 16 March 2024

For years, or even decades, I have gone for daily walks. For years I have enjoyed them and for years it felt like freedom. Since a dog charged at me, and nearly bit me in Autumn last year, and since cars are in the habit of driving too fast and too close, on a regular basis, my desire to walk has evaporated.

Looking Forwards to Heatwaves

I find myself impatient for the heatwave to come back. In a heatwave dog walkers and normal people stay home. In a heat wave you don’t live in fear of a dog sensing that you’re afraid, and attacking. In a heat wave you have the freedom to walk off of roads without getting muddy. The ground is dry.

Dogs and Cars

I used to walk on agricultural roads but I stopped. Either you had dog walkers with large dogs, or you had people in cars driving fast. The car drivers thanking me for stepping off the road. I step off of the road, into the muddy field because I’m tired of them driving too fast and too close on roads where they have no reason to be. It’s a farming road, not a main road. During the pandemic farm roads were nice because few people walked, and few people drove. Now that traffic is back to normal the dangers of dog attacks and being hit by a car are back in force.

Of course I haven’t been hit by a car, or bitten by a dog in years, or even decades. It’s the risk that became toxic. It’s the nead to be cautious that tires me. Even with a pram people do not slow down, as I was reminded of yesterday. Even yesterday a dog was threatening. I crossed the road. The dog barked.

The owner said “that’s strange, he doesn’t usually bark at people”. One person had tried to get its attention, but then didn’t consider that others are afraid of dogs. Since last Autumn’s incident I never get near big dogs. I’d rather walk across a rain soaked field, and mud, than have to overcome my fear of dogs.

A More Varied Life

There could be a positive reason for my desire not to walk the same routes every single day as I have done for four years or more. My routine isn’t as routine as it was. I went to Spain for three weeks, and I often drive to walk in another village more regularly. That my routine varies, may be why the sysiphean walk has grown less appealing with time. Before I walked five or six routes, both clockwise and anti-clockwise and now I walk just two or three variants.

I’m tired of facing my fear of dogs, and tired of bad driving because I’m ready for a change. Thst’s a good thing.

Swiss walks

Replacing a WD Thunderbolt Duo Drive with an ICY BOX

Byrichard 15 March 2024

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.

observation | social media | tech related | Video

Flying a Toy Plane 22 Miles

Byrichard 14 March 2024

James May is interesting. People like me know him from Top Gear and Grand Tour with Clarkson and Hammond but his side projects are interesting. Instead of farming like Clarkson, or driving cars with his daughter Clarkson plays with grown up toys. When I say toys I don’t mean adult cars, planes and more. I mean actual toys. In the video below James May sets himself the project of building a model plane that can fly 22 miles.

The video shows footage of him as a child playing with a model plane, and then as an adult playing with a slightly bigger model plane, then a prototype and then the finished project. In the episode I watched he built and played with a model plane but in others he tries to build other things and succeeds.

What I like about Naked Science, produced by Pioneer TV, is that they produce proper documentaries, rather than breathless crap like so many others do. This is television production quality content, rather than youtube content. I recently noticed that youtube content creactors use the same sound effects, the same music, the same editing, the same chaotic jumble, that makes their content tiring to watch.

In contrast when you watch James May play with model airplanes you get a well produced, well edited, well paced documentary that is interesting to watch. This is a fifty three minute video where you don’t stare at your phone, or get distracted. You watch it from the start to the end without being distracted, or fatigued.

There was a time when I would watch every documentary in the morning, and then do something else on satellite TV. I don’t do this anymore. Too many programs are designed to distract people from adverts so they’re constantly repeating themselves.

I loved watching Mythbusters but that was the decline of Discovery Channel Documentary making.

What makes James May’s Naked Science shows stand out is that they are watchable by a “dinosaur” like me. When a documentary is well paced, and edited to be watched without commercial breaks it becomes engaging. YouTubers should strive to make content that is equal to television rather than scrape the barrel of throwaway culture.

And Finally

The premise of my post is simple. We live under the illusion that content has to be sensationalist to be worth watching, and we live under the illusion that youtube content needs to be sensationalist to stand out but that notion is wrong. Television quality content should be edited and produced to be shared on YouTube. In this day and age the notion that something has to be two minutes is wrong. The notion that something has to be in “YouTube style” to be noticed on YouTube is wrong. In my eyes we should produce long form content that is well produuced, for YouTube and social media.

