Richard's blog

Category: youtube

  • Expired Tailscale Device Keys

    Expired Tailscale Device Keys

    Reading Time: < 1 minute

    Yesterday I found myself accessing Audiobookshelf on one of my Pi devices in the morning and it timed out in the morning. As I am travelling this situation is not ideal as I had to find a way to recover access.

    I checked the tailscale device list and could see that the device was online but I didn’t know how to access it.

    Initially my reaction was that the Raspberry Pi had crashed in a way that I could no longer access it unless I hard reset. This didn’t make sense as I haven’t had that issue for months. If that did occur I have no way of accessing the Pi device. I would need a way of powering off and on the device. Not so simple from one thousand two hundred kilometres away.

    The other solution was to experiment with tailscale and ask for advice. It advised me to use tskeys and after some trial and error, without success, on a mac, I decided to try another method.

    If you scroll down to the list of services you can access a device such as a Pi remotely and that seemed to do the trick. After this step I was able to access and use the Pi remotely. I was able to access Audiobookshelf and Photoprism.

    In reality this post isn’t to explain how to access a server remotely via tailscale after the lease is up. It’s about taking a few seconds, before a trip, to renew the key. The issue is that I had an outdated key, not that the instances were down or that the Pi had hard crashed.

  • The Hidden Wash Basin

    The Hidden Wash Basin

    Reading Time: < 1 minute

    When roads are built they often require a lot of soil to flatten the land so that the road may be built. In the process objects are hidden. In one case old clothes washing basins were hidden beneath a road. It’s funny to see a road, a hole, and within the hidden baths.

    In Nyon they found an ampitheatre when excavating for a new building. Near Benitachell they found the wash basin. From the road it didn’t look special but when you walk around to see the excavated ruins you get a sense of the importance of the site.

    You get them in most towns and cities, since many villages had them for the washing of clothes. In some of these villages you still have the old wooden boards although they are covered in moss afer years without use.

    It’s a good habit, always to check within road excavations, to see what lies beneath.

  • Nextcloud Via Infomaniak Hosting

    Nextcloud Via Infomaniak Hosting

    Reading Time: 2 minutes

    For a few days I was playing with Day One, the note taking app, after years without touching it and I was playing with the idea of paying for the app. The cost is 38 CHF per year. It used to be cheaper. I think it was around 23-28 CHF rather than 38.

    If you have web hosting with Infomaniak then you can have 20 sites and 250 gigabytes of storage. With this deal you can have your principle website for your blog such as I do, and a sub-domain for Nextcloud, Classicpress and other such events.

    The point of using Nextcloud in a sub-domain is that Nextcloud is one of the apps that is pre-configured on Infomaniak services. Create the sub-domain, create the user account and within a few minutes you’re self-hosting your own instance of Nextcloud.

    The advantage of Nextcloud is that it can be used as a note taking app from any mobile phone or computer OS, hence you have tremendous flexibility, and although you pay more per year, you’re paying for a European web host.

    There is a discussion at the moment about digital sovereignty. I don’t like the term. I prefer "independence" or some more neutral term. The concept is simple. At the moment we are becoming too US centric with social and anti-social media, news sites and more. With Infomaniak, among other hosting solutions we are shifting back to a Europe centric solution.

    Nextcloud too is a Europe centric solution, with part of it being based in Germany and various European countries.

    It’s good to think laterally, and to find solutions that are "local" to our continent. In this case, Europe, as I write this as a European. I’m using Nextcloud now, to write my blog posts and then copy them over to the WordPress blog. I have toyed with migrating to ClassicPress but will decide on this later.

  • Random

    Random

    Reading Time: < 1 minute

    Writing a blog post every day is a challenge that I have tried to be consistent with for several seasons if not a year and a half or more. It requires inspiration, and doing interesting things.

    If life becomes routine, or if events became normal, then writing inspiration fades away.

    After a year and a half or two of trying to blog every day I have begun to run out of inspiration.

    I often take an hour or two of thinking before I find inspiration for what to write. I haven’t had that much time to think in the last two days, hence the shorter or non-existant posts. I question whether to change the blogging frequency, whether to write daily, or to write once every second day, or once per week.

