Walking Heatwave Strategy

Walking Heatwave Strategy

Byrichard

Two days in a row I have poured water on my head. The reason for this is that yesterday we were in 35°c heat and today we were in 33°c heat. When you’re walking for two or three hours at the solar Maximum the best cooling strategy is to pour water on your head, as I did. It’s a quick way of cooling. It’s not that the water was cool. The water is warm, heated by direct sunlight for the last half hour, or even hour.

I Feel Okay

I set off with 1.6 litres of water and drank every few minutes. I have a 600ml camelbak eddy+ in my hand and a 1l Sigg water bottle in my bag. I drink from the camelbak because I can walk at full speed, and sip. With the Sigg bottle I need to stop.

Refill from the Sigg Bottle

When I get low on water in the Camelbak I refill it from the Sigg Water bottle. It takes a few seconds and then I can continue walking. As I refilled the water bottle the first time I had a tractor heading straight for me so I went into the corn crop. The driver was looking at his phone. At least by being in mature corn he would sub-consciously know to avoid the corn. I was fine.

Replenishing on Electrolytes

For a long time I haven’t had electrolyte drinks because I felt no need. Now that we’re in a heat wave I am taking the time to remineralise, after the walks. I get so warm during the walk that I’m constantly “glowing” or “glistening”. My body is constantly covered in evaporating water and I am cooling down.

The Soaked Hat

During the last two walks I have felt that the sun was getting a little too strong so I soaked my hat twice today, once yesterday, and I soaked my entire self two days ago. Although I feel in control I know that these walking conditions are dangerous. That’s why I have 1.6 litres of water, and why I routed myself so that the fountain was near the end of the walk rather than the beginning. I can also catch buses home on two different bus lines if I suddenly feel overwhelmed and unable to continue

Why I Walk At The Hottest Time Of The Day

One of the reasons I love walking after 1300 is that no one else does. Most people lock themselves indoors and sleep, nap or do other things. I like to walk when it’s too hot for normal people to walk. It’s nice to have the landscape to myself.

During my walk I saw clouds of dust two or three times. They are created by tractors preparing the soil to plant the next crops. In one case I saw the dust rise high into the air and considered how strong the thermals must be at the moment, for the column to be so well pronounced.

And Finally

I have been for two walks and a bike ride. I came home feeling fine. I didn’t feel too thirsty, or too faint, or coughing. I am pushing myself by being in the sun at the hottest time of day but this year has been more gentle than others. I also carry more than enough water, and know where fountains that work are. If I saw a negative effect then I would stop exposing myself to these weather conditions.

Learning by Trial And Error

Learning by Trial And Error

Byrichard

Every day or two I see people post about how the Fediverse should be simplified to welcome new people. It’s a shame. Signing up for a fediverse server is easy. It’s the same process as for every site. The biggest difference is that you’re signing up for a privately owned, crowd sourced community instance. The instances vary slightly from mastodon to firefish to ClassicPress to WordPress but at their core they are the same. It’s just the community that changes, but even that can be the same if you migrate from one instance to another.

Experimenting

A core aspect of the World Wide Web is that it is a platform where people can experiment with ideas, community tools and more. If you need a manual then you are stuck on websites like Twitter and Facebook, rather than exploring what the World Wide Web has to offer. You’re stuck in a silo.

It worries me that people want to simplify the Fediverse, to write guide books and tutorials. If you spend an hour or two experimenting you’ll understand how things work with ease. I don’t think we need manuals for everything in life, especially not social networks on the fediverse.

The Case for Manuals and Tutorials

There are moments when manuals and tutorials are important. That’s when you’re trying to use something that is not as intuitive as you had hoped. WordPress is plug and play and requires no manual. It works like every other CMS works, so it’s easy to pick up. Hugo is easy to pick up, but you might need to RTFM for one or two functionalities.

