Not a landscape I would expect in June

Playing with WP Rig

Byrichard
Reading Time: < 1 minute

Today I started following the “Building Progressive Themes with WP Rig.” course on Linkedin Learning.

Before you start playing with WP Rig make sure that you have installed Composer. Composer is required to use WP Rig during the build process. Composer itself requires that you have PHP on your machine. After that it should be easier to use. I also ran npm-install-peers because I kept getting error messages.

During the daily walk today I saw that the grass along the side of the road is dry and dead. It crunshes as you walk on it. As you look at other fields they are dry and probably crunchy too. We had some rain a few days ago, but within minutes of the rain stopping the landscape was dry again. We never get rain. I am impatient for a day of rain. I am impatient to look forward to good weather, rather than bad. It seems to be absurd to want rain in Switzerland. In winter skiers and snowboarders want snow.

I managed a 179 day reading streak with the kindle before I broke it. It wasn’t that I didn’t read, but that I didn’t read using the kindle. It’s frustrating to lose such a streak because it will take 179 days to get back to the same point. It makes no sense to reach for such a goal in the first place. These apps that get you to do things for an unlimited days in a row detract from the pleasure of doing certain things habitually. I have read a book every day for many months, probably years, but I use Audible, Kobo, physical books and the Kindle. I need to find an app to track reading streaks without it being locked in to one book store.

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Relaxing Cows – The Right Crowd To Be With During A Pandemic

Relaxing Cows – The Right Crowd To Be With During A Pandemic

Byrichard

During a pandemic it makes sense to go to the mountains and it makes sense to walk where you have space to the left and right to keep social distancing. Today I saw the cows near St Cergue and they were all sitting and relaxing, chewing the cud, waiting for the tourist day to open.



I haven’t been to the mountains much over the last four years because of the pandemic, a broken arm and for one summer no car. I say this but I did go up, on a bike. I have been up at least three or four times this year. I’ve been up to St Cergue via the safe road, la Barillette via the normal road, once, and up the steep La Rippe climb twice. It’s not that I don’t go to the mountains, it is that I do go up and going up is the workout, not what I do once at the top.


I avoid the mountains during the pandemic because I can’t avoid people on narrow paths that go up a mountain. I’d rather walk where the paths are wide and where I can observe adequate social distancing. As we see the pandemic is far from over and we must actively avoid being disease vectors, and falling sick. I’m fully vaccinated but News shows that we should not be lulled into a false and flawed sense of security.


I miss going to the mountains to do group activities every weekend but for that to be possible we need to get the delta variant to be dealt with, and we need for people to vaccinate. Society has opened up, before people were vaccinated, and before 14 days of zero new infections had elapsed.


The situation is bad enough for Anne Levy to say, “I’m worried”, but whether she will act on it, or just play lip service is not certain. In the eyes of many people the Swiss government should act now, rather than wait.


The sooner the pandemic ends, the sooner I can revert to writing adventure blog posts.

Barefoot Shoes and Socks

Barefoot Shoes and Socks

Byrichard

Today I am going to write about something a little different. A few days ago I saw a child with a huge hole in at least one sock and I commented “for once you’re the one with holes in your socks, rather than me. Usually I do have holes in my socks, and when the child noticed he pointed this out in public once.

After this incident I started to throw socks away as soon as they got holes, to avoid such a comment. For some reason it bothered me to have holes in my socks in a context where I had to take off my shoes. That’s not actually what this blog post is about.

Barefoot Shoes are Kinder to Feet

I noticed that all the signs of wear and tear that I had on my feet, as a result of wearing normal shoes are gone from my feet. My feet have recovered from having the toes, heels and other parts of the foot rubbing against parts of the shoes. The result is more elegant feet, thanks to soft barefoot shoes.

Intact Socks

I have been using the same socks for weeks, or even months at this point and they are barely worn. At one point, with normal shoes, I was wearing through socks within weeks. It got so bad that I was starting to worry about how expensive it would be to buy new socks every few weeks. With barefoot shoes that problem seems to be gone.

Five million steps

Over the last twelve months I have still taken over 4.9 million steps, so it’s not that I am walking less. I am cycling more, but I’m still in the five million steps per twelve month period range. My walking habit is consistent.

