The weather was finally dynamic today. The storm warnings were flashing towards Hermance, on the French side of the lake. This gave a nice contrast between the yellow of the Colza fields and the dark threatening clouds behind.
At moments I thought that rain would begin to fall but luckily the doppler radar, and my instincs were correct, so I did not get drenched in rain or pelted with hail. At one point it did feel as though hail could be a possibility.
In the last week or two I have cycled around 150 kilometres, which isn’t bad. It could be better but single rides are around 49 kilometres. Once the ride was 49 kilometres but I saw that I could easily get an extra few meters to make it 50 so I made the effort. The second time I skipped.
My only trips into Geneva this year have been by bike, but only up from the lake, up the Via Appia and then back towards Vaud. No stops in Geneva itself so far. We are still in a pandemic and I am not going to play Pandemic Roulette, as I like to call it. I am not taking risks that are not worth taking.
If you are so inclined you can now listen to Germinal as podcasts via France Culture. Each episode is 28 minutes long so easy to slot into your day, either commuting or doing other things.
During the pandemic I spent a lot of time reading swiss news, to keep up with current affairs. Now that the Swiss government has decided to pretend that the pandemic is over I have stopped reading the RTS info site. There is not much value when they do not provide relevant news and information.
I will update this blog erratically because it’s hard to know when I will or will not be inspired. Today’s blog post is mainly as an excuse to share photographs.
There are currently two societies. On one side we have those who believe what they are told and take everything at face value. On the other side we have those that look at the bigger picture, that follow international news, and look at the big picture.
The society that believes what they are told without asking questions believes that the pandemic is over and that life is back to normal. They believe that there is no longer a need for masks, and that big events with plenty of people are without danger once again. Paradoxically the behaviour of the virus will give these people their moneys’ worth because it will not make them sick instantly. There is always a nice calm, before a wave of new infections. People will have normal lives of insouciance for a while. Eventually though, by mid September or later a new pandemic wave will hit and those that danced with the sirens will fall victim to their songs.
On the other side you have those that are looking at the big picture, that are seeing in international news that the pandemic doesn’t just end, by some miracle. We see that China and New Zealand make a massive effort to keep the pandemic under control. Shanghai went into full lockdown. Beijing is currently busy testing everyone, to see whether there is a problem, and if there is they are willing to react instantly.
In South Africa we see another wave, similar to the one from last year, but with reports of “The death rates may have been under-reported last year. The aim of this blog post is not to document every article and idea I saw, but rather to give a global view of what I remember to provide people with some context.
Every summer the number of sick drops down, so every summer in Europe would be the ideal time to work towards Covid zero, but people never do. This means that for year after year we live in pandemic insecurity, knowing that spending time indoors, with too big a group, will result in a mass-spreader event.
You may think “But you’re an idiot to worry so much, it’s just a little virus, plenty of people are fine.” and you’d be partially right. The problem is that there is a “what if?” element. When you’re hiking, climbing, diving or doing something dangerous you always ask “what if” and you assess whether the risk is too high to go ahead or not.
I was going to list all the organs that Covid could affect but instead I will simply refer to the tweets we see often that say “I went from training for my 11th marathon to struggling to shower” to “my resting heart rate is 120” to “my spouse died of Covid” to “my child is unable to attend school due to long covid”. The problem is serious enough for people with Long Covid to be dispensed from the GCSE exams. This is not nothing, and self isolation is for a valid reason.
Do I feel good or smart about isolating? Am I overfilled with joy? No, I feel like an idiot in certain circumstances. I feel sad that I don’t socialise at the moment. Is being this cautious worth it in the end? Of course the answer is no, until you fall sick with Long Covid, and you’re one year into your recovery, wishing you could finally be well enough to walk for 10 minutes without getting tired.
The emotional yoyo only goes up when I am reminded of the life I am not living. When I am in solitude I feel fine. When I study I feel fine. When I cycle and when I walk I feel fine, until I cross people not walking in solitude.
How young people felt during this pandemic in Switzerland
The table above shows how people have felt during this pandemic and what you see is that the young people have felt the worst about this pandemic but that for the first wave they were not happy but they seemed okay. I see this data and I believe that it shows that society could have coped with a prolonged soft lockdown to get to Zero Covid. With Zero Covid the second wave and the obligatory certificate would have been unnecessary.
It’s interesting to see how the 30-50 year olds joined together in mysery by December 2021.
Before I conclude this post I think that it’s worth looking at what New Zealand, Italy and Covid Zero countries are doing because they will suffer less from Long Covid, once the pandemic is over, twenty two years from now. I mention Italy because they have decided to keep masks at least until summer, if not longer. I would love for Switzerland and other countries to do the same. We are sleep walking into the next wave, but we are also missing yet another opportunity to get to Covid Zero.
Today someone on twitter asked this question, and rather than be reply: 320 of 10,000, I chose to write a blog post about it. The TLDR answer is Vanilla JS because if you learn how it works without the help of a framework you understand the language. This doesn’t mean that I don’t have an interest in learning to take full advantage of frameworks.
As I listen to JavaScript Jabber one thing is clear. Whereas if we listen to courses and twitter discussions we are tricked into thinking that we should either use React or Angular we see, through JavaScript Jabber that frameworks are as diverse as they are flexible. One app will be excellent for one type of task and another will be awesome for something else. If you spend time learning Vanilla JavaScript, and then you learn about the diverse choice of frameworks then you can either write concise and effective code that does what you need with little to no bloat.
I don’t want to just learn a framework and be inflexible. I want to learn how it works, behind the scenes. Before WordPress, I was learning about navigation using Server Side Includes and other such tricks. When I played with PhpBoards, WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, wiki software, and more I managed to use them as a user, and they did want I wanted, but I never looked behind the curtains so I could use WordPress, but I couldn’t create my own themes, etc, and to some degree, I still can’t.
