The Swiss Television archives shared this nice news item about how to prepare a fondue from 1969. It’s nice because we see the old way of preparing a fondue with the fluid burner rather than electric heaters. We also see the ingredients being placed in the caquelon.
The Foggiest idea, or a pun, after a walk this morning through Geneva on a foggy day. “The Jet D’eau will be off”, I thought. It was pumping out water at its usual rate but you’d find it hard to see. The grey/white fog, along with the white water, converged and became one.
On a day like today, the Jet D’eau is not the only thing that is hard to see. So are the mountains. If you try to see the other side of the lake you see nothing, just a blank canvas on which you could add anything. It’s also a time when you might be happy to go back indoors where it is nice and warm.
On such a day it would be interesting to set up a timelapse camera from the top of the RTS tower or some other building. You could capture as the fog burns off and reveals the view. From the top of the RTS tower you have a good view of Geneva and it’s surroundings.
Climbing is a sport that I have enjoyed for most of my life. As a child I would climb on to roofs, on climbing frames and up trees. Occasionally I would climb on rocks but as I had no safety equipment I was limited. Five or six years ago I went climbing with some people via Glocals in Italy and we climbed 5a routes. I enjoyed the sport but I found that there was a lot of waiting. It is for this reason that I spent five years doing via ferrata.
Recently I have found a group of people with whom I can go climbing every week. As a result of this I have learned to lead climb. Lead climbing is different from top rope climbing because if you fall you fall. When you are top roped you will fall a few centimetres.
I went up to Villars on Friday and I really enjoyed the IFSC Climbing World Cup. I enjoyed watching high level climbers compete to be qualified for stage after stage of the event. It was an opportunity to capture moments such as the one above. Four people climbing up the same wall in an attempt to qualify. The routes were apparently 8a-8b so two grades higher than I can climb. I still don’t have the finger strength. With training that may eventually come.
What makes watching high level climbers so much fun is that they are methodical. They work efficiently from one hold to the next. They clip when they feel comfortable to clip and then they move onwards. It is as fun to watch the belayers as the climbers. That can be shown in another post.
Look at the finger holds. The more you climb the stronger your fingers become and the more freedom you eventually get. By freedom I mean that you have more routes that you can enjoy. I want to have more strength to enjoy more overhanging routes.
When watching these climbers you notice that the arms are almost always straight to avoid wasting energy. Hanging from an arm is easier than keeping it bent. Look at how the hand needs to grab the hand hold rather than just hang from it. It is a shame that we are not allowed to share video of these climbers. It would have been interesting to study their technique.
The Pandemic is alive and well and I am still walking around in circles. I would go for bigger, more interesting adventures but no one is publicising those events until after the fact. During a pandemic it helps to be misinformed, an alcoholic and a festival goer.
If you like real sports, like climbing, cycling, group hikes etc then you have to wait for months, or at this point, probably years, for the pandemic to end. Last year when the government made the mistake of opening too early you could believe they were silly. By making the same “mistake” again it starts to look like government policy. That leads to the obvious conclusion that at the current level of incompetence the pandemic will never end.
The way that countries around the world are making the same mistakes, in the same way, at the same time, is leading people to discuss whether eugenics is being experimented with. I prefer to think of it as incompetence, rather than deliberate.
Israel, England and the United States are clear indicators of what Switzerland can expect from the pandemic and yet they fail to take the lessons and warnings on board. Instead they let the situation degrade and get worse. We are now at 20+ percent of ICU beds taken up by COVID patients, out of 79 percent occupancy, according to the RTS.
The Swiss have a strange threshhold limit. They prefer for it to reach a certain critical limit. I’m impatient for the next soft lockdown, as that is when the numbers will decrease again.
