Keir Starmer’s Speech Today

Byrichard
Reading Time: < 1 minute

This speech reminds us that English democracy is not gone, that there are moral people still around, and that we need to get the current Tory government out of power and go back to having leadership worthy of respect.

When you are at events you listen to speech after speech, and they meld into each other. Occasionally you hear speeches that stand out and are worth sharing. This is one of them. It reflects values that have recently been lost in several countries. We need to revert to good moral values. Pandemics are a marathon, not a sprint.

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Trees Turning Green

Trees Turning Green

Byrichard

Trees are currently turning green on the Jura. Leaves are growing and so the colour of the Jura is shifting from brown to green at last. Trees suffer in Summer at the moment, due to the lack of rain. That lack of rain results in them changing colour sooner.


Yesterday I went for a run in between two lots of rain and I was lucky. As I arrived home rain started to fall on me. Within minutes I could hear lightning and the rain started to fall heavily. I was lucky. I timed my run to be right in between two lots of rain. It would have soaked me if I had been unlucky.


Ultrasound Plants


According to a Tel Aviv university plants broadcast their distress, either from drought or from injury. Imagine the noise during a forest fire or when plants are harvested.


The Hidden Life of Trees


When walking in a shopping centre I noticed a few books about trees. I saw The Hidden life of Trees and started to read it, as an e-book, despite seeing the physical book. I could have bought it in French but English was cheaper. It speaks about how trees communicate with each other, although I haven’t read far enough to understand how. It also speaks about how crops are silent and isolated, due to how they are planted. I will elaborate when I know more.


It’s interesting to consider that plants can communicate with sound, or through networks of fungus under the ground. It’s interesting to consider the wood wide network, the notion that the soil is a means of communicating between trees. I am currently trying to revive a few orchids. After a year or two of thriving they suddenly slowed down and now seem to be struggling for life. I want to revive them.

Quechua MH900 Shoes

Byrichard

People who walk as much as me wear through shoes within a few months. The soles that were deep and ridged when new, become smooth as we walk, and wear away the soles. Usually I know that shoes are new, or that they need replacing the same way. They start to cause blisters, and I feel that stones are starting to be felt through the soles.


These shoes stand out from others because they are waterproof almost to the top of the shoe, so as long as lake waves are small you’re fine. I tried on the lake, but with a speed boat passing seconds before, I didn’t insist. I tested in the blue shower by the lake to see the result. They performed as expected.



Usually we would put shoes on, and walk once or twice, down the aisle, to see if they were comfortable, but this time I took a liberty, I walked around decathlon with two or three pairs of shoes, to see which ones I liked most. This is a worthwhile. If you forget you’re wearing the shoes you’re trying on, then that’s a good sign. That’s how I chose these over two other shoes I tried on.


According to the marketing content they are meant to be comfortable for walking 20 kilometres a day, 6hrs a day. I haven’t put them through that test, due to recent rainfall.


Testing waterproofing


It feels childish, to put a shoe in a basin of water like I did in the photo above. It confirms your expectations of how waterproof a shoe is. Now that I have confirmed my suspicions, I can walk through puddles, without fear of getting socks wet. With these shoes, the problem is rain seeping in through the trousers and socks, rather than through the fabric. They also have “gaiter” although I would call it a gaiter, to keep stuff out.


With time, we will see if I like them more than other shoes.

Replacing a WD Thunderbolt Duo Drive with an ICY BOX

Replacing a WD Thunderbolt Duo Drive with an ICY BOX

Byrichard

While consolidating all of my files and deleting triplicates of files I came across my thunderbolt Duo Drive. The issue is that the drive uses thunderbolt two ports and these are nowhere to be found. To be more specific it’s seen as a DVI display port by everyone but Apple for a brief period of time. The result is that I was stuck with data on a drive that I couldn’t retrieve. The solution was to transport the Duo to an old mac book pro with the right ports, transfer the data, and then think about what to do with the two drives within.

Thunderbolt Adaptor Expensive and Not Guaranteed to Work

For a while I considered buying a Thunderbolt 3 to USB-C adaptor but I didn’t know whether it would work for data transfer and it costs 49 CHF depending on when you look. That’s without counting the thunderblot cable to go with it. I calculated that I would have to spend 80 CHF to have access to the drives within this case.

