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Enjoying A Rainy Day
Although unfamiliar to most, there is pleasure to be felt from a day of rain. A day of rain, in a place where rain is rare is welcome. It provides a break from the daily walk. It provides an extra one and a half hours in a day. I have been impatient for such a day for months and it has finally arrived. Who wouldn’t want a day a rain. The rivers are happy. They were looking naked, with their rocks showing, and trees that are sometimes at river water level hanging high and dry. It will be good for the trees and everything else too. Rain cleans everything. That layer of dust that had accumulated over the weeks and months can finally run away, to flow into the lake, and from the lake down a river, towards the sea. It is also a break from the pressure of walking. Although walking is pleasant, and although it is relaxing, it is also a workout. You’re walking, deciding on a route, avoiding people and their dogs, and trying not to be yelled at by car drivers. You walk by one village and you hear a piano being played through a window. You wonder whether it is every day at the same time, whether the person is learning. Maybe it is simply someone who likes listening to music.
I Considered A Twitter Break
This morning I considered taking a twitter break after I saw one or two tweets that either seemed toxic or made me have a negative response. I take social media breaks, not because of negative opinions of social networks, but because either the people, or the conversations are not as pleasant or positive as I would like. I want to have fun, not be negative.
Not Drinking Enough
During this pandemic, after taking the habit of shopping for drinks once per week I find that my drinking habit declined. Instead of drinking two to three litres like some applications and journals recommend I drank one to one and a half litres. Recently I have started drinking more water and I see a change. In particular I am two to three weeks in. I am happy just to drink water now.
Road Side Fires and Hashtags
There is a level three risk of foresst fires at the moment. Now is a time when smoking and other forms of fire should be forbidden. Now is the time of year where the sides of roads catch alight easily. Forests are at risk.
Yesterday when driving home I spotted a fire by the side and I reported it on Waze. They don’t have a “warn about roadside fires” option yet. I have now added it as a suggestion.The sooner a fire can be reported, the sooner firefighters or other emergency services can put it out.
Hashtags
I hate hashtags. I have tweeted my hate for them since they came out in 2007 or 2008. I hate them because I came to the web when meta information was meant to be hidden in the meta data of a page, not plastered as white text on a white background to spam search engines.
I was playing with the Pixelfed iOS app yesterday and I wanted to explore the social network. I gave up within seconds. I scrolled down and I saw that rather than sub groups that were for cats, dogs, lemmings, landscapes and more the sub categories, or categories were hashtags.
Why Hashtags are crap
Hashtags are crap for two reasons. The first of these, as I argued back in 2007-2008 is that it makes it easy for spammers to look for a hashtag and start to spam a conversation with little to no effort. It neutralises the possiblity of good engaged conversations, especially around some topics.
The second reason is that with WordPress, Hugo and other content management system style services you can generate pages with tags and categories directly.
The Origin of the Hashtag
People forget that the hashtag was developed when Twitter was an SMS compatible system. Hashtags would allow people to quickly and easily see the topic of a tweet withing having to read the entire text. Now though, in the age of dedicated apps, the hashtag is obsolete, and should be destroyed.
Threads Wants Hashtags
I’m writing about this topic because I saw that Pixelfed uses hashtags, rather than tags or categories, which I find absurd, but also because I see that Threads wants to implement hashtags.
So Called Ugly URLs
The same culture that calls hyperlinks with extentions ugly is fine with #tags. That’s absurd. As an archivist and Media asset manager I think that having /topic/index.html that resolves to /topics/ is much uglier than /topic/ducks.html because when you want to find a file you need to sort through thousands of index.html files that mean nothing if you don’t read the front matter of the files.
Hashtags are Fashion Over Function
Hashtags, in my eyes, are fashion over function. By adding a tags text field, you could add keywords/tags, and have the software create relevant hyperlinks. Tags work extremely well on Hugo,and categories work well on WordPress. We don’t need to use ugly hashtags, when proper meta data practices would do the same thing, without wasting characters.
An Alternate Solution For Idiots Like Me
The alternate solution, to keep idiots like me, happy, would be to see that someone wrote hashtag keyword, and have the website parse the hashtag and turn it into a hyperlink to that keyword automatically. We have had href tags for decades, and that’s why hashtags are so absurd.
It encourages me to see that not everyone puts hashtags in every post on Mastodon.
Moving Sugar Beet
For a few weeks you see piles of sugar beet at one end, or another of fields. They stay that way for a while, until it rains for some reason. When it rains those piles of beet are loaded into hundreds of tractor trailer loads and transported to the train yard. The closest to Nyon is in Eysins.
During this time you see two things. Tractors going back and forth from the fields to the loading yard all day long filled with sugar beet and muddy roads. I don’t know whether they wait for the rain to clean the sugar beets before moving them, or if the wagons just happen to be free when the rain falls. In either case the roads around this train stop are covered in mud. It’s dangerous for scooters and bikes at this time of year.
Sometimes you see six to eight tractors with their loads parked with a sheet of paper with “25m3” or some other reading. Apparently the farmers drive their tractors to be unloaded and seem to leave them there either because it’s lunchtime, or because they are waiting for the train or loaders to get more wagons ready.
It would be interesting to pick up one or two sugar beets that fell by the side of the road during transport and try to process the beets to make sugar.
I walk almost every day, and by walking I see the seasonal changes in fields, and the different stages of different plants. We can all get in cars, drive for an hour, and walk for an hour but I prefer to walk locally, to see local seasonal changes, and to avoid spending money on petrol. I also like to reduce my carbon footprint, by driving less.
