For the first time in my life I am cat sitting. I’m used to village cats and this is a city cat so I don’t know how much time I need to spend with the cat, how much I need to play and more.
When I look after toddlers I know that I have to be attentive to them from the moment they wake up to the moment they nap or sleep. It’s a challenge to have that level of endurance.
I’ve started the first 24hr day of looking after a cat and so far it seems that I’m more attentive than I need to be. I feel like I should keep the window open and keep the cat entertained but this is a cat we’re talking about. They entertain themselves.
If we were in the middle of summer I would go for three to five-hour rides taking advantage of the new starting and endpoint. As we’re in the middle of winter I’m waiting for a film festival to start. As soon as it starts I will have something to do in Geneva. For now, I’ve been walking around and playing Ingress.
It’s nice to be so close to the centre of Geneva. I can walk everywhere within half an hour to an hour. Geneva is a small city when you know it. There is no need for buses, trams, taxis etc. Usually, something like going to the Apple store would be an expedition because it takes a 20-minute walk, a train, and then another 20-minute walk. Today I could do the walk within 20 minutes.
We will see how my impressions change over the coming days.
On Cloudneo are shoes that you rent, rather than own. They are designed for running but you can also use them for walking. They are designed for dry, warm weather, rather than wet. They are designed to last from three months to six months depending on how quickly you wear them out. They are brilliantly white when new, but within two or three runs they lose their luminescence.
Circular – Use – Reuse
These shoes are designed to reduce the carbon footprint of the shoes we wear. They are made from beans, rather than petroleum based products. Once you’re done with a pair you send it back to the manufacturer, so that they are grounded back down and turned into a new pair of shoes. In theory you never own them. In practice they are just extremely easy to recycle.
Comfort When Running
I have run with them in heavy rain, sunny weather, through grass, mud and a river that was running down a road. I was so used to the trail glove 7 that I had to get used to normal shoes, and the difference in the feel and centre of gravity. I found that with these shoes my ankles rolled on uneven terrain. I attribute this to being used to barefoot shoes, rather than a design flaw.
With some running shoes I notice that I feel knee strain if I run too hard, or after a certain distance. I find that with these shoes my knees feel okay. I have run five or more kilometres several times.
Slippery when Wet
The shoes are designed for warm, dry weather so when you’re running in Switzerland, over slippery surfaces you will slip and show that you were a snowboarder or skier multiple times. They’re sub-optimal for rainy and muddy conditions. When it’s raining water will make its way through to your socks within seconds or minutes. The one advantage with these shoes is that they’re made from such minimal material that if they get wet they dry by themselves overnight, ready for the next day. Shoes that dry quickly don’t need to be waterproof because they dry fast.
Walking Comfort
Although they are not marketed or purposed as walking shoes I have used them on a variety of walks. They felt good until I tightened the laces. I could feel a pressure point where I had accidentally flipped the lace around. When I identified that this was the problem they were more comfortable to wear, once again. When I run up and down the stairs in this building they’re quieter than other shoes.
Mud Removal
Although the shoes are mediocre to bad in mud they are very easy to brush clean once you get home after a run or walk. This is important to me. In Autumn, Winter and Spring shoes can get very muddy. The lack of tread that makes them bad in the wet makes them great for cleaning. A few brush strokes and they’re clean, ready for walking indoors.
Cost
These shoes are designed to last for about 600 kilometres, as are most shoes, so if you run or walk a lot you will replace them sooner than every six months. After 45 days of use, but without a clear idea of distance, although at least 75 kilometres the only signs of wear are a slight loss of tread on the front of the shoe, and a discoloration on the rest of the shoe. Running in muddy and flooded conditions has that effect on shoes. If you walk and run 240 kilometres per month you will replace them within three months.
If you replace your shoes after three months they have cost you 105 CHF. If you replace them after six months they have cost 210 CHF. The more you walk and run in them, the sooner they need to be replaced, and the more rational they are to own.
Limitations
At the moment Cloudneo shoes are designed for running on asphalt, rather than mud or gravel. They’re good on dry surfaces but tend to slip on painted road surfaces and slick mud. If it’s raining your feet will get wet although despite running in 6°c temperatures my feet did not get cold.
Niche Use
I walk eight kilometres per day. This comes to 720 kilometres every three months. If I replace my shoes every three months then I go through four pairs of shoes per year. By using the Neocloud shoes for walking and running the shoes that I used for three months are recycled and reused for the same purpose.
