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E-bikes, autumn and the changing seasons.

Byrichard
Reading Time: 2 minutes

One evening this week I was walking in the countryside at the foot of the Jura enjoying the evening when I walked by a couple. They were sitting on a bench looking across some fields towards the Mont Blanc, the Alps and of course the Lac Léman. Leaning against the bench were two e-bikes with good suspension.

It made me think about retirement and free time. It encouraged me to think about the freedom and pleasure of exploring the landscape on a bike without having to make the same effort as if you were on a conventional bike. I thought of the range it would offer and the gradients you could climb. It would in essence give you the freedom of a car with the practicality of a bike.

Of course there is a barrier to enjoying this pass time and that is the price of these bikes. In Switzerland they cost as much as a scooter. They lack the range and flexibility though. Electric bikes, in relation to road bikes are in fact cheap.

I already alternate between a car, a scooter and a bike and with the change in weather I prefer the comfort of the car or the speed of a scooter. If it’s raining then I would much prefer to use the car. It is a shame that they have this promotion at the end of the pleasant season. If they had this promotion at the beginning of summer then I would have taken advantage of it. I will take this option if they offer it next year.

 

 

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Self Driving Cars will teach us How to Drive

Byrichard

I am impatient to try a self driving car. I am impatient for the day when the car will know where we’re meant to be and at what time. That is when cars will be autonomous. In this future I envision that self driving cars will teach us how to drive.

For the moment learning to drive a car is problematic because you need fuel, you need a car and you need someone trusting enough to put their life and car in your hands. You also need to find enough money to pay for a driving instructor to teach you how to drive. These are seen as barriers. People say that they would like to learn but that lessons are too expensive.

Self driving cars that teach us to drive are the solution. Cars are driving themselves around California and self driving truck convoys are driving around Europe. As these cars drive and provide data for algorithms, and as exceptions are found so the algorithm is tweaked. We remember the story of the Google car confused by a track standing cyclist and by the Google car that was crashed in to by a human driven bus.

When the bugs have been ironed out, when the challenges have been overcome I visualise a future in which we will choose whether we want to use our phones to read the news or socialise or whether we want to drive the car. In this future the car will be advanced enough to teach its passenger/driver to drive. Cars already provide drivers with a lot of assistance. Breaking assist, automatic windscreen wipers, parking sensors, automatic gear box, cruise control, parking assist and speed limiters are already familiar. The car is “teaching” us to be better drivers, or at least assisting.

The next step is for cars to teach us to steer and situate the car on the road. It could warn us if we are too far to the left, too far to the right, if we are below the speed limit and creating a traffic jam or driving too fast for the road conditions ahead. At a roundabout it could remind us to indicate our intentions both when entering and leaving. It could also assist with parallel parking, backing in to a parking and more.

Once the basics have been learned we could also envision cars teaching us to drive with a trailer or caravan. Software could be written to help people negotiate bends properly, place the caravan properly in a parking and more. Driving assist can be as complete or as passive as we want.

I would like to see how self driving cars would cope with mountain roads. It would be fun to get them to go up narrow roads with traffic and teach them to get around easily. It would also be interesting to develop a behaviour which the car knows will minimise motion sickness for people not used to mountain roads.

Weather and climate affect driving ease. Cars have sensors that are optimised for driving in good weather. When cars meet, rain, snow or other conditions they may get confused by reflections or obscured road signs. Humans should be able to take over in these conditions. We have to see whether cars or people are better suited to drive in fog. In theory cars have technology that should help them see through fog so it should be safer handing control to the machine.

When autonomous cars are ubiquitous and self reliant the shift will move away from humans teaching machines how to drive. Machines will teach humans how to drive instead. In theory there should be no need for humans to drive cars anymore. Redundancy is good.

Net Neutrality and The United Kingdom

Byrichard

Slashdot today quoted Small fries as saying that the Net Neutrality Debate crosses the Atlantic.

Analysts believe that ISPs will be forced to place stringent caps on consumers’ internet use and raise prices to curb usage. Attempts have been made by players in the industry to form a united front against the BBC by asking the Internet Service Providers’ Association to lead the campaign on the iPlayer issue.

There is a golden age for video sharing online. With services like operator 11, I can’t help but look forward to future versions as bandwidth increases. The idea that an ISP would think of “stringent caps on consumers’ internet use…” appears counterproductive. Apple has recently sold over 3 billion songs on iTunes, now imagine how many films they could sell if only they provided movies to Europe and the rest of the world. Tell those people they need to pay extra for the bandwidth and see how they respond.