The moment you really need a manual or instructions is when you’re experimenting with Angular, Laravel, 11ty, Jekyll and other platforms. It’s when you don’t know what the options are that you need a manual. With the Fediverse all the answers are easy to find. You just need to spend a few minutes looking for them. I suspect that chatGPT, Bard and Bing AI can help you when you have questions.

With Hugo I was able to create pages and get a table of contents with relative ease. With 11ty I got a little stuck so I felt the need for a tutorial. I know what I want to do, and I know how I expect it to work, but it’s not like other solutions. that’s why I decided that for 11ty I would use a learning resource, or more, to experiment with, and learn how to use the tool. I am not against manuals and instructions. I like to read the fantastic manuals, when I get stuck. I even like to ask AI for help in some cases, because I can ask a tailored question and get a tailored answer.

The Case Against Manuals

The more time I spend on Mastodon and the Fediverse, the more it feels like a waste of time. I love the concept, and the freedom we have on the website. What I don’t like is that people want to write manuals and instructions to make the same mistakes as people made, on mastodon, and if that is the case, then I have no reason to stick around. Every day people discuss how to use hashtags, bully people into writing alt text for imagess and encourage thousands or tens of thousands of people to follow individual accounts. If that is what people want then there is little reason for using Mastodon, rather than Twitter. Twitter has the community of friends amassed from 2006 to 2023. The Fediverse is a network of strangers.

I Want the Community to Teach Itself

I want communities to learn by participating, rather than reading. I don’t want people to read a manual about how to use the fediverse, I want them to learn by trial and error, and by what feels good, rather than by doing what is expected. The more time I spend on the fediverse, seeing people speak about better onboarding, the more it feels kitsch, and the more I want to close the tabs.

Experimenting with Eleventy

Since I was getting stuck with eleventy I decided to follow Learn Eleventy From Scratch. As I said, it’s not that I am opposed to learning from guides, manuals, or documentation. I like to learn from these sources, when trial and error doesn’t yield the results that I am looking for, or where trial and error takes more time than is reasonable to figure out.

What I want to do is simple. I want to have one directory for posts, and so far that works quite easily, but I also want another folder that acts as an archive. That is where I am getting stuck, and that is where a manual can streamline my learning process. It’s when I see that I have gaps in understanding that I use manuals to fill them.

And Finally

In my experience the people who write manuals on how to use social media websites are utilitarian, rather than humanists. They encourage people to develop a utilitarian approach to social media and that’s what I fear, and object to.

When you look for books about blogging none of them are about the philosophical or intellectual process. They are all about monetisation, which is fantastic, if you want to be a spammer, but awful if you want to be a humanist. I blog to explore ideas, concepts, and speak of cycling, walking and climbing experiences. If I followed the guide books my blog would be aimed at making a fortune, rather than developing and elaborating ideas.

I will always try something new, without RTFMing (Reading the fantastic Manual), before getting stuck and following a tutorial. What has changed is that now I am learning through manuals, instructions and more, rather than online tutorials. I am learning independently. I am a step further along now.

Blogging and Medium

Blogging and Medium

Byrichard

During the early days of the pandemic I wrote for at least one days every day. I was blogging the pandemic experience from my point of view. More recently I have kept up another blogging streak. This time I am reaching day 274 as I write this blog post.

Developing a Writing Habit

I mention this because when Medium was first created I liked the idea of a website where we could share writing daily, but at the same time I blogged irregularly and didn’t have a voice. As a result I created an account but never used it. Things have changed now. Now I have written for 274 days in a row. Writing has become part of my daily routine. I was toying between the idea of Substack and Medium but I prefer Medium for the reason that I dislike the idea of sending an e-mail that will be ignored. I subscribe to newsletters but almost never read them. Usually I go through them when working on Inbox zero. E-mails stroke the ego of the writer, but they’re just noise.