    I don’t think that once per week is a good frequency. I think that I want to write every second day One day to think, and one day to write. I suspect that by taking a break from writing daily the quality of what I write will increase. I suspect that it could also become more positive once again.

    And in the meantime I had played with Visual Studio for blogging, to Day One, and now I am playing with Nextcloud because it’s cheaper/self-hosted, it’s cross platform and best of all it isn’t 38 CHF per year like Day One. I think that price is too high for a note taking app.

  • The Long Drive

    The Long Drive

    Reading Time: 2 minutes

    It’s funny. It is a drive that I have done plenty of times. Tomorrow I will do the usual twelve hour drive from Switzerland to around Alicante, and I will do so with minimal stops.

    In essence the drive is easy. I take the motorway from Nyon all the way to Ondara, with a small segment on open roads around Grenoble. It’s long, but easy.

    There is a difficulty that I face. I always do this drive alone. Whilst it gives me the freedom to drive at my speed, stop when I want to and more, it also reminds me that I am still solitary. I always feel a little fragile before a trip, especially one like this.

    If I was going to Barcelona it would be an easy eight hour drive, but to go towards Ondara is a twelve hour drive. That’s twelve hours of podcasts, audio books and more. With a good audio book the drive is easy.

    Some people would stop along the way, and I have considered it. I don’t know where I would stop. If I stopped I could break the journey in two, but would that increase fatigue over two days?

    In reality this drive is a fun challenge. It’s liberating to drive for twelve hours, and to listen to an audio book from cover to cover. it’s fun to travel through three countries in a car like this. From the road to Grenoble in the dark to the sunrise near Valence to getting to see the Motorway after Marseille, to the wind and more as I head to the Spanish border, and then the congestion around Barcelona, before the quieter roads toward Valencia and beyond. The road is familiar, and it has memories.

    It would be nice to do this trip as a person in a relationship, rather than solo. I was reading The Midnight Library and this is one of those situations. When I travel my subconscious feels the presence of the book of regrets, so rather than excitement I feel regret until I start to drive, and then I feel the adrenaline of the open road. It’s the waiting for a trip that plays with us.

    Yesterday I spoke to someone who said doing this trip solo would be boring. That’s why podcasts and audio books are good.

    I considered taking the bike but that adds a layer of complexity. This time is different. I have my climbing stuff with me. If an occasion to climb comes up then I can take that opportunity to do something a little different.

    I think the problem is that I have too much time to think before a trip. If I had no time to think about the journey I’d be excited, and impatient. I should be excited and impatient. I will read most of Nexus, in theory. I finished Sapiens while eating lunch today.

    Tomorrow I drive a familiar road that is one thousand two hundred kilometres long. In the US such a distance is ordinary. In Europe it’s less ordinary.

  • EV Charging around Signy and Nyon

    EV Charging around Signy and Nyon

    Reading Time: 2 minutes

    Yesterday morning I plugged the car in to charge at Signy Centre while shopping and for the price of a coffee I charged the car by ten percent. I then went to the lakeside of Nyon to test the Service Industriel de Nyon (SIN) chargers and failed.

    They were out of service so I drove towards Chavannes Centre because I thought of using their chargers until I realised that by the time the car is charged I would be driving through rush hour traffic. Instead I drove back to Signy Centre.

    I charged the car from 40 percent to 100 percent in about two hours and fourty minutes at about 10.4kw/h. While waiting I played games on the mobile phone but I also went for a walk. In the process I noticed that the Avia garage has chargers, which I knew about, that Bottone has chargers which I knew about, that Signy Centre itself has several chargers, and finally that Shell has a new charger and this is a 300kw charger. In one industrial area you have four charging solutions, and if you include Nyon then the one by the Pisciculture place was out of action but the one by the Aviron was working.

    You can tell chargers are working because they’re busy. In Nyon if no one is parked at a charging station there is a good chance that the chargers are out of order.