Add to this the recent article about a grandmother in Sweden getting 40Gbs per second to her home, taking into account that countries such as Japan have 100+ Mb/s and the recent increase of bandwidth in Switzerland and you may conclude that there is no need to increase the cost of bandwidth or throttle packets from programs such as the iplayer because other countries are doing the opposite.

With the “BBC … being asked to cough up to pay for bandwidth charges, otherwise, traffic shaping will be used to limit access to the iPlayer” is surprising because of its role as a public service broadcaster and because of the user license fee paid by all television owners in the UK. This content is already available to the British public and they have paid for it. Various ISP thinking of getting more money out of new developments goes against the purpose of the World Wide Web and current social trends which require increased bandwidth.

A decade ago the web was static pages of text with the occasional image whereas now it’s video and radio on demand where the user creates their experience according to their feelings. As people spend more time online so their need for interesting activities increases hence photo sharing and increasingly video sharing websites. These websites need bandwidth and a lot of it. As I write this article I’m listening to a stream coming from Last.fm. Last night I was watching three simultaneous streams from Operator 11 and found that I could stream from two laptops at once to this website. I was using a lot of bandwidth and it worked flawlessly.

By giving the user the freedom they desire for how they use the internet and a variety of websites so you allow new phenomena to occur. With restrictions on photo-sharing Flickr would never have been and it’s the same with Youtube. Restrictions stifle creativity and markets that should have been stagnant rather than improving. As a result, I am for net neutrality because of how many great things are currently accessible online. I also believe that those analysts should experiment with the medium and see what doors are open as a result of new trends and see whether they can subsidise these startups.

Om Malik:

Their arguments sound hollow, on one hand they urge subscribers to sign-up for faster download plans, and pay premium prices. And yet, they complain when subscribers finally find an application that puts their web speed to work.

Day 75 of Self-Isolation in Switzerland – Switzerland Expects to Return to Normality within weeks

Day 75 of Self-Isolation in Switzerland – Switzerland Expects to Return to Normality within weeks

Byrichard

Switzerland “expects to return to normality” within the next few days and weeks. As of tomorrow groups of up to thirty people will be able to meet. That’s good for all of the activities that I like to do. It means that the Via Ferrata, hiking, climbing, and other seasons can begin shortly.


D-Day – 6th of June 2020


From the 6th of June onwards cinemas, theatres, zoos, ski lifts, camps, swimming pools, and higher education will begin again. The article doesn’t specify whether people will have to space themselves out in the cinema or if people can cluster again. From that day groups of four or more will be able to meet in restaurants.


D-Day + 2 – 8th of June


From the 8th of June public and private events grouping, people of up to three hundred people will be possible with protective measures still in place. It’s not clear whether this means maintaining the two-meter rules, no contact, etc.


Businesses will be able to recruit from the EU and other countries from then on.


How It Feels


It feels awesome to read this news. I didn’t dare get my hopes up, or allow my enthusiasm to trick me into being disappointed yet again. At this stage it looks promising. We’re a week or two from social lives for those living alone to be booted up again. It’s such a relief.


I think that to ease back into normal life I’d like to hike, cycle and do other such sports where proximity to others is less frequent. I don’t feel the urge to return to climbing and Via Ferrata yet. The advantage of hiking and cycling is that we don’t need to use a car to reach the starting point.


I feel no urge to rush back to using the car for every sporting activity.

A Little Too Experimental
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A Little Too Experimental

Byrichard

The Fediverse is great because people are experimenting and trying new idea. It’s also great because we can be there through every step of the process. This is also why things could be better.


I am now writing my blog in Hugo first, and then moving the content over to Wordpress at the moment. I could just replace my Wordpress blog with Hugo but I don’t for two reasons. The first reason is that I’m experimenting, and if I change my mind about something, I can, without affecting Quality of Service. The second reason is that I believe that the production server should be in fine working order with as little downtime for users as possible. With one or two projects on the fediverse this isn’t the case. Downtime can be for hours, or even days at a time.


A Reminder of Seesmic and Twitter


For a long time Twitter was suffering because it was using Ruby and Ruby had bottle necks. The result was a lot of downtime. The failwhale became a cultural icon as a result. Seesmic was a fantastic video sharing community. It was about video instant messaging. Watch a video, record an answer, watch other answers, record another video. It would go for a thousand video exchanges for some topics. It was great. At the end of the day we even had Seesmix videos to summarise the best moments. In this case as new features were added we would make sure that they worked well. In the end I think Seesmic was sold or abandonned. It marked a turning point in online communities.


