Grasshopper is a Google app to teach adults and children about Javascript. It provides people with short, easy to understand modules to get a grasshopper to do things.
The curriculum is divided into seven modules. These are:
Fundamentals
Fundamentals II
Intro to Interviewing
Array Methods
Animations
Animations II
Using a Code Editor
Intro To Webpages
So far I have only played with part of the fundamentals course. You don’t need to write much code. You can select which function and variable you want to use, rather than typing lines and lines of code.
This is the type of app that you can use almost anywhere, and anytime you have a few minutes free.
One of the challenges, when you want to learn a new programming language, is to set up an environment before you start playing with code. That can be a long process and it’s easy to lose interest before you have even written two lines of code.
With such a simple app you don’t need to set anything up. You can play with code, see what it does, and then try something more complex. You can familiarise yourself with the language before you install a development environment on the machine you use.
An example of Grasshopper on a desktop.
As soon as the app is installed on your phone you start learning.
While I was cat sitting I spent time playing with a Roomba. Most people set the roomba, and let it clean. I don’t. I watch it and I observe how it works, how it goes from place to place and how it navigates, and gets trapped, and procrastinates in one corner or part of an apartment/studio. Roombas are glamourised but I think they are flawed.
Their flaw is that they start from their dock, back and go beep beep beep beep, then they rotate and they start cleaning. So far so good. The issue comes when they hit an object. They start from the top right of a room and they go diagonally to the other side of the room and they hit an object and they turn right.
How they turn right changes. Sometimes they turn right and start circling clockwise, and then counterclockwise. Other times they hit an object and go they go across to the other side of the room. Their programming sees them pass by the same corner dozens of times whilst ignoring other parts of the room.
I tried using shoes and other objects to control how big an area they focus on. I tried a bathroom, a small kitchen and a living room. In each case they go over and over the same spot.
I think Roomba should have been programmed to do a search pattern instead. When you’re mowing the lawn as a pattern you start from one side of the garden and you go back and forth, turning 180 degrees when you get to the other side and do a line right next to where you’ve been. In so doing you cut the grass in a short amount of time.
If Roomba simplified the programming they would be more efficient. They would not need to learn the room, they would not need to be “smart”. They could clean a room of any size within minutes rather than tens of minutes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FSUtSurqA4
The video above shows that smart vacuum cleaners take an artistic and inefficient approach to cleaning. They waste a lot of energy going over parts of the room they have already cleaned whilst missing some spots.
The brush at the front also has a habit of flinging dust and larger forms of dirt away from themselves and into a part that was just cleaned. As a result, they may spread some dirt. There should be a way of preventing this.
Due to their programming flaw, Roombas are more fun to play and experiment with than use as a replacement to manually vacuuming a room. A simple tweak in their software would make them more efficient. At the moment they behave like toddlers with a vacuum cleaner rather than teenagers with a lawnmower.
Over the last two days, I have been playing with Infomaniak K Drive, Swisscom MyCloud, Apple iCloud and Google Drive. I settled for Swisscom Mycloud because backing up pictures is free with my current contract and it’s cheaper than two terabytes with Apple iCloud. It’s free.
Infomaniak K drive is interesting because you can back up images automatically but when you have over ten thousand images on your phone like I do it cannot work through the backlog without timing out. The only way for me to update would be to keep the app alive for several hours as it uploads images and videos.
Swisscom Mycloud has the same issue but I invested yesterday getting all the images to upload from my phone. With patience, I might be able to upload all the videos but this may take several weeks. Both services have the flaw that when the app goes to sleep they stop uploading, and as video files are large it takes more time to determine which files still need to upload than to start uploading again.
Flickr also has this issue but as Flickr raises their yearly fees every year, and makes downloading files a messy and painful experience I am happy to find alternatives.
Both iCloud and Google Photos do not have this issue either because I’ve been synching as I go along or because they have the right privileges to work through the backlog.