Softer Steps

When you walk with normal shoes the shoes do the work of amortising every step, so every step comes down with force, especially around the heel, where holes would begin to appear with some socks. With barefoot shoes you’re not crushing that part of the sock so the sock has a longer life expectancy

More Space for Toes

Plenty of people who write about barefoot shoes speak about the bigger “toe box”. With normal shoes you instantly feel that the foot has less space. This difference in room for the toes could contribute to the tips of socks wearing against the shoes, forming toe holes on socks.

Barefoot Barefoot Shoes

Since some people wear barefoot shoes, barefoot, without socks, it would make sense for the shoes to be designed to be barefoot friendly, to avoid friction points and more. It would make sense for shoes to be made to be comfortable.

And Finally

This observation is based on wearing a single pair of barefoot shoes for over 500 kilometres. If I wear another pair of barefoot shoes I might notice that the wear and tear of socks is different. usually new socks cost about 20 CHF for a week’s worth of socks. If I need to replace them twice, in the lifespan of a pair of shoes then I could buy a pair of shoes that is 20-40CHF more expensive, and the price of new socks would be offset, by not needing to buy socks as regularly.

I wrote that last part as a joke, rather than a serious consideration. I am happy to have stopped wearing through socks so quickly, at last.

Getting Home Before The Sun Sets and Pikmin Bloom

Getting Home Before The Sun Sets and Pikmin Bloom

Byrichard

At this time of year there is a race between the walker and the sun. Either you must go for a walk earlier in the day or you must be ready to walk after the sun has set. Both of these are possible. The days are getting shorter and the temperatures are getting lower. They are getting low enough for gloves to be tempting. I haven’t worn them yesterday, or today, but yesterday I almost felt the need.


One aspect of Autumn walks is that we walk at the golden hour, so the light is good for pictures, if you are equipped to walk, once the sun has set. I was not, so I continued walking, hoping to get home before it was too dark to see. I did, easily.


Pikmin Bloom is simple. It is an app/game that uses your steps to decide how many flowers you have planted in the AR world. As you go for your daily walk you plant flowers, and as you plant flowers, and as you take steps, you also gestate flowers in pots.


The game is made by Niantic Labs, makers of Ingress, a great game, and Pokemon Go, a game for compulsive OCD people. Can you tell which one I prefer. So far the biggest flaw i see with Pikmin bloom is that it does not count all your steps. It only counts those that are taken as the app is open, or a certain mode is engaged, and that is a shame. With Ingress I would easily have the 2500 kilometre badge, if only it counted all walking, rather than just the walking you do with the app open.


We are not all going for walks, just to play AR games. Some us go for a walk to go for a walk, and if we’re in the mood we may spend a few minutes playing Ingress or other Niantic games. I dislike Pokemon Go because of the random rejection when you try to catch Pokemon Go creatures. It feels too time demanding, to be worth investing in.


I will spend more time playing with Pikmin Bloom. The name is hard to remember. We will see how long I last.

Shifting from Tutorials to Practical Experience

Shifting from Tutorials to Practical Experience

Byrichard

Since getting the Raspberry Pi devices my shift has moved from following tutorial after tutorial to experimenting with setting up a number of server projects fron Home Assistant to Nextcloud to Photoprism and Immich to name a few. In the process I have instantiated and then pulled down plenty of instances before finally deciding to keep certain instances up and running for longer, to see whether I can use them. I also experimented with CUPS and set up a printer/scanner for remote use.

Tools That work

Nextcloud, Photoprism, Home Assistant and Pi Hole work well so I can now use them without thinking about them too much. Both Ad Guard and Immich were slightly less successful but this might be due to fatigue, and running two things at once. The issue with Ad Guard is that it seemed to block 192.168.1.1 which I need to be able to access. I also noticed that when I switched things around Windows stopped being able to see local devices.

Immich Potential

I see a lot of potential in Immich but there is one flaw. If your library is too large it loses the ability to crawl all the files and upload them before timing out. I got to 14,000 images backed up, and the last 4000 are currently in limbo, waiting to recognise that they can be moved from the phone to the Immich server. With Nextcloud and Photoprism I was able to transfer all files from the phone to both services and now I can add the latest images with ease.

