Autumn Colours in Céligny

Autumn is Coming

Byrichard
Reading Time: 3 minutes

Autumn, not winter, is coming. A week or two ago I noticed that a tree was changing from Green to red, as the leaves began to turn from Spring and Summer mode to Autumn and Winter mode. I noticed that the trees as you enter and leave Cheserex are also beginning to turn read.

Changing Trees

As if that wasn’t enough the leaves are also turning on the Jura. It is turning from green to orange, and red, and one or two other colours I didn’t pay attention to. As I cycled from around Haute-Morges to Pampigny I noticed that, there too, the leaves were turning. Not only were they turning but they were falling from the trees. The season of death is returning.

Leaves Are Turning Too Early

Last year, as well as this year, the leaves are changing too soon. They’re changing before they’re meant to, due to the drought. Some trees drop their leaves in anticipation of hardship but others drop them as a result of hardship, so when we see leaves drop their leaves so soon, we know that they are under duress due to the changing climate and weather systems. Now would be a good time to walk by forests, to observe the change, and fly drones, to get an aerial view.

Mud and Dogs

Now that the air temperature has dropped the scary dogs are back on their walks. So is the mud. I loved walking during the heatwave because I was often the only person walking. Dog owners couldn’t walk, because dogs would get heat stroke, and normal people didn’t walk, because they would get heat stroke. I could enjoy my walks in the peace and quiet.

Now that the temperatures have dropped, so dog walkers have resumed their walks. Now I can either overcome my fear of dogs on every single walk, or I could get a gym membership and stay indoors and work on recovering the strenght I have lost over the last five years.

I have a deep hatred for dog walkers. A few days ago I came across someone walking a bunch of dogs and I went down the gap between two fields, rather than walk by dogs. The problem, with fearing dogs, is that dogs know, and want to attack. At the start of summer I was charged, and it traumatised me for two or three weeks. It didn’t bite, but I was convinced that it would bite me. I froze, and luckily it changed its mind.

The damage is done. I already had a fear of dogs. That experience cemented it. This morning I retrieved the walking sticks from the car. I’m considering walking with them as shields, in case of such an encounter over the next few months, when the weather is cold enough for dogs to terrify those of us who are afraid of dogs.

Apathetic Dog Walkers

The issue is that dog walkers are apathetic towards people who fear their pets. They have leashes that are ten metres long, or the dogs are unleashed. If you’re afraid of dogs you’re trapped. Either you overcome your fear or you walk along roads where dog walkers will not walk, with their beloved terrors.

If dog walkers recognised that we are afraid of dogs, and got them under control, then I would feel happier walking by dogs. When I was attacked, the woman just watched. She did nothing to control the dog, until it was charging. If I had run it would have mauled me. If I had not been afraid it would have done nothing. If the owner had controlled the dog I would not have been filled with fear, that was justified, in the end.

Lost Freedom

Now that dog walkers are out in force I will revert to my walks along roads, where dog walkers keep their dogs under close supervision.

Indoor Training or Cycling

Two options do exist. Indoor training, and cycling. The advantage of cycling is that it’s cheap but the bike will get dirty and I will get cold.

The other option is to go to an indoor gym for the first time in years, and resume indoor training. If I went into a gym I would wear a mask. I like the idea of going to an indoor gym but I would wear a mask. Autumn is just arriving, so I have time to consider the situation.

And Finally

Two days ago I walked an extra four kilometres to avoid dog walkers. Instead of walking an 8km loop I walked 12km. I saw a car, with a dog cage, so rather than walk, and be subjected to my fear of dogs, I enjoyed a longer walk, along paths that I walked along for years, years ago.

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Can You With Trail Glove 7 Around Lavaux?
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Can You With Trail Glove 7 Around Lavaux?

Byrichard

Yesterday I tried an experiment which could have been a silly one. I tried to do the Lavaux hike from Puidoux to Vevey with Trail Glove 7 shoes. They are barefoot minimalist shoes so I could have regretted it. I didn’t but mainly because of the preparation before hand.

The Preparation

I have worn through one pair of Trail Glove 7 shoes before switching to the pair that I am using now. In that time I have walked at least 800 kilometres with one pair and an unknown amount with the second pair. The second pair is starting to show signs of wear. I think the left heel is about to fail.

The key difference between barefoot shoes and normal shoes is that barefoot shoes do not offer much padding for the heel. Every time your heel hits the ground it hits with more force than it would with normal shoes.

With the Vapor Glove seven, trail glove 6 and meindl barefoot shoes I find that the padding is not enough for my normal walks so I wear them very little, especially when walking my usual walking routes.

 The Walk

Yesterday my shoes felt fine for almost the entire walk. They felt fine when going downhill and they felt fine when going uphill. They also felt fine in terms of temperature despite the snow. I think this is due to walking fast enough not to feel uncomfortable with the temperature.