No Obligation to Read

In contrast Medium posts are more volatile. They appear in our timelines but we are under no obligation to click through and read them. This is better. Most of what we write has little value but the act of writing, in and of itself has value. It is by writing that we develop the habit of thinking, not just 140 characters, or even 1000 characters, but for an ever growing stream of conscience.

Practicing with VIM

For a while I was using Day One to write my blog posts but the software kept crashing on me so I dumped it for VIM. What I like about VIM is that it’s minimal. I get to practice writing Markdown whilst at the same time practicing with VIM. Vim is a powerful tool that is worth getting familiar with.

The Decline of Social Media and the Increase in Attention

As I write this I read a post about people no longer reading. I read every single day. I read both from a kindle before going to sleep, but also from Audible during my daily walks or runs. Remember that if you don’t have to read in one format, you can always read with another one.

The same was said of blogging. “I don’t have time to blog because I’m distracted by social media”. That was true before. During the pandemic something changed. Social Media emptied of conversations and people we would desire to meet in person, either because we wanted to self-isolate, or because we grew tired of seeing others ignore COVID lockdowns. That’s why I quit Facebook and Instagram. I was tired of feeling more lonely, rather than less lonely.

The Silver Lining

By becoming less sticky Social Media freed us to do other things. It freed us to study, to read, to write, and to work on projects again. For wishful thinkers the pandemic is over. For others, like me, the habits that helped me cope with solitude are still valid now. Now that I have a writing habit that is consistent, I can share blog posts, rather than tweets, toots or notes, depending on wheither you’re on Twitter, Mastodon, Firefish, other Fediverse instances, Threadiverse, or other.

Online Communities

Remember, before Social Media took over online conversations we had social networks. Bloggers are part of a social network. Medium is a social Network. The Fediverse is a social network. Social networks are centered around human being communicating by electronic means. The problem with Corporate Social Media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram TikTok, Threds and others, is that they use algorithms to control the conversation, rather than chronology. Mastodon and the Fediverse are chronological social networks, like the real world. where conversations take place in real time, where algorithms don’t manufacture conflict.

A Personal Blog First, Medium Second

Sharecropping between Medium and a Personal Blog is the reason for which I didn’t want to post to Medium. I’d rather have my own blog, that I write for, daily, and then share on Medium. I have had my own website since 1996. I left Facebook because I felt they benefited more from me wasting my time, than I got.

User ROI

Since 2007 or so I said that Social Media companies spent so much time thinking about ROI for brands, PR firms and corporations that they forgot about ROI for the user. This is demonstrated beautifully by the Threads situation. It picked up one hundred million users within days, but lost four fifths of them within a week or two. Threads forgot about the ROI that users got out of being on their app. I loved the idea of Substack Notes until I saw that it was a popularity contest. My enthusiasm for Substack lasted for minutes.

Medium

As I mentioned above I like Medium because we can read or ignore what people write, without having to mark things as read. We can also read articles on the site or app, when we’re on the app, rather than working through e-mails. I like the idea of revenue sharing but I don’t like that some content is paywalled. I feel that this removes from the user experience. There are two issues with the Paywall:

  • We need to pay to finish articles

  • By paying to read articles our content has to have much more traffic to break even.

And Finally

Medium doesn’t have to be a mirror of my blog. It can highlight the better content, the content I feel is worthy of being shared more broadly. Now i the time to start a new experiment.

Three Hundred and Sixty Kilometres in Trail Glove 7
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Three Hundred and Sixty Kilometres in Trail Glove 7

Byrichard

Since the Seventh of May 2023 I have walked more than 360 kilometres in the Merrel Trail Glove 7 and the experience has been good. For a long time I enjoyed wearing normal shoes but recently they started either to rub the front of my feet, or the heel would get worn away to bare plastic and I’d consider protecting the heel from friction damage when walking.

