Every so often I get in a car to walk somewhere different. For two or three days we have been in the fog. Yesterday the fog was so thick that when I was driving I decided to slow down. I wanted to be able to stop in half the visible distance.
When the wind is still, and fog forms, there is another advantage, if you get above it. The water on lakes is flat. It’s so flat that the lake becomes a mirror. This is great for photography.
For 40 CHF you can buy a Tapo or Xiaomi webcam and it is almost ready to be used as a webcam. You take it out of the box, plug it in, add an SD card, download the app, pair it with the phone and let the phone connect it to wifi and then it detects motion, can take video, photos and more, with ease. In such an environment it’s easy to forget about what we called “Plug and pray” back in the day.
Back in the geeky old days of computing there was a lot of trial and error to get things to work. You would try one thing, and see if it worked, and then another, and then a third, and then a fourth, and eventually you would either find a solution, or give up. One of the reasons I switched to Apple, rather than Linux, in 2003, is that I wanted to be able to connect to the university’s wifi with ease. I expected that if I used a linux machine I would struggle with wifi.
Apple is the leader in making everything work so flawlessly, as long as they want you to do things, that trial and error is part of history. Apple controls everything, to ensure that it works “flawlessly”. I put “flawlessly in quotation marks because my phone crashes or hangs on almost every one of my walks. I rebooted it today and yesterday, while walking. If I take photos during a walk the phone acts up and freezes, and stops the podcast I’m listening to.
I’m being distracted. The point is that Apple, until recently, was known for producing reliable devices. Windows is also known for dumbing down their devices more and more. They try to make it so that users just click install, and the computer does the rest. Usually webcams, printers and more are plug and play.
With Linux you’re using a tinkerer’s OS so things can be simple, if you buy a generic webcam and plug it in. I tried to set an android phone up as a webcam and it worked within minutes. Integration with Home Assistant was smooth and efficient.
With a Raspberry Pi 3b and a Raspberry Pi zero 2 W I have struggled for three or four hours trying to get the camera to work. You have to do A, and then you need to do B and then you need to do C. You also need to wire the camera into the board the right way.
As you’re doing this from a CLI you’re not seeing whether the webcam is giving a picture or not. I tried to take pictures and it appeared to take them but when I tried to get motion to work with the camera to stream to a device with a web browser I just see nothing. I get an error message about the camera not being available.
I know that the right camera is detected because I see it in the output. I just haven’t taken the time to see if the images generated correspond to what I expect them to be. The subtle art of of trial and error is about having a goal and tweaking and experimenting until you get the result you want to get.
The first error is that I wired the camera the wrong way. The second error is that I don’t need to use the legacy camera option with this camera. The third error is that I’m trying to get a Pi and camera module to work as a webcam before I get it to work within its own device.
I am so used to Windows, MacOS and dedicated hardware being so reliable that I forget about the trial and error part of computing that was once so familiar to those of us geeky enough to spend hours of our free time playing with computers. When computers just work it’s easy for everyone to be a geek, because turning it off and on again is easy. So is plugging in a USB device.
My aim is not to build a CinePi.My aim is to setup a webcam that I can see via Home Assistant. I can then add motion detection and more features when I achieve the initial goal of building a Raspberry pi webcam server in minutes“. The instructions are for the V2 module, or a logitech device, and I’m using the V3 module, so the instructions need to be updated. That’s why I’m struggling, and that’s why it’s interesting to do these projects.
I came across this challenge when following programming courses that were over a year old. Sometimes I had to look for the new way of doing things to get the code to behave as it was expected to. Sometimes ChatGPT, Bard and Bing are helpful to find the up to date way of doing things. It is also a case of Reading the Fabulous Manual (RTFM).
There are at least ten Home Assistant Camera integrations to experiment with, so if the method I have been experimenting with doesn’t work I still have 9 other solutions to experiment with. The FFMPEG option looks interesting.
I call it the subtle art of trial and error because the art lies in learning a methodology by which to come up against an issue and to develop a system by which to resolve the issue in an increasingly short amount of time. The point isn’t in knowing how to do things. It’s in knowing where to look for help. It used to be called Google Fu.