It’s near the end of the walk that I could feel that my left heel was starting to hurt. It wasn’t excruciating pain. I was simply aware that my body was getting tired. You would expect this. It’s hundreds of meters of climbing and descending as well as a reasonable walking distance.

It’s 11.3km of walking with 447 meters of climbing and 636 meters of descending over three hours of moving time and three and a half hours overall.

And Finally

The advantage of barefoot shoes, once you get used to walking with them is that they are light and malleable. You have a more direct contact with the ground. I tried them because I started to find cheap shoes uncomfortable, and wanted to try something new.

I knew that this walk would be on tarmac and concrete so I wasn’t worried about deep muddy puddles and more. I still had spare socks in case. I switched to these shoes because I was curious and stuck with them because I find them comfortable.

Paying for Facebook and Instagram

Paying for Facebook and Instagram

Byrichard

The Unappealing Thought of Paying for Facebook

Facebook would like us, in Europe, to start paying to use Facebook, Instagram and Threads, eventually. I will never pay for any of these services because they do not provide us with anything of value. The day we begin to pay for Facebook and Instagram we will be paying to be spammed by influencer content whilst not seeing content by friends, family and colleagues. In light of this we’re paying to see more adverts. We’re paying to have our time wasted.

Influencer Spam Rather than Posts by Friends

At the same time as Facebook wants us to pay for their mediocre sites there is another option. For 6CHF per month or so we can setup a mastodon instance, or a Pixelfed instance, and we can microblog, or share images, or both, for 12 CHF per month. Facebook wants us to pay 14 Euros per month to be spammed. I will not pay Facebook anything. They experimented with making us miserable, without saying sorry. They did nothing to stop the genocide that was being orchestrated from their social media platforms. They turned Instagram from a photo sharing app between friends to a spam network for influencers. Why would I thank them, by paying for services that they made worthless?

Interesting Alternatives

Flickr is still alive, and people are still active on the site. People are still sharing hundreds of pictures per day, in some cases. Others are sharing occasional images. For 156 CHF per year for Instagram you could get Flickr, and share with people passionate about photography, rather than utilitarian influencers.

For around 6.47 CHF per month you can get a mastodon instance that can be shared by five users. For around the same price you can also get a Pixelfed instance but I think Flickr is more interesting, because it’s a legacy community with 20 years of conviviality. I also think that Pixelfed might be pleasant to install on most instances, unlike Mastodon which I have tried, and so far failed to implement on a personal web server that I control fully.

And Finally

Since 2007 I said “think of ROI for users, not advertisers” and Facebook is finally realising that they should have, but too late. I would have paid for Facebook and Instagram when they had healthy communities of friends that I met on a daily basis. Now that it’s a dormant network of friends, populated by influencer spam, I have no desire to pay for their services. I was on Facebook and Instagram for the IRL community I knew. Now that it’s a network of strangers it would be irrational for me to pay 13 Euros for a primary account and 6 euros per supplementary account. For 20 Euros a month you can get something much more interesting.

Sliding Between MacOS, Windows and Linux Daily

Sliding Between MacOS, Windows and Linux Daily

Byrichard

Recently I have been sliding between Windows, Linux distributions and MacOS throughout the day. I use a mac for blogging, and Linux to experiment and learn new skills, and windows to watch Netflix and YouTube. I might be over-simplifying but that’s the simplified version.

Pi and Linux

I find that I have come to be at ease in all three environments, especially since playing around with Raspberry Pi devices. “Why?”, you may ask. Because with a Pi you can try dedicated images for Nextcloud, for PhotoPrism, for Immich and more. You can also try them for Ph-Hole and others. The advantage is also that you use microSD cards. This means that you slot in card A and try A1, then you slot B and try B1 and finally you try C with C1. In the end you’re trying instances with what could be thirty seconds with your Pi being a PhotoPrism server, before it becomes a NextCloud server, and so on. With enough SD cards if you mess up you can revert to something that you enjoyed using with a minute or two.

MacOS

I am using the Mac for blogging for one key reason. The git history for this blog has become too big for a sync in a single go and I need to learn how to sync just the last 10 changes, rather than the entire history, but that requires RTFM. I haven’t taken that time yet. It’s not laziness. It’s about having more interesting projects to work on before reaching this one.

Windows

I use the windows machine for media viewing habits because it’s plugged in to external screens and a monitor whereas the other two aren’t. I practiced using Chocolatey and PowerShell, as well as other windows related experiments. I also use it for flashing linux SD cards. It’s good at that because it has an SD card reader built in so I don’t need a dongle.

And Finally

In the 80s, as a child I played with the CLI, and norton commander, and DOS, and Windows 3.1. I installed games and chose sound cards and more. I used to see displays that recently I have seen quite regularly. It’s interesting that the CLI interface to NextCloud reminds me of when I was playing with computers as a child in the 80s. For decades I left the CLI behind, but now I’m back. I use it daily at the moment.

