Bookcrossing and A November Walk

Byrichard
Reading Time: 2 minutes

Today I went for a slight variant and came across a book dating back to 1930 so of course I picked it up. I like the look and feel of old books. I also like that they carry history. The book is 91, almost 92 years old and it has been passed on from generation to generation for almost six generations. I looked in the book and at first I just ignored the scribbles at the front of the book, not thinking much of it. Now that I looked closer I noticed the BCID so I looked up bookcrossing.com and logged that I found the book.

Now that I know about this project I feel that I should add books that I own to that database, for people to find and share them. One book has 601 hops, and the next only 198. That is how many times books have been passed on from person to person.

I see that the project is still new but it will soon reach two million members (bookcrossers) and approaching 14 million books. It is present in 132 countries, and what is impressive is that this is only since April 2021, so the site is still new. Registering a book is quick and easy. Note the ISBN, Double check the info, write a comment, create the book, and then add the BCID to the inner cover and a new book is logged. It takes seconds.

I believe that this is a great project because if you think that the use case for cars, is bad, due to how much time they spend sitting around, then imagine how bad it is for books. They spend years, even decades on shelves collecting dust, without being read more than once. With a website like Bookcrossing those dormant books are given the opportunity to travel, to be read, to be discussed and to be shared, over and over again. A book is no longer read by one person but dozens, or even hundreds. It works like a library, but the library is the world, and everyone can be a curator.

I could now create an entry for The Unbearable Lightness of Being and other favourite books of mine, and over time I could follow as they are shared, commented on, and as their locations move either west or east, south, or north. It would show how interconnected the world is.

I will participate in this project. I like the opportunities that I think it opens up.

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Rain and Water Tables
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Rain and Water Tables

Byrichard

There is an article on Swiss Radio and Television that discusses the positive impact that the flooding has had on the water tables. For several years not only have we had warm weather but we have also gone with very little or no rain for months at a time.


During some weeks we were told “The water reserves are so low that we will soon need to switch to retrieving water from the lake rather than our reservoires. Underground water is great for when there’s a drought above ground, but the problem is that underground water is finite, and as a result if it is not replenished then it will eventually run out.


The fact that we have had so much rain over the last few days is excellent for the water tables, as I have tweeted or written here. As that water gets down to the water table, it will remain, until the next time it is needed.


Après plusieurs années de canicule, les eaux souterraines avaient, en certains points, fortement baissé, notamment dans le canton de Vaud.

Source: Les fortes précipitations ont un impact positif sur les nappes phréatiques

It’s easy to see the human tragedy of mass flooding, and people losing everything. We must also understand that nature has a way of balancing things out. That’s why this planet, and these latitudes, are inhabitable. It is normal, after a period of drought, for a lot of rain to fall, to replenish water tables, and then for another period of drought to come back.

This amount of rain has not fallen in seventy years. What makes this year unique is that it is spread across the whole of Switzerland.

Chaque ville a déjà connu des débuts d’été particulièrement arrosés. À Sion, ce fut l’année 2007. À Genève en 1997, à Lucerne en 1993. La particularité de cette année 2021, c’est l’étendue du phénomène. Toutes les stations montrent un pic des moyennes quotidiennes de précipitations.

Un niveau de précipitations inédit depuis 70 ans en ce début d’été

And for your intellectual curiosity, if you understand French. The phenomenon of the “Cold Drop”.

Les faibles températures et les violentes précipitations qui s’abattent sur la Suisse sont dues à un phénomène météorologique appelé “goutte froide”. Il désigne une poche d’air froid qui est abandonnée par la calotte du pôle Nord.

Cette masse est ensuite “étranglée” et “attaquée” de part et d’autre par un air plus chaud. Elle se met alors à tourner sur elle-même jusqu’à former une dépression, donnant lieu à des orages et de fortes pluies.

That’s it for today.

Get Up – A Book Encouraging Us to Stand and Move More.

Get Up – A Book Encouraging Us to Stand and Move More.

Byrichard

What do snails have to do with chairs, I wondered as I listened to a book speaking about our addiction to sitting and chairs. It turns out that snails and other animals are programmed to move, walk, slither or other in an individual way. He started, by discussing sleeping in class, and having chalk thrown at him. Movement is an integral part of our lives and apparently, and as we have seen, children move a lot more than adults.


I have barely started the book Get Up but I’m writing about it because I find it amusing. There is a typically British sense of humour in the book. It also feels like you’re reading a story, despite it being a factual book, It’s the type of book that you can enjoy relaxing to. Such books are entertaining to listen to. Style is important with audiobooks, because it makes the difference between books within a few days or a few months. Books should be pleasant to listen to.


