When the weather is cold and grey as it is today people are not tempted by a walk in the mountains. Chamois at la Dôle are more relaxed, especially up at La Dôle. They are hidden by the clouds and if humans are coming then they will smell them long before we get to see them.
On Friday of last week we were lucky. With a friend we decided that we would eat lunch at La Barillette after going for a short walk up from the radio mast to the Sky Guide facilities above.
There was a light drizzle and the clouds were playing. At moments we could see the top and at other moments it was hidden by clouds. We walked up the path and saw a few cows spread about the landscape.
As we started up the steep path and arrived to where the path flattens we could see two or three chamois in the distance. I thought at first that it was just the mother I had seen several months earlier with her young one. As we approached and as the wind blew away some clouds we saw a full herd.
This was excellent. It is rare to see so many of them so close together like that and from such a short distance. At moments we were just metres away from them. It was a rare and welcome privilege.
Nextcloud is an open source file sharing solution that has iOS, MacOS, Android, Windows and Linux apps. You can install it via a docker container, natively or via a number of other solutions. For my experiment I installed via Docker on Windows but haven’t done anything with it, and with [Nextcloudpi](https://nextcloudpi.com/). The latter is an ISO image that you can download and install to an SD card using the Raspberry Pi Imager.
Use Case
It’s easy to take dozens, or even hundreds of pictures in a single day on the mobile phone but it’s a nuissance to download them all locally so you usually use iCloud, Google Photos or some other solution. This is great, for as long as you have enough space on your phone. The moment iOS or Android stops offloading your photos from your device you’re in an annoying situation. Uploading photos to cloud services is painless. Retrieving them is a nightmare, for two reasons. The first reason is that you need to have enough storage locally to download all those files. When you’re on a laptop storage is at a premium.
You could use an external hard drive but it may take days, or even weeks to download all of your files. This means that you need to keep your machine plugged in and downloading for as long as it takes to download those files. That’s where Nextcloud comes in. When it’s working correctly it will download files from your phone, either as you take them, or when you choose to upload them.
What it does
It allows you to store and share photos, including encoding and decoding of video files, as well as preparing preview files, reading RAW image files and more. It allows you to have contexts, calendar, time tracker, apps like GpxPod, Tasks and more. It also provides you with an RSS reader, video player, and audio player.
With the photo app you can use facial recognition and other AI tools. As images are added to the galleries it checks for their location and adds them to a map as you would with Google Photos and iCloud. It also gives you the option of adding an exif reader to get more info from your saved files. With the GpxPod app you can download walks, hikes, runs, bike rides and planned routes and view them on the screen. I have yet to play with it properly.
How to Break Things
– upload 19,000 images at once. It will overheat the device
– reboot the machine. Having a different ip will get nextcloudpi.local to fail.
– ensure that your machine is called nextcloudpi.local
– use “sudo nano /var/www/nextcloud/config/config.php” to enter the config file and ensure that the ip address is listed. It needs to see that the current IP is a trusted one.
– Go from one wifi access point to another. I found that if I go from the living room wifi to the bedroom wifi it loses sight of the server and fails.
– Allow the Pi to Overheat. If the Pi reaches above a certain temperature the Pi will begin to fail. You need a fan if you’re playing with Nextcloud on a pi, especially when synchronising tens of thousands of pictures.
Why This Solution is Interesting
The system is new to me so I’m micromanaging it as it tries to get through thousands of files. Once it’s up and running it will be invisible and that’s the beauty of such a system. Once the Pi has its own fan it will no longer overheat and if I provide it with WiFi and Lan it should be accessible locally whether on one wifi network or the other.
With some network storage solutions you have the disks and the LAN interface within the same box, and if one fails you might lose access to the drives. With this solution you can attach an SSD or other hard drive to the Pi. If the Pi fails you just replace it. Once everything is running smoothly I would have two drives. The primary drive would be in constant use, and the second drive would serve as a backup.
It’s also low cost. A raspberry pi is cheap, and so are micro SD cards. Mobile phones are usually 128, 256 or 500 gigabytes. With a single SD card you can backup your phone every time you get home, as it syncs the most recent files.
And Finally
If I was not synchronising a huge backlog of photographs this solution would be up and running. It’s because I’m trying to backup the images that are on my phone that there are teething problems. I edited the config file to recognise nextcloudpi4.local and the two ip addresses the device is currently on. I have it on wifi and lan because I want to see if I can access it from either wifi. If that is the case then I have succeeded and the last step will be to have the Pi in a case with a fan.
It is important to know that you are in Justified Self-Isolation. Over the last three or four days I have felt like an idiot for self-isolating, but I now see that this is entirely justified. The R number for some canton went from 0.70 or so up to 1.4 or higher in recent days. This is for Bern, Geneva and Vaud, and it should spread more with the weekend.
As tough as it is to keep self-isolating and not meeting people the change of this board from light orange to dark red has been very fast. What’s worse is that this data is from the 25th of June. This isn’t data from today.