YouTube is big enough for content that appeals to my generation and others to be produced and thrived. Algorithms should take this onboard. I want YouTube’s algorithms to provide me with content that is relevant to my age group and interests. I want more content recommendations such as the video above.

tech related

Of Punch Cards and AI

Byrichard 13 March 2024

Many decades ago, when computing was still in its infancy punch cards were used for looms, to design patterns in English mills. They were then modified to store census data and to help measure the US population. In the process they saved the US government weeks of work and five million dollars at the time. This is according to my memory of reading The Big Switch and coming across this information two or three days ago.

The idea of punch cards was that you design cards with holes. Each hole gives a true or false value. Instead of writing “Billy Bob lives in a house with five children, two cats, three geese with an income of 500 USD per month you could punch the relevant hole on a tabulating machine. “Two contestants required 44.5 hours and 55.5 hours. Hollerith astounded Census Bureau officials by completing the task in just 5.5 hours!”

Fast forward to last year or the year before and you see that the world become super-excited about AI and how it could process big data, but also how it could intuite what we wanted to write by hoovering petabytes of data. Plenty of people are saying “This isn’t AI, this is machine learning”.

I am currently reading I, Robot by Isaac Asimov and we see that even today the same problems are occuring. (spoiler alert coming up). They fed info to one supercomputer and it broke, so another company fed the same information to another system but told it “if you find that this would kill people ignore it and return the document”. To this day AI is being taught this. “I am only an AI and I cannot answer this question” for Gemini and “I am not able to answer any questions related to events after September 2021 by ChatGPT.

If The Big Switch was written today it would be extended from “Rewiring the world from Edison to Google” to “Rewiring the World From Edison to OpenAI”. The book was published in 2008 and I’m reading it in 2024 so it will stop way before current information.

I bought the book over a decade ago, but didn’t get around to reading it until now. We are told that AI and other technology is revolutionary. Books such as the Big Switch show that in the grand scheme of things AI is evolutionary and itterative, rather than a brand new paradigm. Punch cards were as revolutionary in their day, as AI is today.

If we want to jump forward a few decades is another good example of “evolutionary progress”. We see that the technology that Google uses to help us look for flights is decades old and that Google is just a user interface built upon old code and interactions. The video I link to demonstrates how old tech needs to be modernised to help cope with crewing requirements. In the video they speak about how when everything is working it’s easy to manage. It’s once flights are cancelled and flight crews are scattered in the wrong place that chaos ensues.

During a big storm you need one system to track flights, but you need a second one to track aircrafts, and a third to track crews. You then need that system to route new routes until everything is brought back to the normal schedules. With time you could combine these three requirements to provide a flexible and optimal flight re-booking system to minimise bad weather disruptions.

And Finally

It’s easy to call something revolutionary, if you don’t look far enough back in time. If we look only at our own lifetime then plenty of things seem revolutionary because the change is new to our generation but if you expand beyond our own lives, and look back a century or two you will find that almost everything is itterative. If anything is “revolutionary” it’s that we now have enough processing power for AI to make reading “punch cards” that are petabytes of data faster than in the past.

Just search for a file on a mac with easyfind or finder and you’ll see how slow searching on a local machine is, compared the the AI optimised systems that people are playing with today. LLM runs slow on Pi and 2016 mac book pro but it runs fast on newer machines. That’s where the new opportunities lie. Machine learning, masquerading as AI is enabled by technological advancements. Just look at the rivers, lakes, and gigawatts of power that are required for “AI” to be of any use.

observation

Zen and the art of Fishing Leaves Out of a Pool

Byrichard 12 March 2024

While I was in Spain I spent hours by the pool. Due to it being winter, rather than Spring or Summer I wasn’t going into the pool or sunbathing. I was fishing out leaves that had accumulated over a period of months. The bottom of the pool had been filled with a layer of leaves, the sides had become like the sides of a fish aquarium and the water had turned slightly green. It’s not as bad as it sounds.

Pools are seasonal and water evaporates. If they’re not used for several months filling them to the brim, and allowing the water filter to run will use a lot of energy that could be used for heating or other things. It also saves water in regions where there is a drought.

A pool person did throw chlorine into the pool on a regular basis but the water wasn’t processed.

It’s amusing to clear leaves from the bottom of the pool with just a net. It’s relaxing. You skim the surface, pick up all the leaves, feathers and insects, and dump them into a container and once the surface is clean you begin to clean the floor of the pool. As you do so you see clouds of leaves and debri fly up.