An Experimental Close Call

This morning I had a close call. I plugged in a one terabyte drive to the Pi with Photoprism and Immich. My plan was to mount the external hard drive, move the files from the SD card library to the external drive library and then to change the .env file to read from the external hard drive rather than the local drive. This didn’t work.

After some quick searches and practicing my AI using skills I had set things up as I thought I wanted them and started to copy from one location to the other. I wanted to check on progress a few minutes later but noticed that I was copying between two partitions rather than between two drives. I aborted the copy. No data was lost.

That’s why you experiment in a context where it doesn’t matter, and why you don’t assume that data is safe until it is backed up off site once, and locally twice.

In the worst case scenario I would have lost my Photoprism and Immich instances.

The Postponed Experiment

Before the setback described above my idea was to see whether the Android App would allow me to backup photos from Google Photos to Immich. It can’t. It only sees what is on the phone locally, not online. For the second part of the experiment I wanted to copy images from Google Takeout to Immich using Immich Go.

If Immich detects duplicates it will mark them as duplicates and throw them away. The reason for which I want to experiment with the tool is that I have eight hundred one gig files to get through, and to do this manually will take more than five minutes. I also need at least a terabyte of space free on another drive, so that when the files are unzipped and added to immich there is enough space for the task to complete successfully.

I want to experiment with the Uploads folder that I noticed in Immich, as well as Immich go.

The Concern

My concern with unzipped Google Photos files is that they will have lost exif and other data so Immich will import them as being created tomorrow or the day after rather than the day they were actually created, along with exif data for location data, camera used, and more.

Immich Go is meant to read the image file and the relevant JSON file to ensure that the relevant metadata is attached to the relevant image. iPhoto and Google Photos tend to strip this data to make migrations more difficult.

And Finally

Tutorials are great for building a good foundation but it’s by playing with practical examples that we learn to think about things in the right way. We consolidate what we learn both through repetition, as I did with Nextcloud, or by finding the right packages for docker and a specific OS, before changing OS and getting Docker to work on that instance. It’s about encountering an error and knowing how to fix it.

My next challenge will be to install Immich, Nextcloud and Photoprism on a single system.

A Meetup Weakness
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A Meetup Weakness

Byrichard

Before the pandemic, when life was normal, I would go to three or four events per week organised via websites. These days, on meetup.com things are organised every two weeks, and for just 15 people at a time. This means that if you’re not first to sign up you’re on a waiting list and you could be social once every few weeks, rather than three times per week. This frustrates me.

There is a simple solution. There is a demand for events to be organised. I recently bought fresh Via Ferrata stuff and may start doing them regularly once again. I want to accertain that I am comfortable with the sport after such a long break, and once this is done I can create my own via ferrata and walking group. I would organise things at least once per week, maybe more.

The biggest nuissance with Meetup.com is that it requires a monthly fee for having a group. The result is that groups are created, run for a bit, and then destroyed to avoid paying for longer. The alternative is to use Facebook but I absolutely hate what Facebook is and what it represents. Every time it abuses of peoples’ trust it and gets caught it never apologises.

I have car and I have three seats. Like I used to do before the pandemic I can pick people up in Nyon, drive them to and from the activity, and when it comes time to say goodbye they can contribute towards petrol and the cost of having a group.

I would never charge people a fee to participate in an activity because that goes against my ethos, but having people pay a fair share towards petrol is the right thing to do. If you don’t charge people for the petrol used, they abuse of our kindness as drivers.

There is an added benefit. The problem with group activities is that when they end people rush to the train, without saying goodbye and I find this really strange. Before the pandemic there would be a stop at a bar to have a drink, and then drive home. In the Pandemic age that stop no longer occurs. I find this to be a shame. At least by driving from Nyon to the via ferrata or hiking location there is a moment for conversation before and after the journey.

I could be like others, and take the same trains as they take but that would increase my costs for participating in events. It also doubles or triples the journey time.

Last week I walked an extra eight kilometres rather than take a train, so it isn’t that I want to use the car. I have spent five or six years doing almost all of my bike rides and walks from home. The point of the car is to expand my range, once again.

And Finally

As I got to the end of this post I noticed that I am included in the hike that I thought was overbooked, and I see that other people are doing a VF at the same time on the same day and now I am torn about which one to do. The beautiful irony.

The old paradox is back. Nothing to do for the entire week, and then two activities to do at the same time.

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