I could easily buy a webcam for 12-30 CHF now but by experimenting with various “integrations” I invest my time in learning new skills and that has value. If I get FFMPEG to work, then I can potentially build my own camera systems. Instead of reverting to film like some, I could go the other way, and experiment with concepts similar to the Cinepi.
For at least two or three years I have been using Timelogger and I really liked the app. That’s why I kept using it for so long. There is one fatal flaw to Timelogger. It wants you to pay 2 CHF per month, or 9 CHF per year, or 25 CHF for a lifetime of use. It makes sense to pay for more features. It doesn’t make sense that you need to pay to backup to your own icloud account or export the data.
I have been using the app since 2020. I tracked 60 hours in 2020, 601 hours in 2021, 780 hrs in 2022 and 681 hours so far this year. The issue is that this data is now trapped on the phone I am currently using. I can release it for 24 CHF if I pay per month, 9 CHF if I pay for year, or 25 CHF if I pay for a lifetime.
In the early days of the Apple store you could download an app and use it for free but over time every app you download has asked for 25 CHF to 50 CHF per year. When you use 4 apps that’s 100CHF to 200 CHF per year. If you use 8 apps it’s 200-400 CHF per year. The apps that you use end up costing more than an iPhone SE, every year. It becomes absurd. I have used the Timelogger plus app for over 2,122 hours so I should pay but I’m not going to pay just to back up my data to my own cloud.
That’s especially true when you have to pay to backup your own data to your own iCloud account or to your iphone’s storage. That’s where an app like Timetagger becomes interesting, especially for people ready to setup a Pi on their home network to use as a time tracker.
One technique I use when dealing with iOS subscriptions is to take the minimum option, go to settings, subscriptions and then cancel the subscription within minutes of paying for a service. This has two advantages. The first is that you don’t get conned into paying for more than you want to use. If you do decide to extend you are asked, and have to take action to spend more money.
The second reason is that in my experience I would pay for a year, use the app for a week or less, and not be able to be reimbursed. It’s cheaper to pay for a year after you decide that you have a use for the app.
As a case in point, the Timelogger Plus allows you to “backup” your data but as a proprietary file, rather than a useful CSV or other file. The result is that you’re paying for a backup that condemns you to keep using the app. I find it dishonest to provide apps that give no way of sliding from one to the other.
You have the option to pay 3 Euros per month, for someone else to take care of the hosting, and you just use it, or you can follow the Pi My Life Up instructions to setup your own instance. The one thing to note with this install is that you need to run it with a docker command each time you reboot the Pi. You could set the Pi to do this automatically but I haven’t read the fabulous manual to see how to set that up yet.
With an app like Timetagger you give a name to what you’re doing but you also tag it with what you’re specifically focusing on. For what I am doing now I tagged it with blogging, writing and one or two more tags. I can then look at what I have spent time on for the last day, week month, quarter or year. You can select which tag you want to export as a spreadsheet, CSV or PDF document.
One of the key features that seems of interest with Time Tagger is that you use tags. With tags you can start tracking time spent for a specific client within seconds, without the need to create a folder with the name of the type of activity, and a specific sub activity within. With this you press play when you start, add the right tags, and when you stop the activity you press stop and everything is logged in simplicity.
The cheapest option would be to setup a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, and if it works you’d have paid 30 CHF and be happy. The options you have for the hosted solutions are 4 Euros per month, 36 Euros per year, or 144 Euros for life. They’re more expensive than the Timelogger app but exporting data is easy. You’re not locked in. You can also setup your own server and potentially add billing and other functionality.
If you only want to log your activities when you’re at the office or home then you can simply use the local network but if you want to access time tracking remotely you can add your instance to tailscale and use your VPN to connect when you’re away from the network with the instance.
Although I use the example of the raspberry Pi Zero 2 W you could just as easily set it up on your windows, mac os or other machine using Docker. Your work machine can serve as the host.If you want to work on adding features you can visit the github page and scroll to the bottom.
I have only tracked two hours so far but I like what I see.
I initially really liked Timelogger and Timelogger Plus but as the project advanced, so it became more and more of a trap. I would have left sooner, if I had found an alternative before now.
