The weather was finally dynamic today. The storm warnings were flashing towards Hermance, on the French side of the lake. This gave a nice contrast between the yellow of the Colza fields and the dark threatening clouds behind.
At moments I thought that rain would begin to fall but luckily the doppler radar, and my instincs were correct, so I did not get drenched in rain or pelted with hail. At one point it did feel as though hail could be a possibility.
In the last week or two I have cycled around 150 kilometres, which isn’t bad. It could be better but single rides are around 49 kilometres. Once the ride was 49 kilometres but I saw that I could easily get an extra few meters to make it 50 so I made the effort. The second time I skipped.
My only trips into Geneva this year have been by bike, but only up from the lake, up the Via Appia and then back towards Vaud. No stops in Geneva itself so far. We are still in a pandemic and I am not going to play Pandemic Roulette, as I like to call it. I am not taking risks that are not worth taking.
If you are so inclined you can now listen to Germinal as podcasts via France Culture. Each episode is 28 minutes long so easy to slot into your day, either commuting or doing other things.
During the pandemic I spent a lot of time reading swiss news, to keep up with current affairs. Now that the Swiss government has decided to pretend that the pandemic is over I have stopped reading the RTS info site. There is not much value when they do not provide relevant news and information.
I will update this blog erratically because it’s hard to know when I will or will not be inspired. Today’s blog post is mainly as an excuse to share photographs.
Today Amer Sports announced that it has bought Sports tracker. Sports Tracker is an application that I have been using since I had the Nokia N95 8GB. I used it on symbian, iOS and Android devices over the years. What I love about this app is the way it displays information about the work out. It gives you several screens while you are exercising with the option to select which information you want to see most.
Once you arrive home and synchronise the workout with the web interface you can see the information displayed above. You can choose whether there is a topographic map, a normal map or satellite imagery. It is simple and intuitive to read.
Suunto make devices that I like using. I have used the Suunto D9 diving computer, the Suunto D4i diving computer, the Suunto Ambit 2 and the Suunto Ambit3. Suunto dive computers are small diving computers that you can wear in day to day life. When you are passionate about diving this is nice.
The Suunto Ambit family are more interesting for people who do land based sports. I used the Suunto Ambit 2 and 3 when doing via ferrata, hiking, cycling and other sports. The advantage of these fitness watches is that they have long battery life. This means that you can be active for two or three days before worrying about the battery dying. In this respect they are far better than mobile phones for fitness activity tracking.
Suunto products and Sports tracker do not communicate natively. Suunto products synchronise with movescount. From movescount you need to export the GPX workout files and import them to Sports tracker. I would like to see Suunto devices communicate directly with Sports tracker. In my eyes the best option would have been for Sports tracker to buy movescount and for them to take over the web interface for Suunto. They both provide interesting web interfaces and combining the two would have been mutually beneficial.
Time will show whether Amer Sports with links to sports tracker, precor and Suunto will come out with an interesting amalgamation of the three products/services. I look forward to finding out.
Originally I wanted to write about following route 50 from one village to Romainmôtier. I changed my mind as I created the title for this post.
Yesterday I cycled with two people on electric bikes on my normal bike. I didn’t feel that I was making that great an effort, especially since I was cycling at a relatively slow speed compared to usual. I actually felt that I was taking it easy.
Calories Burned
It’s when I looked at calories burned that I realised that what felt like an easy ride to me, was actually a huge effort. It didn’t feel that way to me, because it is normal for me to make such an effort, and I usually push myself when I ride alone.
Three Times More Calories
By riding with people with electric bikes I felt that I was having a relatively easy day. I burned three times more calories than them. It shows to what extent being fit affects how we perceive effort, but also how much energy electric bikes save.
Perfectly Within My Comfort Zone
I was surprised by the huge difference in calories burned because I felt comfortable. I didn’t feel that I was struggling to keep pace with the bikes, or struggling on hills whilst they glided with ease. That’s the beauty of cycling a lot. Effort becomes ordinary, and fitness makes electric bikes harder to justify. Why get an electric bike when you can cycle with people with electric bikes and keep up?