[caption id="attachment_9338" align="alignnone" width="300"]global wear on trail glove 7 after 60km global wear on trail glove 7 after 60km[/caption]

Not Goldie Locks

The first Merrel Barefoot shoes I tried were the Merrel vapor glove 6 but they felt too thin. I could feel too much of the road’s surface, especially on weather worn former tarmacked roads that were breaking apart to become mud paths once again. Stepping on stones would be painful so I chose to experiment with the Trail Gloves. The soles are just a little thicker but I found them very comfortable to walk in. So comfortable that they became my every day shoes. I thought that the soles would wear out because of the thin indentations that had little material, and they have.

The Wear

[caption id="attachment_9386" align="alignnone" width="225"]137 kilomètres later - worn trail glove soles 137 kilomètres later[/caption]

The wear and tear has occurred under the heels and under the front of the shoe, where the most pressure is applied when walking. The center of the shoes are still fine, with little to no sign of wear and tear. The inside and sides of the shoes are also still fine. I think that I can get them to five hundred or more kilometres, despite most of the walking being road walking.

[caption id="attachment_10581" align="alignnone" width="225"]Three hundred and sixty kilometres later Three hundred and sixty kilometres later[/caption]

Experimenting with Trail Glove 6 and Meindl Pure Vision

Trail Glove 6

Because I was so happy with the Trail Glove 7 I decided to try the Trail Glove six shoes and Meindl Pure Vision shoes. With the Trail Glove 6 I found that they are very tight around the part of the foot that gater straps would hook under. I was worried that they would give me cramps as a result. So far this hasn’t been the case. They felt okay on ten kilometre walks, although they’re annoying to put on.

I also get the impression that with these shoes I tend to hit the ground too hard, with my heel strikes, so the heel begins to hurt very slightly near the end of walks.

Meindl Pure Vision

The Meindl Pure Vision shoes use a system similar to Boa for lacing. You tighten and loosen the shoes by sliding something on thin cables. These are marketed as secondary shoes for hiking, cycling and more. I believe that they are meant to be used as an alternative to wearing hiking boots during hiking breaks, for example to catch trains, buses or go shopping and to restaurants. I don’t think that they’re intended for long distance walking.

We often read about people taking crocs on long hikes for camps or town days. I believe that barefoot shoes are both lighter, and more versatile, so more interesting to carry as spares. The pure vision shoes come folded in a bag that you can attach to your bag with a carabiner, for when you are tired of wearing hiking boots.

One Hundred Days Later

Yesterday I checked my feet and they seem better than they were when I started the experiment. The damage that other shoes seemed to have started to do to my feet is gone and they now feel good. These shoes are extremely comfortable to wear, light, and compatible with the style of walking that I am used to. I do feel that the way I put my feet down has changed a little. Rather than heel strike I now tend to put the side of my feet down first, before rolling the entire foot to the ground. Near the ends of walks my legs do get tired and I sometimes heel strike.

I don’t know whether the slight pain I feel in my heels is because the Trail Glove 7s have worn so much that the base no longer provides the heel with adequate protection or if it’s because I played with the Trail Glove six shoes. The Trail Glove six feel less forgiving of my walking style, as do the pure vision. That’s why I wear those two shoes when I walk with people, rather than alone. People walk slower than me, so I can afford to wear less forgiving shoes as my strides are shorter.

I recently read First Steps while walking with various shoes and it’s interesting to learn about how the human body has had to evolve to enable walking upright/bipedally. Since beginning this experiment with “barefoot” shoes I have worn normal shoes for walking just once. I have tried one run, and felt fine.

More Tiring

I alluded to it before but I want to make it clear. I think that these shoes make walking more tiring because they require a different technique. I like to walk fast, and fast walking requires striding., but striding, with barefoot shoes results in violent heel strikes. If I am not careful I will damage my heel bone. That’s why I think that three pairs of barefoot shoes are fine when I’m walking with others, and the last is better suited to me walking alone.