And Finally
You have a month to see that the shoes fit. They prefer for you to test them for fit indoors, so that the shoes do not get dirty as this would result in them being recycled too early, rather than reused by someone without recycling. The minimum contract duration after the one month trial is six months which comes to 210 francs. If you use one pair per six months they cost that to own. If you replace them after three months this falls to 105 Francs.
It doesn’t bother me that shoes are not weatherproof but it does bother me that the sole doesn’t have grip on wet and muddy surfaces. Yesterday I slid several times walking out of the village. With other shoes I wouldn’t. They need to provide shoes that are good in wet and muddy conditions so that this becomes a year round solution, rather than in good road conditions.
These shoes are not worth 210 CHF, and at 105 CHF they’re still expensive compared to other options. I feel that this is a six month experiment, to experience high end running shoes but that when I can I will end the contract.
In theory shoes are meant to last for eight hundred kilometres before they need to be replaced. I am now one eighth of the way towards needing to replace my Trail Gloves. In theory.
In practice the left shoe is worn and the tread is gone, in two spots. The toes, where most of my force is transmitted to the ground, and the heel, where I tend, or least tended to strike. That’s why the vapor gloves hurt if they’re used too much.
The Five kilometre Run
Yesterday I went for a walk, but as I walked I decided that I felt like running, so I did. I had not intended to run but I managed to run five kilometres without suffering. My feet felt fine, my legs felt fine. I felt fine. I was able to run five kilometres in minimalistic shoes. No real heel protection. Just the tone of my leg muscles to ensure that I did not injure myself. I consider that switching to “barefoot shoes” on a whim was a success.
What I enjoy is that they’re half the price of running shoes, and paradoxically, you work on your own body, rather than rely on the shoes. It was a smart move. Instead of spending 180CHF or more on running shoes, I spent around half of that amount.
The Feel
There are moments when I’m walking in these shoes and the ground feels really smooth and gentle. It’s really nice when the road surface and temperature are just right. For some reason it feels like walking on a soft matt, rather than the road. I prefer running on dry soil and short grass than tarmac.
With the vapor gloves I feel like I am walking slightly tip toe, to avoid smashing my heel into the ground and feeling pain. In the trail gloves I walk normally but try not to land with a thud, on my heels. The trail gloves forgive my mistakes. That’s why I wear them as my normal shoes now.
The Push Away from Normal Shoes
I was pushed away from normal shoes for two reasons. The first reason is that for some reason the vertical part at the back of the shoe gets worn through, and when my foot rubbed against the plastic back I had to wear blister protection. I also didn’t like to feel the top of the shoes rubbing against my toes. For some reason shoes that had been comfortable, have been changed, and are now uncomfortable.
And Finally
I never expected that one day I would feel the desire to wear barefoot shoes. I thought “What a stupid idea” but now, several week in, I like the sensation of such shoes.
For two days I have played with the Garmin Instinct Solar and I already see a niche for it. If I want to be like every other reviewer I will say, “use the expedition mode for up to 127 days or hours of battery life, but I won’t because I think there is another more interesting niche. Activity tracking, without needing to take off the watch for weeks or months at a time. With Suunto, Apple and other devices you need to remove a watch at least every three or four days to recharge it, which means that you have a gap in heartrate and activity data.
With a watch like the Garmin Instinct Solar you can track your days for 25 days in a row without recharging. In summer, in theory you could wear the watch and it would charge as you’re eating lunch or walking on the beach or sitting at a terrasse in the mountains. I really like the idea of going back to watches that we can wear for weeks, without having to take them off.
I tried using the watch in normal mode yesterday, and wore it overnight, and by the next morning it said that it had six hours of power left so I had to charge it. I tried with the morning sun but it didn’t work, so I tried with the mid morning and afternoon sun and that was better. I had to recharge it from a power socket anyway.
26 Days of Tracking
Today I put the watch into normal mode for a run, and then as I walked I tracked hiking, for a little bit, before switching to just counting steps and charging with the Autumn sun. When I got home it was at 25 days of battery life from 26-27 days. Four weeks of battery life, with the Autumn sun.
What makes this solar watch stand out is it’s price. It costs 298 CHF. Compare that to the Casio hr1000 Solar watch that cost up to 1000CHF a few years ago, and the Garmin Pro Fenix solar that costs about 800 CHF.
Power Hungry GPS
The problem with GPS technology is that it uses a lot of power, so for a solar powered watch to work effectively the solar panels would have to be quite a bit bigger. That’s where a solar powered activity tracker is brilliant. The watch can do a lot more, if you want to charge it every day, but if you don’t, then simply keeping track of your steps will be enough, along with heart rate.
Power Modes
You have expedition mode, for 127hrs of battery life, You then have battery saver where the heart rate monitor and phone connection are turned off for 70hrs. You then have jacket around 40hrs I think and normal that is about 30hrs.
