Over the past year, over half a million visits have been counted to this website.
Over the past five months over fifty thousand visits, a month took place. For the period in question, there have been almost two million hits and 58 gigabytes of data transfer.
Last night at Four AM I got an alpha release of SeesmicAIR from Critter and I started to play with it. My initial response was good. It’s fast, intuitive and it doesn’t a browser. Today as I had lunch I went mobile with my laptop, relying on battery.
Those who follow my blog know that I’m using a macbook pro and those that follow my tweets know that I was happy about something. Usually when i seesmic I go into the user interface and I get told that my battery will last about an hour and a half to an hour as I seesmic. Today though I had almost three hours of battery life whilst being able to keep an eye on seesmic.
That’s because SeesmicAIR is running off Adobe and rather than use most of the CPU to work it’s running with far fewer resources. As a result I can lurk on seesmic without killing the battery or running a hot machine.
I saw that both Loic Lemeur and Johann are on the Eurostar and I was able to comment on seesmic and keep an eye on reactions. Vinvin answered my question and it’s good.
I love the fact that I don’t need to worry about battery life anymore. I’ve had time to prepare lunch, have lunch and then still have an hour and a half of battery life to write this post. I really enjoy having the ability to do this. It means that I can do something in the background. In brief SeesmicAIR is just as useful as I thought it would be. It’s still a little buggy but that’s normal when dealing with Alpha.
Remember the macbook air song?
Recently I saw her perform at the Paléo Festival de Nyon and saw how much the crowd enjoyed the concert. I also saw how much she loves to perform.
Just hear the crowd, let alone the music
And here you can see that beaming smile, appears to be her trademark. This interview was part of a press conference I shot at the Montreux Jazz Festival a few weeks ago for musicorama.tv.
Before the pandemic, when life was normal, I would go to three or four events per week organised via websites. These days, on meetup.com things are organised every two weeks, and for just 15 people at a time. This means that if you’re not first to sign up you’re on a waiting list and you could be social once every few weeks, rather than three times per week. This frustrates me.
There is a simple solution. There is a demand for events to be organised. I recently bought fresh Via Ferrata stuff and may start doing them regularly once again. I want to accertain that I am comfortable with the sport after such a long break, and once this is done I can create my own via ferrata and walking group. I would organise things at least once per week, maybe more.
The biggest nuissance with Meetup.com is that it requires a monthly fee for having a group. The result is that groups are created, run for a bit, and then destroyed to avoid paying for longer. The alternative is to use Facebook but I absolutely hate what Facebook is and what it represents. Every time it abuses of peoples’ trust it and gets caught it never apologises.
I have car and I have three seats. Like I used to do before the pandemic I can pick people up in Nyon, drive them to and from the activity, and when it comes time to say goodbye they can contribute towards petrol and the cost of having a group.
I would never charge people a fee to participate in an activity because that goes against my ethos, but having people pay a fair share towards petrol is the right thing to do. If you don’t charge people for the petrol used, they abuse of our kindness as drivers.
There is an added benefit. The problem with group activities is that when they end people rush to the train, without saying goodbye and I find this really strange. Before the pandemic there would be a stop at a bar to have a drink, and then drive home. In the Pandemic age that stop no longer occurs. I find this to be a shame. At least by driving from Nyon to the via ferrata or hiking location there is a moment for conversation before and after the journey.
I could be like others, and take the same trains as they take but that would increase my costs for participating in events. It also doubles or triples the journey time.
Last week I walked an extra eight kilometres rather than take a train, so it isn’t that I want to use the car. I have spent five or six years doing almost all of my bike rides and walks from home. The point of the car is to expand my range, once again.
As I got to the end of this post I noticed that I am included in the hike that I thought was overbooked, and I see that other people are doing a VF at the same time on the same day and now I am torn about which one to do. The beautiful irony.
The old paradox is back. Nothing to do for the entire week, and then two activities to do at the same time.
For a while now I have been wearing a Casio and an apple watch or a Garmin and an Apple watch, or a Casio and a Garmin watch or a xiaomi smart band and a casio or a xiaomi smart band and… it goes on.
The reason for which I’m flying between so many devices is two fold. I have too many devices. There was a time when I went climbing, hiking, cycling, diving, swimming, on via ferrata and more and I was happy with just one watch.
Now, with the pandemic and other factors I seem to have more devices than arms, and no loyalty to either. I believe that it’s due, in part to walking the same loops over, and over, and over again. Every so often I walk clockwise and then I walk counter clockwise. I take the short route, then the medium route, and then the long route, and then the extra long route, and sometimes I backtrack, especially on weekends.
