Walk The Distance – PCT 94 Percent Done
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Walk The Distance – PCT 94 Percent Done

Byrichard

On the 10th of May 2023 I started walking the PCT virtually and now I am 94 percent done. I have about 300 kilometres left to walk and I will have completed the entire distance. Some of it was covered walking and some of it was covered while walking. Of course I didn’t walk the actual PCT. I walked it via the Walk the Distance app.

The thing about walking the Pacific Crest Trail virtually is that eventually you forget about it and just keep covering the distance, without paying attention to landmarks and more. I’ve been walking this virtual path for 10 months. I have ‘walked’ 4008 kilometres and passed 469 checkpoints.

At the peak of my walking habit I would have covered this distance sooner, but because of the return of cars and car drivers, and dog walkers, my walking habit has declined. I don’t enjoy playing chicken with cars, and being challenge to overcome my fear of big dogs that are unrestrained. If we were in the pandemic honeymoon I would still be walking five and a half million steps per year.

I like that we can take on such big walking challenges. On one app I am walking the Silk trail and on Walk the Distance it’s the Pacific Crest Trail. On Garmin’s app I am walking the AT. I think that when I finish the PCT I will walk the Continental divide trail.

The beauty of these virtual walking challenges is that I can walk the same 20-40km loops IRL daily, without the walks I’m actually doing being too boring.

In less than a month I will finish the PCT. I think that it will be done within 30 days.

Exhausted by Noise Pollution

Byrichard

Yesterday the drive was easy. 12-13 hours of easy driving with good road conditions. The exhaustion came from having neighbours that start making noise at 20:00 so the “early bed time” you planned is ruined. I woke at 0230 and by 0330 I was driving for 12hrs straight.

If I had been able to sleep as I had planned to I would have found the drive very easy.

Tired of Garmin and Apple, Playing With Casio
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Tired of Garmin and Apple, Playing With Casio

Byrichard

For a while now I have been wearing a Casio and an apple watch or a Garmin and an Apple watch, or a Casio and a Garmin watch or a xiaomi smart band and a casio or a xiaomi smart band and… it goes on.

A Break of Routine

The reason for which I’m flying between so many devices is two fold. I have too many devices. There was a time when I went climbing, hiking, cycling, diving, swimming, on via ferrata and more and I was happy with just one watch.

Collecting

Now, with the pandemic and other factors I seem to have more devices than arms, and no loyalty to either. I believe that it’s due, in part to walking the same loops over, and over, and over again. Every so often I walk clockwise and then I walk counter clockwise. I take the short route, then the medium route, and then the long route, and then the extra long route, and sometimes I backtrack, especially on weekends.

To break from that monotony I think I fiddle with various watches and tracking devices.

We think nothing of wearing a different pair of socks every day, or trousers, or t-shirts, but if we switch between watches, or wear two at once we’re lunatics.

Compulsion

If I wanted to be nasty about myself I’d say that I’m not a lunatic, I’m an addict. I feel the need to preserve my step count on as many services as possible, as a result of which I feel the urge to wear multiple devices each week.

Personal Fitness Tracking

There are two solutions to this. The first is a learning opportunity. Home Assistant and NextCloud have fitness tracking sort of built in. If I worked on updating HomeAssistant automatically, with data from Garmin, Apple, Casio and Xiaomi then I would have by data in a central place, and I could wear just one device at a time as the data aggregator I care about is my own.

Apple and Garmin

Apple and Garmin have frustrated me with their apps. They have taken fitness tracking and tried to make it an addiction. Apple and Garmin want you to push yourself every day, seven days a week for years. I burned out on Apple several times and yet I can’t stop wearing their device. My steps are counted by my phone anyway. Garmin has been faulty on occasion. It has crashed on some walks.

Stop Hesitating

The second solution is to pick one device and to stick with it, without flitting between one and the other. I feel myself drawn to Casio at the moment. I like that it tracks without nagging, and without judgement. I also like that I can go for months or even years without the need to charge.

The Paradox

Garmin, Apple and Xiaomi don’t care about walking as fitness habits, so you wear them every single day, but they won’t mark your fitness as progressing. You’re quantifying for the sake of quantifying, and wearing a casio would be fine.

Yesterday Garmin asked if I wanted to join the beta so I did, but I need to run or cycle for two weeks for the app to provide me with feedback.

And Finally

For years I wore a Suunto, and then for years I wore an Apple Watch, and then I played with an Apple Watch and a Garmin device, and now I feel like experimenting with Casio, as I did when I was a child.
Casio stand out now, because everyone already has an Apple Watch or a Garmin device, but few wear Casio.

Cyclist Sightings

Cyclist Sightings

Byrichard

Yesterday I went for a walk, during which I listened to two podcasts via AudioBookShelf, but that’s not the point of this post. The point of this post is that the seasons have changed. The snow has melted and there was a brief interlude in rain so plenty of people went out for bike rides. So many in fact that I seemed to be one of only two or three people on foot.

This makes me happy. I like crossing people on bikes because they usually don’t have big dogs, and they pass by within seconds rather than longer. They also tend not to take up the entire width of the road.

For some reason when couples walk they take the entire width of the road, as do families, and other groups. They’re not morbidly obese. they’re average. They could take as little space as cyclists and I do.

I should be cycling too but my bike lives half an hour from where I live at the moment, by car. It lives there because that’s where I went for bike rides several times and I felt that by transporting my bike, back and forth, in the car, I was damaging it, so I left it there. I never repatriated it because winter was coming so it made little sense. Now that summer is back it could make sense to repatriate it.

In reality I should prepare it for Spain. I should dismantle it, and take it to Spain, for a Spring service, before coming back to Switzerland, and use it, freshly serviced.