Smartwatch: Up to 24 days/54 days with solar* Battery Saver Watch Mode: Up to 56 days/Unlimited with solar* GPS: Up to 30 hours/38 hours with solar** Max Battery GPS Mode: Up to 70 hours/145 hours with solar** Expedition GPS Activity: Up to 28 days/68 days with solar*
The Apple Watch needs to be charged every day. The Suunto that I have needs to be charged every second activity, especially after over three years of daily use. The Garmin Instinct Solar, in the right mode could go for three or four weeks without needing to charge, and in the middle of summer, could recharge, at least partially, while you are active.
On Activity Trackers
Most activity trackers last from 5 to seven days between charges, when they are new and this depends on whether you have heart rate and o2 monitoring. With the Garmin Instinct you leap up to 68 days over the summer months. In theory you will have no gaps in data, for months at a time. This means that if you’re trying to save on weight, you could travel without the charging cable for weeks at a time.
Should You Get it?
Yes, if you want to track your activities but are not worried about heart rate and using the watch for notifications. It is one of the cheaper solutions, and from that aspect it stands out. It gives you plenty of functionality that you find on higher end devices, without the price. Add to this that plenty of functionality is accessed via Garmin Connect and you have a good reason to get this alternative solution that costs a third of the price.
If you’re replacing a Suunto Spartan Wrist HR because it’s getting a little old then don’t. The battery life on that device is still better or as good, and the screen is easier to read. After a decade or so of using Suunto I find the menus and navigation more intuitive and rational.
My reason for considering switching from Suunto to Garmin is two fold. The first is that suunto is moving over to android, so it no longer has a unique OS, and that it’s move to more colourful displays means that battery life will suffer. They also no longer offer a web interface for the application, so you are forced to use a mobile phone.
I was also curious to play with the Garmin ecosystem. I like to be familiar with these platforms.
And Finally
And finally the best device is the one that can last as long as the activity you do, whether it’s a two hour daily walk, a two day hike or a longer duration journey. Switching from Suunto to Garmin has a learning curvey. The navigation menu is different. Eventually you understand the logic.
I had a theory that if I wanted to I could transport a raspberry pi running ubuntu server from one place to another and connect by wifi, with a little tweak, or by ethernet if that didn’t work and today that thought was proved wrong. I spend at least an hour experimenting, before calling it a day, because of lunch time, rather than a loss of desire to find a solution.
I had the theory that if you plugged an ethernet cable into a Pi it would become visible on the network with ease but this didn’t seem to be the case. The Pi wasn’t happy. It was configured for one wifi hotspot but when I tried to change the config file for a second wifi access point it simply didn’t work.
Two Things I Learned
There are two things I learned. The first is that raspi-config works when you have Raspian installed. it doesn’t work when you have a flavour of linux installed. The second problem I encountered was that the tools which various sites, including Bard and Chat GPT recommended required a working connection to download the tools that they recommended. I tried this, but had no luck, because for some reason the ethernet network was not detected.
The lesson is that I should download those tools before migrating a Pi from one location to another, so that if I encounter such an issue I have a simpler UI that works, rather than modifying config files by hand, and failing. I wrote failing but this wasn’t a failure. My entire goal was to take a Pi, configured for one environment and transpose it into a second. It didn’t work and I familiarised myself with the tools I need to install before attempting such an experiment again.
The Beauty of Pi
Don’t forget. One of the strengths of Pi is that you can download instances and install them on microSD cards. You can attempt something with one card, and when it fails swap it for a second and try a variant, until you succeed. If you succeed you can remove that SD card, run an experiment, and see if that experiment works, before reverting to the original card with the install that works.
The beauty of Raspberry Pi, and staring and stopping instances is that you can try various ways of doing the same thing several times, and make mistakes, and invest time in learning how to problem solve, before achieving your goal and moving forward. In this situation the experiment was the goal, so my ideal outcome was not reached, but the opportunity to learn was.
And Finally
With today’s experiment I learned that to make a Raspberry Pi running Ubuntu easier to port from wifi network to wifi network, for example to backup a phone while traveling, I need to add the network manager tools. If I had done that my day’s experiment would have been a success. I also learned that raspi config is not on Ubuntu installs via the Raspberry Pi imager, and this is a useful thing to learn. Now I can see whether I can recover the system before having dinner.
The most evident form of torture is traffic. This comes in the form of passengers in trains, buses and to some degree cars. In trains and buses you will have the pleasure of standing in work clothes next to youths in t-shirts, drinking beers and possibly listening to music and generously allowing other people to listen. Imagine how pleasant this experience is when you’ve just finished a ten hour work day and you want to listen to an audiobook. “If I wanted this experience I’d have stayed in London” is something you might hear the locals say.