Cheap RAID System

As I shopped around for hard drive enclosures I came across the ICY BOX IB-RD3621U3 for 69 CHF so I ordered that instead. The advantage I gain by buying this case is that I can use any drive I want to with it. With the Western Digitial Thunderbolt Duo they want WD Red drives to be used. With the Mybook NAS solution they want WD Green drives. With the ICYBOX solution I can have any drives I want.

Quick Setting at the Back

The added feature, which I have not tested yet is that you can have the case in single mode, where each drive is indepdent, big, where both drives count as a single volume, raid 1 where the data is mirrored or RAID 0 where the data is split between both drives. The advantage of raid 0 is that it writes data faster as it writes to both drives at once but it’s scary because if one drive fails all data is lost. I don’t remember if raid 0 or a single disk is considered scary RAID.

Not Hot Swappable

To the best of my knowledge the drives are not hot swappable, especially in RAID 0 and Big drive mode. It also requires a smaller screw driver that I have on a bike tool, rather than the Swiss knife. It took a few seconds for me to get into the drive but once I did everything went well.

Why Not A NAS?

In theory it could have been interesting to get a NAS rather than a simple HD enclosure but there is a 100 CHF difference in price. If I do want to use it as a NAS I can place one of my Raspberry Pi in front, install NextCloud or Samba and setup my own NAS within a few minutes. The other consideration is that NAS drives cost a lot more because they have to cope with being on for thousands of hours at a time.

One of my ideas is to use this box with PhotoPrism and Nextcloud in RAID 1 configuration. The reason for this is that if one drive fails I can swap the one that failed and then it will rebuild from the one that survived. The other reason is that having two or three drives plugged into a PI takes USB ports, power and space. If I have a single box it will be tidier.

Looking Forward

At the moment I have two terabyte drives acting as a four terabyte drive in Raid 0. Once I have backed up the data from this drive confidently I can either have them as a mirrored raid so that if one drive fails I do not lose all my data or eventually I can upgrade the hard drives to increase storage capacity.

And Finally

There are two advantages to getting such an ICYBOX. The first is that now if I have a DUO drive with ports that are no longer common I can simply swap them from one enclosure to another and use the drive with ease. I am no longer concerned with hardware ports. The second advantage is that it’s easy for me to swap drive pairs so I can upgrade when required but I can also quickly access data from another drive pair with ease.

In conclusion, although the automatic reflex is to an adaptor to get data off of a duo drive it makes more sense to open the Duo drive, remove the drives, put them in a new enclosure, backup the data and put the old case in storage. Within a year or two you can buy two new higher capacity drives and use them instead.

Day 55 Of Self-Isolation in Switzerland – Long Horned Cows

Day 55 Of Self-Isolation in Switzerland – Long Horned Cows

Byrichard

Long-Horned cows are a rare treat. We usually see short-horned or even de-horned cows in Switzerland. To see longhorn cow is a treat. I took a tiny detour from my walk to get some pictures. I have walked by the field a few times before seeing them close enough to the fence to consider taking pictures again.


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One of them started to approach the fence so I moved back. I later noticed that some calves are in this field too.


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We are now two days away from the 11th of May when shops will re-open and life gets one step closer to being “normal” again. We are going to be in a dangerous phase of the pandemic for two reasons. The first reason is that people aren’t going to be as careful about who they come in contact with so the virus will have a new opportunity to spread within small communities.


The second reason is that I see people driving two or more hours to do activities in the mountains rather than staying locally. By combining the two the virus may grab the opportunity to start spreading again.


I am not critical of the government. I am critical of the people who are taking liberties that don’t yet make sense. In theory I could be climbing Monday afternoon but I won’t, because I think it would be wise to wait to to three weeks before enjoying such luxuries.


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The best sport that we can do for the environment, and for each other’s safety is cycling, whether on mountain bikes like these two people. or on road bikes like others. By cycling we are staying within a three hour radius of home, where our range is limited by our physical health.


It makes sense to continue enjoying what the local area has to offer. By now we should have seen that there are plenty of things to do locally. This is especially true for people who have experienced the pandemic in Switzerland.





Did you find some interesting walks by staying local?

Negative Watch Displays

Negative Watch Displays

Byrichard

The Casio GBD-200 and GW-B5600 both have negative displays but the GBD-200 has a display that is much easier to read in low light. The contrast is good enough to read at dusk with the GBD-200 but not the GW-B5600. When backlit both are easy to read.


I chose to wear the GBD-200 today, on a whim.


I will get back to proper blog posts soon.

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