Infomaniak K Drive is around 65 CHF per year, Google Drive and iCloud are around 100 to 120 CHF per year.
With Swisscom Mycloud I have “free” unlimited storage for photos and videos as well as 250 gigabytes for online backup of other files. I can then look at these photos via Swisscom TV, not that I do.
Swisscom Mycloud could be made more interesting by adding duplicate detection as well as the ability to upload from two or three devices at once.
Features I would like
Duplicate detection, so that I could upload images from several sources at once
Multidevice support, so that I can upload from the desktop, the phone, and other devices.
Background uploading, when on WiFi. Video files are heavy and the app times out on iOS devices before the upload is complete.
Select by day, because pictures from one day may be of a specific event. When you have more than five images selecting images individually takes too much time.
360 image and video support. Content on my phone is of spherical images and videos
Features I like
Placing images on a map. It’s fun to look for images by location. As you zoom in you can see everywhere you’ve taken pictures. This uses Exif data rather than location information based on where your phone has been, as with Google Maps.
Unlimited free storage of images and video. Since mobile phones aggregate pictures and videos from 360 devices, cameras, and other gadgets it’s nice to have as much data as we need for the storage of these images. It gives us an offsite backup in case we lose or break our phones.
It’s fast. Uploading new images is fast. Within seconds of taking a picture, it is backed up. Accessing images is also fast.
Smooth Integration With Swisscom TV. As soon as images are uploaded to Mycloud they can be viewed via Swisscom TV on the screen of your choice. This is interesting for videos and images that are worth seeing on a big screen.
Easy sharing of images and image folders. I like how easy it is to share images and folders and to allow other people to add images. What I would like to see on top of this is the ability to allow specific people to see the content. It would be nice to restrict access to chosen phone numbers, e-mail addresses and more. I would also like to password protect folders as I am not comfortable sharing certain images openly.
Select All and download, Should you desire to download all images at once this is possible. Select one image, then choose “select all”, press “download” and theoretically, you will be able to download all images at once. I say theoretically because I selected over 10,000 files which included videos and photographs. Google Drive is limited to 500 images per zip file and when I tried downloading from Flickr I found the process clunky and messy. Flickr strips all EXIF data so you’re left with a mess of images. (A media asset manager’s nightmare because of the volume of work, but a dream, because of the hours of work) 😉
Why The Interest?
iPhones, iPads and Android devices now have 120 or more gigabytes of storage each and with this amount of data, it is easy to reach the 200-gigabyte wall beyond which you pay ten CHF per month for storage. A “free” option like Swisscom MyCloud Standard is interesting for those on the right contracts because it’s free. This means that no matter how much storage their phone has their images are backed up. It also means that as time advances and they gather more and more images it can expand.
Apple and iPhoto want you to believe that they are the best integrated, slickest option. When you’re in a situation like this they say “You have 30 days to download your photos in the photo app”. There is no “select all and download” option. There also seems to be a limit of how much bandwidth you can use in a single day.
And Finally
The reason for which MyCloud, Google Photos, and other solutions are so interesting is that we have moved to a laptop-based workflow and as a result, the hard drive on our laptop is as big as the one on our phone so backing images up locally requires an external hard drive.
I had Firewire 400, 800 USB 2, 3 and USB C drives. Apple loves to de-standardise ports and so hard drives that were once convenient to use become problematic. With increasing bandwidth and online storage solutions we can stop worrying about external hard drives on a daily basis and use them when we need to “desaturate our drives”. I apologise for the diving term.
With online storage, we’re backing up when we’re hiking, cycling, climbing, doing via Ferrata, traveling and more. We don’t need to worry about our box of cables, adaptors, or which drive what material is stored. As a media asset manager, I can help you consolidate your media assets into a single location, along with backup solutions.
I hope that this blog post helps you understand this topic and provides you with solutions.
