Avoiding Rush Hour Recycling

Avoiding Rush Hour Recycling

Byrichard

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.

Barking Dogs and Soaked Socks

Barking Dogs and Soaked Socks

Byrichard

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.

Retiring Google One and iCloud for Photo Cloud Storage

Retiring Google One and iCloud for Photo Cloud Storage

Byrichard

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.


What I Do


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.


It Backfired


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.


What I Require


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.


The Android Advantage


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.


Using Nextcloud as a Home Alternative


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.


The Saving


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.


And Finally


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.

Routine Happiness

Routine Happiness

Byrichard

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.


And Finally


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.

The Noisy Raspberry Pi Case Fan

The Noisy Raspberry Pi Case Fan

Byrichard

While playing with Nextcloud I saw that the raspberry pi was overheating so I played with a fan for people to cool the device. It worked well, except that when you’re holding a fan you’re stuck holding a fan. I looked at various Raspberry pi cases and decided to get a Joy-IT case with an integrated fan.


The case is simple. It consists of a base plate, a middle block, and a top plate. You put the pi, with the card inside. You then plug the fan to some of the GPIO pins and the fan starts to spin and cool the Raspberry pi beneath. The Raspberry pi went from 50-70°c to 38°c so it works, but it’s noisy. It seems paradoxical that something as small as a Raspberry Pi could end up with such a noisy fan. It’s as noisy as an old laptop or an old external hard drive.


This does not mean that I don’t like the case. I do. I think it’s great that it is so simple. You don’t need screws. You just put the card into the Pi’s card slot, put the pi on the base plate, put the middle sandwich part over the USB and ethernet adaptor, you then plug in the fan to the GPIO pins, and put the top on.


In my case I found that the fan seemed to be blocked so I improvised a solution to keep the fan from hitting the Pi and now it’s happilly spinning and cooling the Raspberry Pi. For 11-12 CHF you don’t expect it to be as silent as newer mac book pro.


As I write this post I’m playing with the time tracker app in Nextcloud. With the app you can provide project names, and then you can specify the task that you’re currently doing. I created an IT project, and a blogging project. Now I’m tracking the daily blog post time spent, and when the post is finished I can stop the timer, and see how I have spent the morning.


And Finally


I think the fan on this case is so noisy that it would fit right into an air conditioned server room, but it’s too noisy for a living room or bedroom. I need to place it where it won’t be so disruptive.

Experimenting with Nextcloud and A Raspberry Pi 4

Experimenting with Nextcloud and A Raspberry Pi 4

Byrichard

Nextcloud is an open source file sharing solution that has iOS, MacOS, Android, Windows and Linux apps. You can install it via a docker container, natively or via a number of other solutions. For my experiment I installed via Docker on Windows but haven’t done anything with it, and with [Nextcloudpi](https://nextcloudpi.com/). The latter is an ISO image that you can download and install to an SD card using the Raspberry Pi Imager.


Transfer screen
Transfer screen


Use Case


It’s easy to take dozens, or even hundreds of pictures in a single day on the mobile phone but it’s a nuissance to download them all locally so you usually use iCloud, Google Photos or some other solution. This is great, for as long as you have enough space on your phone. The moment iOS or Android stops offloading your photos from your device you’re in an annoying situation. Uploading photos to cloud services is painless. Retrieving them is a nightmare, for two reasons. The first reason is that you need to have enough storage locally to download all those files. When you’re on a laptop storage is at a premium.


You could use an external hard drive but it may take days, or even weeks to download all of your files. This means that you need to keep your machine plugged in and downloading for as long as it takes to download those files. That’s where Nextcloud comes in. When it’s working correctly it will download files from your phone, either as you take them, or when you choose to upload them.


What it does


It allows you to store and share photos, including encoding and decoding of video files, as well as preparing preview files, reading RAW image files and more. It allows you to have contexts, calendar, time tracker, apps like GpxPod, Tasks and more. It also provides you with an RSS reader, video player, and audio player.


