Nothing to Say
I have nothing to say today.
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 a few years now I have noticed a worrying trend, one that sees content become so sparse on a web page that you see one tweet or facebook post per screen height.
Before mobile first design, and the proliferation of React websites you would find pages that had twenty to thirty tweets per page. The same is true of Facebook. Now it’s barely one post per screen height. This means that you see one tweet, facebook post, instagram image and more.
I really dislike this trend because Twitter, Facebook and other content heavy websites show one bit of information at a time. You’re forced to look at content individually, before moving on to the next, and the next. We might be in a single page app world, but it’s also a single piece of content. I miss the old way of displaying content, where you could see ten to twenty articles, and choose the one that you find most interesting.
YouTube now shows 6 videos per screen height, compared to 20-30 videos at a time before. This means that if you’re browsing you’re doing so more slowly.
It seems paradoxical that a time when we worry about the energy spent on light or dark screens, we are wasting an enormous amount of power, relatively, to display just one tweet, one post, 6 videos at a time. We are wasting time and energy by designing for mobile phones, without considering that people are browsing on desktops.
It does get worse. Mobile phone screens are huge now, so when you design for mobile first you’re designing to display one tweet on an a 5.5 inch screen. We see less, in 2023 than we did in 2007. We’re wasting space.
Of course there is a clear reason for being so wasteful. It means that people see one advert or influencer post at a time. We’re guaranteed to be forced to see individual pieces of content.
We need to correct this error. We need to provide more content per page, once more. I’m using Day One to type this blog post and this use of screen space is better. We need to design websites so that we see ten more more articles once again. I’m typing this blog post in Day One and I see 30 or more lines of text.
We should see 15-20 tweets and posts per page. Even 8 would be an improvement. A post or tweet should only take up the entire screen when we select it.
And Finally
If people’s attention is measured by how little information you show on a single screen height then Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are awful. Their users are as distracted as kittens on a hike, discovering life outside of an apartment for the first time. We need to stop being so wasteful with website and content design. We need to return to using space more effectively. What is the point of having a screen in dark mode if we display one tweet per screen, before we need to scroll?
There is no reason to write a blog post every day. I don’t have things to say daily but I try to write anyway. I have no interesting photos to share today. Tomorrow I may be more inspired. It’s also because I don’t have two hours to devote to writing a blog post at the moment. I could cheat by using AI, but that feels like cheating.
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.
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.
I am currently learning to run five kilometres again. I’m one week away from completing the training program. This isn’t learning in the conventional sense of the word. It’s about fitness and endurance. About pacing and stamina.
I have run five k in half an hour in the past. I managed to run 10k and more. I stopped because my knees disliked my running. Now I am running again. In less than eight days I will have completed the challenge and I will be able to move on to something else. I ran 5.6km two days ago. The next runs are one or two short runs, and a 5k run.
The biggest challenge today, with the 4k run was running directly into the wind. At 21km/h according to Strava or 28km/h according to Garmin connect it almost stopped me when I ran into it. You just push forward, until you’re facing a different direction.
Today it was raining and I wore glasses anyway. They steamed up at one point so I took them off. Running in the cold and rain isn’t too unpleasant, until the rain blows onto wet trousers and you start to cool. I wore quick drying hiking trousers and I changed when I got home. It’s more comfortable than wearing rainproof layers and a winter jacket.
When it rains I usually wear the cycling rain coat. It has no hood but it’s light and practical for these conditions. For half an hour to fourty minutes it is fine.
Recently I have been running on rainy days, and having rest days on days with nice weather. I am getting to run in sub-optimal conditions.
Summer is almost back. I Hope that this year will be more interesting and inspiring than “I walked, ran and cycled in circles.”