Fields and Pylons
| |

Day 58 of Self-Isolation in Switzerland – Writing For Future Generations Now.

Byrichard
Reading Time: 2 minutes

I’m writing for future generations now. As I looked at the stats for the most recent posts i see that readership is low. I’m tempted to start writing about something else as a result. In two or three weeks if we’re still seeing low numbers of new cases I might.

The biggest change since two days ago is that when I went to the shops I saw that InterDiscount and other places are open. Restaurants are open too. I saw some people in these places but without counting.

Inspiration to write usually comes from meeting people and having conversations but it’s at least 58 days since I met someone new and had a different conversation so it’s hard to explore new ideas.

The CSS front page I’ve been working on for the past three or four days is almost ready to be shared. I still need to tweak three or four things. I’m happy about this. When I replaced the time I spent on social media with playing with CSS I gave myself a great opportunity to learn two or three new skills. I was afraid that I would be confused and lost but so far I’ve found the opposite to be true. I’ve found it relatively easy.

The biggest challenge is getting the content to be desktop and mobile-friendly so every experiment I run has to look good on both. So far this has been a good experience. It’s something that I haven’t done, possibly since social media came along, and distracted us. It’s a shame that social media didn’t grow in quality of conversations but it has benefited my drive to learn something new.

We have to keep upskilling, and upskilling by working on a website is good, because we learn skills that others can see and assess within seconds. The more time I spend tweaking the first page the better it will look, and the more knowledge I will come away with.

See you tomorrow for day 59. We’re just two days away from two months without being within two meters of another person.

Similar Posts

Playing with the Hugo With An Old Site

Playing with the Hugo With An Old Site

Byrichard

For a few days I have been playing with Hugo with Markdown and HTML pages. It says that it is “the world’s fastest framework for building websites” and so far I do notice that it has a key strength that I like. 


Front Matter


That strength is that with small modifications you can take an existing static website and make it dynamic.  Hugo requires that each page has Front Matter.  


Front matter is:


• title


• date


• tags


• description


• author


• slug


• draft


• and more. It’s a quick and easy way of organising a website, one page at a time. 


Front Matter according to chatGPT is “a metadata configuration section that is commonly used in static site generators like Hugo, Jekyll, and others.” It is placed at the top of a document to provide useful information like post title, publish date, tags and more. The beauty of tags, author and other tags is that they are used to organise data without the need for a CMS back end. 


The Niche it Fills


The advantage of Hugo, over a CMS like Wordpress, is that it doesn’t lock you into itself. It allows you to create pages, and to organise those pages by tags, category or other. It allows you, via the layout metadata to specify which css layout a page should use. You can have one website section with one theme, and another section with another theme. 


If your website has a section that is about geography, and another about environmental systems. You use the relevant tags for each page. If you click on the geography tag you get a page with a list of all the pages tagged with geography. If you click on “Environmental Studies” you get the content on that topic. 


Aside from creating tags you can create a hierarchy. If you write “film/french” it will recognise that you have the tag “film” and within that tag you have the sub tag of french. If you write about french films you can add the tag “french/film” rather than “french, film” and it will create sub-tags. This is an effective means of organising tags. 


The Weaknesses


When you create pages their default is draft, which means that you need to change draft to false if you want it to generate pages with the hugo command. When a page is generated it does not switch the draft status from true to false, so you need to tell it to export drafts each time. 


When you generate the static website it creates a directory for each page, with an index.html page in each. 


The same is true of the tags page generation. If you have 20 pages you will have 20 directories with index.html pages. If you have  100 tags you will have one hundred folders with an index.html file and an index.xml page.  If you want to fix this Hugo calls them ugly URLs. 


Switching from Pelican to Hugo


Initially I thought Pelican looked like a powerful tool until I encountered the issue with categories being “one per page” by default. The plugin to allow for more was simple to implement but I like to experiment with tools and I found that Hugo is an interesting alternative. 


The Strength


I want the flexibility of a CMS driven website without being stuck within Wordpress or another CMS. This tool gives me the features of a CMS without the limitations. As i add Front Matter information to each page, so it becomes easy to index every page and update navigation one final time, rather than every single time small changes are made. 


Partial Templates


With Hugo you can create partial templates, as you can with Laravel and other framework tools, except that with this framework html and markdown are used. The learning curve is more gradual. 


The Sitemap


A nice feature of Hugo is that it generates a sitemap with information about the location of each file, when it was last changed, the change frequency and priority. In this way Google and other search engines may quickly see what has changed and when. 


And Finally


If your website is already written in HTML it makes sense to find a tool that will connect all the pages together, for navigation. The CSS, JS, and html stay the same. It’s just the framework behind the scenes, connecting everything efficiently. 

The Noise Pollution of Caribana and Other Music Festivals

The Noise Pollution of Caribana and Other Music Festivals

Byrichard

Summary


In the 21st century technology exists that could make music festivals sound good for festival goers, whist not ruing the night of sleep for neighbours of the festival. I would like EPFL and other academic groups to work towards finding a way to make music festivals more considerate of neighbouring humans, and wildlife. Music festivals should apply Corporte Social Responsability by reducing noise pollution.