With the photo app you can use facial recognition and other AI tools. As images are added to the galleries it checks for their location and adds them to a map as you would with Google Photos and iCloud. It also gives you the option of adding an exif reader to get more info from your saved files. With the GpxPod app you can download walks, hikes, runs, bike rides and planned routes and view them on the screen. I have yet to play with it properly.


How to Break Things


– upload 19,000 images at once. It will overheat the device


– reboot the machine. Having a different ip will get nextcloudpi.local to fail.


– ensure that your machine is called nextcloudpi.local


– use “sudo nano /var/www/nextcloud/config/config.php” to enter the config file and ensure that the ip address is listed. It needs to see that the current IP is a trusted one.


– Go from one wifi access point to another. I found that if I go from the living room wifi to the bedroom wifi it loses sight of the server and fails.


– Allow the Pi to Overheat. If the Pi reaches above a certain temperature the Pi will begin to fail. You need a fan if you’re playing with Nextcloud on a pi, especially when synchronising tens of thousands of pictures.


Why This Solution is Interesting


The system is new to me so I’m micromanaging it as it tries to get through thousands of files. Once it’s up and running it will be invisible and that’s the beauty of such a system. Once the Pi has its own fan it will no longer overheat and if I provide it with WiFi and Lan it should be accessible locally whether on one wifi network or the other.


With some network storage solutions you have the disks and the LAN interface within the same box, and if one fails you might lose access to the drives. With this solution you can attach an SSD or other hard drive to the Pi. If the Pi fails you just replace it. Once everything is running smoothly I would have two drives. The primary drive would be in constant use, and the second drive would serve as a backup.


It’s also low cost. A raspberry pi is cheap, and so are micro SD cards. Mobile phones are usually 128, 256 or 500 gigabytes. With a single SD card you can backup your phone every time you get home, as it syncs the most recent files.


And Finally


If I was not synchronising a huge backlog of photographs this solution would be up and running. It’s because I’m trying to backup the images that are on my phone that there are teething problems. I edited the config file to recognise nextcloudpi4.local and the two ip addresses the device is currently on. I have it on wifi and lan because I want to see if I can access it from either wifi. If that is the case then I have succeeded and the last step will be to have the Pi in a case with a fan.

Experimenting with CWT Vulcan

Experimenting with CWT Vulcan

Byrichard

Recently a CWT Vulcan system was installed on a pipe in the building where I live and the calcar that I had watched being deposited in a kettle stopped depositing, and even started to disintegrate. Within a week, or less the calcar almost vanished.


To over-simplify it, you wrap a coil around a pipe, with an electronic ciruit board and it uses electric currents, through electrophoresis to take calcium and magnesium from complex to simple structures. In the process calcar no longer builds up. It goes a step further and cleans the calcar, as was shown by the kettle example. You can read more about the process from this source. If that’s not technical enough you can read this paper.


According to a sheet of paper the system needs two watts of power. Once it is installed you can leave it to do its work. The difference is noticeable very quickly. One test was to boil water five times in a sauce pot, so I did. I could barely see any calcium build up and when I wiped it with a cloth the small traces wiped away.


I am used to filling a kettle with water, boiling it, and making tea or coffee. I played with Moka pots to make coffee and with kettles and moka pots I saw a build up of Calcar. With water treated by the CWT Vulcan system the kettle and Moka pot clean themselves thanks to the treated water.


When you use Brita filters you need to shake them in water, and then you need to flush water through them twice, and then you can use them for a month, before repeating the process. With CWT Vulcan devices, once it’s installed you’re done, and you get softer water.


When you’re washing dishes, or rinsing glasses water drips from the glass or other container and leaves traces. With the Vulcan treated water there is no deposit left behind. Before the Vulcan water treatment system leaving a drop of water to evaporate would leave a trace of rust coloured calcar behind. I’m convinced of the value of this system within two or three tests and the company suggests six tests.


One of the tests is the rusty nail test. The problem is that I don’t know where I can find a rusty nail. The closest I come to a rusty nail is a rusty double edge shaving blade. Upon consideration I could test it with a wok that is several decades old by now. It has traces of rust, when you forget to oil it before storage.


