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One Hundred and thirty Two Kilometres in Trail Gloves
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.
Via Ferrata de Tière, first of the season
The weather was good today and spring is here. As a result I headed back to the Valais for the first Via Ferrata of the season. I felt a little nervous at first as I had not done any via ferrata for a few months but that fear soon left.
The walk up to this via ferrata takes up 30-45 minutes depending on your level of fitness. Once you get to the bottom of the ferrata you ascend with the river to your right. There are two bridges that must be crossed and the waterfalls are impressive. Today the amount of water was low due to the lack of rain. At this time of year it is better to go up a little later in the day to take advantage of the sunlight. I didn’t. The sun was on the other side of the valley.
It is a nice easy via ferrata without too much height, hardly demanding physically and divided in to three parts. The first part to the waterfalls is easy going, walking along a path. Once you get to the waterfalls you have your first via ferrata climb to the first of two bridges. You cross the first bridge and walk to the second bridge. From the second bridge you walk along for a bit, to the cave with teddy bears people have left there.
From this point the via ferrata starts properly. You have a traverse to the left, then up a bit, then to the right. Looking down you get a feeling of height but you are not that far off the ground. Chains are there for you to grab on to. After the chains you start going straight up again for a bit, traverse to the right again before the final ascent to the top of the via ferrata.
There is a walk back to the car from the peak through arcades carved in to the rock. You have two buvettes to chose from and a tree adventure park. I think that after via ferrata the tree adventure would not provide enough adrenaline to be fun.
[flickr-gallery mode=”photoset” photoset=”72157626508513366″]
A Walk While Downloading Files by FTP
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.
Experimenting with Nextcloud and A Raspberry Pi 4
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.
A Simple iPhone – iCloud solution
A few years ago I bought a 256 gigabyte iphone because I wanted more space and for a long time it was great because it meant that I had plenty of room to grow into. The issue comes when you get to over 200 gigabytes of data stored in iCloud because you go from 3 CHF per month to 10 CHF per month. You go from 36 CHF per year to 120 CHF per year. That is a big increase.
I wouldn’t mind paying this much, if it was easier to retrieve this data. Once data is on iCloud and plenty of services it is a nuissance to retrieve. If you think “I can expand it for a few weeks then you’re right, you can. It’s when you want to recover the data that you will get blocked. iCloud doesn’t allow a photo library to be spread across multiple drives, so either you have everything on a single volume, or you’re trapped paying for decades to come.
Now for the simple solution I hadn’t considered until last night. A lower capacity iPhone. With a 256 gigabyte phone you need ten terabytes of storage to backup the entire phone, but with a 126 gigabyte phone you sneak under the 200 gigabyte limit with ease. The cost of a new phone is relatively high, but consider that you’re saving 81 CHF per year, and several hundred francs on a mobile phone.
Next time you consider an iPhone consider the size of the phone compared to your laptop hard drive, as well as the cost of cloud storage and backup. The bigger the phone, the larger the yearly tax. Keep it to 200 gigabytes and the tax is 39 CHF per year, expand it to two terabytes and it’s 120 CHF per year. Retrieving the data is not straight forward. I will stick to smaller capacity phones, to avoid hitting the 200 gigabyte limit in future.