Noisy Summers


During the summer months people organise outdoor events, which is fantastic. What is less fantastic is that those outdoor events are organised to take place from mid to late afternoon, all the way to 2 to 3am. This means that if you live downwind from Music Festivals you will not be able to sleep for days at a time. 


Sleepless in Nyon – Due to Paléo and Caribana


Instead of going to bed by 2200 and sleeping by midnight you’re stuck trying to outdo the festival with noise. If you go to bed then you’ll have the noise pollution from the festival for hours. 


Staying Up Later


When I was a university student living in halls I would make sure to go to sleep by two or three am, every single night. I wanted to go to sleep after all the noisy people had gone to sleep, to avoid being bothered by noise pollution. It worked extremly well. 


The paradox is that I went to sleep after everyone else, but I also got up before a lot of people. I was easily living on four hours of sleep per night.  The problem is that I am now two decades older, or thereabouts. I actually need my sleep now. 


More Noise Pollution Due to Increasingly Powerful Speakers


The problem with music noise pollution from music festivals is that it is getting louder, with time, rather than quieter. For years I had the noise of the Paléo, during Paléo, but I could sleep through it. It was just barely loud enough to sometimes make out what was playing. 


With the Carbiana the music is so loud. three to five kilometres away, as the drone flies, that with an air conditioner and a fan going at full power in a small room, or an extractor fan in a living room/kitchen, the thump is still audible. The speaker stacks are set so loud that two or three villages away you hear the festival as if you were there. That’s with all the windows closed, and double glazed windows. 


The Sub Optimal Festival Sound Engineer


Caribana and other music festivals have people who are not that intellectually astute. I say this, because, in the 90s and the zeros there was an excuse for that flood of noise. Technological limitations. In 2023 that excuse is moot. The speakers are more powerful, more noisy.


With speakers becoming smaller, more efficient, and less visible it would make sense to distribute the speakers, within the crowd, and set them to a lower volume. It doesn’t make sense to pump out a wall of sound for a tiny festival venue. 


Increasing Nuissance


I’m writing this blog post because I think the problem is getting worse, as the technology makes noise pollution easier to create. I’m writing this because if we have people gluing themselves to roads, because of car pollution, then we should have people protesting music festivals, for failing to consider the environmental impact, and corporate social responsibility in regards to noise pollution. 


Fairness – Environmentalism


Festival goers are meant to be altermondialistes, in favour of a fairer, more environmentally friendly society, and yet for five days per year individual festivals make sleep difficult or impossible. Boiled down to one word festivals like Caribana are selfish. They don’t consider that people want to sleep at night, that they don’t want their personal sphere to be invaded by the noise pollution from a festival. 


Develop Accoustically Conscious Solutions


I want Paléo, Caribana and every other festival to consider the noise pollution that they create, and stop it. Paléo collaborates with EPFL, so EPFL and Paléo, should find a way to play music loud enough for festival goers to hear it, without earplugs, and for the neighbouring countryside to be silent. How Caribana and Paléo behave, in regards to noise pollution is immoral and unethical. I want it to change. 


Geneva’s Attitude to Noise


I know I am one solitary voice, but don’t forget, the fêtes de Genève had to stop making noise by midnight when they were allowed, and eventually I think they were banned, because locals complained. 


Remember, the Geneva motto, between neighbours is “The less we hear each other, the better we get along.” Festivals are loud and disruptive. Something should be done to resolve this issue. 


I expect to have another sleepless night tonight. Monday I will have my first night of sleep, since Tuesday. 


Oh, to have quiet summers, like we did during the part of the pandemic, when governments were not ignoring the spread of the virus. 

Avoiding Rush Hour Recycling

Avoiding Rush Hour Recycling

Byrichard

On Monday, Wednesday and Friday the recycling centre is open from 1600-2000 or so, which is great if you’re working and want to go after work. The drawback to going at this time is that the one for local villages is down a narrow road where cars can barely pass each other. If you go at rush hour traffic you have commuters, and you have people heading to recycle.


When I had the scooter I would often go with that, because with a scooter it’s easy to go down a narrow road despite cars coming towards you. In a car you need to be careful that the mirrors on your car don’t hit the car coming the opposite way. There are two issues. The first is that the road was narrowed to slow down traffic. The second is that a road that should have no commuter traffic does have commuter traffic. Ideally this would be a one way road system.


If I go at 8 in the morning on a Saturday I miss the rush hour commuters, and I also miss all the people who can’t find the motivation to head to a recycling centre at 8 on a saturday morning. I used to be one of those people. I changed because I found that traffic is more fluid and because it’s quieter.


I find it hard to motivate myself to go and recycle. If it’s raining I use that as an excuse. If it’s sunny I use that as an excuse. If I have just finished my walk as it opens I use that as an excuse not to go.


I have been recycling for two or three decades or more, so the process of sorting recycling is normal. I’ve been recycling glass, aluminium, electronics, grass, paper and other things for a long time. It’s an ordinary part of life. It’s taking things to recycle that I find annoying. That’s why I wait until the car is full to go. I feel that it makes more sense to go when the journey is justified, rather than weekly.