    What would be nice is for every town and village to have a public charging point. At the moment we can either shell out and get charging for home, but then if you live in an apartment you need permission to install it, and if you live in a house you get a little more freedom.

    If we knew that every village we drove to had public charging points then we could head to these, park, and then go for a bike ride or hike, and get back to a car that was fully charged and ready for the trip home.

    And Finally

    I was thinking, if only I had people to meet in Nyon for an hour or two, while waiting for the car to charge, but if I had set a meeting point and time, and the chargers were not functional then I would have missed an opportunity to charge. Luckily I had flexibility so I went to Signy Centre and the charge time was not too long. If I was in a rush I could use the 300kw charger but this wears down the battery sooner so it’s interesting for road trips, rather than daily use.

  • Goodreads Et Al

    Goodreads Et Al

    Reading Time: 2 minutes

    Recently people wanted to move from Goodreads to open alternatives to move away from the grasp of Amazon. I wanted to do the same so I moved to two or three apps and used them for a while. I stopped using them for one simple reason.

    They don’t have an extensive library of books, so when you start to read a book you can either spend several minutes adding all the information about the book you’re reading into the system, or you can save time and stick with Goodreads. When you’re reading audiobooks and e-books you might not have all of the relevant information.

    Another flaw of these apps is that they have a monthly or yearly cost. Bookly wants 31 CHF per year, So does Bookmory. That’s 62 CHF per year if you choose to have both apps, which most will not. With Bookly you can spend 150 CHF for lifetime ownership.

    31 CHF per month, for apps where you have to manually enter the books you’re reading. For that you could set something up in Excel or a similar app for free. We would pay, and we would get to do the work for them.

    With Storygraph you get an experience that uses AI to give you more data about your reading habit but for this they charge 40 euros a year.

    If they had a web app then this could make sense. With a web app it would take a few seconds to add books into the database. If we enter books manually on a phone we are likely to create duplicates and make mistakes.

    The Experience

    In my experience of Twitter, waze, Instagram, Goodreads, Strava, Zwift and more we start out investing in them, using them, giving them our data and then they sell themselves to the highest bidder. YouTube did this too. Yes, I love the ideal of independent apps, and yes I would contribute financially to use them but every app I have invested time and effort into has been sold.

    It’s not just that they get sold, once they have the right valuation. There are a dozen apps to choose from. How do we choose which app or apps to use? How easy would it be to migrate from App A to App B, and from Goodreads to App C and from App C to Goodreads?

    Do you want to have your entire reading history on each app, which can take several days of effort, or do you want to use a different app each year, and with time choose the one you want to stick with?

    Initially I loved the idea of switching from Goodreads to other reading apps, until I realised how much work it would be, and then I reverted to Goodreads. It’s just easier.

    One Last Thing

    Although I speak of all these apps Audiobookshelf offers me a "year in review" that is a little skewed. According to this app I have finished 43 books, read for 14 days, through 1263 sessions and counting. My top narrator was Larry McKeever, the top genre was Literature and Fiction and the Top AAuthor was James A. Michener.

    Of course I did not read this many books. It’s that this is how many books I added to Audiobokshelf as read, this year.

  • Immich and an M.2 NVMe Drive on a Pi

    Immich and an M.2 NVMe Drive on a Pi

    Reading Time: 2 minutes

    Immich is an easy to install and use app that works well with the Pi5. By default you will have it run on the SD card but yesterday I finally found an NVMe drive at a reasonable price so I swapped the AI kit for a 521 NVMe drive.It was detected with ease so I formatted the hard drive. I then used GRsync to move the photos from the SD card to the NVMe drive. I then modified the .env file to tell it to look on the NVMe drive rather than the SD card.

    Since there was an update for Immich I updated the docker image, and in the process it went from using the SD card to using the NVMe drive.

    The move was quick and simple. It is is also tidy and at least now there are two points of failure, rather than one. If the SD card fails I still have the photos.

    The next step would be to repeat this with a second Pi, a second HAT and a second NVMe drive so that I could mirror my Immich library across two devices in case one fails. My aim would be to have the primary device in one place and the secondary device in another place, and for GRsync or similar to duplicate data from the primary device to the secondary device.

