Spanish blossom
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Lost Streaks

Byrichard
Reading Time: 2 minutes

On Saturday I drove for twelve and a half hours and felt exhausted by the time I got home. I didn’t write a blog post so I lost my 480 day blogging streak, and I didn’t read using the Kindle app so I lost my Kindle reading streak. In the end losing such streaks is healthy.

Kindle Streak

The problem with the Kindle reading streak is that it encourages us to read a page or two every single day, but that may result in us reading just a page or two, rather than a chapter or two. The other issue is that my reading streak is intact, in that I read an entire book while driving. I read Nowhere for Very Long, as an audiobook. It’s a shame that the book isn’t more focused on travel and adventure. I still read it in a day. I think it could have explored the pleasure, rather than the trauma that led to having that life.

Blogging Streak

With the blogging streak I think that it’s healthy to take a break from writing daily, because life isn’t that interesting. it doesn’t require a post every single day. It’s easy for posts to become spam, or boring, if we write every day. It also encourages us to be more negative, eventually. By taking a break we recharge, and we return to writing about positive things.

Free Once More

By breaking streaks I often feel a sense of freedom. A streak requires something to be done consistently and the further you get into a streak, the more difficult it is to reach a new record if you break it. I need to blog for 481 days to break my previous streak and read from a kindle for 281 days in a row.

The thing is that I don’t want to read books exclusively on my kindle. I want to read Kobo, Google Books, Kindle and Audible and have all of them count towards the streak, without it being propietary. There are several reading apps that keep track of streaks. With these the important thing is to read and log daily.

I have plenty of physical books. Now that I have broken my kindle streak I can read them. I can revert to reading a book in bed and lying down, and dropping the book onto my face as I try to turn the page. I collected so many books in physical form that I ran out of space on my shelves and now I need to read them, and place them in reading libraries once more.

And Finally

Breaking streaks is a good thing. Streaks are a sign of being in a rut. If we break a walking streak, or a blogging streak, or a reading streak it shows that our lives vary from day to day, or week to week. It shows that we have other things to do than keep routines. Years ago said that diving was a break from routine. That person has dived almost every week for a decade or more. That break from the routine is in and of itself a routine. My reading routine is intact. I just broke the shackles of having a Kindle centric reading routine.

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Village Photography

Byrichard

On Google Plus, one of my muses, I saw that instead of Street photography someone suggested Village photography. I like the idea because villages are such an integral part of my life.

Life in villages is a privileged one. Every time we go for a walk we cross people we do not know and say hello. We walk from field to field and along paths. We see which crops have been planted and which ones are being harvested. We see frequent horses and dog walkers. We also see families. We hear the sound of rifle practices at the local gun range. The practice is for military service most of the time.

We also have fountains and old buildings. We hear the church bell every half hour and hour. We see the fountains with wooden chalet to protect from the cold in winter.

Villages are seasonal. In summer the sounds of children playing, of fireworks and of barbecues can be heard. In Autumn the sound of wind blowers can be heard. In Winter we see lights on as the neighbours prepare their evening meal.

In the mornings we see parents bring their children to school before the bell rings and they head in to their classes to sit and wait impatiently for the school day to be over so that they may go out on adventures.

That’s why village photography captivates my imagination. I know villages well. I appreciate them. I look forward to looking at images from the past, and preserving today for future generations.

Cropping an activity on Strava
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Cropping an activity on Strava

Byrichard

When you’re hiking, cycling, climbing or doing other sporting activities it is easy to forget to stop tracking an activity. When you’re at home or static this is less critical. When you get into a car after a hike or other activity that mistake will screw up your average speed and other data.


Yesterday I realised that I had forgotten to stop tracking on my Suunto device and on my apple watch. With the Apple watch this was less important because it logs individual climbs. With the Suunto device however it tracks the speed of the drive as well as the increase and decrease in altitude.



Strava has two options to fix this mistake. Split is good for running and cycling activities. It allows you to split and then delete what you do not want to keep. Crop allows you to select the in point and the outpoint of an activity like you would if you were editing video.



