Hike near Leysin in the Canton De Vaud
Today was a warm day. With a group of people we went to Leysin for a hike. Here are some pictures from the event.
[flickr-gallery mode=”photoset” photoset=”72157628177774925″]Recently I rediscovered my love of the game solitaire. It is the game we played on windows 3.1 and other windows operating systems, up to iOS and more. Solitaire is a simple game to play on a mobile phone, ipad or computer, whether laptop or desktop.
I have found that a game of solitaire can last from two to four minutes between deal and win. It’s the type of game that takes a lot of focus when you’re learning to play it as a child. As an adult though I find that within milliseconds I make the decisions and move on to the next one.
The paradox of solitaire is that it’s an old and simple game. Is the card red or black. Is there somewhere I can place the card. If not then I just deal, and deal, until I can. The more you play the quicker you recognise whether an opportunity exists or not. That’s why it becomes a relaxing thing to do, whilst watching television, or listening to something.
The paradox of Soliaire is that such an old and simple game, is, in many ways more compelling than the games that require you to watch adverts every 30 seconds or so, depending on how quickly you fail, or succeed at a task. It’s the type of game you can play, fully focused, or as a distraction, and succeed.
I have played plenty of modern mobile phone games and it’s the one that I gravitate towards now, because it’s the one that costs the least, and forces me to see the least adverts. It’s also the one that doesn’t require me to wait for three hours for A to b ready, before being able to do c, before completing task D.
I think Solitaire is a great little game to play during our free time.
According to the report, the majority of users — 73% in the United States and 57% in Europe — accessed mobile maps via the handset’s browser. Less than a third of customers in these markets used a downloaded application.
In a town like Lausanne it would make sense to use google maps paired with the phone’s gps because there’s municipal wifi you don’t need to agree to for use. As a result it’d be much faster simply to load the appplication.
With time and as dat costs go down the trend of using Nokia’s in built maps will evolve…
For 40 CHF you can buy a Tapo or Xiaomi webcam and it is almost ready to be used as a webcam. You take it out of the box, plug it in, add an SD card, download the app, pair it with the phone and let the phone connect it to wifi and then it detects motion, can take video, photos and more, with ease. In such an environment it’s easy to forget about what we called “Plug and pray” back in the day.
Back in the geeky old days of computing there was a lot of trial and error to get things to work. You would try one thing, and see if it worked, and then another, and then a third, and then a fourth, and eventually you would either find a solution, or give up. One of the reasons I switched to Apple, rather than Linux, in 2003, is that I wanted to be able to connect to the university’s wifi with ease. I expected that if I used a linux machine I would struggle with wifi.
Apple is the leader in making everything work so flawlessly, as long as they want you to do things, that trial and error is part of history. Apple controls everything, to ensure that it works “flawlessly”. I put “flawlessly in quotation marks because my phone crashes or hangs on almost every one of my walks. I rebooted it today and yesterday, while walking. If I take photos during a walk the phone acts up and freezes, and stops the podcast I’m listening to.
I’m being distracted. The point is that Apple, until recently, was known for producing reliable devices. Windows is also known for dumbing down their devices more and more. They try to make it so that users just click install, and the computer does the rest. Usually webcams, printers and more are plug and play.
With Linux you’re using a tinkerer’s OS so things can be simple, if you buy a generic webcam and plug it in. I tried to set an android phone up as a webcam and it worked within minutes. Integration with Home Assistant was smooth and efficient.
With a Raspberry Pi 3b and a Raspberry Pi zero 2 W I have struggled for three or four hours trying to get the camera to work. You have to do A, and then you need to do B and then you need to do C. You also need to wire the camera into the board the right way.
As you’re doing this from a CLI you’re not seeing whether the webcam is giving a picture or not. I tried to take pictures and it appeared to take them but when I tried to get motion to work with the camera to stream to a device with a web browser I just see nothing. I get an error message about the camera not being available.
I know that the right camera is detected because I see it in the output. I just haven’t taken the time to see if the images generated correspond to what I expect them to be. The subtle art of of trial and error is about having a goal and tweaking and experimenting until you get the result you want to get.
The first error is that I wired the camera the wrong way. The second error is that I don’t need to use the legacy camera option with this camera. The third error is that I’m trying to get a Pi and camera module to work as a webcam before I get it to work within its own device.
I am so used to Windows, MacOS and dedicated hardware being so reliable that I forget about the trial and error part of computing that was once so familiar to those of us geeky enough to spend hours of our free time playing with computers. When computers just work it’s easy for everyone to be a geek, because turning it off and on again is easy. So is plugging in a USB device.
My aim is not to build a CinePi.My aim is to setup a webcam that I can see via Home Assistant. I can then add motion detection and more features when I achieve the initial goal of building a Raspberry pi webcam server in minutes“. The instructions are for the V2 module, or a logitech device, and I’m using the V3 module, so the instructions need to be updated. That’s why I’m struggling, and that’s why it’s interesting to do these projects.
I came across this challenge when following programming courses that were over a year old. Sometimes I had to look for the new way of doing things to get the code to behave as it was expected to. Sometimes ChatGPT, Bard and Bing are helpful to find the up to date way of doing things. It is also a case of Reading the Fabulous Manual (RTFM).
There are at least ten Home Assistant Camera integrations to experiment with, so if the method I have been experimenting with doesn’t work I still have 9 other solutions to experiment with. The FFMPEG option looks interesting.
