Today I practiced vocal German and I found it relaxing compared to being with people in person. This pandemic sees the opportunities almost impossible.
When I played with voice recognition on the laptop it failed but when I use it on the phone it works fine. Practice speaking with a phone, when you’re in a quiet room.
Today we might as well speak of blue skies and autumn leaves because that is what we’re facing. The Septemper/Autumn grey clouds, fog, and cold are not here yet. Instead we have warm sunny days. The habit of walking one and a half hours a day is perfectly safe, with such a stable weather system.
I have two Sigg water bottles, the half litre and the one litre. For months or even a year they lied dormant due to the pandemic and attempts to clean them. I used the tablets but I didn’t like the taste so I left them aside. Yesterday or the day before I decided to take a sponge and clean the exterior and mouth of the bottles. That’s when the taste I expect from these bottles came back.
Previously I had cleaned the bottles with a brush but that didn’t work. Using a sponge did. It is something so simple, and yet I did not consider it. If you don’t like the taste of a bottle try cleaning with a sponge. My one litre bottle lives inside a neoprene sleeve so although it has been smashed about over the years it still has no scratches on it, despite hiking, climbing, via ferrata, conferences, work and more.
Today I went through the motions of tracking the walk and I thought I had started the tracker but when I went to stop tracking as I arrived home I noticed that either I forgot, or I pressed the wrong button. Before the pandemic, and even slightly into the pandemic I would have been annoyed not to have a perfect record of my walks and activities. One and a half years into a pandemic I don’t care. I stopped using Strava because I grew tired of seeing who was ignoring common decency by not self-isolating locally.
I also do the same activities day after day, for years in a row. It isn’t interesting. There is no mystery. I also have no link with people doing group activities. People who do city things have returned to their old habits, but I see that group sports have not returned. The pandemic is still too volatile for things to be as they were.
Although I forgot to “track” my walk it is still logged as steps, heart beat and more. The effort is logged, but it’s not visual.
Some of us are confined by freedom. By this I mean that as society is opened up, as people are told that they don’t need to wear masks, that they don’t need to self-isolate and that they don’t need to show covid passes, so the freedom of others is taken away. During a pandemic there are two types of people. Those that hear the word pandemic and think “I need to self-isolate, wear a mask, and vaccinate.” and the others who think “Why should I do what the state tells me to do? I am my own person.”
Quarantines have already been shortened so people who could be contagious are allowed to move through society freely. At the same time there is discussion about not requiring people to wear masks, returning to work and not requiring covid passes.
If this was in a vacuum we could say “well, let’s see what happens.” except that we are not. We see that Denmark has gone from the BA-1 wave to the BA-2 wave. We see that in England, France, Switzerland and the US the number of sick children is going up. We also see that hospitalisations are increasing. If we look at a map of Europe now with levels of spread of the virus then the whole of Europe is dark red with serious Covid outbreaks.
This is the worst possible time to reopen society, because the virus is already virulent, and governments are not trying to contain it. All of the indicators above show that we have a choice to make for this spring and summer. Do we self-isolate and spend a third summer in solitude, or do we play pandemic roulette, hope for the best, and see whether we fall sick? I would prefer not to play pandemic roulette personally, so, for now, the summer will be solitary.
Recently I have been listening to plenty of Late Night Linux podcasts. I like them because they’re half an hour long, the adverts are half way through the show, and in general I don’t feel that they’re filling time to fill one and a half hours of podcast time.
Plenty of other podcasts last for an hour and a half or more, which if you listen to one episode a week is okay, but I don’t do that. I find a podcast that I like and I listen to the most recent episodes and then I listen to them in chronological order. This takes a lot of time, but it also provides me with an evolutionary appreciation of how things have changed.
I want to listen to them in chronological order because I feel that they provide me with a timeline of what changed, when, and how people reacted to those challenges, as well as how this made them feel.
There are occasions where I skip episodes, either because I don’t like the topic, especially for Linux Extra. In one case I got annoyed because they spoke about “We weren’t taught A in school” or “we weren’t taught b in school”. I was never taught how to use a computer. I learned by trial and error, after trial and error, after trial and error. I learned by RTFM if I got stuck, but also by experimenting. I only RTFM if I get stuck.
I have paid for Lynda.com which then became Linkedin Learning and I have paid for courses on Udemy and Coursera but that’s courses that I chose to study, rather than formal tuition.
I was never taught how to use Final Cut Pro, or Adobe Premiere, or Avid Media Composer. I learned by having a PC with Adobe Premiere on my computer at home. I learned to edit tape to tape on a DHR-1000 editing deck. I learned to edit with FCP because that’s what we had at uni. I don’t remember whether we had it in Weymouth and Harrow, or just Harrow. It’s two decades ago.
With Avid I spent half a day trying to figure out how to do a simple edit. I eventually figured out that you mark in where you want a video to end and out where you want the next one to start, cut, and then your edit is done. It’s the type of editor where you do everything with keyboard shortcuts so it’s very fast, once you learn how to use it.