I knew that it would rain heavy yesterday (at the time when you read this) so I considered running so that I would spend less time in the weather. The issue, at this time of year, is that if you run you need to do so before the sun sets but you also want to wear lighter clothes, for running to be easier.
For these reasons I went for a walk instead. I rolled up the trousers to avoid contact between the socks and trousers. I wore waterproof trousers, and a good rain coat. I walked for an hour and a half in the rain and crossed almost no one. In this weather even the dog walkers stay home. That is what I want. I like when the paths are empty of people, when I can enjoy my solitary walks in solitude, without being reminded of my isolation.
I wore barefoot shoes for this walk. They get wet almost immediately as they are not waterproof. Within 200 meters my feet were drenched. That’s what I expected. That’s what I planned for. That’s why my trousers were rolled up. I didn’t want the humidity to creep up my socks, and then my trousers, and into my t-shirt and fleece.
It worked. I stayed dry.
There is one challenge in such rain. When you get to the end of one podcast you need to find an underpass, or a lending library, or some other shelter. You need to dry the phone screen and your hands enough to use the phone to select the next podcast. After that you can keep walking.
For many it would seem to walk in the rain, but that’s because they don’t walk the same path every single day, for weeks or months, or even years in a row. Changes in weather are like changes in crops, changes in seasons and more. When it rains I see a different landscape. I see where the land is low, and where it is higher. I see where the water flows heavily, and where your feet remain dry.
The greatest paradox is that despite the heavy rain, and the uncomfortable conditions you can still notice golden hour. As I walked today I saw that the light became more yellow, despite being under the rain. Despite the bad weather there was a discernable golden hour.
As I walked through one village I saw people burning wood in a barbecue. I don’t know whether it was to actually have a barbecue, or just to burn wood. If they were going to cook with it then it shows that the English are not the only people to barbecue in the rain.
As if that wasn’t surreal enough I also saw two children walking with someone dressed in a Santa costume. They all carried umbrellas to protect themselves from the rain. It’s not every day you see Santa walking in the rain with an umbrella.
In the end I wasn’t the only strange person out this afternoon, walking in the rain, as the heavy rain fell. If I was that type of person I would say that this walk was magical. Today was surreal, like Godard’s 1967 film, Weekend, where we see strange things as a car drives through a traffic jam.
For many rain is an excuse to stay in. I don’t see it that way. The familiar landscape becomes unfamiliar. The rivers that were barely a trickle are now full. The water that is transparent when the rain has just started has become brown. We can see rivers of muddy water flowing from the Gravière into the river. We can see where the road is low, and water flooded onto a road, and left mud and other detritus. In another location I saw apples strewn about. The rain had made the apples float, and transported them into nearby fields where other crops were growing.
Walking during the rain is unique, and worth doing, when equipped for the weather.
Reblog via harmonicarichard
https://mastodon.social/@jpmens/111532759490595481 I hate the cybertruck for this reason. No decent human being needs a car that can run people over without being damaged. Imagine cycling in a world with bastards driving cybertrucks. It’s frightening enough without the cyberfucks.
Yesterday it snowed for several hours and that snow was covering the path to my house. When I saw the ground turn from asphalt black to grey, to white I decided to go and start clearing the snow. It’s easy to clear snow when you have three or four centimetres, rather than more. At first it was light and easy to move so I cleared the path once, and then a second time, and then a third, and by the third I decided to stop. It had become a sisyphean task. It was falling as fast as I was clearing it.
Eventually I got around to spreading salt but because it had got wet it was clumpy and very hard to spread as efficiently as when it’s dry so in the end I didn’t spend too much time on it. I could have got away with not using any salt because within a few hours the snow turned to rain. I could have ignored the falling snow and the problem would have solved itself.
It was never about clearing the snow. It was about having a different workout than usual. It was about seeing an opportunity to have an upper body workout for free. It’s easy to walk, run or cycle. Sometimes it’s just as good to shovel snow, even if it was going to be melted by nightfall.
Eventually I was going to go for a walk, but because the snow was still falling I shovelled more snow. By this point it was wet and heavy so I eventually felt that I had reached the limit of my endurance and stopped. I was frustrated by the clumpy salt that was hard to spread because I was worried that the snow would freeze overnight and the ramp would become a rink.