And Finally


What I appreciate with this system is that it requires two watts of power and it does what it’s designed to do. You don’t need to replace filters every few weeks, or months and there is little to no waste. I love gadgets so I’m convinced by this solution. Originally I thought it was moronic to spend thousands of francs on a system that would then require thousands of francs per decade to keep running. With this system once it’s installed there are no, or fewer costs.

A Walking Decline in the US Since 2019
|

A Walking Decline in the US Since 2019

Byrichard

According to streetlight data walking in the US has declined over the past three or four years. The decline was by up to thirty six percent from 2019-2022. The clearest reason for this is that 2019 and 2020 were walking honeymoon periods. By this I mean that for the duration of lock down and “work from home” people had more time to walk since they spent less time commuting, but also because the natural habit of getting into a car to do something had declined., thanks to the pandemic.


The Return of Driving Post lock down


As pandemic lock downs came to an end so the nightmare of people using cars revived. When people are free to range further, out of lock down, they drive to do things, like shop, go to cinemas and go to indoor gyms, rather than enjoy the outdoor world. Imagine if, during the pandemic, you went for a one hour walk because the indoor gym was closed. Imagine if you walked locally, because it made sense not to drive far from personal toilets, and other conveniences.


The Pandemic Walking Options


I am not in the US, so my experience is irrelevant to the US situation. In my experience I walked up to three hours per day, and enjoyed my walks, until the habit of driving became a problem once again. Plenty of walks that were probably pleasant due to lock downs and fewer people driving, were destroyed by the return of cars and their drivers.


For two or three years I would walk down towards the lake and along farm roads that were narrow. During the honeymoon these roads were quiet. They were a pleasure to walk along. With the return of normal life people started to drive along these narrow lanes again, without being considerate of pedestrians.


The Loss of Safe Walking Paths


I went from having three hour walking loops that were empty of cars, and a pleasure to walk along, to paths that became a nightmare. When you have a car going at 50 to 80 kilometres per hour half a meter from you, every few minutes, every day, for years, you get fatigued.


That fatigue results in people, including me, choosing to walk less, and even to consider not walking at all, and getting into the accursed cars.


Attention On Cars Rather than Walking


No one addresses the elephant in the room. We have made a landscape where walking between villages on foot, or cycling, have become dangerous. If it’s dangerous to walk along pandemic walking paths, due to the return of people in their cars, then it makes sense that there would be a 39 percent decline in walking habits in the US. Why would you walk, when to walk is to expose yourself to dangerous drivers?


The Need for Rural Walking Paths Between Villages and Towns


That’s why I argue so often that instead of making towns and cities pedestrian friendly we must make it safe to walk between villages, and from villages to towns, and from villages to cities. Why would people walk along dangerous roads, rather than take a bus, or car?


Awful for Walking


I see that efforts are being made to make towns and cities more walker friendly but in my opinion it makes more sense to connect villages with walking loops. I want to be able to walk from Crans to Céligny to Crassier to La Rippe to Borex to La Rippe and plenty of other villages without having to walk along busy car roads. I want to be able to walk on walking paths where cars are banned. There are plenty of agricultural roads but villages like Eysins are scary. There is a bridge from Crans to Eysins where cars drive fast, playing chicken with each other despite pedestrians crossing. On another road people speed along at 80 or more kilometres per hour, without showing consideration for pedestrians. On a road between Arnex sur Nyon and Crans there are agricultural roads where drivers speed, without being considerate of pedestrians.


It’s fine and dandy for Nyon, Geneva, Lausanne and other towns to say that they want to increase walking, cycling and other forms of movement, but they won’t increase those means of transport if you can’t walk from villages around Nyon, into Nyon, or cycle from Nyon to Geneva without being thrown into parkings or onto busy roads where car drivers park in cycling lanes in summer.


I often walked to Crans and Céligny, until I grew tired of walking along agricultural roads with cars that were driven too fast and too close to me. I don’t want to stop every time a car is close to me. I want cars to slow down and overtake at slightly more than walking speed. That’s what I do when I am driving a car. I want cars to respect pedestrians.