I have started to keep recycling by the car. In so doing the excuse of having to run up and down stairs 3-6 times to take things from home to the car is taken care of. I just need to load the car and go. It’s important to remove key excuses.


I could take my walking loop by the recycling centre but people tend to mount the pavement where I’d be walking. I prefer not to go there by foot. The other option is to recycle things on the mornings when I shop. I could easily turn up five to ten minutes early, recycle some things, and shop.


I have a modular system. If you order things from online shops or other online stores you get boxes. I use these boxes to store PET bottles, glass and more. I wait until they’re full, and then I place them by the car. It’s my way of recycling cardboard boxes, before recycling them. If I use plastic containers, or paper shopping bags I need to bring them back up, after I’ve been to the recycling centre. By using boxes that need to be recycled anyway I have a convenient, modular system, for trips to recycle.


Although it could be seen as lazy not to go every single week I am one person, not two to four people. I generate half to a quarter of what others produce in recycling so it makes sense to go half, or a quarter as often as others. I also save petrol and wear and tear on the car. By going once every few weeks I help reduce congestion around the recycling centre, especially by going at 8am on a Saturday, when others prefer to sleep.

A Rainy Day

A Rainy Day

Byrichard

I hate pandemic weekends because out of pandemic I would be free to do a lot. In pandemic I am not free to do those things.



I will write longer posts when i regain my healthy solitude.


Recently I have started forgetting my phone at home when I go out. I use it to take pictures and for the fitness apps but but not much more now that Twitter is gone and Mastodon and other alternatives are unpleasant.


Pandemics are not fun when you’re surrounded by people living with the delusion that the pandemic is over. We have lived with that delusion for two years.

The Curious Step Miscount Due to Walking Sticks
|

The Curious Step Miscount Due to Walking Sticks

Byrichard

Yesterday I walked with hiking sticks and whereas one watch told me that I had 13,000 steps, or so, the other said I had 9000. It is the second time that I notice such a difference in step count. 


Walking stick step count. The count is lower than without walking sticks
Walking stick step count. The count is lower than without walking sticks


The first time I noticed this issue was a few days ago, after a similar walk. I knew that the walk was over 10,000 steps so when I saw the low count I thought something was wrong, but didn’t worry about it. It happened again yesterday. I went for an 11 kilometre walk that should be at least 12,000 or more steps but it was undercounted by at least three thousand steps. The Apple watch had over 13,000 and the Garmin Instinct Solar had 9000. 


The normal walking step count
The normal walking step count


I have a theory about what is causing this issue. When you’re walking normally your arms swing for every single step. When I walk with hiking steps I usually take two to three steps in between stick strikes on the ground. This results in one step being counted for every three or so steps. It seems to happen when I am in the walking, rather than hiking mode. By resting my hand on the sticks for a few steps at a time the watch counts that as a single step. 


It doesn’t stop there. I also noticed that the step per minute count was a fifth of what it usually is. Usually my step count is around 100-120 steps per minute. In this case, just twenty steps per minute. 


The simplest solution is to shorten the walking sticks to match your walking pace. With long sticks you will take four or five steps between lifts of the sticks. With shorter it might be half as frequent.


I can run two more experiments. With the first I can measure whether walking stick length has an effect, and then I can test whether walking in hiking, rather than walking mode changes the result. 


If you’re not a habitual walker like me, and if your step count is important, then walking with sticks may give the illusion that you are lazier than you are. This isn’t an issue, since distance is measured. If you’re trying to beat a walking record then the Apple watch might be a better option, as it seems to count steps more accurately, even with hiking sticks. 

On Engagement and Leaving Social Media Platforms
|

On Engagement and Leaving Social Media Platforms

Byrichard

I used to like Facebook and Instagram because they were extensions of my social life. I left both of them when I saw that only two or three people reacted to my posts. Although social media platforms had started as being solitary, they had become social with time, and then lonely again, as time went on.


I left Facebook because it made me feel lonelier to use it than stay way. The same is true of Instagram. When I felt that I was looking at ads and influencer accounts, without getting anything for myself I dumped both, and this occurred during, and because of the pandemic. When solitude is permanent, social media plays an important social role.


With Twitter it’s different. My engagement and social network are growing and if I kept tweeting my network would grow and I’d get something out of it. The drawback is that I have an intense dislike for the attitude of the person in charge, and the people he allows to influence himself. I want moral and ethical people to take a twitter break, not because I want Twitter to fail, but because I want Musk to get a clear message that social media platforms are what they are, because of their users, and that without respecting human rights platforms empty of users.


I don’t expect people to take a twitter break so I don’t think that what I want will have any effect. The second reason for the twitter break is to take some time and some space to work on other things, to blog more. I am tired of spending hours a week on social platforms. only for them to be sold off, and for others to profit from our attention, and our engagement.


Twitter should never have been sold to an individual, especially not such an individual. Social networks always collapse when they change hands. I always leave them when they change owners, because the website goes from being a place for innovative early adopters, to being a place for advertisers and disengagement.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.