Recently I have been listening to various Linux podcasts and I kept hearing about Plex, a video streaming service, and self-hosting solution. Plex is both a self-hosted media server as well as a film and television streaming service. Yesterday I watched Breaker Breaker as well as Ice Pilots NWT. When I watched Ice Pilots NWT on the laptop I had no ads but when I watched Breaker Breaker on an iOS device and Apple TV I did. I’m not sure whether it’s because of content type of viewing platform.
Plex looks like a great alternative to YouTube. It allows you to watch film classics like Nanook of the North, films from the 30s as well as plenty of films from the seventies, as well as more recent content. It’s divided in two. On one side you have video on demand, where you choose what and when to watch. You also have the Live TV option. Here you can watch Guardian TV, Euronews and other channels. You also have the Washington Post, Reuters and more.
The TV cateogires you can choose from are featured, news, hit tv, crime, sports, Game shows, Movies, action and more.
Plex feels like Satellite Broadcasting used to feel. You have a choice of many genres and hundreds of channels for niche interests. Rather than sorting through clickbait headlines like you do with YouTube you get real content, produced by Television and Film Professionals.
When it snows you have a great opportunity to get an upper body workout. At this altitude it’s quite rare, so that’s why its fun. Plex is an interesting alternative to Netflix and YouTube because you have a wide variety of programs to watch when it’s convenient for you.
On Monday, Wednesday and Friday the recycling centre is open from 1600-2000 or so, which is great if you’re working and want to go after work. The drawback to going at this time is that the one for local villages is down a narrow road where cars can barely pass each other. If you go at rush hour traffic you have commuters, and you have people heading to recycle.
When I had the scooter I would often go with that, because with a scooter it’s easy to go down a narrow road despite cars coming towards you. In a car you need to be careful that the mirrors on your car don’t hit the car coming the opposite way. There are two issues. The first is that the road was narrowed to slow down traffic. The second is that a road that should have no commuter traffic does have commuter traffic. Ideally this would be a one way road system.
If I go at 8 in the morning on a Saturday I miss the rush hour commuters, and I also miss all the people who can’t find the motivation to head to a recycling centre at 8 on a saturday morning. I used to be one of those people. I changed because I found that traffic is more fluid and because it’s quieter.
I find it hard to motivate myself to go and recycle. If it’s raining I use that as an excuse. If it’s sunny I use that as an excuse. If I have just finished my walk as it opens I use that as an excuse not to go.
I have been recycling for two or three decades or more, so the process of sorting recycling is normal. I’ve been recycling glass, aluminium, electronics, grass, paper and other things for a long time. It’s an ordinary part of life. It’s taking things to recycle that I find annoying. That’s why I wait until the car is full to go. I feel that it makes more sense to go when the journey is justified, rather than weekly.
I have started to keep recycling by the car. In so doing the excuse of having to run up and down stairs 3-6 times to take things from home to the car is taken care of. I just need to load the car and go. It’s important to remove key excuses.
I could take my walking loop by the recycling centre but people tend to mount the pavement where I’d be walking. I prefer not to go there by foot. The other option is to recycle things on the mornings when I shop. I could easily turn up five to ten minutes early, recycle some things, and shop.
I have a modular system. If you order things from online shops or other online stores you get boxes. I use these boxes to store PET bottles, glass and more. I wait until they’re full, and then I place them by the car. It’s my way of recycling cardboard boxes, before recycling them. If I use plastic containers, or paper shopping bags I need to bring them back up, after I’ve been to the recycling centre. By using boxes that need to be recycled anyway I have a convenient, modular system, for trips to recycle.
Although it could be seen as lazy not to go every single week I am one person, not two to four people. I generate half to a quarter of what others produce in recycling so it makes sense to go half, or a quarter as often as others. I also save petrol and wear and tear on the car. By going once every few weeks I help reduce congestion around the recycling centre, especially by going at 8am on a Saturday, when others prefer to sleep.
Yesterday I went for a run despite the rain. I was going down to run along one road that I usually avoid because of dog walkers. I ran along it before spotting someone walking with a dog. I couldn’t tell whether he was walking towards me or away from me so I turned around. I ran along a difficult bit of grass, trying to avoid the drivers in cars who have no empathy for people on foot.