Every so often I would put the net at the bottom of the pool and walk around the pool several timess trying to pick up debris before bringing the net up to the surface and emtpying it again. Bringing the net to the surface can be frustrating because you see a cloud of leaves and debris fly up into suspension, so you then fish out the leaves that have found an upwelling that brought them to the surface. You skim, until the net loses more leaves than it catches. You empty it again. You then dip the net back in and gather more leaves.

Eventually the shallow of the pool looks cleaner. You can see the tiles clearly, and you can see where other leaves are. You then move towards the deeper end of the pool and repeat the actions.

Of course pool cleaning is not just about cleaning the pool. It’s about getting a gentle workout for the arms and shoulders. The effort is not like carrying a safe from the car to the first floor of an apartment without a diable but it’s still good for the biceps and shoulders. You end the session feeling that your arms have done some work.

Due to the nature of water cleaning the pool stirs things up, so that they remain in suspension. At this point you can continue but it’s futile. When things are floating they’re easy to gather, before they sink. Once they sink they’re easy to get to again, because they’re on a single plane. It’s when things are in suspension that it’s time to take a break, to wait for everything to settle.

The result is that over a period of three or four sessions you can clean a pool without using an aquatic vacuum cleaner.

When the leaves are gone, and the bottom is clean, you can then take a brush and loosen all the crap that has grown on the sides of the pools, and the bottom of the pool. To some degree this is the frustrating part of pool cleaning. You see clouds of dust, and the pool turns green, as things are stirred up.

It’s at this point that my efforts became futile. It’s at this point that my efforts made the pool look more messy. It’s at this point that the pool vacuum and a pool cleaner were needed, to finalise the spring clean.

And Finally

Through spending a few hours cleaning the pool with a net I felt that my skill and experience did increase. I became more efficient at trapping leaves and other things in the pool and I developed a technique that would stir up sediment before I then captured it and dumped it into the container at the side of the pool. I also rescued two bees in the process. Cleaning pools is a moment of mindfullness. I did this without podcasts, audiobooks or other distractions.

observation | tech related

Lost Streaks

Byrichard 11 March 2024

On Saturday I drove for twelve and a half hours and felt exhausted by the time I got home. I didn’t write a blog post so I lost my 480 day blogging streak, and I didn’t read using the Kindle app so I lost my Kindle reading streak. In the end losing such streaks is healthy.

Kindle Streak

The problem with the Kindle reading streak is that it encourages us to read a page or two every single day, but that may result in us reading just a page or two, rather than a chapter or two. The other issue is that my reading streak is intact, in that I read an entire book while driving. I read Nowhere for Very Long, as an audiobook. It’s a shame that the book isn’t more focused on travel and adventure. I still read it in a day. I think it could have explored the pleasure, rather than the trauma that led to having that life.

Blogging Streak

With the blogging streak I think that it’s healthy to take a break from writing daily, because life isn’t that interesting. it doesn’t require a post every single day. It’s easy for posts to become spam, or boring, if we write every day. It also encourages us to be more negative, eventually. By taking a break we recharge, and we return to writing about positive things.

Free Once More

By breaking streaks I often feel a sense of freedom. A streak requires something to be done consistently and the further you get into a streak, the more difficult it is to reach a new record if you break it. I need to blog for 481 days to break my previous streak and read from a kindle for 281 days in a row.

The thing is that I don’t want to read books exclusively on my kindle. I want to read Kobo, Google Books, Kindle and Audible and have all of them count towards the streak, without it being propietary. There are several reading apps that keep track of streaks. With these the important thing is to read and log daily.

I have plenty of physical books. Now that I have broken my kindle streak I can read them. I can revert to reading a book in bed and lying down, and dropping the book onto my face as I try to turn the page. I collected so many books in physical form that I ran out of space on my shelves and now I need to read them, and place them in reading libraries once more.

And Finally

Breaking streaks is a good thing. Streaks are a sign of being in a rut. If we break a walking streak, or a blogging streak, or a reading streak it shows that our lives vary from day to day, or week to week. It shows that we have other things to do than keep routines. Years ago said that diving was a break from routine. That person has dived almost every week for a decade or more. That break from the routine is in and of itself a routine. My reading routine is intact. I just broke the shackles of having a Kindle centric reading routine.