Klettersteige Schweiz – Swiss Via Ferrata
A trailer for a collection of videos on Via ferrata to be included with a book.
I have been an audible member for years at this point and in that time I have “bought” hundreds of books. I write “bought” because I payed for a Platinum account for years and got credits and got the books with those credits. Over the years I have collected more books than I can read in a year.
That library lived in the cloud, rather than my devices, for years. I would download the books I was listening to but not those that I had finished, or would read later. That’s because laptops and mobile phones have smaller hard drives than I require for my books.
The first step when backing up audible books is to download them. The second is to strip them of DRM, and before you tell me off for being like a pirate I will correct you. I bought an MP3 player but because it doesn’t support AAX files I had to find a way to make the content that I own, legally, playable on a cheap mp3 player. In the process I stripped the DRM because I had no way of playing the audio files otherwise.
It’s because Apple, Audible and Sandisk do not play nicely that I had to strip the DRM. If they played nicely I would not have stripped files of DRM.
AudioBookShelf serves as a site/service that makes it easy to catalogue your books and listen to them from your phone, laptop, desktop tablet or other. An Android App exists, but the iOS app is only available via Testflight.
The app can be installed as a docker container within minutes, and then you can point it to the folder where you store all your audiobooks. I write audio books, rather than Audible, because you can download audio books or podcasts and add them to your instance of audiobookshelf, to listen to files, streamed, or downloaded.
As you listen to books with this app you get to see how many minutes you listened per session, as well as which book, and for how long. If you use the app for more than a year you get the summary of previous years of listening.
The app gives you the option of looking for book cover art from a number of different audible libraries, depending on language and country, but also from open library and other sources.
You can add as many accounts as you like with this app. The admin account can also create libraries either for individuals or to make it easier to differentiate between open audio books, audible, or other providers.
If you have a spouse, or children, or both, or live with others you can share access to this library. You can choose whether people can read, download, upload and more. This enables people to add the books that they want to have available via this website.
The app supports podcasts. If you add the OPML file of your podcasts it will automatically retrieve the latest ones, for you to listen to. I have yet to test this feature.
So far I have listened to an hour of audiobooks via this website/instance and it works well. I tested it via firefox on iOS and via the web browser on the laptop and it works very well. As you listen on the phone you can see the progress bar update on the laptop and vice versa. You can seamlessly switch between devices.
The advantage of such an app is that you can share books, without giving people the files. They can then listen to audio books and their progress is kept between devices.
One of the key nuissances with audio players is that they do not usually keep track of progress. With this app you do, so you can switch between books and it will remember where you are.
The other advantage is that each listener is independent so you get listening stats for yourself, but not others.
So far I am happy with my experience.
For the last 24 hours I have been L’âne de Buridan because I wanted to do two activities. I saw that a group was hiking in Annecy and I was hesitating due to the drive, the parking and the distance. I also saw that there were no spaces left. That’s why I signed up for a second activity while sitting in the waiting list. I didn’t expect to get a place.
The second activity is a via ferrata and I love that sport and I just got new kit so I should use it. The issue is that the group that is doing this activity meets irregularly and I prefer to find a group that meets regularly, to spend time with people more often.
The first activity then changed from Annecy to being at La Dôle so I thought that committing to the VF would be much easier., except that it isn’t because A) Via Ferrata are fun but you usually spend more time getting there and back than climbing, and because the group meets irregularly the group becomes less interesting.
I’d like to elaborate on this point. One of my character flaws is that I often want to try something new, rather than remain loyal to a group of people. The result is that I end up with solitude, rather than companionship. I’d like to meet the new group, and new people, but at the same time I feel that I should show “loyalty”, and I use the word loosely, for the group that I have done one thing with, so far.
I now have two groups that do things on alternate days so I can easily be a regular with both groups.
Annecy would have been a 50 minute drive, each way, Morez is a 40 minute drive. St Cergue is an 18 minute drive. It makes environmental sense to do the local walk, on a rare occasion when people do something that is so convenient for me. If I had known yesterday I would have kept the electric car.