That’s it for now.
The Daily Workout
According to Euronews Next up to half of people in some European countries do not exercise enough. This is based on “A joint report by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)”.
There are only three reasons I would not walk ten thousand steps in a single day. A road trip, where I am in the car for most of the day, a bike ride, where my workout is not counted in steps or because of some reason I have forgotten about. Last month I walked 450,000 steps. This month I am regularly walking over 17,000 steps per day. I can’t imagine not being physically active every single day. It’s part of my routine.
I forgot that one of the motivators for people to exercise is Ingress, and Pokemon Go, the two augmented reality games that you play while walking around in the physical world. Plenty of those players go on walks, just to play Ingress. They never consider walking, for the pleasure of walking. Those that do are at an advantage.
I played Ingress on a bike, rather than walking. Cycling between villages takes more effort, especially around the vineyards that head up to the Jura. Do a few steep climbs and you will feel the effort.
And Finally
I have been walking during lunch breaks and more for as long as I can remember. I have been going for afternoon and evening walks since before GPS tracking with devices like the Nokia N95. I ended up tracking my walks and more, but not before I took on the habit of daily exercise. I can’t imagine not going for a one hour walk every single day. This habit means that I do not need to wait for buses or other forms of traffic. It means that I can walk to the shops for some things, or walk to meetings, if I know far enough in advance.
The Nicest Pi Setup Yet
There are several types of people. One of them is youtubers that try and fail until they succeed, and then there are people like me, who also try and fail until they succeed. In one case the individual probably gets millions of views, and earns enough to waste hundreds of dollars per video in microtransactions, to people like me who are experimenting with Pis because it’s cheaper, once you know what you’re doing than getting a synology box.
Over a few weeks I have experimented with installing Ubuntu and Raspberry Pi OS on several Pis and then added docker containers, and tried installing straight to the system. In the process I have iterated and iterated until I developed an effective work flow. Yesterday I spent an hour or two preparing an Ubuntu SD card, snap installing Nextcloud, and then docker, and then Photoprism, Immich, Home assistant and maybe one or two other apps. I also set photoprism to boot automatically at start up. When I tried to do the same with Immich it failed. In the end I settled for a shell script, thanks to Chat GPT help.
I kept a copy of the 48 commands I got to setup the system but ignored the trial and error part, for now. Ideally I should setup a script that can do this configuration automatically. I would install ubuntu, boot it up, and then run the shell script to install what I want automatically, so that a system is quick and easy to setup.
Centralised
Initially I had one Pi per service/server. This gave me the freedom to experiment with one service/server without destroying everything else. As I began to understand how the apps/services/servers work I was able to move them together on the same machine and have them run side by side. I go from needing several Pis with dedicated roles to a single Pi that can do it all, if I feel like centralising everything. Before I centralise everything I want to be able to migrate the logs and data from several apps to a central point.
I like that Home Assistant has weather data for several weeks. Part of the learning process is learning to move data between systems without losing their history.
And Finally
By installing a system, and then re-installing it over and over I learn with each iteration, and with each iteration I see something that could be improved so I improve it. Eventually I get a work flow that is fluid and does what I want with relative ease. I kept those 48 lines of commands so that when I do this again I can refer to my “notes” rather than several pages from two or three sites, and Chat GPT. That I managed to install Immich and Homestation counts as a success, because I had tried and failed to install both of them recently.
The Guardian, Google and advertising Revenue
For a reasonable amount of time I would check all of the news websites on a daily basis. These include The Guardian, the Independent, BBC news and french news sources. In so doing I was kept up to date with current affairs. Certain websites, such as the NYtimes and Le Temps were hidden behind paywalls so there was not much to see from such sites. At the time I went directly to the websites, without following hyperlinks. I saw the adverts and publishers got their revenue direct from my personal visit to their website.
Many newspapers, broadcasters and other media outlets are currently fighting to remain relevant. They are restructuring, they are dumbing down their content and they are reducing staff numbers.
The announcement comes after a difficult year for the newspaper industry as huge digital firms such as Google and Facebook take the lion’s share of advertising budgets while the growth of mobile proves harder to monetise than print for news organisations.
As an avid consumer of news content through news websites, podcasts, documentaries, radio and books I see the shift away from newspapers not as a result of Google and Facebook but rather as a result of poor editorial integrity. When I go to a news source I want facts to be presented in a serious and informational manner. I want article headlines to tell me what the article is about without being told how I should feel about it. The Guardian has a news website that I visited every single day for years. The same is the same of the Independent, the BBC and other news sources. I read articles and I compared the stance to form an opinion on current affairs.
When newspapers shifted towards the clickbait model I stopped visiting their websites. They told me that I’d be amazed, that my life would change forever and more. That might work for a younger more impressionable audience but for readers like me it feels condescending. The experience is unpleasant.
Experience has taught me not to click on those headlines because they fail to provide me with new information. They should not assume that we can’t take five seconds to go to a reference website for context. We buy books to understand the context of current affairs and it is easy to visit wikipedia when we need to refresh our memory.
Many news organizations, facing competition from digital outlets, have sharply reduced the size of their newsrooms and their investment in news gathering.
But The New York Times has not.
We have our subscribers to thank for that.
News gathering and newsrooms are the origin of a newspaper’s value. The more professional editorials are, the more they respect their audience, the more of an audience they will have. We are on facebook, Google+, Twitter and Linkedin. We live across multiple tabs and websites. When editorial teams respect us we return the favour. We become or remain loyal. When we see value we commit to become subscribers. We invest in news outlets when they show that they provide us with worthwhile information.