Production Server Level Testing


For a while I have been reading and studying web development and one of the key things I read is that you should have a testing environment that is exactly like your production environment, to make sure that everything works well, in testing before pushing to production. With The Fediverse I see people testing in production whilst looking for more people to join. It is normal to want to move fast, but if a site goes down for several days then there are wekanesses in the workflow.If I was playing and experimenting with a fediverse instance I would make sure that I run tests locally, and when I see they’re stable, migrate across. If things broke then I would revert to another instance as quickly as possible.


Playing With WordPress


Sometimes I play with WordPress, as I try to learn new things. I could experiment directly on my blog, and sometimes I do, but I try not to do this too often. I setup a mamp instance instead, and that’s where I break things, and try to rebuild them. That’s where I can break things, experiment, learn, mess up, give up, and more. The production server can go down for a few minutes here and there, as I experiment, but not for hours at a time. My blog has gone down for extended periods of time (a day or two, due to vulnerabilities on my site being exploited)


The Social Web, Conversations and Exchanges


Social networks should have as little downtime as possible because if they go down then the community that relies on them to stay in touch finds itself tempoarily out of reach. If a social network goes down too regularly when people want to use it, then it makes sense to migrate instances. Finding people willing to use a site is one challenge. The second, bigger challenge is to keep them around. If you experiment on a production server then you are disconnecting the community for the time of that experiment. That’s why you have A/B testing, but also why you have two or more instances. If you make a mistake on one instance to switch to the secondary system, fix the primary, and then switch, and fix the secondary.


And Finally


I wanted to experiment with FrontMatter yesterday when playing with my website but found that it has one serious limitation. It requires pages to be markdown, not HTML to work. It is a Visual Studio Code plugin that helps use VS Code as a cms for MD pages for Hugo and other blogging sites. The beauty of this app is that you can see all your tags at a glance. You can sort your pages any way you like. You can create new pages and it will add the appropriate information. What I especially like is that the file name is year-date-day-title and that’s fantastic, for me. I work as a media asset manager and that’s what I wanted to do with my blog, but I didn’t know whether it would then require me to rename every page. With this plugin you choose the website section, the title, and it does the rest. It’s fast and effective, once the DB is populated. The data is kept in a json file.


I will write a more comprehensive blog post about this when I learn more.

Playing with NextCloud

Playing with NextCloud

Byrichard

Google, Apple and Microsoft have cloud storage solutions. So does Evernote, Kdrive and other products. The issue with all of these solutions is that they are owned by corporations. They are simple and convenient to use but at the cost of being locked in to an OS in some cases, and to corporate interests.


NextCloud is an open source alternative with hosting solutions that offer people with the choice of choosing between hosting solutions that are as local, or as remote as they want. I could choose between a German and a Dutch hosting solution. I chose [tab.cloud](https://tab.digital/) simply because they offer 8gb rather than 2gb like another solution. You can upgrade to 128 gigabytes, or to a maximum of over 500 gigabytes in the paying tiers.


You can install Nextcloud locally too. I installed it on a raspberry pi but I haven’t configured it to make it usable yet but I also installed it on a windows machine via Docker. That was quick and easy to do. I was thinking of playing with NextCloud on Linode but will do some local experimentation first. It seems intuitive and simple to use after several minutes of experimentation. That’s how quick and easy it is to get up and running.


The price for Google One is 100 CHF per year for two terabytes, and 120 CHF per year for iCloud with the same amount of storage. The price for theGoodCloud is 240 for one terabyte of data shared with five people. With Linode/Akamai the estimated cost could be 206.88 Dollars per year. The cheapest solution is Kdrive at about 60 CHF per year for two terabytes.


And Finally


Buying two terabytes of storage to keep at home costs from 63 CHF upwards. You could easily setup NextCloud on a Raspberry Pi and plug an external drive to that computer and keep it on 24/7. When you get home you could back up all the photos from that day. You would save on storage costs. One of my biggest frustrations with online storage solutions is that if you want to retrieve your data you need to spend several days downloading the data.


With a solution like NextCloud and the mobile phone app you could setup a local machine to backup all your photos. You would have the tertiary backup online but keep the pictures on your phone, the primary backup in your own home and the tertiary backup online.


I will setup a NextCloud system locally.

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