Beware The Storms
They announced rain and storms but we hardly ever get either in this part of Switzerland. I wasn’t going to use this blog for short posts but I can’t focus.
According to my watch, and farmers, a storm is coming. That’s why they are busy trying to harvest all the grain before it hits.
At this time of year you can watch the combine harvesters harvesting all the fields and collecting grain. You can then see tractors following up and gathering what they leave on the fields and making plenty of bails.
I can’t focus so I’m cutting this post short.
Today I spent some time expanding my knowledge of JSON because understanding how JSON works, and how it works, opens doors. Every social network allows you to download your file as a JSON file. If you learn how to use JSON you can then re-use your data on a site of your own design, according to your own moral code.
I was also playing with static pages from the older parts of my website and trying to bring them into wordpress and for now it half, rather than fully works. My goal is to be able to have The Romans section with one look, the Geography section with another and the Environmental Systems with a third, to give just two examples. I found something promising but I haven’t understood it fully yet. It is a work in progress.
People are arguing that the world wide web needs to be decentralised, to become web 3.0 and yet the services we use are more and more centralised. Google, Amazon and Microsoft all have data centres and are getting a stranglehold on hosting and cloud solutions. Solutions like those by Infomaniak are much harder to learn about because they are still a small player, in contrast to the giants.
Facebook went down due to a misconfiguration error and two topics come to mind. The first is that Facebook shouldn’t have all three services on the same backbone because it becomes a single point of failure, and that was precisely what the Internet was designed to avoid. The second issue is that behemoths like Facebook should not exist, because they monopolise too much. When they went down IM went down for many, image sharing went down for many, and discussion groups went down for many. For a slice in time the world had to think of an alternative to communicate. Even Facebook had to.
This demonstrates that the Web, when it is too centralised, as it is via Facebook, has become fragile. I don’t mention Google, Amazon or Microsoft because they are giants, but they help the little guys be seen. Facebook doesn’t. It likes to capture and keep its traffic. We need to keep working on personal websites, to keep the web from being to vulnerable to outages.
As is usually the case, I did not set out on my walk in the rain, expecting to get rained on. I set off because although the weather app said there would be rain, did not say that it would be heavy, so I set off and for most of the walk the weather was nice. Not t-shirt weather nice, but bits of sun, and not too cold.
During the walk I took the Sigg original bottle. I put it in my coat pocket and forgot about it. By this I mean that it’s so small and light that it doesn’t get in the way of walking at full speed for an hour or two. It’s a good, small bottle, for when you want a drink, but you’re not in the middle of a heatwave.
And now for something else to read: Understanding How Facebook Disappeared from the Internet
Today is Day Four of Orca in Switzerland and I saw that the Canton in which I live has the most active cases of COVID19 so my motivation both to go to shops and to go for walks has taken a hit. At the same time I don’t know whether it’s COVID 19 that is having this effect or the fact that I walked a theoretical 197.2 kilometres since the start of this month for the March Activity challenge.
All I have to do now to complete the challenge is walk 7.8 kilometres a day for the next ten days and I’m done. Easy goal. I’m impatient for this challenge so that I can return to cycling, no matter whether it’s on the indoor trainer or outdoors.
Today I went off exploring the trail less traveled. I walked towards an Ingress portal and then I took a right turn and walked along a trail. I could have taken the road and crossed a bridge to get to the portal but the muddy path is an excellent option because it keeps me away from people.
The path wasn’t too muddy but I did have to scramble over a tree that had fallen to the ground and avoid slipping on mud. I captured the portal, full deployed and then I went off exploring.
I love walking along this river because you would never believe that you’re so close to Eysins and Nyon. If you stood quietly you could probably hear both. It’s nice because it’s secluded but it’s also nice because you could imagine children playing by this river on a hot summer’s day.
I walked beyond the waterfall but at this point the path becomes more challenging. I could have gone across and towards Nyon but I chose to go down towards the river. The river, is less full of water than it was a few days ago when the rain was heavy so I could sneak a little further than on previous explorations.
The image above shows a safe bit of cliff but there are moments where you feel that it’s precarious. Erosion is slowly eroding the soil away and trees are falling forward, into the valley. I wouldn’t recommend exploring certain segments on a rainy day.
During the quarantine, the message is to stay away from people. By exploring snickets in forests you achieve this goal easily. No dog walkers, no families on a walk, no one.
Quarantine can be boring, and it can be lonely, especially for those of us living in solitude who still have the fortitude to endure loneliness for society at large. Exploring is a nice way of living in the moment. It’s a way of finding things to write blog posts about, but it’s also something to show others, once solitary people, are once again allowed the company of another human.
During this pandemic, I am trying not to use the car and I use the scooter as little as possible. I try to stay within walking distance for everything. My logic is that by traveling further I would come in contact with more people and I might bring the virus from an infected region to one that was clear of the virus.