Discouraging Cars Without Providing Alternatives


When Geneva changed traffic systems to discourage drivers, I stopped going to Geneva, and when Nyon made the same mistake I stopped going to Nyon. When I lived in London I once drove from Switzerland to London, saw the price of petrol and left it parked. If public transport is good, from villages to towns, and from towns to cities, then people will not use cars. The problem with Switzerland is that the policy makers live in towns and only see the journeys between towns, rather than villages. It used to take 45 minutes to drive from work home, and one and a half hours by public transport. You encourage people to walk, cycle, and take public transport when trains or buses are every five minutes, as with the London underground.


Walking Rather than Driving


If it was pleasant to walk from Arnex sur Nyon to Nyon, or from Borex to Nyon, or from Signy to Nyon people would have the opportunity to leave the car, and enjoy a pleasant walk instead. The problem that I see, every single time I go for a walk, is that whilst towns and villages try to discourage driving within them, they do nothing to encourage walking and cycling from outside.


I have a really healthy walking habit, but when I am made to fear for my safety on every single walk I seriously consider getting into the car, to walk somewhere, where I feel safer to walk. The paradox is that I would drive far, to walk a smaller distance. I would be part of the problem, by getting into a car, to go for a walk.


Think of that paradox. I have to get into a car to go for a walk, because the local walks are too dangerous because cars do not slow down enough, on roads that are meant for agriculture, not cars.


And Finally


During the pandemic honeymoon, especially during lock downs, I got to experience the great potential of walking locally. During the honeymoon of lock downs I could walk from Nyon to Founey, and from Founex to Crassier, and from Crassier to Tranche-Pied, and from Tranche Pied to Gingins, without fearing cars. I could even walk along the motorway because it was quiet and pleasant.


So many efforts are being made to discourage the use from within towns and cities, but they forget that the place from which people are most likely to drive, is villages. If people can walk between villages safely, then the need for cars is diminished. It is futile to make towns and cities pedestrian friendly, and more village like, if villages require people to use cars.


For me there is no mystery. People walk less because it’s more dangerous to do so, now that roads are filled with cars again. Global society should bring back the habit of people walking between villages, safely. Cycling suffers from the same issue. If it is dangerous for children to cycle, things need to improve.

Running Through Ankle Deep Water
| |

Running Through Ankle Deep Water

Byrichard

Yesterday I went for a run, despite the rain being heavy. I wore a proper rain coat and waterproof trousers. I should have also worn waterproof shoes. I didn’t so I ended up soaked once again. What made this run special is that the rain was heavy from the start.


The rain was so heavy that water running from fields and hills was creating deep rivers that ran downhill along roads, filled with muddy water. Normal people would postpone their run for the following day, especially since we knew yesterday that the weather would be good for several days to come.


I got into the habit of walking and running in all weathers so the weather doesn’t affect whether I will go out or not. If it’s raining dog walkers and normal people are usually not out, so the paths we walk and run are free for us to enjoy.


I ran uphill for the first part and it felt hard. It always feel hard to run uphill but there isn’t much choice. If I run downhill I run along the roads where drivers have no respect for pedestrians. I walk and run uphill because that’s where I feel that the roads are safer from cars.


In this day and age everyone is trying to make towns and cities pedestrian friendly but when I lived in London, when I walked in Paris, London, Florence, Geneva and plenty of other cities I never felt bothered by cars. It’s in between villages and towns that cars behave cruelly towards pedestrians and cyclists. To me roads should be dedicated to cycling, running and walking, and there should be a requirement for dogs to be on leads.


I run up the hill because I know that where I am exposed to traffic the roads are wide and I have space to move away from the sadistic drivers speeding by pedestrians. I also walk along those roads because they’re wide enough for cars to avoid us, when no other cars are coming the other way. Where agricultural roads are used by normal cars, where they are wide enough for a car but not two, drivers drive too fast.