And Finally

I tried barefoot shoes out of curiousity. I didn’t want to get back to basics, and I didn’t want to resolve any theoretical problems. I was inquisitve and spontaneously decided to try such shoes. I consider the experiment as a success. I like the Trail Glove 7 best. They forgive me for my walking style.

Social Media Glossy Magazines via Facebook and Twitter

Social Media Glossy Magazines via Facebook and Twitter

Byrichard

Recently I spent time on Twitter and Facebook and I was reminded of that horrible feeling you get when you’re looking for posts and tweets by friends, to interact with, and see crappy adverts instead. Imagine if you walked into a pub or conference and instead of having personal conversations you were harassed by marketers rather than human beings looking for a human connection.


The reason I dumped FaceBook and then Instagram is that I got tired of not only feeling that I wa wasting my time, whilst making myself feel lonelier, but on top of that someone else was making a profit from me being lost in the time wasting corporate social media landscape.


Twitter and People Selling Crap


Most of the stuff that is being sold via Twitter ads is crap now. You look and it’s con men trying to sell cons, from cryptocurrency, to privacy, to other crap. It’s ironic that they would sell this crap in a place where anyone with any decency, would no longer use.


It’s not the Owner, But The Spam


Of course it bother me that Facebook and Twitter are owned anc controlled by immoral people, and I could look beyond that, if I could find pleasant conversations, rather than see ads. What gets to me about social media is that it’s about making money for people that don’t value us as human beings. That’s why I switched to blogging, rather than social media. With blogging I might devote an hour to per day, but rather than make money for people who see me as an addict, I give people a reason to surf to my website. I also get to explore ideas in the process.


A Feeling of Being Used


Several times I have looked through Facebook, Instagram and Twitter timelines but I quickly become demoralised by the ads, the reminders of what my life isn’t and more. It’s not that people are using Facebook and Instagram to converse, they’re using it to broadcast. No one is listening. Everyone is being made invisible by the algorithms, and ignored by those that do see posts. For so little engagement I can write blog posts.


The Apathy of Mastodon


Two days ago noise pollution was making my afternoon hell, and I said so on social media. Rather than empathy though, I found apathy. The beauty of social media is that empathy doesn’t cost anything, whereas apathy can ruin someone’s experience. If we come to social media it’s to find empathy, or at the very least vent, and be ignored.


Networking for Projects


I see people write about using Twitter to make money from the content they create. That’s the wrong attitude. You should be making contacts to work on projects with people, rather than making money from social media. Too many people are utilitarian about social media, which is why it becomes a waste of time for human beings. When everyone is trying to sell, then no one is conversing, and without conversation a blog post would have the same impact, without enriching the wrong people.


A Reminder


I was reminded, while writing this blog post that the reason I became tired with Twitter is that people use it, and the community, rather than participate within it. People are busy promoting themselves and their ideas, without engaging, without investing time in friendships and more. The same people are on Mastodon and the Fediverse.


And Finally


There is a difference between what I want social networks to be, and what others want social networks to be. I will never find social networks that achieve what I want because society labels as social people on the web as addicts, and corporate social media profit from wasting our time in the hope that we will see more ads. I don’t use Facebook for moral reasons. The issue is that it has a monopoly so I am isolated, for not using Facebook.


Today Twitter feels just like Instagram. I know that if I spend too much time on Twitter it will become toxic, so I know I need to moderate how I use it.


Althought the Fediverse is an interesting project I think that the community is still weak. I can go for hours without my timeline refreshing, and when I do engage I am either trolled or ignored.


Some toots did well, but mostly likes and re-shares rather than conversations. What I want to find are conversations.

Generating Images with Bing AI

Generating Images with Bing AI

Byrichard

Yesterday I played with Bing Chat, which is Microsoft’s AI engine and I noticed that I could play with generating images. I spent quite a bit of time generating a multitude of images, in part for fun, but also to get a grasp of the limitations of the opportunity presented by software like AI.