At the moment we know which Cantons are affected but we have no idea of whether villages or towns are clean. If we knew that villages or towns were clear of the virus we could go into reverse quarantine. Rather than keeping people isolated, we could keep them insulated. By this, I mean that shops, handshakes, and social life could be restored. Of course, this is unfeasible.
Before I stop writing for today I did see people start to wear masks, and gloves, attempting to isolate themselves from the risk of contagion. I’m still washing my hands, and simply staying home when not on a walk, and washing my hands as soon as I get home.
What is your pandemic footprint. Mine, is just two at this moment in time.
Yesterday I went out for my daily walk but within minutes I noticed that my legs felt cold and that I really did need the scarf that I wore. It’s exceptional for me to wear a scarf. My fleece and my inner coat both have neck protection built in so I usually feel fine. Yesterday was unusually cold so I was happy to add the scarf to really keep my neck warmer. I removed it for a few minutes because it felt itchy but I soon put it back on.
In the meantime PhotoPrism has been chugging away, indexing tens of thousands of files and adding location information as well as other metadata. It has indexed 60,000 files of which 20,000 are videos. Most of the video files are junk though, stuff I saved that has no personal value. I’m marking the video files as private and I will probably delete them as they take teraybtes of space without having much value.
I also experimented with migrating my blog writing from this mac to a Linux machine. I managed to gh clone the blog files from github to my local linux machine but struggled a little with uploading the test file from the linux machine to the web server. While writing this blog post I was reminded of the solution that should work.
My mac is old and I suspect that at some point the battery will fail and I will lose access to it. I already had to swap the battery once and soon it will die again, and that’s when I will stop using it.
I considered swapping the battery a second time but I saw that Apple is about to stop support for it. If I can use a Linux machine instead, then I save money.
Walking in challenging weather is good. It requires us to equip ourselves better, to remain comfortable, whether it’s cold, rainy, windy, or a heatwave. By migrating from Google Photos to PhotoPrism I can keep photos and videos locally rather than in the cloud, and access them with ease, as well as slide from the cheapest service to the cheapest service without investing days or weeks in the effort.
Sliding from Mac to Linux is about learning, and cutting costs, but mainly about experimentation and learing about a different OS. It’s good to be comfortable on Windows, Linux and Mac. At least now if, and when, the mac fails I will be ready to slide from one device to the other.
Now that I am seventy kilometres from finishing the Camino De Santiago virtually I have less than a week of virtual walking left. I walk in the real world, but the distance is mapped onto a virtual Camino. This is advantageous for two reasons. The first is that it makes walking around in circles near home less boring, but also because it means that there is less one less individual on the Camino De Santiago, so one less person contributing to population stress. I am doing this via the Pacer app.
According to their schedule I have 111 days in which to complete the walk, so I will complete it with over one hundred days to spare. I wasn’t even walking that much compared to this summer. Their target for walking 800 kilometres was too long for me. My habits are faster. At the same time I do not walk 30-40 kilometre days like thru-hikers do.
For years and years I have had points via a card, and for years I have never used them because I never had anything that tempted me. I saw someone that had a Sigg bottle I was not familiar with so I looked at it, and then I was told that I could get it with those points. Of course being the individual that I am, what I am looking for is something that can replace my Camelbak forge.
For years I loved using the Camelbak forge, until, eventually I overtightened it too many times, and so the top became loose, and dangerous. Imagine freshly boiled water, carried via the cap rather than the base, and you have a painful accident waiting to happen.
As I browsed through a variety of options I found the Sigg Travel Mug. It comes in 0.27L and 0.47L versions and I chose the larger version. The difference is 5 CHF. When I worked 4am shifts one winter I really liked having such a drinking vessel. I then used it constantly for long enough for it to fail on me.
It is nice to have hot drinks on demand when you’re fighting to stay awake, and when you’re outdoors working in cold weather. It is also nice when sitting at a desk.
The kettle I have requires me to boil at least 800ml of water at a time, but if I prepare just one cup then I waste a lot of energy and water. My solution, for a while, has been to boil that volume of water, but to pour it into a thermos, that way the drinks stay warm, and I can drink the hot drink hours later, or even the next morning.
If you’re sitting at a desk, or at home, unscrewing a top is not an issue, but when you’re driving anything that allows you to remain focused on the road is good, and that is where the Camelbak forge and travel mug are good. The Camelbak Horizon and Sigg Travel Mug Pure ceram could also be considered except for one serious flaw. They need to be upright to keep your drink from leaking. Although named Horizon the Camelbak Horizon prefers to be vertical. If you shake or lean it then it leaks. If you have a car with cup holders then this isn’t an issue. I don’t, so I anticipate a mess.
The Forge failed months ago and I was looking for a replacement. I finally see that I can replace it for 15 CHF so I am seizing that opportunity.