To the left there is a massive field of mud. It used to be an agricultural field but the Swiss turned that field into a field of mud that fills with water when it rains. There is a dirt road but that dirt road is behind a fence. It can’t be accessed on foot.
I was running towards an agricultural road where I would be off the road once again. Once on the road I appreciated the metalled surface but I heard barking so I turned to look to the right and saw a cage with what appeared to be a dog or more barking so I continued running. I then spotted that two dogs were running along a road, on a course to intercept me. I count this as a dog attack because I turned around and ran back towards the road with traffic. In the end I cut across a fallow field but the fallow field was filled with deep puddles of water which I tried to avoid stepping in.
My feet ended up ankle deep in water several times and the effort of running was far greater than if I had been able to follow the path I wanted to run initially. The problem is that I had to overcome my fear of dogs to enjoy that route.
Over the pandemic, and ever since then I have found walking routes that keep me away from people, and away from their dogs. The habit that I picked up during the pandemic never ended, because COVID denialism replaced pandemic awareness. I walk by people sometimes, but if I can avoid them I do.
Over the last five years I have walked locally almost every single day and I have found routes that I enjoy walking along. Now I have an eight kilometre loop that I walk either clockwise or anti-clockwise. I had more routes but because of how cars behave towards me I decided to abandon certain walking roads.
When I hear a car I often step into the wet grass and the mud, because I know that they never slow down for me. Buses don’t slow down, delivery trucks don’t slow down. Motorbikes don’t slow down, and bikes don’t even bother to give me a safe space. The result is that I step into the wet grass and mud, and they wave to thank me. I’m not getting out of their way out of courtesy, unless they’re tractors or trucks. I’m getting out of their way because I am so tired of them passing me way too fast, way too close. It was easier to change my walking route.
For a long time I walked with waterproof shoes but I stopped, because waterproof shoes have good tread, and good tread is excellent at trapping mud. The problem with shoes that are great at trapping mud is that they require half an hour to clean at the end of every walk. It’s easier to wear shoes that have little to no tread. These shoes are not waterproof, so my feet get soaked.
Yesterday I was dressed for running, so I was warm when I was running. Because of the two detours I took, along wet fields the humidity wicked up from my socks to my trousers, and from my cap down to my t-shirt. This is despite wearing waterproof trousers and a rain coat (with no hood).
I have a route that I run and walk every day, whether clockwise, or anti-clockwise. Because of the rain I thought there would be no dog walkers, and that I could enjoy my rainy route. Due to the dog walker I couldn’t, so I deviated, and that deviation eventually got me soaked.
I achieved my running goal nonetheless. I would have enjoyed it more without the challenge of overcoming my fear of dogs. My fear of dogs is recent, growing over the last two or three years. Before that I didn’t bother about seeing dogs. The problem is that a dog ran and barked very aggressively along one fence, near Crassier. Two or three times I encountered that dog with nothing to hold it back so I ran into a field, and waited for it to leave me alone. Another time a dog ran towards me and barked aggressively near a forest, and I climbed onto a fallen down tree to have a slight height advantage. Yet another time I encountered a dog in a forest, where I shielded behind a tree until it left me alone.
The one that radicalised my fear of dogs was near the motorway. I stood still waiting for the owner to put in on a leash so that I could past. Eventually it charged me, ready to attack. I turned to run, and then turned to face it. I really thought that this would result in me being mauled. I walked away with no physical harm, but traumatised by the experience. The only time I decided not to avoid a dog walker I ended up being charged.
Since then I always avoid dogs when I’m alone.
Without dog walkers and cars on agricultural roads I would love my daily local walks. The pandemic showed me the euphoria of walking without cars and I really miss how quiet and pleasant the world was, when cars were rare. I call it the lock down honeymoon. For people who enjoy local walks it was fantastic.
There was a time when I would automatically get into a car to go for a walk. There was also a time when I would not consider going for a walk, or run, in the rain. Those days are gone. Now I go for my daily walk, or run, whatever the weather. I planned to be out for about half an hour yesterday, but because of the deviations I ended up going through wet fields. If I had run my usual route I would have remained relatively dry.