In the image above you can see the track from the climbing gym towards the motorway. Initially I adjusted the sliders simply to remove that segment but noticed that there is a more precise tool.



With the climbing profile view you can see each climb as well as the difference in altitude as you drive from the car park to the motorway. I deleted the superfluous data and pressed “crop”. I then had a clean export of my activity.


This is a quick, intuitive and useful feature to know about. It allows you to keep a more accurate record of previous activities and a more reasonable track of distance covered over the last week, month or year. Some day I might go back and clean up previous activities.

Road Side Fires and Hashtags

Road Side Fires and Hashtags

Byrichard

There is a level three risk of foresst fires at the moment. Now is a time when smoking and other forms of fire should be forbidden. Now is the time of year where the sides of roads catch alight easily. Forests are at risk.


Yesterday when driving home I spotted a fire by the side and I reported it on Waze. They don’t have a “warn about roadside fires” option yet. I have now added it as a suggestion.The sooner a fire can be reported, the sooner firefighters or other emergency services can put it out.


Hashtags


I hate hashtags. I have tweeted my hate for them since they came out in 2007  or 2008. I hate them because I came to the web when meta information was meant to be hidden in the meta data of a page, not plastered as white text on a white background to spam search engines.


I was playing with the Pixelfed iOS app yesterday and I wanted to explore the social network. I gave up within seconds. I scrolled down and I saw that rather than sub groups that were for cats, dogs, lemmings, landscapes and more the sub categories, or categories were hashtags.


Why Hashtags are crap


Hashtags are crap for two reasons. The first of these, as I argued back in 2007-2008 is that it makes it easy for spammers to look for a hashtag and start to spam a conversation with little to no effort. It neutralises the possiblity of good engaged conversations, especially around some topics.


The second reason is that with WordPress, Hugo and other content management system style services you can generate pages with tags and categories directly.


The Origin of the Hashtag


People forget that the hashtag was developed when Twitter was an SMS compatible system. Hashtags would allow people to quickly and easily see the topic of a tweet withing having to read the entire text. Now though, in the age of dedicated apps, the hashtag is obsolete, and should be destroyed.


Threads Wants Hashtags


I’m writing about this topic because I saw that Pixelfed uses hashtags, rather than tags or categories, which I find absurd, but also because I see that Threads wants to implement hashtags.


So Called Ugly URLs


The same culture that calls hyperlinks with extentions ugly is fine with #tags. That’s absurd. As an archivist and Media asset manager I think that having /topic/index.html that resolves to /topics/  is much uglier than /topic/ducks.html because when you want to find a file you need to sort through thousands of index.html files that mean nothing if you don’t read the front matter of the files.


Hashtags are Fashion Over Function


Hashtags, in my eyes, are fashion over function. By adding a tags text field, you could add keywords/tags, and have the software create relevant hyperlinks. Tags work extremely well on Hugo,and categories work well on WordPress. We don’t need to use ugly hashtags, when proper meta data practices would do the same thing, without wasting characters.


An Alternate Solution For Idiots Like Me


The alternate solution, to keep idiots like me, happy, would be to see that someone wrote hashtag keyword, and have the website parse the hashtag and turn it into a hyperlink to that keyword automatically. We have had href tags for decades, and that’s why hashtags are so absurd.


It encourages me to see that not everyone puts hashtags in every post on Mastodon.

On The Value of Not Being Anonymous on Social Media

On The Value of Not Being Anonymous on Social Media

Byrichard

For years I felt comfortable tweeting as myself for two reasons. The fist reason is that we met up so often than tweeting under my actual name made sense. The second reason is that it was a network of friends of friends and we were seldom, if ever trolled. That changed during the pandemic so I chose to tweet under one pseudonym, before another, and then another. The reason is that I felt that I was going to be attacked by people online, if they knew who I was. 


