Speaking Of The Next Pandemic

Byrichard
Reading Time: 2 minutes

Imagine that you break a leg, but instead of speaking about rehabilitating that leg, and getting back to doing fun things, you get distracted by the joy/misfortune of breaking your leg again. I see people worrying about the next pandemic today, but this is silly. Why would you start thinking about the next pandemic when the current one isn’t understood or declining? Instead of ignoring the current problem and focusing on the next, people should be addressing a number of key problems.

The first are disinformation and misinformation. How can you get people who are not enthusiastic about masks and vaccinations to be enthusiastic about vaccinations and masks. If you achieve this, then the pandemic takes a gigantic leap towards being finished.

The second challenge is to convince economists and businesses, that not making money for two or three months because of a lockdown to get to zero-covid is more interesting than living for two years in a pandemic. Zermatt, apparently, lost millions in reservations, due to insecurity around the Covid situation. In my opinion this should convince economists and businesses, that zero covid and soft lockdowns, in the short run, will bring big gains in the long run.

For now the dog is chasing after its tail, people are growing fatigued with half-thought out measures, and they want to see an end to the pandemic, but we are at wave five out of more. The vaccine for Beta was already not ideal for Delta, and now there is talk of another vaccine being needed for Omicron. At the current rate we will always be one variant behind, and in Europe and the US, governments are playing catch up, rather than neutralise. Covid-zero would shorten the pandemic by years, at this point. The status quo could last for years, and in that context, migration becomes interesting.

I am bored with the pandemic and I want it to be over, but I don’t see how this is possible, for as long as governments keep repeating the same mistakes over and over.

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The Futility of Blogging

The Futility of Blogging

Byrichard

I have been writing blog posts every single day for one hundred and fourty five days and rather than feel more inspired, and get a big audience, I am writing for an audience of one. Some days I am filled with inspiration and I write the blog post in twenty minutes or less. Other days it takes me an hour or two. It’s hard to write every day because some days are interesting, so there is something to talk about, and other days are dull. 


Mindful


I spend more time blogging because it’s a chance to look inwards, and outwards. it is an opportunity to spend time thinking and formulating ideas. It does count as mindfulness but only if we use the Day One app on the iPhone. On the laptop it doesn’t count. This should be fixed. 


Bickering


Twitter and Substack are in the news at the moment because they’re arguing. Substack is bringing out a “Notes” product, to fill the microblogging niche, and Musk is not happy, but Musk had Revue, before he terminated the project, so he’s arguing for nothing. Rather than excel at what it does Twitter is sliding backwards. Substack has 34 million users, and Twitter has 130 million if you look at who follows Musk, and 240 million if you look at other figures. Twitter could easily be overtaken. Twitter probably will be overtaken, as it has gone from being a source for collaboration and inspiration, to a place for bickering. 


Yesterday I posted a few tweets. Not a single reply. Twitter is now a ghost network. Those that would converse with me have left, so Twitter is losing its “stickiness”. It is losing users. 


A Bike In The Car


I put the bike in the car yesterday. It fits easily and this is great. It opens up the regions around which I can cycle, without having to cycle along some of the busier roads. I could drive to Palais and try to do some riding there, as I have been wanting to do for years. I can go to the top of the Jura and range around there. It provides me with more flexibility for more adventures. 

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The Bike Ride

Byrichard

During a pandemic one of the safest places to be is on a bike on quiet rural roads. The only people you meet are sporty so there is a higher likelihood that they are sporty.



Today I had to be respectful when passing two horses. They can often be afraid when they see cyclists, as we look strange. Bright colours, a strange machine underneath us. It can also be that the rider is also a little afraid. I always pass or let horses pass with caution.


A few bike rides ago I was told that they get spooked when they don’t know what is behind them. In this case I was in front of the horses.


I take the paths because I want to avoid dangerous roads and cars. The weather was good for cycling today.

Retiring Google One and iCloud for Photo Cloud Storage

Retiring Google One and iCloud for Photo Cloud Storage

Byrichard

Since I am planning to downgrade my Google One plan from two terabytes to 200 gigabytes as Kdrive offers me a better deal I took the time to check when, and how easy it would be to downgrade the plan. It’s actually very easy and I have a few months to back things up before downgrading.


In the process I was reminded that Google One originally had one terabyte of storage. They automatically upgraded all those with a one terabyte plan to two terabytes back in 2018 or so. We were getting twice what we paid for.