The rain is falling again today, so once again I will get wet, but this time I am walking so I can wear waterproof shoes, maybe.
Since I am planning to downgrade my Google One plan from two terabytes to 200 gigabytes as Kdrive offers me a better deal I took the time to check when, and how easy it would be to downgrade the plan. It’s actually very easy and I have a few months to back things up before downgrading.
In the process I was reminded that Google One originally had one terabyte of storage. They automatically upgraded all those with a one terabyte plan to two terabytes back in 2018 or so. We were getting twice what we paid for.
Of course we’re not getting twice what we’re paid for. We’re paying for storage we’re not using. For most of the time I have had Google One storage I have used less than 500 gigabytes of storage, out of two terabytes so a plan that offered 500 gigabytes of storage would have been closer to what I might have wanted.
The problem with cloud storage is that the more you have, the more you use, and the more you use, the more trapped you are. You’re trapped because either you need a two terabyte drive, and several days to download everything or you’re trapped paying 100 CHF per year until you invest the time it takes to download everything.
I have the three franc apple plan and Google One. I usually backup my photos to iCloud, until I run out of space. I also simultaneously back them up to Google Cloud. When I need to make space for an OS update on an iOs device I delete apps and photos from the iPhone as they’re backed up to Google One where I have plenty of storage.
Rationally I would expect Google Photos and Google Drive to be stored in the same place. You use Google Photos when you want to look at photos specifically and you use Google Drive for media asset management. Unfortunatley Google doesn’t think that way, so Google Photos is completely seperate and a pain in the abs (intentional spelling) to deal with.
iPhoto and Google Photos make it very easy to backup up photos to the cloud, but not retrieve them. Whilst this is fantastic for keeping us trapped it has the opposite effect. I never upgraded iCloud to the two terabyte plan because I saw how difficult it was to retrieve photos.
With Google Photos they make it very easy to backup your photos to the cloud, and offload photos from the phone, but in so doing it’s easy to exceed the storage capacity of a laptop drive, or mobile phone drive. According to the Google Photos app on Android I have half a terabyte of photos.
For me to see iCloud and Google Photos as viable primary photo backup solutions I want it to be as easy to download and store cloud photos locally as it is to send them to the cloud. If it’s easy to send them to the cloud but time consuming to get them back then this is not a solution because it is very easy to lose images, if we swap from one provider to another. We need backing up locally to be as fast as backing up to the cloud. We need it to be invisible and simple.
Android has a huge advantage over iOS in that we can by a 500 gigabyte micro sd card, or even a one terabyte SD card, and when we change phone we can swap the card from the old device to the new one and all our images are in the same place. With iOS devices we have to buy dedicated hardware to do the same thing, and we need to get a large external drive for the laptop to back up our images. In theory we wouldn’t need cloud storage to be more than a backup if apple allowed SD cards in iOS devices.
That’s where Nextcloud shines. I spent a few days trying to sync all my photos from an iOS device to a Raspberry Pi running Nextcloud and it failed, mainly because I played around instead of letting it sync. The quicker, rational solution is for me to download all the photographs from Google Photos locally, and then to send them from a windows or macOS device to the Raspberry PI, make sure it’s up to date, and then sync new photos as they’re being taken.
Without photographs I could use the 50 gigabyte option with iCloud and the 100 gigabyte option with Google One. I would save one franc per month with Apple but 80 CHF per year with Google, from 100 CHF per month, to just 20 CHF per month.
Although it’s fantastic that we can store photos to several clouds whilst we’re on our daily walks, bike rides and more it comes at a cost, both in terms of storage and financial. By using a solution like a home based storage solution like Nextcloud we can automatically backup our photos locally before deleting them from iCloud, Google Photos or both. In so doing we go from needing an expensive cloud storage plan to a cheap one. We also make it easier to flit from the previous cheapest storage solution to the next, without worrying about data loss.
I enjoy the idea of storing photos online but I hate the idea that they’re hard to retrieve, and for this reason I want to have a locally based, automatic cloud download solution, such as Nextcloud running on a home based machine. I won’t do away with the cloud storage solution but by having the primary backup locally the cloud storage can be swapped within minutes rather than days.