13 Minutes to the Moon is an interesting podcast dedicated to the Lunar Landings. This podcast, along with audiobooks, is interesting because they allow us not just to read the dialogues that took place but to hear what the controllers and astronauts heard.
At one point in Episode two, you hear two communications loops at once. It’s a shame that they didn’t balance the audio so that loop 1 was in one ear and loop 2 in the other. If they had done this then we could have heard the audio as mission controllers had heard.
The podcast is also interesting because it’s divided into twelve 50 minute podcasts so each topic is explored in depth. There is some overlap with the books I have read. For enthusiasts, this overlap is interesting as it allows them to fill in gaps in their knowledge.
You remember the old saying. The best camera is the one that you have with you. Today the same can be said about “edit suites” that you carry in your trousers or jacket pocket. I’m speaking of edit suites that work with your iphone or ipad. Lumafusion is one such example.
It differs from other mobile editing solutions in a number of key ways. The first is that it allows you to edit on a timeline with three video sources at once This means that you have more control. It allows you to split audio which allows you to overlap sound from one clip to another and provide a better finish.
This includes the option to add graphics, idents and other visual content. It allows you to provide a finished product, ready for broadcast or distribution.
Another nice feature is that you can record your voice over directly to the timeline once the edit is finished. This means that vloggers and people who like to record commentary rather than natural sound, can capture natural sound, and add commentary later.
I played with this editing solution with footage shot on an iphone SE at a music festival as well as other footage shot on an iPhone 8 Plus. The edit suite was my iphone 8 plus while lying on a couch.
I like this editing solution because it allows for a high quality turnaround of mobile phone footage for a number of platforms without carrying a laptop. This is ideal for hiking, climbing and other types of video content. It costs 20 CHF so once you’ve spent several hundred on an iphone it’s cheap. ;-). It allows export in h264 as well as h265.
Caveat
I tried importing greenscreen footage via Google drive from a PMW-200 that had been converted to mp4 but the video codec was not recognised. I have yet to try greenscreen quality.
For about six weeks I have been trying to do at least one seven-minute workout every single day. I eventually fell out of the habit for a few days because I had to fight a little virus. I’m feeling better again. Time to see if I can beat my old maximum of 36 days.
At least one circuit a day
The Seven-minute app I was playing with is by Perigee. The app provides you with the opportunity to train for fitness, for strength or to lose weight. I tried to last for seven days on the Fitness program and suffered. I managed to stick with the routine for a week once as a challenge. Now I choose the routine that I feel I am most in the mood for. On some days I choose a stretching routine and on others I choose to push myself. I tried a chest workout and I found it hard. Yesterday I went for an animal routine and it was easy.
Workout to your day’s energy level
The beauty of these apps is that as you get familiar with them you can give yourself different intensity workouts depending on the time of day and how you’re feeling. You can start with one of the morning routines if you like or an office chair workout. When you’ve finished with a run you can stretch or you can do the post workout routine.
Chose the trainer
I tried the drill sergeant for a while but he frustrated me so I tried the hippie and the kung fu master (or whatever name they used for the app). I have settled for the cheerleader. If I met someone that cheerful in real life I’d probably avoid them but for the workouts it’s nice. I’m usually working out either an hour before bed or more recently before dinner. This is the best time when I can decompress from the commute.
Complimentary
These workouts are complimentary to the rest of my day. I have started training with the c25k app once again and I’m trying not to push too hard. Eventually I want to get to 10km runs and beyond but only when my body can keep up. During week days I walk at least 2 and a half kilometres to work and back as well as walk during my lunch break. Today was an average day and I walked up the equivalent of fifty floors. The 7 minute app is just a bonus.
Motivation
I’ve tried a few of these apps and after less than a week I usually stop using them because they’re either too expensive or they’re a good challenge but not much more. With this app I like that you get badges for the challenges you accomplish. I My goal with this app is to go for seven months without missing a single workout. I managed for 36 days and now I have to start all over. I’m on day 8 of the current challenge. When I finish typing this blog post I will have accomplished day 9.
