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On twestival
The first tweetup I went to saw a crowd of no more than sixty people. The twestival had many more. Enough to fill the Doon club. So many new faces but not many new people to follow. It’s fun to see how big the London twitter community has become.
The usual people were there, sizemore, loudmouthman, documentally, danacea weaverluke and a few new faces like digitalmaverick, amandita, Poppyd and a few more people. Some video was shot of the event but I’m not sure by when they’ll go up. There was no wifi so no opportunity to do some live streaming.
At the same time I’m thinking it’s time for a plurk up of the same scale, since for the moment there are so few people.
Now it’s time for Tuttle.
Of Blogging and Substacking
A month or two ago we had the chance to jump on the Substack wagon while it was hot and to ride the wave of new followers and experience a growing community. I could have joined in. I could have become one of those “I’m one of you people” but I didn’t.
Substack Life
Substack went from being a newsletter to almost becoming a community of writers. I say “almost”, because for me to consider a community a community it has to behave like a community. It has to be a network of friends of friends, and it has to be about individuals connecting with other individuals, through their community.
With Substack it went from “Wow, notes look great” to “My follower numbers have exploded”, “oh so have mine”, and that’s when I disengaged. People behaved the same way on Twitter and the community was degraded into a network of strangers following each other and fighting for attention. Within the space of hours the network that it could have become was degraded to a popularity contest. I have no interest in these. If I wanted to join one I could socialise in the physical world of bars and other places.
What I don’t like about Substack, and social media in general, is that it’s about users creating content for the owners of the social network, and then making money off of our backs, without giving us anything in exchange. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and other networks have all made this move.
On Blogging
With tools like WordPress, among many others we have the freedom to generate content, and choose whether to pay for our own hosting, and manage our own websites and attempt to monetise them, or jump onto Wordpress.com and other solutions. and just create content for the pleasure of it.
I mention pleasure, because with blogs we write because we have inspiration. Either we have done something that we want to share, or we have an opinion on something, that we want to get out of our minds, by putting it on screen, and then forgetting about it.
I prefer to blog because although it could be e-mailed to someone it is usually just one post, in a timeline, among many others. People can look at it, think “this is dull and boring” and move on. With blogs there is no obligation to read any post. It’s all about whims.
With Substack the opposite is true. You write a post, you e-mail it, and people have to swipe to it, keep it on screen until it’s marked as read, before moving on.
I like e-mail for private conversations, but feel that newsletters et al would be better served by being blog posts that we can opt in to reading. or skip and ignore.
And Finally
I prefer blogging to Substack Newsletter writing for two reasons. The first is that I want to write about anything, rather than on a specific theme. The second reason is that I don’t want to generate content that someone else will benefit from, more than I will. I don’t want to be used and exploited. With blogs I do not feel that way. With Substack I do., I went from being a person to a statistic within hours of Substack Notes being created.
Day 57 of Self-Isolation in Switzerland – Another Walk In The Rain.
Walking in heavy rain for two and a half hours doesn’t make much sense. You don’t see much. The more time you spend outside the more of you is wet, and by the time you get home you’re cold and in need of warming up.
It’s day 57, the 11th of May. In theory Switzerland has rebooted in safe mode and we can start returning to normal life. I don’t know whether the shops or other places were busy because I didn’t go into any shops.
The Sound of Bells and the Smell of Colza
What do you hear and smell when you go for a walk in Vaud at this time of year? You hear the sound of cowbells and you hear the sound of cows mooing. I like the sound of cow bells
A few days ago I could hear mooing from a distance. As I looked across, at an old train station, now used as a house or office I could hear mooing so I crossed the train lines to see where the cows were. They were mooing incessantly. Usually they’re quiet but not this time.
Weeks ago we walked by a plant but we couldn’t recognise it. Within the last two weeks the plants flowered and so we could see that they were cola. Colza are funny plants because they’re so different at every stage. At first they’re just leaves, then they’re taller plants with leaves, and then they turn yellow, and after that they’re yellow and they smell strong. After that it rains and they lose all the petals and they look strange. Eventually they’re harvested. It’s a plant that goes through several transformations. Now you have fields of yellow.