I set myself the goal, this year, of reading 25 books. So far I have read 24 and I am on track to reaching my goal. The aim was to read an average of one book every two weeks. I see someone else who has read one hundred this year. Two books a week. I know, reading, and standing up are a strange combination, but due to audible and other services you can read, without sitting comfortably. In so doing you can read at moments, or in places that are not associated with reading. During a run for example, or while you’re cooking.


A few months ago I was contributing to a read and review project and I found it interesting until I found that I could simply use my audible subscription to get plenty of books, lending libraries, and specifically Kindle Unlimited. I didn’t mind reading books to give a review until I saw how much was being charged per book. At this point I thought this was far too much.


One reason for this is that I often got PDFs and PDFs are a pain to read because you have to log what page you’re at if you don’t want to lose your page. The second is that I had to do the work of contacting an author, getting them to send the book and then read it within a short time, losing the freedom to read what I wanted, when I wanted.


I would consider dumping Waze for the same reason. A game where you are encouraged to drive to earn points is not worth playing. I prefer for walking, running and other activities to be gameified.


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A Curious Little Fox

Byrichard

I enjoy to go on walks that last from one to two hours and to explore the area where I live. In doing so I see interesting wildlife. Just yesterday I came across a furry little fox. I didn’t have my proper camera so I had to go home and get it. This is some of the footage I managed to get.

He’s cute isn’t he?

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Amersports and Sports tracker

Byrichard

Today Amer Sports announced that it has bought Sports tracker. Sports Tracker is an application that I have been using since I had the Nokia N95 8GB. I used it on symbian, iOS and Android devices over the years. What I love about this app is the way it displays information about the work out. It gives you several screens while you are exercising with the option to select which information you want to see most.

Once you arrive home and synchronise the workout with the web interface you can see the information displayed above. You can choose whether there is a topographic map, a normal map or satellite imagery. It is simple and intuitive to read.

Suunto make devices that I like using. I have used the Suunto D9 diving computer, the Suunto D4i diving computer, the Suunto Ambit 2 and the Suunto Ambit3. Suunto dive computers are small diving computers that you can wear in day to day life. When you are passionate about diving this is nice.

The Suunto Ambit family are more interesting for people who do land based sports. I used the Suunto Ambit 2 and 3 when doing via ferrata, hiking, cycling and other sports. The advantage of these fitness watches is that they have long battery life. This means that you can be active for two or three days before worrying about the battery dying. In this respect they are far better than mobile phones for fitness activity tracking.

Suunto products and Sports tracker do not communicate natively. Suunto products synchronise with movescount. From movescount you need to export the GPX workout files and import them to Sports tracker. I would like to see Suunto devices communicate directly with Sports tracker. In my eyes the best option would have been for Sports tracker to buy movescount and for them to take over the web interface for Suunto. They both provide interesting web interfaces and combining the two would have been mutually beneficial.

Time will show whether Amer Sports with links to sports tracker, precor and Suunto will come out with an interesting amalgamation of the three products/services. I look forward to finding out.

 

A Day In The Clouds

A Day In The Clouds

Byrichard

Today was a different to recent days because we spent it within the clouds, rather than beneath, or above them. It is hard to be above the clouds when you are near lake level. SRF has two nice time lapses of clouds flowing over a mountain as if it was water, or dry ice. Choose the one you prefer.


https://twitter.com/srfmeteo/status/1486011638956314626


It is estimated that a tenth of the Swiss population could be sick with covid-19 at the moment. If a tenth of those people had long covid then Switzerland is faced with 87,000 people with long Covid.


“Environ une personne sur dix a contracté le Covid ces dernières semaines en Suisse, a dit Urs Karrer, vice-président de la task force scientifique de la Confédération devant la presse à Berne. Les nouvelles infections se concentrent actuellement surtout chez les enfants de moins de 10 ans.

source


One million one hundred thousand cases of Covid have been detected in Switzerland, out of a population of around eight point seven million. In theory that’s an eighth of Switzerland that has fallen sick, if we ignore second and third infections of the virus.


There are two challenges to face. The first of these is to see whether we can get through the current wave without being infected, and that’s unlikely for parents of children and people who are exposed to others. The second challenge, it to see how much longer this pandemic will last. At the moment, with the speed at which new variants arrive. Three, within a matter of weeks, it looks as though new variants will emerge faster than vaccines and as if we will have many more waves.


Some countries stand out by the way in which they are not trying to make things better.


And Finally


I am still studying and learning. I will continue to study for as long as the pandemic lasts, because it is the one thing that is guaranteed not to be taken away from me. It also provides me with a sense of accomplishment every day.

Playing with Nextcloud Continued

Playing with Nextcloud Continued

Byrichard

Setting up a drive to be available via Samba is a relatively simple thing to do. The drawback is that you have files that are as organised as the media asset manager. It can be quite chaotic unless you have someone trained as a media asset manager, archivist, or other, to help order photos videos and more. To some degree Nextcloud is just as disorganised, initially.