If you threw in some running between workouts then it would be just like parkour vita. That’s what they should do next.
12 exercises with three or four minutes of running between routines. By the end, you’d be exhausted. With perseverance, you’d be fit. Or you could just do crossfit.
My latest Suunto device is the Suunto Spartan Wrist Hr. This is a practical device that finally includes two features that I really wanted to see in a suunto device. The first of these is the Wrist heart rate monitor function and the second is a step counter that tracks physical effort on a daily basis and that can be reviewed later.
Used for a multitude of sports.
I have used this device to track hikes, runs, indoor climbing, outdoor climbing, walks within cities and 7 minute workouts. Two of the devices strengths is that I no longer need to wear the heart rate monitor belt. This saves a few seconds and when you’re hiking or doing other activities with groups this is a nice feature. The second nice feature is that it detects GPS signals and provides a position within seconds. This means that you don’t need to wait or two like you needed to with the Suunto Ambit 3 and others.
Fitbit replacement
I have owned a number of fitbit devices and I liked that they tracked step count and heart rate 24 hours a day but I did not like that the data was siloed. I also disliked that most of their devices are not shower proof. This means that you need to take them off every single day. With the Suunto Spartan Wrist HR I can wear it 24 hours a day and keep track of my movements throughout the day for multiple days between charges. I can also keep track of data for the day, the week and longer periods of time. In effect it has allowed me to stop using the Suunto Ambit three and the Fitbit charge 2 in tandem. I am back to wearing just one device.
Movescount and Sports tracker combined
I am currently beta testing the Suunto Version 0.4.0 app and it now combines Movescount and Sports tracker, two apps that I have now been using to track fitness activities for years. I have been using sports tracker since it was available on the Nokia N95 8gb. I am now at over 1100 tracked activities and I like the data that both apps provide. Combining both apps is a nice move forward.
You can now record your own Wazedriving directions. Instead of using pre-determined voices you can record a number of pre-determined phrases and use them for when you are driving. Recording and using your recording is easy.
Setting it up
In the settings menu go to voice directions, click on record new voice, name the voice and then you can record Start of Drive messages, Distances, Instructions, Reports and Other. Each instruction can be up to 6 seconds in duration. Simply click the red record button, record the phrase and then listen to it. Once you have recorded the first clip you can save the new voice.
Multiple languages
It is possible to record multiple languages. Simply go to settings, general and language. Select the language you want to record in and then repeat the setting it up instructions. The phrases will be provided in the language of your choice. As I speak English and French I can record instructions in both languages.
Friends and family
If you don’t like your own voice you can get friends and family to record their voices. You could use one voice for driving to work, another for driving with friends and a third one to keep children entertained in the back. You can also share these recordings publicly for other people to use. If you’re a Vlogger or podcaster this is one way to grow your audience.
Long trips and frequent GPS use
When you go on long trips and use the GPS frequently the default voices can be tedious. The ability to record the voice of your choice is a nice addition. For three or more hours you can hear the voice of a friend or family member. It can become a source of entertainment. I often drive with the GPS silenced to avoid pestering passengers. With the correct voice, you could leave vocal directions on.
Clean water is important to have when you’re cycling, hiking or climbing in summer but the issue is that it is heavy. When I go cycling I go with just one flask and I fill up the water bottle when I get to fountains that are marked as safe to drink from. When I go hiking or climbing I usually do not go with more than one and a half litres of water although I have gone with up to three litres for a hot summer day’s activities when the temperature is above 32°c.
In Switzerland, France and Italy you theoretically do not need to walk with that much water because you cross streams, fountains, rivers and lakes. If you had a water filtration system you could theoretically purify the water from these sources and continue hiking. Yesterday I came across Katadyn and two solutions for water filtration.