Today I’m going to write about happiness, and specifically about routine happiness. During the pandemic I noticed that people with children all looked happy. There is a simple reason for that. Children don’t understand what a pandemic is, so to give them a feeling of normality you distract yourself from the pandemic with children. The result is that all the parents I saw were in their own little happy world. I noticed that parents were laughing, happy, going to parties and more, ignoring the pandemic, despite having the most to lose.
I didn’t have children or a spouse, so I had to find happiness from another source. For months and months I was desperate for zero COVID to be reached but eventually the inhumane head of Switzerland decided to ignore common sense, and that the vaccine was enough. This act doomed me to solitude, because it meant that COVID zero would never be reached.
I value my health, so I still mask to this day, when I am indoors. It makes me both absurd and consistent. It makes me absurd because I’m surrounded by people who are happy to live in COVID denial. They are happy to ignore the inconvenient truth that COVID can result in Long COVID and long COVID can last a lifetime.
I really suffered when I saw that COVID was a new disease that people wanted to make endemic so I had to change where I got my happiness from. That’s when I learned to derive happiness from moving forward, of having a daily routine. My routine is that I write a blog post every single day. By doing this I spend an hour or two being mindful, thinking of topics, and taking the time to elaborate on them, as if I was having a conversation with someone.
The second part of that routine is the daily walk. It is almost always an hour and a half, whilst listening to podcasts or audio books. The third part is to spend an hour or two each day studying IT related topics. Recently I have been practising with the provisioning of Linux systems on raspberry pies. In theory once you’ve set up a system you know how to do it.
As I have learned, through playing with Nextcloud you provision the machine, you get it up and running, but then you find that it can only be accessed via one wifi hotspot, not the other. You find that the device overheats as you try to sync 19,000 pictures from a mobile phone. You also find that you need to adjust the folder permissions so that the phone app can create folders to organise the photographs you’re sending from your phone to your Nextcloud instance. Finally you find that it’s better to use your old mobile phone for these experiments because you can leave it plugged in for hours, or days as it syncs.
You also find the need to learn about cooling, how to plug a fan into a pie, and more. You also realise how noisy that fan is so eventually you turn off that Pi instance.
The point of routine, and working on projects, is that it helps you forget that you’re lonely and isolated, so you don’t feel lonely and isolated. This is an emotion that people with family lives never experienced for real. People who are not alone think they feel lonely, but they haven’t been alone during a pandemic, for months in a row. They will never understand.
Due to the pandemic requiring me to redefine my sources of happiness I derive happiness from reaching my daily goals, not seeing people. People put my personal goals on hold.
Back in 2006-2007 I was working on my dissertation for a few minutes a day, every single day, seven days a week, for months. If I didn’t spend five minutes every day on it, I couldn’t sleep. I needed to move forward with that goal. What amused me in this scenario is that I really enjoyed the process. Other people called it “The D Word” because they had not invested as much time, over as long, as I had, so they were panicked. I was happy.
The point is that I’m happy to see people, once I have reached my personal goals, either for that part of the day, or for the entire day. If I don’t work towards my projects because I’m with people, then I feel unhappy, until I have reached my daily goals.
Once I have reached my goals I am happy to be distracted by other things, but only once I have reached my goals, not before.
If I see people spontaneously I am happy, but if my presence is required I am miserable. People love to say that we can always say no, but we can’t. We can’t say no. “I don’t want to” might be a valid reason for a child, but not for an adult. Mental health is a valid reason but I don’t want to play that card, despite it being the real reason for me not wanting to do something today. I will burn over an hour of petrol to see people who a few days ago said “don’t come over unannounced. That message is the reason I don’t want to do a chore today. I don’t like being told I’m unwelcome, and then told to go a few days later.
There is nothing to gain, by saying no, because I have a favour to do nearby anyway, so it’s absurd to say no, but after today I will take a break from driving to that location. Last month I drove over six hundred and eighty kilometres, not for work, not for pleasure but for a favour.
Last time I went up I left the electric car, because I had no intention of going back up. I want my life to stop being absurd. The last five to six years have been absurd. I want my routine to stabilise once again, so that I reach my goal of feeling employable again, but I want to work remotely because I am not a friend of COVID.