If I was driving I would slow down to walking speed as I pass pedestrians and cyclists. They don’t. They almost never slow down.


Yesterday, in the heavy rain I could have gone downhill and stayed dry. I didn’t. Every single time I walk along those roads I yell abuse at cars being driven too fast, too close to me. Words about wanting people to walk rather than drive are empty when you make it impossible to walk between villages and towns safely.


That’s why I went uphill. That’s why I went to the farm roads that flood when it rains. The fields get saturated in water and that water runs downhill, onto the road, and when it hits the road it runs down the road. Yesterday it rained so heavily, for so long, after several days that the roads were now deep rivers. The rivers were now ankle deep. I put my foot down, and the top of my shoes was underwater for a few steps.


I went to the side, I went to avoid the deep water, but I couldn’t avoid it all the time, so I ran through the river running down the road. My shoes and my socks got wet, and it wicked upwards, onto my trousers, up to my t-shirt. I was soaked from the shoes upwards.


I didn’t feel cold. I wasn’t bothered. It’s only rain and muddy water. I ran for 37 minutes in this rain, before I walked the rest of the way home. When I got home I put my shoes on an empty cardboard box, and hung the socks on the same box, to dry. If the box gets wet I don’t mind. It will be recycled anyway. So will the shoes I used.


A few months ago, or last year I frequently said that I was impatient for rainy weather, to have a rest day. Recently I have found that I will go out in all weather, whether we’re in a heat wave heavy rain or other. The time when I really would think twice about going out is on a cold and windy day. I find that rain is fine. It’s the cold wind that is unpleasant.


In circumstances like yesterday’s there are two choices. The first is to wear quick drying shoes, like I did, or to wear hiking boots, that reach above the ankles. The drawback to such shoes is that they are not good for running. Quick drying shoes, in yesterday’s situation were the best option. Feet get wet but we just change socks when we get home.

The Daily Struggle to Find Something to Write About – CloudNeo Shoes

The Daily Struggle to Find Something to Write About – CloudNeo Shoes

Byrichard

For three hundred and sixty two days I have struggled to find a topic to write about. In that time I have, more than once, felt, during my walk, that I had a great idea for the next day, only to deflate the next morning.


On CloudNeo


Yesterday as I was running I considered writing about the On CloudNeo Shoes. They’re shoes that you pay for, monthly, rather than weekly, and you can get them replaced every 90 days. If you browse to the site you will see a count down for when to get them replaced.


They started being so clean and white that I didn’t like having such obviously new shoes on my feet. I don’t like when clothes are so obviously new. I prefer them to have a little more character.


Or maybe I just prefer darker colours on my feet. Light grey shoes are fine. The thing about white shoes, in rainy weather, is that they quickly get caked in mud. Once they’re muddy the’re less obviously new, so they’re more comfortable to run in.


Cost Spread Over Time


The CloudNeo are interesting for two reasons. The first is that they enable you to get running shoes at a monthly cost, and the faster you wear them out, the better the deal you get. The other advantage is that running shoes are often 200-300 francs per pair. That’s a lot to pay for shoes, that, in the end you don’t find comfortable.


Years ago I bought expensive hiking shoes, and I used them in the arctic circle, at first, before using them for hikes, via ferrata and climbing for years to come. That’s right, years. I then bought another pair of hiking boots and they lasted days, or weeks. It’s not the boots that failed. It’s that they were too tight around my ankles and I felt as if my ankles would break if I continued to wear them.


I then bought a cheap pair from Decathlon and these are nice and comfortable. The point is that expensive shoes can just as easily be fantastic, as cheap shoes, so it’s worth trying cheap shoes first.


The Experience


When you get the Cloud Neo shoes they come in a white bag with velcro. You open the velcro, pull out the shoes, and wear them indoors for a bit, to see how they feel. This is because you have 30 days to test these shoes before you’re commited for six months. If you try them outdoors and find they’re uncomfortable then they’ll be dirty and will be recycled, rather than sent to someone else.