The difference in service price between Spain and Switzerland is 70 euros compared to 300 CHF. I could also take advantage of the slightly better weather in Spain to go for bike rides.

I have a few days to decide.

Setting Up AudioBookShelf

Setting Up AudioBookShelf

Byrichard

I have been an audible member for years at this point and in that time I have “bought” hundreds of books. I write “bought” because I payed for a Platinum account for years and got credits and got the books with those credits. Over the years I have collected more books than I can read in a year.

That library lived in the cloud, rather than my devices, for years. I would download the books I was listening to but not those that I had finished, or would read later. That’s because laptops and mobile phones have smaller hard drives than I require for my books.

OpenAudible

The first step when backing up audible books is to download them. The second is to strip them of DRM, and before you tell me off for being like a pirate I will correct you. I bought an MP3 player but because it doesn’t support AAX files I had to find a way to make the content that I own, legally, playable on a cheap mp3 player. In the process I stripped the DRM because I had no way of playing the audio files otherwise.

It’s because Apple, Audible and Sandisk do not play nicely that I had to strip the DRM. If they played nicely I would not have stripped files of DRM.

AudioBookShelf

AudioBookShelf serves as a site/service that makes it easy to catalogue your books and listen to them from your phone, laptop, desktop tablet or other. An Android App exists, but the iOS app is only available via Testflight.

The app can be installed as a docker container within minutes, and then you can point it to the folder where you store all your audiobooks. I write audio books, rather than Audible, because you can download audio books or podcasts and add them to your instance of audiobookshelf, to listen to files, streamed, or downloaded.

Listen Tracking

As you listen to books with this app you get to see how many minutes you listened per session, as well as which book, and for how long. If you use the app for more than a year you get the summary of previous years of listening.

Cover Art

The app gives you the option of looking for book cover art from a number of different audible libraries, depending on language and country, but also from open library and other sources.

Multiple Accounts

You can add as many accounts as you like with this app. The admin account can also create libraries either for individuals or to make it easier to differentiate between open audio books, audible, or other providers.

If you have a spouse, or children, or both, or live with others you can share access to this library. You can choose whether people can read, download, upload and more. This enables people to add the books that they want to have available via this website.

Podcasts

The app supports podcasts. If you add the OPML file of your podcasts it will automatically retrieve the latest ones, for you to listen to. I have yet to test this feature.

And Finally

So far I have listened to an hour of audiobooks via this website/instance and it works well. I tested it via firefox on iOS and via the web browser on the laptop and it works very well. As you listen on the phone you can see the progress bar update on the laptop and vice versa. You can seamlessly switch between devices.

The advantage of such an app is that you can share books, without giving people the files. They can then listen to audio books and their progress is kept between devices.

One of the key nuissances with audio players is that they do not usually keep track of progress. With this app you do, so you can switch between books and it will remember where you are.

The other advantage is that each listener is independent so you get listening stats for yourself, but not others.

So far I am happy with my experience.

Cloud Storage Tiers

Cloud Storage Tiers

Byrichard

On the 17th of February I will stop using Google One Drive and I was looking at the smaller tiers. You have 15 gigabytes for free, 100, and 200 gigabyte options, and then 200 gigabytes. At the moment I have 200 GB on Google Drive for documents and three hundred GB for photos. All of those photos are now backed up with Immich, PhotoPrism, and possibly one or two other storage solutions.

The Chasm From 200 GB to 2 TB

The issue that I, and others, come accross is that there is a massive leap from storing 100GB, 200GB or 2TB. There are no 500, 750 or 1TB tiers. You go from three francs per month to 10 CHF per month. I’ve had Google One with 2TB of space and used no more than 800 GB except for a day or two when I backed up my photos to Google Drive while migrating them off Google Photos.

Infomaniak is Cheaper, Microsoft 365 Offers A Better Tier

It turns out that Infomaniak’s Kdrive and Microsoft 365 Personal are two of the best options available. They’re priced with a 2 CHF difference. 67 CHF and 69 CHF per year. One offers Office Suite, as well as one terabyte of storage to use as you like, and the other offers two terabytes to use as you see fit. Both make it easy to backup photos from your phone to the cloud, and from the cloud to your laptop or external hard drive.

Self Hosted Replacements

As I mentioned above Google Photos has been duplicated via PhotoPrism, Immich and to some degree kDrive so I can delete those photos without concern, in theory. Google Drive is backed up to Kdrive so in theory I can delete that dat from Google Drive safely.

No Perfect Tier

My reason for moving away from Google is not based on conspiracy theories, or a moral problem with Google. It’s based on financial considerations. if they had a 500 GB or one terabyte tier then I would just downgrade my account for that tier size. This option does not exist so rather than downscale I might just jump ship.

Crowded Environment

The online backup market is huge. You have the choice between self-hosted solutions and cloud hosting solutions. Their pricing is quite similar but the question is whether you want your data to be in Europe, the US, or your own home, or the home of a friend or family member.

  • Google One – Google/Alphabet
  • iCloud – Apple
  • kDrive – Infomaniak
  • myCloud – Swisscom
  • OwnCloud
  • flickr – hosted
  • nextCloud – self hosted or hosted
  • PhotoPrism – self hosted or hosted
  • Immich – self hosted or hosted
  • Mylio – self-hosted or cloud hosted, although once you pay to backup to an exteran drive you have both

And Finally

I was happy to use Google One, Google Drive and Google Photos for years. The reason for which I decided to leave their service is that I saw the same experience, but for cheaper from Infomaniak. It has the added benefit that the data is stored closer to where I am. It’s nice to support local providers when the option exists.

Now that I have a local backup of my photographs, rather than depending on cloud services I can shop around and switch from the current cheapest to the next most affordable. I only need to check once per year, when the current contract is about to be renewed.