The R number for Switzerland is 1.45 and the Delta Variant, at the time of their data was 40 percent. This means that we are in for another autumn and winter of self-isolation. There is talk from Pfizer of a third booster shot. It seems that the effectiveness declines after 6 months.
In the past when I heard about pandemics, and highly infectious diseases, I was always under the impression that the aim was to contain and prevent the spread of a virus. During this pandemic, this was definitely true during the first few months of the pandemic. As we move forward though the aim of getting to a transmission rate of zero for two weeks in a row, before easing restrictions seems to have been abandoned. This does not make sense. Containing a virus makes sense, because as we have seen, if it is given enough opportunities it mutates, again and again, and each time the danger and threat level increase.
This time from the lifting of sanctions to the R number increasing has been short. Within two or three weeks of the lifting of restrictions, we see that active self-isolation is justified. It is a shame that more people do not watch the news, and react appropriately. It feels as though, if the government does not give people orders, they will not protect themselves, or each other. Furthermore, it is a shame, as self-motivation is better, than having to be told what to do.
Walking is an easy activity. You put your shoes on, and you go for a walk. Sometimes you walk from home. Other times you walk from a car park. Sometimes you walk along rivers that are full, and others you walk along streams that are almost dry.
A few years ago I did the same Via Ferrata by a waterfall two or three times within a few weeks because I liked it so much. The beauty of waterfalls is that sometimes they’re erupting with power. They’re roaring and sending a mist of water outwards. Other times they’re running dry and you can really get a good look at the underlying rock beneath.
Yeesterday I walked in a different region than usual so we explored. We walked a little bit, and then to decide to go a little further, and then a little further again. In the end it was an 8km loop.
For the most part the walk was about walking along the indications from L’I’sle to Le Puits and then on to Montrichet, and then back. For the outward journey we followed the paths, but for the return I wanted to explore if there was a secondary path.
The secondary path led along a path, until you hit some woods. You could head down, back towards a road, or you could head upwards and then across a field. At this field there was a lot of water flowing so it required finding clumps of grass not to submerge shoes and soak socks. This time my feet stayed dry.
The reason for exploring a secondary route is simple. I like my walks to be loops, rather than a bounce. I like to walk in a circle so that my outward and homeward legs are different. Yesterday’s walk could have been a loop but it would have required walking along either of two main roads, and main roads are not designed for people to walk alongside them, which I think is a shame.
When you walk three to five kilometres it is easy to find loops that do not expose you to cars, but once you walk across several villages you have to walk along roads, and deal with traffic. It’s because I like long walks that I encounter so much traffic. With short walks I would encounter dog walkers and normal people, with normal lives.
I have cycled around where I walked yesterday. On foot you more. You can look through windows. You can stop to read signs. You can go to look at the collection of books that are available in lending libraries. You also get a feel for the ondulations of the landscape.
And Finally
I tracked this walk with my old Apple Watch and a casio. The casio tracked the entire walk, via the phone, without issues. The Apple Watch ran out of power without saving the walk, so I lost the track with that device. I am frustrated by this. If I wear a watch, I don’t want it to lose my track.
I was looking for this type of information online and I found a few websites that provided such information. This one is useful because it is full of Greek and Roman mythological people so it serves as a good resource.
I found it at one of the phone boxes turned into a book library locations.
My intention is to skim through this book and slowly to get a good overview of the complex topic. I didn’t know that Musée was a name, not just a place.
Yesterday while driving the radio was on. Usually I would turn it off because people usually speak about unimportant things. Yesterday was different. Yesterday someone was speaking about solar power and Switzerland. He said that at the moment just 6 percent of houses have solar panels, when it should be closer to 20-30 percent. He also said that instead of destroying pristine nature we should add solar panels to train stations and other buildings.
He went even further. He spoke about the need for architects to think about renewable energies by default, with the addition of solar panels on new buildings and more.
This podcast is so important that I listened to it as it was broadcast, but I also re-listened to it when I got home. There is a walk I have done three or more times in the Jura that goes along the Trans-Jurassienne train lines. Back in the day it generated part of its own energy by using hydroelectric power. You can still see the building where that power was generated.
At one point there was an interview from the 70s or so where the TPG were spoken of as adding solar panels on their buildings to generate their own power. “Why do you do this, do you save money?” “No, but we’re investing in the future, for our children, so that they will have energy.”
They also spoke of a solar powered community near Zurich, where a collaboration between property owners saw them find a way to generate solar power for their own community. This was 50 years ago. Even then people were living in the future, compared to today.
And Finally
Onr of the other points that was covered was the idea that there needs to be a discussion around how to sell and buy energy from a de-centralised energy system where someone on one floor can send energy to a neigbhour on another floor. The issue is that at the moment the grid is still centered around power stations. and with solar, hydro and wind power there could be a shift towards a de-centralised energy system.
It’s actually something I said a few years ago. If every village creates and shares its own power then high tension powerl ines could become a thing of the past, as power would be within smaller nodes.
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