Katadyn BeFree
The Katadyn BeFree is a collapsible water bottle system that you fill from unfiltered water and then filter as you drink. This system also allows you to refill clean water containers within a very short lapse of time. It takes very little space in your bag and it’s light. It’s easy to have this with you at all time. It would be practical for cycling and climbing. You leave home with clean tap water and when you run out of clean water you fill this system and squeeze clean water in to your clean water bottle and continue the day’s activities. I have seen this system for 45 CHF in Switzerland.
Katadyn Hiker Pro
The Katadyn Hiker Pro is a slightly more expensive but portable solution. It allows you to filter water straight from a river, stream or lake to a clean water recipient. It has a first filter on the hose that goes from the water source to the pump. The pump has a pre-filter to get rid of any sediment still suspended in water and the third filter filters out almost all bacteria. Clean water then flows from the pump to the clean water container. If you’re climbing near a river or exploring a via ferrata near a waterfall then the need to carry water is reduced.
SteriPen Water purifiers
According to this article you can go a step further to stay safe. Almost every article and review mentions that the two systems above are not designed to kill viruses. If you want to go that extra step then you have the Steripen Aqua UV Water purifier. It is meant to kill almost all bacteria and viruses. The link is to the cheapest model. The second option is to boil water.
“Boiling can be used as a pathogen reduction method that should kill all pathogens. Water should be brought to a rolling boil for 1 minute. At altitudes greater than 6,562 feet (greater than 2000 meters), you should boil water for 3 minutes.Apr 10, 2009” source:
Water Quality maps
If you’re going to drink river or lake water in Switzerland this document from March, 2017 provides maps with water quality information. In some areas waters may be contaminated with chemicals or pesticides and it is good to check that cattle are not upstream of your water source.
Wehike is a website dedicated to find people with whom to hike. People can contribute hikes to wehike and then they or other people can organise events based on the hike information. This includes a GPX file and images. At the moment this site is in beta so they are looking for user feedback. At the moment they are based in Switzerland but they will be able to expand globally as people contribute hikes and other people participate in these hikes.
I liked yesterday’s hike because for once I was struggling to keep up with the group rather than the opposite. Usually I’m leading the group and stopping every so often to take pictures and because I’m not certain of which fork to take next. In this case they were waiting for me. This is in part due to the Via Ferrata de Saillon trip the day before. I’ll get back to being in front of the group and taking pictures soon.
This hike was interesting because winter is not over. Apparently twenty five centimetres of snow fell the day before. As a result one local recommended that we choose another route than the one we had planned on. We decided instead to see how the conditions were. As is the case when you go for hikes in Spring the damage from winter has not being cleared away. We found trees and branches on the paths and paths that would normally be clear to find required more instinct and orientation than average.
When you start heading up properly you walk straight up through a pasture and you get to a stone ruin. We stopped at the ruin for a snack/lunch. From this point you walk up steep paths near the field’s age with a river to your right until you get to a clearing. From the clearing you walk up some more and you get towards the vista below.
This is a view looking North at a steep climb up. If you continue to the Cap au Moine then you still have some climbing to do. Due to the deep snow and conditions this is the point at which we started heading back down. We walked along in 20-30 centimetre snow falling someone’s snowshoe traces and then headed down.
When the snow is deep and powdery like it was yesterday it’s really fun. You can run and jump down the hill. I would share the photos if I had the participants’ permission. Here’s a taste.
If you look at my GPS trace you will see how fast we were descending the slope. Eventually you get back to the grass and the tree line. When you get back down to the river you cross a stone bridge and to the right you see a waterfall pictured below.
I enjoyed this Wehike because we had the opportunity to navigate and find the route, we got to climb over trees and walk under branches. We also got to walk a steep hill in the snow and run and bound down a snowy slope without worrying. Snow is so much softer for the knees. I would like to redo the hike later in the season when the snow has gone.
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