I decided to create an account on Calckey where I was posting as myself. until I was trolled and insulted. I blocked the offending account but I also created an anonymous account, in reaction to this attack. It’s not that I want to be anonymous. It’s that I don’t feel comfortable tweeting as myself on a network, and in an era, where trolling is normal. I am on social media for conversations that will eventually encourage me to meet people in person. 


I believe that this is a coming of age thing. The Fediverse is still young and growing up. Communities are not mature. Communities are not yet networks of friends of friends so the social bonds that would normally keep people civil have not been formed yet. I believe that, in time, this will come. For now I think it makes sense to be anonymous, until we find a community where we feel safe being ourselves, rather than pseudonyms. 


On Reddit, Quora, Twitter and Facebook you respond to posts by strangers. Every time that those strangers attack us, is a time we feel that we should not speak to “strangers” on the web. It consolidates the habit of lurking, rather than participating. I don’t want to lurk, I just want to insulate the real me from internet trolls, in case it escalates and potentially damages my reputation. Remember, a troll is anonymous, but their trolling can have real life consequences, if we are not anonymous. 

A Long Drive in the Rain

A Long Drive in the Rain

Byrichard

Yesterday I went for a long drive in the rain. I drove from an hour from Valencia back to Switzerland with rain along most of the journey, and rain. The rain was sometimes falling so heavily that I had to slow down to see. At other moments the rain was light but trucks and cars were throwing up torrents of water so I had to slow down and wait until a drier bit of road before overtaking.

I’m used to this drive, and I’m used to the roads and the route. I’m so used to it that I don’t really notice the turn offs anymore. I drive automatically. This doesn’t mean that I don’t pay attention to the road. I do. I’m so focused driving that this morning when I woke up I was in a daze. I think that between twelve and a half hours of non-stop focus and rain I tired myself out. By the time I got home I was tired.

Sometimes I have felt so tired that I had to stop by the side of the road long enough to recover. I think that’s from my 3600km in four day road trip. Geneva to Tarbes, Tarbes to Barcelona, Barcelona to Tarbes, Tarbes to Geneva. 800km per day. This time it was just 1300.

The drive is easy, because I’m used to it, and because I drive at a speed that feels comfortable for the conditions. I was often as fast as the trucks, when the conditions were bad. I usually drive at 120km/h in France, despite the 130km/h limit, to avoid fatigue.

During the drive I read Nowhere for Very Long, in full.

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What I’m reading – Kadaré’s L’Hiver de la grande Solitude

Byrichard

From friendships and the people we meet so our knowledge of authors increases. It is through English literature classes that I learned to appreciate Milan Kundera. I read all his books over a period of years. Following a conversation with an Albanian friend I heard of Ismail Kadare. He originally wrote in Albanian and French, living in Paris for many years.

The two books I have read so far are Spiritus and Les Tambours de L’automne. Both of these books are interesting in their own right. Spiritus is interesting because it’s taking a look at the effect that being a listening spy can have on how you feel others perceive you. It’s an eye opening book into the world of spying that is not often discussed in books. Les Tambours de L’Automne is based on a key moment in Albanian history several centuries ago. It’s only near the end that you understand the title.

Now I’ve started to read L’Hiver de la Grande Solitude and so far I’m enjoying it. It was completed in the mid 1970’s and within the thirst few pages I found what I love. There is a description of a photographer and film developer who is about to retire. He was developing photographs of a personality and as he did so he noticed something different. Upon closer inspection he realised that the expression he read on the photographed person’s phase was one of concern.

I enjoy reading such sections because of the depth of perception that comes from books from this time period. Rather than having on a superficial level you learn about characters and their perception of the world. It is through the characters that we learn a lot about the world within which we live. Some like Sartre write more technical documents whilst skilled authors write like Camus, Kadaré and Kundera. These are the authors that bring history and a different world to life.

Ismail Kadare reads better in French and finding his works can be a challenge so whenever I drop into a bookshop I look to see what they have available hoping to find one or two of his books. It’s a shame that his writings are not easier to find.

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