Faces

If you ask Dall-E via Bing Chat to generate a face then it can. It wanted to generate the face of a woman with curly hair so I did, and the image looks realistic. I then asked it to draw the face of a tired man and it did. It’s when I asked Dall-E to draw a woman cyclist exploring the Dolomites that I saw that faces are a mess. It’s fine with generating human faces, in isolation, but if you ask for a landscape, and a human with a face then the face is wrong. This is both great, and a shame. It’s great because it means that we still need to photograph real people doing real things, but it’s bad because if all we need is a face then AI is ready to provide us with some.

Cycling Ducks

I asked Dall-E to create images of ducks cycling around the Vallée De Joux and it drew ducks, where instead of legs, the ducks had wheels. Sometimes these wheels were not round. In one case a duck had the front forks and a wheel coming out of the front of its body. Dall-E obviously hasn’t spent much time reading Duck Tales stories. If it had then it would draw flawless ducks.

Drawing Monuments

I asked Dall-E to draw the Palais Wilson with the Ballerina in one instance and it failed. It took a generic building and showed it within the scene I described for it to draw. I also asked it to draw the broken chair at Place Des Nations in Geneva and it failed to do this too. Dall-E doesn’t imagine real things we describe as accurately as I would expect. In fact it doesn’t, at all.

Firefish

I asked Dall-E to draw Firefish providing IT support, staring at a phone, and writing a post. In most of these cases Dall-E worked well. It was able to provide amusing or interesting images. When I asked it to draw a frog waving at a heron it generated one image that was better than the others.

People and Meerkats Cycling

I asked Dall-E to draw people cycling down a cycling route with a railway tunnel and the result was quite good. I then asked for the people to be replaced by meerkats and the result was amusing. If you use your imagination Dall-E can generate some interesting results.

A Flock of Geese and a camera operator

I asked Dall-E to draw a camera operator on a crane filming a flock of geese bobsledding and it drew the camera and the crane well, as well as the geese but it ignored the bobsledding part, and the face of the camera operator was awful.

And Finally

Rather than write more, I will include a series of images on my wordpress blog for you to enjoy.

The Unquantified Self and the Garmin Etrex SE
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The Unquantified Self and the Garmin Etrex SE

Byrichard

Since boyhood I have liked watches. There was a period when I wore none, but eventually I got the habit back and now I regularly wear two watches. I don’t wear two watches because I like to wear two watches. I wear two watches because Apple sends to one database and Garmin sends to another, and there is some functionality that is dedicated to one platform. If you want Apple functionality you have to wear an Apple Watch, and if you want Garmin features you need to wear a Garmin watch.

The Etrex SE Solution

The Garmin Etrex SE is different from the Garmin Etrex 32X because it’s a cheaper, simpler model with a built in ability to communicate with iPhones and other mobile phones. The advantage of this is that you can track your daily walks, cycling, flying and other sports for up to 160 hours non-stop before you need to recharge or swap the batteries.

An AA Advantage

The other advantage of the Garmin Etrex family, but especially the Etrex SE is that it requires two AA batteries that can be swapped within seconds, but last for 150 hours or more.

By accident I left the device on overnight and it tracked for 19 hours and still had plenty of battery remaining for that day’s walk. With this device you can track walks, bike rides, and more for days at a time.

In contrast the Edge Explore can track for three or four hours before needing a recharge if it is in normal mode, but many more hours if it is in battery saver mode.

The Garmin instinct can track for a day or two at a time, before needing to be recharged, but to charge you need an external battery and time. With the Etrex SE you need a few seconds to swap batteries.

Geocaching Built In

If you enjoy geocaching then this is a great device because it pairs with your geocaching account and makes it easy for you to see surrounding objects and their location. It allows you to mark and navigate to geocaches of interest, with ease.

Up To Date Weather

Although it can take a few seconds to load you can also get live weather conditions with the device. This is based on weather service information, not a built in barometer.