When I determined that they were comfortable, walking around indoors, I tried running with them, and they felt okay so I kept them. I’ve been with them for several runs now and they’re fine. My knees don’t hurt as I run with them.


I did notice with normal shoes, after wearing barefoot shoes, that my ankles tend to roll more, especially on rough surfaces. I don’t know whether it’s because the shoes are not stable, or because I lost the habit of wearing normal shoes. In either case I have had to relearn to run, in normal shoes, on uneven surfaces.


I like a little more rigidity in the back. I often find that my heel folds the back of the shoe as I put them on. Other than that I like the shoe laces and I like that they’re light. They’re not weatherproof but they’re so light that if they do get wet it doesn’t matter because they dry without any concious effort.


Minimal Grip So Mud Removal is Quick


The base of the shoes has very basic grip, so if the ground is slippery you’ll know. Some people might see that as a drawback but I see this as an advantage. If you go running through mud, for any reason it takes seconds to clear mud away from the shoes, rather than minutes. Last year I regularly spent 10-20 minutes after every walk clearing the mud from my shoes. With these shoes I don’t need to.


They are aimed at road runners and dry trail running, not muddy or uneven surface running. It’s on roads that you want good padding so they’re well suited to various types of road running.


After 90 days, or when you’ve worn them through, within six months, you can get them replaced and get brand new recycled shoes and start again.


These shoes are made from bio-based resources and the expectation is that you will recycle them every three to six months. They say “You don’t own these shoes, you just use them for a bit, and then return them.


When you get the shoes they come in a white bag with a velcro fastening. Within this bag you have the shoes, but you also have the return address for the shoes. You can send the shoes back, and a new pair will be sent to you.


Recycling Shoes


With conventional shoes you wear them, and once they’re worn out you attempt to get them recycled but they’re counted as bulky recycling so I don’t know what happens to them. With these shoes they’re sent back to their home, they are shredded, cleaned, and then turned into new shoes.


An added bonus to having shoes that are made from “bio-based resources” is that as they get worn down through use, their remains are not harmful to the environment. Mine will, in theory, be ready for recycling in over 65 days from now.


Estimated Cost


If you replace these shoes every three months then they come to about 105 CHF. If you replace them after six months they come to 210 CHF. The faster you wear through a pair of shoes, the more affordable the plan is, but conversely, the worse your habit is for the environment, since shoes require energy to be recycled and reused.


Although they are sold as running shoes I wear them for running and walking. I usually run for a set distance and once I have finished the run I walk. These shoes are okay for both but I don’t like these shoes like I like the Merrel trail glove 7 shoes. If I had this deal for Merrel Trail Glove 7 then I would be very happy. I have been using Merrel shoes for years and I like them, especially since some of them are so cheap, but I wear them out too fast. With a subscription model I wouldn’t worry about how fast I wear them out because I would get a new pair when I needed it.


Children and Shoe Rental


As I write this I believe that a good niche market for this would be children, because children grow out of shoes, before they even wear them out. By renting children shoes you would ensure that children always get new shoes when required.


Side of the Road Walking


The moment when I don’t like these shoes is when I am walking in the grass to avoid being run over by a car driver who doesn’t slow down or take precautions when seeing pedestrians by the side of the road. I feel my feet and ankles twisting at unsafe angles. That’s why I walk on agricultural roads where I know there are very few cars.


And Finally


Running shoes are usually expensive, so paying monthly to spread the cost makes sense, especially if they are replaced every three months. If they’re replaced every six months then they’re much more expensive and the deal is less interesting. You have one month, tho choose to keep the shoes, and then you’re committed for six months, before you can terminate the contract. There is a huge “cancel plan” button, should you decide to cancel the plan.


These shoes fill a niche. They fill the niche of the person who runs 600 kilometres every three to six months and wants their shoes to be recycled, and turned into new shoes. It fills the niche of the person who wears through shoes at a rapid rate. I do, so such a deal is interesting for me, especially if I burn through 600km per three months.


At a rate of 8km per day it would take 75 days to walk/run 600km. This puts me comfortably within the 90 day recycling window.