    And finally, this is a tidy solution. With Photoprism and Audiobookshelf I have a larger drive attached to a Pi but for that setup I have half a terabyte of audio files, and photos from Photoprism and Immich. I have plenty of storage but it isn’t mobile.
    With the new setup I can travel with the Pi, sync to it, and then replicate it to another system, so if one system fails I change the tailscale ip address from device one to device two and it will be seamless, once it works as I want it too.

  • To Drive or to Fly

    To Drive or to Fly

    Reading Time: 2 minutes

    In a week or less I will go on a long drive from Switzerland to Spain, stopping at least once, to refuel. I love the drive. I love that it gives me time to think, and to listen to audio books for hours in a row, rather than for a few minutes while cooking or an hour or two while cooking.

    This time I considered flying but the issue with flying is that I lose a lot of freedom, and the cost, in terms of time is half a day, instead of an entire day.The point is that flying takes the entire day anyway so I don’t really gain, by flying rather than driving.

    For fun I asked perplexity.ai whether flying or driving had a higher carbon footprint and the first answer is that driving had a higher carbon footprint. I then asked whether if by using my car, and driving at 120 km/h through France this would affect the carbon footprint and the answer is that my carbon footprint would be less if I drive rather than fly. The difference is just 20kg of co2 so it’s not huge. It also added that "if you account for aviation’s non-CO2 effects (e.g., contrails and high-altitude emissions), which can multiply the climate impact by approximately 1.9 times, the flight option’s total climate impact would be significantly higher." In other words it’s better to drive.

    In theory the train is another option but according to various searches, and asking AI it could take over 24 hours, and if that is the case then driving is definitely less tiring.

    And Finally

    Although flying would be easier, and twice as fast as driving I like the process of driving rather than flying. I like the time that driving gives me to think, and transition from being in one place to being in another. As I said when I flew between London and Geneva, it felt like a commute rather than an adventure. Driving gives that sense of a trip. I like that time to think, and listen to audio books and podcasts. If I take the bike then the car definitely makes sense.

  • Step Tracking with the Casio ABL-100WE

    Step Tracking with the Casio ABL-100WE

    Reading Time: 2 minutes

    The Casio ABL-100WE range of watches look similar to the A-168 range of Casio watches with one key difference. It counts steps like several G-shock watches do but rather than have a massive case that can survive a ten meter drop onto concrete it looks "elegant", like the a-158, a-168 and other casio models.

    This is a water resistant watch, so you shouldn’t go scuba diving with it. It has a battery life of about two years, depending on how you use it. This means that in theory you can place it on your wrist and leave it there for two years, before swapping the battery for a new one.

    It has a niche use case. It’s for those that want to count their steps, but aren’t bothered about heart rate and other factors. It gives you that data on your phone via "my page" in the Life Log section. It estimates calories burned and gives you a summary of the step count per day. You can see it per hour if you want to and per week or month. If you want to you can go into the specific watch, go to life log, "Location History Records" and track your location for an hour, up to 24 hours at a time. It will then use the phone’s GPS location to create a track of where you have been during this time. You cannot tell it whether you are running, cycling, walking or other.

    More Formal

    Unlike the GBD-800, GBA-900 and GBD-200 this watch does not stick out. It is more suited to formal settings. It has more functionality than the A-158, 168 and the F-91W watches so if you’re used to watches that serve a purpose you might prefer the ABL-100WE range.

    One key limitation of the Casio Watch App is that it does not share its data with any other app. Some might see this as a bonus, others as a limitation. If you’re looking to wear this watch for Android OS or iOS step counts then this is not the device for you.

    And Finally

    Suunto, Garmin, Apple, Fitbit and others encourage you to push, and push, and push. With the Casio ABL-100WE models you walk during the day and it keeps track. At the end of the day you see that you took a certain amount of steps and that’s it. There is barely any gamification or pushing you to strive, or demotivating you with negative feedback.

    In conclusion, you can get a casio step tracking watch that isn’t a g-shock watch, if you prefer a more elegant/formal appearance for your watch.