Of course we’re not getting twice what we’re paid for. We’re paying for storage we’re not using. For most of the time I have had Google One storage I have used less than 500 gigabytes of storage, out of two terabytes so a plan that offered 500 gigabytes of storage would have been closer to what I might have wanted.


The problem with cloud storage is that the more you have, the more you use, and the more you use, the more trapped you are. You’re trapped because either you need a two terabyte drive, and several days to download everything or you’re trapped paying 100 CHF per year until you invest the time it takes to download everything.


What I Do


I have the three franc apple plan and Google One. I usually backup my photos to iCloud, until I run out of space. I also simultaneously back them up to Google Cloud. When I need to make space for an OS update on an iOs device I delete apps and photos from the iPhone as they’re backed up to Google One where I have plenty of storage.


It Backfired


Rationally I would expect Google Photos and Google Drive to be stored in the same place. You use Google Photos when you want to look at photos specifically and you use Google Drive for media asset management. Unfortunatley Google doesn’t think that way, so Google Photos is completely seperate and a pain in the abs (intentional spelling) to deal with.


iPhoto and Google Photos make it very easy to backup up photos to the cloud, but not retrieve them. Whilst this is fantastic for keeping us trapped it has the opposite effect. I never upgraded iCloud to the two terabyte plan because I saw how difficult it was to retrieve photos.


With Google Photos they make it very easy to backup your photos to the cloud, and offload photos from the phone, but in so doing it’s easy to exceed the storage capacity of a laptop drive, or mobile phone drive. According to the Google Photos app on Android I have half a terabyte of photos.


What I Require


For me to see iCloud and Google Photos as viable primary photo backup solutions I want it to be as easy to download and store cloud photos locally as it is to send them to the cloud. If it’s easy to send them to the cloud but time consuming to get them back then this is not a solution because it is very easy to lose images, if we swap from one provider to another. We need backing up locally to be as fast as backing up to the cloud. We need it to be invisible and simple.


The Android Advantage


Android has a huge advantage over iOS in that we can by a 500 gigabyte micro sd card, or even a one terabyte SD card, and when we change phone we can swap the card from the old device to the new one and all our images are in the same place. With iOS devices we have to buy dedicated hardware to do the same thing, and we need to get a large external drive for the laptop to back up our images. In theory we wouldn’t need cloud storage to be more than a backup if apple allowed SD cards in iOS devices.


Using Nextcloud as a Home Alternative


That’s where Nextcloud shines. I spent a few days trying to sync all my photos from an iOS device to a Raspberry Pi running Nextcloud and it failed, mainly because I played around instead of letting it sync. The quicker, rational solution is for me to download all the photographs from Google Photos locally, and then to send them from a windows or macOS device to the Raspberry PI, make sure it’s up to date, and then sync new photos as they’re being taken.


The Saving


Without photographs I could use the 50 gigabyte option with iCloud and the 100 gigabyte option with Google One. I would save one franc per month with Apple but 80 CHF per year with Google, from 100 CHF per month, to just 20 CHF per month.


And Finally


Although it’s fantastic that we can store photos to several clouds whilst we’re on our daily walks, bike rides and more it comes at a cost, both in terms of storage and financial. By using a solution like a home based storage solution like Nextcloud we can automatically backup our photos locally before deleting them from iCloud, Google Photos or both. In so doing we go from needing an expensive cloud storage plan to a cheap one. We also make it easier to flit from the previous cheapest storage solution to the next, without worrying about data loss.


I enjoy the idea of storing photos online but I hate the idea that they’re hard to retrieve, and for this reason I want to have a locally based, automatic cloud download solution, such as Nextcloud running on a home based machine. I won’t do away with the cloud storage solution but by having the primary backup locally the cloud storage can be swapped within minutes rather than days.

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.

Kdrive and PhotoPrism

Kdrive and PhotoPrism

Byrichard

Yesterday I configured PhotoPrism to work with my iPhone photo album that was being synced to Infomaniak’s Kdrive, before then being synced to a drive that I could access via the Photoprism docker-compose config file. I then used No-ip to make that PhotoPrism instance available to the world wide web.

For several years I have had an Infomaniak Kdrive account but did not use it much, until I noticed that what costs 100 CHF with Google Drive costs 67 CHF with Kdrive. That’s a 34 CHF franc saving.