This morning, as I was doing laundry, I found that I couldn’t focus so I started to look at all the teas that are available at a local shop. I saw that they had herb teas, mint teas, nettle teas, weed tea and more. I also noticed that tea is cheap. You can get twenty cups worth of tea for 0.95 CHF if you’re not picky about the tea you drink. What I find interesting about the broad selection and choices of tea is that it is so cheap compared to water, soft drinks, fizzy drinks, juices, coffee and more. Not only is it cheap, but it is light and easy to carry.
If I was setting off on a multiday hike I think I would transport several bags of tea, and I’d make tea. If it was in the middle of summer I would use the sun to warm up the water in which I would then put the tea, and I’d have a warm cup of tea within a few hours. If you carry fuel with you then you can boil the water, kill any bacteria and viruses and then drink it. Of course this may involve carrying more fuel than you’d like.
I noticed that some teas are cold brew, just put the bag in, wait, and within a certain period of time it’s ready. As you can tell, I have not read the instructions.
I will spend more time looking at different types of tea and I will experiment. It is easy to store, transport, and prepare. Easier than hot chocolate. This morning motivates me to be more adventurous with tea, and to find one or more that I like.
I ran my coffee experiment. I put four espressos into a single cup, and drank it, to see if I like the taste, to determine whether I would buy the grains, and a grinder. As the experiment was a success I can move ahead with that plan.
You see, pandemic life makes us eccentric. Months of solitude has that effect on our well-being.
A few months ago I walked by some nettles and I thought “it smells of mint” and today I looked up the taste of nettles and I saw that they taste of “spinach and cucumber, with a hint of mint.” I don’t mind mint and cucumber, but Spinach puts me off. Shame. It has health benefits.
For two days I have been trying to understand how to use Jekyll, a Ruby version of Hugo. It is a Static website generator that is similar to Hugo but rather than being written in Go, it is written in Ruby. I find that it renders sites faster than Hugo, but that it has less assistance for creating pages, giving them layouts and the rest. That’s why I experimented with YQ
a lightweight and portable command-line YAML, JSON and XML processor. YQ uses jq like syntax but works with yaml files as well as json, xml, properties, csv and tsv. It doesn’t yet support everything jq does – but it does support the most common operations and functions, and more is being added continuously.
I read about it in this article. You can install YQ with a brew command brew install yq or you can install it in a number of other ways, depending on whether you’re using MacOS, Linux or Windows.
The Use case
Exporting a WordPress blog to MD files can be done with a multitude of tools but they don’t add all the FrontMatter that you need for a blog, especially Jekyll. I imported the most recent blog posts, that I created for Hugo, with a year-month-date-title.md name to the posts folder but I created a second one for the archive. As the file title was different Jekyll did not like the files. The problem was the file name format, so that’s why I created a separate directory.
Side Note on Reading the Archives MD Files
Bard’s help: I provide this to help you understand Jekyll logic, as well as Bard help.
Getting It To Work On MacOS
In the article about using YQ to edit FrontMatter for Hugo pages the first part worked fine, but it’s written for Linux rather than macOS so some commands failed. This is where Bard comes in.You can ask Bard to explain what parts of a line of code or a command does and it will explain it to you, and you can eventually transfer the command that is understood by one OS and get it to work with the other.
I tried this find -name “*.md” -exec yq –front-matter=”process” ‘.updated_at = now’ {} \; but it failed to work. Bard was kind enough to explain the options for me to figure out which options to use. I added the correct path, and specified that I was looking for the files with the ‘type f’ flag.
find ./_posts -type f -name “*.md” -exec yq ‘.title’ {} \; To see the title of .md files
I wanted to add these two lines to the FrontMatter of the files in the relevant folder.
I tested find ../unprocessed “*.md” -exec yq –front-matter=”process” ‘.updated_at = now’ {} \; and this works but does not make changes.
This works and updates the pages to add the updated at field to the metadata with the keyword now. The -i tells it to write to the file.
The full command is find ../unprocessed -name “*.md” -exec yq e –front-matter=”process” ‘.updated_at = now’ -i {} \; works to add updated now tag .