I have spent time trying to make it so that I can share my instagram archive on my website without using Instagram, and I managed with WordPress. Recently I tried using Vanilla Javascript and I found manipulating the DOM to be challenging. This is precisely why learning to code with Vanilla JS is so important. It shows you the complexities, and with time you learn how things work together.
One of the jokes is that if you get stuck you should RTFM and with frameworks that’s often quite easy. With Vanilla JavaScript RTFM doesn’t mean read just one manual. It means read about a variety of concepts until you understand enough to get it to work by yourself.
So far I can show a random post after each reload, or show the ten most recent posts and their caption. The next three challenges are:
Go through the posts at a time
Add crud capability using JavaScript. At first I will try with an empty json file, and then move on. CRUD requires understanding of the fs library (I need to double check the term)
Add the ability to transfer data from the json to an SQL or NoSQL database.
Experiment with Houdini and responsive design with a wall of pictures.
We’ll see what else I can think of. The point of this is to take skills I learn in courses and apply them to a project without having someone else provide me with the list of necessary steps.
I am currently learning about Working With Service Workers. Service workers allow you to make a website faster, for those who visit a website more often, or offline, in situations where connectivity may be unreliable. Some of the code used can be found on my github page. MDN Web Docs also have useful information about working with service workers.
With service workers you can web first, retrieve from cache and stale while refresh:
With the first option you visit a website and the cache is generated in case the connection is dropped
With the Retrieve from cache it will access the files in the cache, before looking towards the web for content
In the last case the website will load the content it has but will check for new content in the background.
With these three approaches, and with some experimenting you can speed up static websites, and make others available offline if needed.
Aside from helping you to save content locally service workers can also clean up after themselves. If your website is updated or changes you can give a new archive version number and tell it to delete all the others, for your own web page. I have played with static content and will explore more.
I took some time to practice the new skills I learned in this course on my own website, on the local machine. It will take some time to learn the intricacies of how to get this to work correctly. For now I am on a learning curve.
In the process of learning about service workers I also learned about manifest.json and web app manifests. “PWAs can be downloaded in advance and can work offline, as well as use regular Web APIs.”
When I wore Casio digital watches, Suunto Dive computers, Suunto GPS watches and other wrist wathces I was happy. You wore it and it tracked what you wanted it to track, from walks, to dives, to altitude changes, weather and more. With the Apple watch a new age emerged. The age of the Digital Watch as object of addiction. I don’t like the term addiction, but I use it for simplicity.
The Suunto Spartan Wrist HR I have tracks all day activity and I didn’t mind. It tracked it in the background but didn’t nag you to do more, or to get up every hour. You just got along with your life until you ended your workout and wanted to see a GPS track.
With Fitbit and with Apple watches you have the same invasive habit. Walk 250 steps an hour, stand for one minute every hour. They nag you. As if that wasn’t enough they also nag you to wash your hands for 20 seconds, and more. The Apple watch is too invasive to be pleasant.
One of my biggest frustrations is that although we have one phone each device now has an app, and the apps don’t speak to each other so you have to choose whether to wear watch A for App A, Watch B for app B or Watch C for app c. All of that data is centralised on Apple or Android devices but it doesn’t jump between them so you are forced to make a choice.
If you skip wearing one instead of the other you have a gap in daily data and this bugs me. I went from wearing a GPS watch to track workouts on weekends and evenings to wearing watches 24 hours a day, that all want you to be loyal 24 hours a day to have complete data.
For me to be happy every watch should be able to send the data from the watch to the app, and from the app to the phone, and from that phone to every other app. By putting the data in silos they force loyalty, but by forcing loyalty they tempt me to stop tracking steps, heart rate sleep and other things. They tempt me to wear a simple watch except for my daily walks.
There is a high probability that I will regret putting paprika into the hot chocolate that I prepared for myself. It says to use four squares per 200ml but I used just six for 500ml. I let it warm up and melt the chocolate for the most part before adding some paprika, to make a spicier hot chocolate.
Hot chocolate preparation
I think I will find it far too spicy. We will see when I taste it. For now it has to cool down before I can drink it.
I like hot chocolate but hot chocolate is a pain to prepare, mainly because it involves heating milk and I’m afraid of letting it boil, and I don’t like the smell of warm milk. It also requires more cleanup than tea, but a different type of clean than coffee. We are in a pandemic, and we need to try new things, while waiting for Covid zero, that impossible dream.
Impossible because of the leadership and anti-facters, rather than because the goal is unreachable.
We’re in a pandemic, and it makes sense to invest time in learning. I completed the Become a JavaScript Developer course last night and today I played around with some code to see if it worked for what I wanted. It didn’t. I also listened to a live stream which discussed geojson, smapshot and other projects. I like the idea of geotagged data, and an open API to allow for the data to be shared more easily
I could see this as especially useful for climbing, hiking, archeology and other activities. This reminds me of photosynth, mixed in with photogrammetry and other technologies. When images are taken they are geo-tagged but another layer is added, by detecting the angle the picture was taken at. Whether it was looking down, up or in another direction. In other words in three, rather than two dimensions. This is great for modelling, but also for helping people get a sense of the images that they’re looking at. Climbing pictures, where we can see the upward or downward angle would be interesting.
It would also be fun to write a blog post, find the api information, and include that within a geojson file, to provide location info, angle, and other data. This data could then be ported from a photo app, to a hiking app, to a website and more. With more images 3d models become possible. Imagine gathering Via ferrata images and documenting the route.
Of course they can also use this for mapping glacier progress, or regression, coastal erosion and a multitude of other topics. I found this talk really interesting, and I see plenty of uses for such data.
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