If you want to get off in Gland or Nyon you’d better be patient as there is an excellent chance that you will be stuck for half an hour getting off the motorway. It is for this very reason that when I offered to drive a person I said that I would drive to Coppet to pick her up rather than Nyon. I wrote “In the morning I can pick you up from Nyon but in the evening I will drop you off in Coppet. This turned out fantastically for three people at the end of the day.
Two people were heading back to Geneva and catching the train from Coppet meant that they were on the TPG network. The third person lived in Coppet so my avoiding a music festival provided her with a climbing wall to home village solution.
You see this. A music festival inconvenienced me and yet I still make an effort to simplify the lives of others. That is a demonstration that despite the intense dislike I have for a music festival I still know to be kind and courteous to those who do not inconvenience me.
Noise pollution
Traffic, in isolation is often a nuisance but worse than traffic is noise pollution. The countryside is quiet. The noise of the nearby river is so normal that you do not notice it until you listen to a recording of normal every day sounds. Add to this the summer sound of crickets and birds and you’ve described the noises. In the distance you can hear the train de St Cergue as it makes it way up and down the Jura.
During the music festival you get to hear sound checks from 11am onwards. You hear the sound of the kick drum, voice microphones and other instruments. This goes on until two or three more bands on the Grande Scène have finished their sound check. As a young adult this is nice, this is part of the euphoria of “having a music festival in your back yard” as Americans would say. This is not a nuisance. The torture comes after ten at night.
In Switzerland you are not allowed to shower, take a bath or make noise after 2200 hours under risk of a fine if you do not get along with your neighbours. This makes living in Switzerland civil. Working professionals know that after 2200 they can go to bed and nothing should wake them up.
During the music festival common decency goes out of the window. From Tuesday to Sunday morning if your bedroom is facing towards the music festival you will hear booming and howling until 3am every day. That is the noise that is transmitted through double glazing, thick walls and a layer of insulation. If you open the window you can sometimes make out who is singing. I remember hearing Faithless or other bands when they played years ago when I was still familiar with the artists.
If you’re not working or you have flexible hours then you can shift your sleep pattern to match the music festival. You can wake halfway through the morning and so the impact is neutralised.
Yesterday I did not have that luxury. I am passionate about rock climbing and the great outdoors. For who share this passion usually like to wake early and get to the mountains before the sun is too warm. The music festival kept me awake until 3am and and by 6am I had to wake up to pick people up and drive to the mountains. I had between two to three hours of sleep and waking up was not easy. We arrived at the meeting point early so I had a short siesta in the back of the car to refresh myself at least slightly. I did feel better as a result of this siesta and was able to climb and to film others climbing. I had a good time but I was sleep deprived. If I had not committed to driving another person in the morning then I would have aborted the climbing day and I would have slept. I would have lost a day of doing two things I love thanks to the selfishness of festival goers and the sound gremlins (my name for music festival sound engineers) who flood the countryside with noise.
When I got home and sat at the laptop I could no longer hold my head up. I struggled to prepare dinner and when I ate I was fighting to stay awake. Eventually I gave up and went to bed with the laptop and youtube videos providing background noise to cover the music festival’s inconsistent noise. After the fire works were fired I slept until this morning. I woke but was unable to stay awake several times this morning. Eventually at 9 I woke up and had a deep desire to write this blog post about music festivals as a form of torture.
I don’t want music festivals to stop and I don’t want people to be prevented from having fun. I want sound engineers to do their job. I want sound engineers to design music festival sound so that people at the festival can hear it but so that surrounding villages and working professionals can still sleep properly and work. Sleep deprivation is a torture method and music festivals, for all of their social ideals should respect that not everyone wants to go to a music festival. Music festivals should respect the locals.
I avoid using the name of the festival that inspired this post to avoid giving them free advertising. 😉
At the moment I study seven days a week without fail. Today I was learning about “Coding Your Own Wordpress Custom Post Types”. I think this will be interesting because you can create a new section to a website, or if not a section then at least a collection of assets. In the course they speak about businesses, events or other things. If this is what I think it is, then I will be happy to learn it.
This website has a Roman, Geography, Environmental Studies and other sections. If I could create custom post types for each then the entire website would be contained within WordPress and modifiable centrally. I did not want to do such a thing for a long time, but I think that the learning experience is worth the time investment.
I am happy it rained. I went for a walk and there was some rain but so light that it didn’t soak me.
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