Implementing the Required Change
The lines that I wanted to add to the front matter were ‘layout: post’ and ‘categories: [archives]’. After the trial and error described above I tried:
find ../unprocessed -name “*.md” -exec yq e –front-matter=”process” ‘.updated_at = now’ -i {} \; works to add updated now tag
find ../unprocessed -name “*.md” -exec yq e –front-matter=”process” ‘.layout = post’ -i {} \; works to add updated now tag
Finally the command to make a permanent change was:
find ../_archives -name “*.md” -exec yq e –front-matter=”process” ‘.layout = “post”‘ -i {} \;
find ../_archives -name “*.md” -exec yq e –front-matter=”process” ‘.categories = “[categories]”‘ -i {} \;
The first line ads the layout information to the FrontMatter post and the second one adds the categories information to the posts. Instead of spending hours doing something manually I was able to find the right tools to do what I wanted within seconds.
The Process
I knew what I wanted to do. I started with a google search to see if I could find a tool with some instructions and I did. The instructions were useful, but of limited use for my setup so I used the app’s documentation to try one thing, establishing that this worked, before moving on to accomplish the task that I had set for myself-. Google Bard was able to provide me with some help, but so did chatGPT.
The value of AI tools, in my eyes, is to help us understand the code we’re looking at, but also to help us tweak it for the OS we’re using, when we get error messages. I appreciate that with AI we can ask “I’m getting this error message, why?” and it will help find an answer to the question.
If a web article had provided me with a solution that worked I would have stuck to the web page and I would have little to write about. It is because of trial and error, and using four sources to achieve the goal that I wanted to achieve, that it becomes blog worthy.
FIFAD’s second day’s documentaries were introspective. They looked at mining in Bolivia, Jean Troillet’s life of adventure and the film Sherpa.
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The peaks we see from the Festival[/caption]
Tous Les Jours La Nuit is a documentary by Jean-Claude Wicky who passed away recently. The documentary looked at the lives of Bolivian miners who have to work for up to 20 hours a day in mines where the air temperature can reach up to 50°c, where the life expectancy is between 40-45 years and where they barely earn enough to live. In this documentary he looks at some of the pictures he took when down in the mines. He tells us stories about the people who are photographed and tells us about their culture. At the end of the film he comes back to the country once again and meets with some of the miners and their communities. He donates copies of the books to individual miners as well as their community. The aim is to document the hardships faced by these workers.
Sherpa is a beautiful and powerful film because it teaches us about the Sherpa people, the Everest climbing industry and explores the social challenges posed by professions that can lead to accidental death. The documentary looks at the subject from the perspective of tour operators who are responsible for their clients as well as Sherpa. We also see how Sherpa families see the opportunities but also dangers that come from the industry around summiting everest.
The strength of this film lies in that it provides us with the discussions, sights and concerns of people on site at the time of the tragedy. In the documentary they say that as tourists want an increasing level of comfort when climbing Everest the Sherpas have to climb through the Khumbu ice fall from 20-30 times per season to take up supplies and equipment. The clients, tourists or adventurers, whichever name you prefer face the crossing just twice.
The Khumbu ice fall is a snow waterfall “cascade de glace”. On the day of the tragedy a 14,000 ton bloc of ice came lose causing an avalanche that crossed the entirety of the ice fall.
This film highlights the need for adequate social cover for the Sherpa and their families so that, because they do a dangerous job, that their families are cared for. One of the Sherpa, the leader had been approaching 22 climbs of Everest. I will write no more. Enjoy the film when you get the opportunity.
Jean Troillet is a Swiss explorer with 50 years of experience of the mountains and fourty of those on expeditions. He holds the record for the fastest climb of Everest and has climbed ten summits over 8000 metres. In the main film projected at FIFAD we see him spend a week in a tent and receiving guests to speak about previous adventures and experiences. Some time was also devoted to him providing his home crowd, people from this region of Switzerland with the opportunity to listen to personal accounts and more.