Geographically I am walking in circles but because I walk around in circles where there are crops every walk is different, from week to week and month to month. Recently Garmin Connect added expeditions so I am walking the Appalachian Trail virtually. So far I have covered 423 kilometres of 3500. I’m twelve percent of the way there.
I prefer the Pacer app and how it shows long hikes. I am currently doing the Don Quixote trail and every 35km or so I reach another waypoint, so I get a real sense of distance travelled, rather than an abstract notion of it.
I’m walking through Toledo now, after walking from Alcala de Henares to Madrid and from there to Esquivias before reaching Toledo. I have plenty more cities to cross. That makes the journey interesting.
And Finally
If it wasn’t for cars that drive too fast, and too close to people on foot and on bikes, the walks I do would be great. There is plenty to see and plenty changes from month to month and season to season. I walk on a segment of the Jura Trail and part of the Camino De Santiago route. Where I walk is not lunacy. It’s part of three or four big hiking systems. If cars were more respectful of pedestrians, and if paths were made into the soil, then walking would be more pleasant.
Between some villages paths that were just grass have been worn away to being short grass, to being dirt paths because of the volume of people walking. If walking was made more pleasant, between villages, then the walks I do would not be lunacy, they would be fun.
The Long Walk and More Playing with Nextcloud
Two days ago I went for a longer walk than usual. I walked along roads rather than along the narrow agricultural roads I normally use. I wanted to avoid crowds and dog walkers. The thing about solitude is that it’s enjoyable when you are not reminded that you are alone.
Today I will also have to try to avoid people. Some might be really happy for good weather, but not me. Good weather means that the reminder that others are not lonely is brought home. I go on walks to listen to podcasts and get some exercise. That little walk I went up was so good for my health that I had 18 PAI as a result of that single walk.
On a walk like I did two days ago I combine two, three or even four walks together. These are the walks that I started to walk years ago, after my scooter was hit by a careless driver. She hit the back of my scooter so hard that we slid for several meters. I stayed upright but the scooter needed to be fixed. It was. It took time.
Several times I walked to the scooter place to ask “Is it ready yet?” and several times I got a “nope” answer. In the end that walk that I did to check on the scooter became my ordinary walk. It became one of the circuit walks that I would walk daily for several years. I still like the walks. If people walked with smaller dogs, and kept them on leashes, I’d be happier. I would also be happier if people didn’t drive on farm roads as if they were normal roads, because on foot this is dreadful, especially when people drive too fast, too close, several times a day.
More Experimenting with Nextcloud
This morning I experimented with Nextcloud. I experimented with uploading photos from google takeout zips to Nextcloud using both an Ubuntu machine and a mac. The experiment was a partial success. I found that uploading individual pictures from individual folders is clumsy via Linux. I then tried via MacOS and that was also clumsy. Nextcloud can be used for photo management but that is not what it is really designed for.
There are a few features missing. One of these is the ability to select more than one image at a time. I’d like to select a range of images with ease, rather than have to select sixty video files one by one, before moving them.
I also experimented with moving images from one folder to another and that’s chaotic as well, via the command line. The issue is that Nextcloud detects the images, and indexes them, but if you remove those images it then keeps them in the database. I’d like to be able to refresh the database after making such a move.
Mount a Prepared Drive
Imagine that you have a photo archive that is already well organised. Imagine that everything is organised by year, month, date, and subject. With this tutorial you can learn how to mount your external drive. Nextcloud then sees the images and their folder structure and populates either Memories, or Photos, depending on which interface you prefer.
And Finally
After some trial and error I got Nextcloud to work as I expected it to so I can use it to backup photos from my phone automatically. In this regard it’s a great iPhoto and Google Photos replacement. I think I would have Photoprism and Nextcloud running in tandem. I would have Nextcloud taking care of backing images up, from the phone, and photoprism to work as a DAM/MSM solution.
I will experiment and comment, when I have an opinion.