GPS Precision

When walking I noticed that GPS – All GNSS accuracy bounced between 3-4 meters. That’s good enough to detect if you’re swapping back and forth from side of the road to the other. I played with that level of accuracy with another GPS.

Wrist Freedom

As the title suggested one of the advantages of the SE is that it’s a small, portable GPS that you turn on, track yourself, and turn off. It automatically transfers the walk, run, bike ride, flight, car drive and other activities to the Explore and the Garmin Connect apps, so you have the convenience of GPS watches, without needing a free wrist to use it.

Sports Aware

With the Garmin Etrex 32 you can easily track an activity but when you get home and sync the device to your computer you need to tell it what sport you were doing. You also need to physically either remove the SD card and sync, or you have to plug the GPS into the computer and sync that way. With the SE you can tell the GPS, either at the start of the activity, or when you save, that you’re walking, hiking, running, skiing, driving, using an ATV, flying and more. You don’t need to connect to Garmin Connect and manually tell it what you were doing.

Instant Charge

I write this more as a joke, than a serious advantage. With this GPS if you notice the battery is low, you don’t need to plug it into a wall, and wait for hours. Simply remove the back, swap the batteries and get on with your adventure.

Garmin Explore

When I looked at a comparison of the 32, the 22 and the SE I noticed one big difference between the three. The SE has no built in maps but it does have Garmin Explore, and Garmin Explore has good maps. This means that although the Etrex SE is limited due to its lack of maps, it does punch way above its weight and price, by pairing with the Explore App. You can draw your route whilst charging your phone, and then it syncs to your devices, for you to navigate with ease.

Limitations

  • It has no memory card slot, so you can’t expand to keep track of more activities or maps.

  • it is quite big and bulky. It does fit into a pocket but like a Cuckoo bird it will kick out its neighbours. You could place it in the side pocket of your hiking bag, or the top pocket, depending on preference.

  • No Maps built in. For navigation and maps you need to use your mobile phone. Location information is shared between the phone and GPS live, so you do have maps, but this requires you to use mobile phone battery life. With the Garmin Etrex 32x and other models you have maps built in.

  • GPS or All GNSS services. With this device you can’t tell it “I want to use Galileo, and no other GNSS. You can only choose between GPS, and “all GNSS” which I think is a limitation. I would like more freedom to choose.

  • Pairing is limited. If you want to track heart rate, temperature, cadence and other data then you can’t. It tracks your location, speed and altitude but not much else.

And Finally

If you want a GPS for navigation then this is not the gps for you, unless you’re navigating to geocache locations. This is one of the cheapest GPS devices you can get. It’s cheaper than a lot of watches, handheld GPS and more. The device itself is limited, in terms of maps, but if you pair it with the Explore app, then it becomes a powerful option, for navigating and more.

I am surprised that the device has so few reviews. I spent less than a minute drawing a walking route with the Explore app and I could sync it to the Garmin Instinct watch and Etrex SE within seconds. It’s smooth, fast, and intuitive.

The Garmin Etrex SE, although, very simple, demonstrates the future of GPS navigation devices, taking full advantage of Android, iOS and excellent battery life.

YQ, FrontMatter and Jekyll

YQ, FrontMatter and Jekyll

Byrichard

For two days I have been trying to understand how to use Jekyll, a Ruby version of Hugo. It is a Static website generator that is similar to Hugo but rather than being written in Go, it is written in Ruby. I find that it renders sites faster than Hugo, but that it has less assistance for creating pages, giving them layouts and the rest. That’s why I experimented with YQ


a lightweight and portable command-line YAML, JSON and XML processor. YQ uses jq like syntax but works with yaml files as well as json, xml, properties, csv and tsv. It doesn’t yet support everything jq does – but it does support the most common operations and functions, and more is being added continuously.