When I first started playing with Linux in the 90s I had to download the ROM, burn a CD or a DVD, and then attempt to install the OS on a computer. I would often succeed, and sometimes fail. Now, you don’t need to burn a DVD. You just flash a microSD card and you’re ready to go. You don’t even need to prepare a USB key, and wait for an install on a desktop. Experimentation is faster now.

The next step is to install Nextcloud, HomeAssistant, Pi-hole and PhotoPrism to play nicely on a single device.

A Queue of Tractors Without Drivers

A Queue of Tractors Without Drivers

Byrichard

Today I saw a queue of tractors without drivers. Tractors with trailers full of beat were parked by the on loading dock at the railway siding. There is a machine. The tractors come up to the machine, back, and then start to pour the sugar beet into it. The machine then transports the beets from the receptacle along conveyor belts before they are dumped into a train wagon, ready for transport by rail to where they are needed. I filmed it a few days ago but did not get around to editing the sequence.


Tractors and the train wagons
Tractors and the train wagons


Autumnal colours are here. Some trees are further along than others with their reds, oranges and others. Wind or rain is needed to remove the leaves from the trees, as a last step.


Autumn red leaves on a tree
Autumn red leaves on a tree


I am leaving Autumnal Switzerland behind, and going back to summer, by going to Spain. People say that they miss the sun, but for me the sun is not absent at the moment. We have the sun every day. I am taking a break because a, it’s the right time to and because a change of context will be refreshing. I have spent two years walking around in circles. I need to go a little further, and find some other circuit walks. It will also give me something to document in blog posts.

Playing with the Hugo With An Old Site

Playing with the Hugo With An Old Site

Byrichard

For a few days I have been playing with Hugo with Markdown and HTML pages. It says that it is “the world’s fastest framework for building websites” and so far I do notice that it has a key strength that I like. 


Front Matter


That strength is that with small modifications you can take an existing static website and make it dynamic.  Hugo requires that each page has Front Matter.  


Front matter is:


• title


• date


• tags


• description


• author


• slug


• draft


• and more. It’s a quick and easy way of organising a website, one page at a time. 


Front Matter according to chatGPT is “a metadata configuration section that is commonly used in static site generators like Hugo, Jekyll, and others.” It is placed at the top of a document to provide useful information like post title, publish date, tags and more. The beauty of tags, author and other tags is that they are used to organise data without the need for a CMS back end. 


The Niche it Fills


The advantage of Hugo, over a CMS like Wordpress, is that it doesn’t lock you into itself. It allows you to create pages, and to organise those pages by tags, category or other. It allows you, via the layout metadata to specify which css layout a page should use. You can have one website section with one theme, and another section with another theme. 


If your website has a section that is about geography, and another about environmental systems. You use the relevant tags for each page. If you click on the geography tag you get a page with a list of all the pages tagged with geography. If you click on “Environmental Studies” you get the content on that topic. 


Aside from creating tags you can create a hierarchy. If you write “film/french” it will recognise that you have the tag “film” and within that tag you have the sub tag of french. If you write about french films you can add the tag “french/film” rather than “french, film” and it will create sub-tags. This is an effective means of organising tags. 


The Weaknesses


When you create pages their default is draft, which means that you need to change draft to false if you want it to generate pages with the hugo command. When a page is generated it does not switch the draft status from true to false, so you need to tell it to export drafts each time. 


When you generate the static website it creates a directory for each page, with an index.html page in each. 


The same is true of the tags page generation. If you have 20 pages you will have 20 directories with index.html pages. If you have  100 tags you will have one hundred folders with an index.html file and an index.xml page.  If you want to fix this Hugo calls them ugly URLs. 


Switching from Pelican to Hugo


Initially I thought Pelican looked like a powerful tool until I encountered the issue with categories being “one per page” by default. The plugin to allow for more was simple to implement but I like to experiment with tools and I found that Hugo is an interesting alternative. 


The Strength


I want the flexibility of a CMS driven website without being stuck within Wordpress or another CMS. This tool gives me the features of a CMS without the limitations. As i add Front Matter information to each page, so it becomes easy to index every page and update navigation one final time, rather than every single time small changes are made. 


Partial Templates


With Hugo you can create partial templates, as you can with Laravel and other framework tools, except that with this framework html and markdown are used. The learning curve is more gradual. 


The Sitemap


A nice feature of Hugo is that it generates a sitemap with information about the location of each file, when it was last changed, the change frequency and priority. In this way Google and other search engines may quickly see what has changed and when. 


And Finally


If your website is already written in HTML it makes sense to find a tool that will connect all the pages together, for navigation. The CSS, JS, and html stay the same. It’s just the framework behind the scenes, connecting everything efficiently. 

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