I call it the subtle art of trial and error because the art lies in learning a methodology by which to come up against an issue and to develop a system by which to resolve the issue in an increasingly short amount of time. The point isn’t in knowing how to do things. It’s in knowing where to look for help. It used to be called Google Fu.
I could easily buy a webcam for 12-30 CHF now but by experimenting with various “integrations” I invest my time in learning new skills and that has value. If I get FFMPEG to work, then I can potentially build my own camera systems. Instead of reverting to film like some, I could go the other way, and experiment with concepts similar to the Cinepi.
There are currently two societies. On one side we have those who believe what they are told and take everything at face value. On the other side we have those that look at the bigger picture, that follow international news, and look at the big picture.
The society that believes what they are told without asking questions believes that the pandemic is over and that life is back to normal. They believe that there is no longer a need for masks, and that big events with plenty of people are without danger once again. Paradoxically the behaviour of the virus will give these people their moneys’ worth because it will not make them sick instantly. There is always a nice calm, before a wave of new infections. People will have normal lives of insouciance for a while. Eventually though, by mid September or later a new pandemic wave will hit and those that danced with the sirens will fall victim to their songs.
On the other side you have those that are looking at the big picture, that are seeing in international news that the pandemic doesn’t just end, by some miracle. We see that China and New Zealand make a massive effort to keep the pandemic under control. Shanghai went into full lockdown. Beijing is currently busy testing everyone, to see whether there is a problem, and if there is they are willing to react instantly.
In South Africa we see another wave, similar to the one from last year, but with reports of “The death rates may have been under-reported last year. The aim of this blog post is not to document every article and idea I saw, but rather to give a global view of what I remember to provide people with some context.
Every summer the number of sick drops down, so every summer in Europe would be the ideal time to work towards Covid zero, but people never do. This means that for year after year we live in pandemic insecurity, knowing that spending time indoors, with too big a group, will result in a mass-spreader event.
You may think “But you’re an idiot to worry so much, it’s just a little virus, plenty of people are fine.” and you’d be partially right. The problem is that there is a “what if?” element. When you’re hiking, climbing, diving or doing something dangerous you always ask “what if” and you assess whether the risk is too high to go ahead or not.
I was going to list all the organs that Covid could affect but instead I will simply refer to the tweets we see often that say “I went from training for my 11th marathon to struggling to shower” to “my resting heart rate is 120” to “my spouse died of Covid” to “my child is unable to attend school due to long covid”. The problem is serious enough for people with Long Covid to be dispensed from the GCSE exams. This is not nothing, and self isolation is for a valid reason.
Do I feel good or smart about isolating? Am I overfilled with joy? No, I feel like an idiot in certain circumstances. I feel sad that I don’t socialise at the moment. Is being this cautious worth it in the end? Of course the answer is no, until you fall sick with Long Covid, and you’re one year into your recovery, wishing you could finally be well enough to walk for 10 minutes without getting tired.
The emotional yoyo only goes up when I am reminded of the life I am not living. When I am in solitude I feel fine. When I study I feel fine. When I cycle and when I walk I feel fine, until I cross people not walking in solitude.
The table above shows how people have felt during this pandemic and what you see is that the young people have felt the worst about this pandemic but that for the first wave they were not happy but they seemed okay. I see this data and I believe that it shows that society could have coped with a prolonged soft lockdown to get to Zero Covid. With Zero Covid the second wave and the obligatory certificate would have been unnecessary.
It’s interesting to see how the 30-50 year olds joined together in mysery by December 2021.
Before I conclude this post I think that it’s worth looking at what New Zealand, Italy and Covid Zero countries are doing because they will suffer less from Long Covid, once the pandemic is over, twenty two years from now. I mention Italy because they have decided to keep masks at least until summer, if not longer. I would love for Switzerland and other countries to do the same. We are sleep walking into the next wave, but we are also missing yet another opportunity to get to Covid Zero.
That is it for now.
Images I saw of the Creux de Van made me want to visit the location in person. Yesterday despite the mediocre weather I went there. From Neuchatel you drive towards Noiraigue. Free parking is available.
For the first hour you are walking up a steep winding path. A few trees have fallen, stones and mud are also present until you reach the top of the cliff. From there you see a glimpse of the cliff and views to come. As I stood there I saw a solitary Bouquetin on the rocks.
From there I went right and walked along the cliff. On one side I had green grass and a farm and on the other side I had a steep cliff. I walked along and came to an outcrop. From here you could see the full cliff face. I walked around the arc until I came across a herd of Bouquetins. They were right in my path. I took several pictures before heading back down the other side. I came across a wooden hut and table where people can have a snack. As you walk through the woods you get towards the end of the Gorge De L’Areuse. It was full of water due to the recent rains. By this point I had already walked 10km so I continued back towards the car.
Glympse is a real time location software that allows you to share your location with twitter, facebook, by e-mail or via a number of other social networks. It is simple and intuitive to use. Connect your facebook, twitter and other services with the application. When you are heading to work or to the mountains for a ski trip you can start to share your location in real time. You can set the amount of time that the location is shared.
This is better than google latitude, foursquare and other services because it requires nothing from the receiver of this location sharing offer. Instead they simply click a link and they are kept up to date with your location progress.
The flexibility of this service gives the user good control therefore fearing for your privacy is not so relevant.
What I would like to see in future versions is the ability to play back the route we have taken. I would like to playback the train trip from one city in Switzerland for example.