I read about it in this article. You can install YQ with a brew command brew install yq or you can install it in a number of other ways, depending on whether you’re using MacOS, Linux or Windows.


The Use case


Exporting a WordPress blog to MD files can be done with a multitude of tools but they don’t add all the FrontMatter that you need for a blog, especially Jekyll. I imported the most recent blog posts, that I created for Hugo, with a year-month-date-title.md name to the posts folder but I created a second one for the archive. As the file title was different Jekyll did not like the files. The problem was the file name format, so that’s why I created a separate directory.


Side Note on Reading the Archives MD Files


Bard’s help: I provide this to help you understand Jekyll logic, as well as Bard help.


Getting It To Work On MacOS


In the article about using YQ to edit FrontMatter for Hugo pages the first part worked fine, but it’s written for Linux rather than macOS so some commands failed. This is where Bard comes in.You can ask Bard to explain what parts of a line of code or a command does and it will explain it to you, and you can eventually transfer the command that is understood by one OS and get it to work with the other.


I tried this find -name “*.md” -exec yq –front-matter=”process” ‘.updated_at = now’ {} \; but it failed to work. Bard was kind enough to explain the options for me to figure out which options to use. I added the correct path, and specified that I was looking for the files with the ‘type f’ flag.


find ./_posts -type f -name “*.md” -exec yq ‘.title’ {} \; To see the title of .md files 


I wanted to add these two lines to the FrontMatter of the files in the relevant folder.


I tested find ../unprocessed “*.md” -exec yq –front-matter=”process” ‘.updated_at = now’ {} \; and this works but does not make changes.


This works and updates the pages to add the updated at field to the metadata with the keyword now. The -i tells it to write to the file.


The full command is find ../unprocessed -name “*.md” -exec yq e –front-matter=”process” ‘.updated_at = now’ -i {} \; works to add updated now tag .


Implementing the Required Change


The lines that I wanted to add to the front matter were ‘layout: post’ and ‘categories: [archives]’. After the trial and error described above I tried:


find ../unprocessed -name “*.md” -exec yq e –front-matter=”process” ‘.updated_at = now’ -i {} \; works to add updated now tag


find ../unprocessed -name “*.md” -exec yq e –front-matter=”process” ‘.layout = post’ -i {} \; works to add updated now tag


Finally the command to make a permanent change was:


find ../_archives -name “*.md” -exec yq e –front-matter=”process” ‘.layout = “post”‘ -i {} \; 


find ../_archives -name “*.md” -exec yq e –front-matter=”process” ‘.categories = “[categories]”‘ -i {} \; 


  • A Quick explanation. The ../archives needs to be replaced with the name of the folder your files are in, when terminal i in the same folder. .layout and .categories are the names of the field to add and the “text” part is the content that you want to add to the front matter.

  • I have unprocessed and archives folders because I tested the code on two files to start with, and when I saw that it worked, then I moved to the main archives folder. I also used git to have a backup of the latest versions. If something had gone wrong I could have “stashed” the mistake, and been back to normal.


The first line ads the layout information to the FrontMatter post and the second one adds the categories information to the posts. Instead of spending hours doing something manually I was able to find the right tools to do what I wanted within seconds.


The Process


I knew what I wanted to do. I started with a google search to see if I could find a tool with some instructions and I did. The instructions were useful, but of limited use for my setup so I used the app’s documentation to try one thing, establishing that this worked, before moving on to accomplish the task that I had set for myself-. Google Bard was able to provide me with some help, but so did chatGPT.


The value of AI tools, in my eyes, is to help us understand the code we’re looking at, but also to help us tweak it for the OS we’re using, when we get error messages. I appreciate that with AI we can ask “I’m getting this error message, why?” and it will help find an answer to the question.


If a web article had provided me with a solution that worked I would have stuck to the web page and I would have little to write about. It is because of trial and error, and using four sources to achieve the goal that I wanted to achieve, that it becomes blog worthy.