That’s why I hate the notion of “I wasn’t taught it at school so I don’t know how it works. I experimented with Linux in the 90s because Windows was constantly getting virused, so I eventually switched to Linux, and then windows, to linux, to mac, and then back to Linux.
In Autumn of this year my Mac will no longer be supported by Apple. It already isn’t supported for Final Cut Pro X. I can use an older version, but no longer the latest versions.
Recently I heard plenty of mentions of NixOS in one podcast so I installed and experimented with the OS and it took a while for me to be able to do anything but eventually, yesterday, I got PhotoPrism to work. I installed mysql/MariaDB and PhotoPrism, but I had to setup mariaDB to play nicely with PhotoPrism. I had to do that part manually. Eventually an old HP laptop running NixOS was running PhotoPrism and I was able to transfer photos from my mobile phone to the laptop and it felt extremely fast, compared to the same experiment on a Pi 4 and Pi5.
In the past when listening to other podcasts I have found that they are more enjoyable. They’re shorter. They’re edited, and they have fewer adverts. As you get up to date with podcasts adverts become longer, and more intrusive. I stopped listening to a few podcasts just because I got so tired of listening to adverts. I could skip them, but when you’re walking you don’t want to skip the first minute or two.
At the moment I find that I learn a lot from a variety of podcasts about Linux, and if they’re half an hour long then that’s perfect. My walks are one and a half hours long. It’s because they have less time for off topic chatter in short podcasts.
I am using the Trevolution Ultralight Daypack at the moment. It weighs 120 grams and folds small enough to fit in a jeans or jacket pocket for when you’re not using it. It also has a volume of 21 litres but I would not use it to carry 20 litres or kilos. It has no zips or moving parts. It has two side pockets, one for a water container, and the second for the phone charger. The main pocket is accessed through the top and uses a folding system. You fold at least three times and then cloes the clips.
It also has zip cord at the front for a helmet or other voluminous object you might want to carry. I walk every day so it’s nice to have a light bag that you can forget you’re carrying. It’s also nice to have the flexibility to fold it away and forget about it until you need it.
Your first thought when you see the image is that it was taken at an angle, clumsily, and without any attention. In reality it’s the hay bale that was placed in the wrong place and rolled down to hit a pole.
The weather was good today. It was warm, it was dry. It felt like a summer’s afternoon or evening, as is clearly evidenced by how many people are out doing things in the evenings. It is a great day to spend time outdoors.
Today I experimented with the Camelbak chute system to see how it differed from the Eddy+. The two differences are that
A)It’s half the price
B)It’s a very quick system for drinking
If water is plentiful then the chute is good, but if you’re trying to conserve water try the Chute system.
A few years ago I bought a 256 gigabyte iphone because I wanted more space and for a long time it was great because it meant that I had plenty of room to grow into. The issue comes when you get to over 200 gigabytes of data stored in iCloud because you go from 3 CHF per month to 10 CHF per month. You go from 36 CHF per year to 120 CHF per year. That is a big increase.
I wouldn’t mind paying this much, if it was easier to retrieve this data. Once data is on iCloud and plenty of services it is a nuissance to retrieve. If you think “I can expand it for a few weeks then you’re right, you can. It’s when you want to recover the data that you will get blocked. iCloud doesn’t allow a photo library to be spread across multiple drives, so either you have everything on a single volume, or you’re trapped paying for decades to come.
Now for the simple solution I hadn’t considered until last night. A lower capacity iPhone. With a 256 gigabyte phone you need ten terabytes of storage to backup the entire phone, but with a 126 gigabyte phone you sneak under the 200 gigabyte limit with ease. The cost of a new phone is relatively high, but consider that you’re saving 81 CHF per year, and several hundred francs on a mobile phone.
Next time you consider an iPhone consider the size of the phone compared to your laptop hard drive, as well as the cost of cloud storage and backup. The bigger the phone, the larger the yearly tax. Keep it to 200 gigabytes and the tax is 39 CHF per year, expand it to two terabytes and it’s 120 CHF per year. Retrieving the data is not straight forward. I will stick to smaller capacity phones, to avoid hitting the 200 gigabyte limit in future.
I’ve spent around twelve hours editing today and it’s finally getting to resemble something, as I’d like it to be. It’s involved two days of video capture of a variety of material from a number of events around Europe in particular. It’s starting to be a good edit.
Any creative person will tell you that the hardest part of the work is not the work itself but finding the inspiration and finding how to tell the story the most efficiently. If I understood the brief correctly then the edit I’ve done should be well accepted. I should find out by tomorrow morning normally.
I love the editing phase because it’s one of the more creative phases. You’ve got all the material and it’s a matter of sifting through it, finding the best and then applying it to the finished product.
If I get good feedback then I’m looking forward to tomorrow.