I have spent more than five minutes experimenting with Nextcloud through several iterations and I have finally set things up as I want them. I have Nextcloud running on a Raspberry Pi 8GB. I chose this device because it’s the highest spec pi available at the moment without months of waiting. I could have used an HP Elite Book from several years ago but I want a machine that can be on permanently.

The first sync is slow. Twenty hours ago I started with over 19,000 photographs and videos and now I still have 6400 remaining. I activated recognize, an AI solution that recognises music genre, objects, human movement in video, people, bodies of water and more. I also have a tool running that maps photographs to show where they were taken.

The beauty of Nextcloud for photo storage is that it allows you to sync from your phone via the app, but it also allows you to upload photos via a web interface, or if you’re so inclined via file transfers on the back end. I have yet to test the latter. The idea is simple. If you have terabyte drives filled with photos that you have already organised by year, month, day, location, and topic, then that file structure should be recognised by Nextcloud. The work that you have done to organise media assets is already done. It’s just a matter of letting Nextcloud see them, and it will take care of mapping, and recognising objects, monuments, images with people and more.

Facial Recognition

With time it recognises faces and the faces are just given a number. You can then provide them with a name. I added my name to the collection of photos of me. It needs 120 faces before it starts to recognise individuals. As the model is self-hosted this data stays local to your system

Object and Landscape Recognition

I noticed that it recognises water, alpine landscapes, signs, boat, bridge, flower, furniture, historic, information and more. The Pi is still working hard to ingest the remaining 5600 photos but when that is done it will have plenty of time to recognise what is in pictures.

When you work as a media asset manager it takes time to tag images, and to add location data. If AI can provide some of this information automatically then it saves a lot of human time. Time that humans can spend adding images to the right folders.

Folder Structure

As a best practice you should always use folders with year-date-country-event-name-photographer-initials. If Nextcloud is up and running you can rely on Nextcloud but if for some reason Nextcloud crashes, or you can’t use a web browser or app, you want to be able to find things according to year, month date, photographer, and topic. Nextcloud should be an embellishment but good Media Asset Management practices should be prioritised.

To some degree the iOS app can help with this, as long as you set things up properly ahead of ingesting all the photographs. I haven’t seen how to set it up yet, but for now I’m still testing the proof of concept, for mobile phone image backup.

Using an Intel Machine

What I am doing with the Pi is experimenting with a Google Photo and iCloud replacement. What I plan to do with the linux laptop is use the full power of a normal computer to serve as a media asset manager for when the machine can be turned off, and on, when not in use. The aim of Nextcloud on the laptop will be to provide me with a one terabyte NAS where I can experiment with what Nextcloud really has to offer.

Tensorflow WASM mode
WASM mode was activated automatically, because your machine does not support native TensorFlow operation:
Your server does not support AVX instructions
Your server does not have an x86 64-bit CPU

When you use the Pi it does not have the required the required x86 64-bit cpu. For that I need to use the Intel machine. It also has GPU acceleration, which I cannot use on the Pi. The Pi is good because it can be on 24 hours a day, as a quick backup tool for your phone, but an Intel NUC machine can be a Nextcloud server with the required hardware to do things much faster.

And Finally

iCloud and Google Photos are great for backing up when you’re out and about. They’re less great when you want to recover your photos. This is because if you remove photos from iCloud they are removed from everywhere so it’s dangerous to clear photos to make space.

With Google Photos the issue is that their cloud backup solution is 34 CHF more than Infomaniak’s cloud storage solution. It is for this reason that I wanted to have a local backup of my Google Photos and iCloud photos. When I setup the Intel machine and ensure that all my photos are backed up from Google Photos I will be able to purge Google photos and downgrade my Google One plan.

My aim is not to eliminate Google Photos, but to reduce the plan I’m using. I have access to two terabytes but I never use it, and Infomaniak is cheaper, so I prefer to have a single plan. The Intel will be the main backup, and kdrive would be the offsite backup.

In the time it took to write this blog post I went from 6400 images to backup, down to 3800.

2 Comments

  1. I haven’t heard of this version, but there was a similar project to Bookcrossing started maybe 10-12 years ago that I participated in heavily at the start, because I loved he idea. The book was logged on a website and you left the info in the book when you passed it on or left it in a free library or book-exchange space. Alas, though I logged all my books and tried my hardest to make it all go, it fizzled. Maybe it was just too much work for people to volunteer their time to do? Dunno. Here’s to hoping this version takes off!

    Reply

    1. With the right people designing the interface it should be simpler to do things sustainably today. I think that a QR code that we can print out and add to a book with the same sticky things as for photo albums might be the best solution. A QR code takes seconds to scan and add a comment to. I should suggest that to them. I should study how to implement it.

      Reply

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