To break from that monotony I think I fiddle with various watches and tracking devices.
We think nothing of wearing a different pair of socks every day, or trousers, or t-shirts, but if we switch between watches, or wear two at once we’re lunatics.
If I wanted to be nasty about myself I’d say that I’m not a lunatic, I’m an addict. I feel the need to preserve my step count on as many services as possible, as a result of which I feel the urge to wear multiple devices each week.
There are two solutions to this. The first is a learning opportunity. Home Assistant and NextCloud have fitness tracking sort of built in. If I worked on updating HomeAssistant automatically, with data from Garmin, Apple, Casio and Xiaomi then I would have by data in a central place, and I could wear just one device at a time as the data aggregator I care about is my own.
Apple and Garmin have frustrated me with their apps. They have taken fitness tracking and tried to make it an addiction. Apple and Garmin want you to push yourself every day, seven days a week for years. I burned out on Apple several times and yet I can’t stop wearing their device. My steps are counted by my phone anyway. Garmin has been faulty on occasion. It has crashed on some walks.
The second solution is to pick one device and to stick with it, without flitting between one and the other. I feel myself drawn to Casio at the moment. I like that it tracks without nagging, and without judgement. I also like that I can go for months or even years without the need to charge.
Garmin, Apple and Xiaomi don’t care about walking as fitness habits, so you wear them every single day, but they won’t mark your fitness as progressing. You’re quantifying for the sake of quantifying, and wearing a casio would be fine.
Yesterday Garmin asked if I wanted to join the beta so I did, but I need to run or cycle for two weeks for the app to provide me with feedback.
For years I wore a Suunto, and then for years I wore an Apple Watch, and then I played with an Apple Watch and a Garmin device, and now I feel like experimenting with Casio, as I did when I was a child.
Casio stand out now, because everyone already has an Apple Watch or a Garmin device, but few wear Casio.
Every time you go for a walk, bike ride or run you encounter people being moved along by something using electricity. The most common of these forms of transport are the electric car, the electric bike and the electric foot scooter. People want to be more environmentally friendly in their way of getting around but they use something that has to be recharged.
Quick to Adopt
Electric bikes, foot scooters and cars are a shortcut used by plenty of people. The beauty of the three methods of transportation listed above is that they’re relatively easy to use. Charge them, and then go for a ride.
A break From Driving
A few years ago I lost my driving licence for a month so I replaced the car with a foot scooter that I had to propel myself and public transport. At the time I was happy because I was bored of driving. I was happy to be lazy for one month. That’s not the point.
The Less Strenuous Solution
The point is that we see plenty of people use electric foot scooters because manual ones require a good level of fitness. Using a scooter requires strong leg and back muscles, as well as endurance. Going downhill is easy, you just stand on the scooter and gravity does the work for you. Go the opposite way and that unpowered foot scooter becomes so tiring that you ever walk, to save energy, or work on your fitness, to get up the hill.
As Fast as an Electric Bike
Yesterday I went for a bike ride at an average of 25.9 kilometres per hour. This is a foot powered bike and I was going as fast as an electric bike, without any assistance. Electric bikes are wonderful. They are a short cut. With an electric bike you are as fast as someone who has spent years training to be fast. It provides people with a short cut to getting around on a bike, without the need for physical training.
The Need to Replace All Cars
In theory electric cars are fantastic because they pollute less, and they’re better for the air we breath. As a person who walks and cycles between villages electric cars are as threatening and dangerous as petrol powered cars. I feel that instead of electric cars, especially for short hops, with single occupancy we should think of skate boards, rollerblades, foot scooters and more.
And Finally
Now that I have sold the petrol driven scooter I am thinking of alternative solutions. In theory the most practical is the bike, but the problem with bikes is that they’re easy to steal, and in theory it’s expected. The alternative, the electric foot scooter is tempting but I worry about balance, when carrying shopping. The second concern is that by getting an electric scooter I might walk less, due to the convenience and lazy enticement of letting a machine do the work.
Electric seated scooters would be fun to drive but with a range of just 37km I’d be stuck locally. I’d like the range to get to Geneva and back, without recharging. It makes the electric scooter absurd, for my use case. A pedal bike is fine, with my level of fitness. I have demonstrated to myself several times that I can go back and forth with ease, without adding the day of work in the middle.
Conclusion
Although I was tempted by an electric bike for a long time my level of fitness increased to the point where I saw the electric bike as a luxury, rather than necessity. I could be tempted by an electric scooter, but to get to the train station in a quarter of the time that it would take to walk. It’s a twenty minute walk to the train. I don’t need an electric scooter to take me in five minutes or so.