Migrating Data from Google to Infomaniak

This is interesting because of two things. The first one is that you can easily migrate your Google Photos Albums to Kdrive, and from Kdrive to your local machine without having to spend hours doing so manually. I am in the process of migrating from Kdrive to my local drive, for my Google Takeout album but this is slow.

What worked well was telling Kdrive to download the iPhone photo album from the Kdrive cloud to my local machine. I then edited the docker-compose config file but it took some trial and error before I understood how it works. It’s simple.

Telling PhotoPrism Where to Look

In my mind it should be “label: destination” but this is wrong. With Photoprism config files it is destination: label. To explain this more clearly: 

volumes:
 - "/mnt/photos:/photoprism/originals"
 - "/mnt/videos:/photoprism/originals/videos"

“mnt/photos” is the folder location and “photoprism/originals” is the label that docker and photoprism recognise. This is important because when you understand this you can set an external drive to be the photo gallery main drive, run index, and catalogue everything.

Ingesting Photos and Videos

If you export your Google Photos albums via Google Takeout, you can unzip the 2 gigabyte files, and as they unzip the files and their related JSON files are all brought together. Tell PhotoPrism that the Google Takeout folder is the import folder. After this mark “move files once ingested” and press import. PhotoPrism will then ingest all those files, delete what has already been ingested, catalogue everything, and leave you with an organised folder of photos and videos.

The indexing stage is very fast but can still take time, depending on album size.

The Next Step

There are two possible next steps. The first is to access this gallery from anywhere using tailscale, or using No-IP to access your photo album remotely. I recommend tailscale for this stage, because I haven’t seen much information about how secure PhotoPrism is so I’d rather not risk it.

I setup no-ip before telling my router about it and within a few minutes I had access to PhotoPrism and Nextcloud via No-Ip. I will write about that experiment tomorrow.

And Finally

When you’re playing with linux, and experimentating with projects like PhotoPrism you need to take time to understand how they work, to adapt them to your use case. I did this. Now I can get PhotoPrism to behave as I want it to. Now I can use external hard drives, and index photos, without having to import them. Within minutes I can plug in a drive, tell PhotoPrism where to find it, index it, and then use it.

If it had two factor authentication and more security measures then I would consider having it on the cloud, but for now I’m happy to use it via Tailscale’s VPN, as this is more secure.

From Grächen to Zermatt via the longest suspension bridge: part two
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From Grächen to Zermatt via the longest suspension bridge: part two

Byrichard

From Grächen to Zermatt via the longest suspension bridge: part two

 

When you wake up in the Europahütte and look down you can see the span of the longest suspension bridge in the morning shade of the mountains. It’s at this moment that people like me think “shame, not ideal for pictures”. My advice is to plan the day of hiking so that you arrive at the bridge when it’s lit by the sun to get good images. Plan to arrive in the afternoon. I’d be tempted to start from Zermatt if I did this hike again.

Six minutes to cross

When I crossed the bridge it took about six minutes slowing down occasionally to look at the view. It’s stable and hardly swings. I was able to walk with a camera in one hand without holding on to the cable. It’s nothing like via ferrata monkey bridges and others. If you’re used to via ferrata bridges then this one is tame. The Ladders of Death and other via ferrata are more impressive. I’d compare it to the bridge above Saillon but much bigger.

You can see that the bridge is solidly anchored into the mountain on both ends. It’s a mere 86 meters off the ground and when you walk out and look down you can see the tops of trees like a paraglider would see them. It’s a nice taste of the world as seen from a paraglider.

A Walk in the woods

Most of the hike on the other side is through pine forest with some exposed bits where you can look up and see a glacier and streams flowing as well as waterfalls. At one point you pass above a nice gorge before heading back into the trees. This part of the hike is comfortable compared to the previous day. It undulates less. There is one moment where the trail is covered by reinforced concrete to protect hikers from rock fall. There are two tunnels through which to walk. Between the two tunnels, you can see damage created by large boulders. In one case the reinforced concrete is buckled. at another section the concrete has been pushed down vertically. For a brief moment you go back into the trees and head upwards again. Saplings have had time to grow in this section, implying that rockfalls have not occurred for a few years.

There is a prairie with warnings of active rockfall and at this segment of the hike bunkers have been dug into the side of the mountain. If you hear or see rocks falling you can shelter here until the danger has passed.

Zermatt

I feel that Zermatt should have many more solar panels on roof buildings than it has. After decades of electric cars and horse drawn carriages you’d expect them to seize the opportunity to generate and use their own power.

 

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