Cyclists and Non Cyclists Riding Together
There are two types of people. Those that invests hundreds of hours over several years to boost their cycling fitness, and those that use electric bikes, to keep up with those with experience. I would argue that the strength of the electric bike is two-fold. The first is that it encourages non cyclists to cycle and experience the pleasure of getting from A to B under their own steam, but the second is that electric bikes allow non cyclists to ride with cyclists, and get a taste of what we enjoy.
Visiting Romainmôtier by bike
Romainmôtier is a nice destination to cycle to. The road takes you through a nice quiet road in the forest. The woods are the Bois De Ferreyres. The route that I took was undulating, with some climbing and some descending, but these ondulations are not extreme like cycling up to La Dôle or up to La Rippe, so manageable.
Cycling Destination
Quite a few people cycled to Romainmôtier and I noticed that a few went into the grounds of the Abbaye and rested their bikes against the wall, before having a drink. By taking the bike parking is simplified, but as well as parking being simplified, you get to experience the landscape first hand. You’re faster than a hiker, but still get to experience the winding roads, the ups, the downs, and the freedom to stop with the bike, more conveniently than with a car.
Recommendation
If you are not a confident cyclist, and don’t want to spend hundreds of hours getting fit, then electric bikes are a fantastic short cut because they give you the freedom to explore, without the dread of having to get back, despite being knackered. Electric bikes are more forgiving than cycling without a motor. With an electric bike you just ask for more assistance and you’re comfortable.
Have you considered brushing shoes and mindfulness? I ask because as I have played with the brush, to clear dirty mud off my shoes I have noticed that this is a time consuming task that always takes several minutes, if not half an hour to complete. People stigmatise leaving a muddy trail behind you indoors, but as the last few shoe cleanings have shown, cleaning shoes is more time consuming than cleaning up after muddy shoes, especially when the mud is dry.
People show scorn and derision when they see mud, and yet mud is not bad for health. It makes thing look messy, but we grow food in it. Animals eat straight from the ground, and we use it for huts, and more. Mud is even used in spas to improve skin health and more.
Cleaning mud off of shoes made me think of mindfulness and meditation because clearing mud is a time consuming process. You brush, and bits of mud fly off the shoe, and if its dry then you wear a mask, because a cloud of dust flies off the shoes, onto your clothes, into your eyes, and if you don’t have a mask, into your lungs. It’s important to take precautions.
Brushing works very well with wet mud, as long as you use enough force. When the mud is dry, that’s when the wooden skewer comes into play. That’s when you chisel at the dirt and mud, and loosen it, to fall on the ground, wheter outdoors or in the apartment. When that mud is loose, then you brush, and then with what’s left, you chisel again. You repeat the process until the shoes are clean.
That’s why I think that it should be used as a form of meditation. That’s why I think that, rather than cleaning shoes, to avoid the less intellectual members of society from complaining, you see it as an intellectual relaxation and mindfulness exercise.
I think cleaning muddy shoes is absurd. I think it’s absurd because within seconds of going for another walk they will be filled with mud again. It takes half an hour or more to clean shoes, but the mess that results from cleaning shoes, takes seconds. The notion that cleaners shouldn’t have to clean mud is absurd, because the entire raison d’êtres of cleaners, is to make things look clean.
In the past I used to clean the house before the cleaner came, so that her job would be easier. I have a base level of mess, and every week I had to reset it to zero for the cleaner, so it has nothing to do with not respecting cleaners and their work. It has to do with wasting, or investing time. Cleaning shoes is pointless because shoes are dirty for months at a time during the wetter months.
Old buildings used to have shoe cleaners. they used to have matts so that you could wipe your feet, metal bars so that you could scrape the mud off your shoes, cubbies so that outdoor shoes could be swapped for flip flops and more. If the building has a problem with mud, then a proper mud clearing mattress would make sense.
In the 21st century everyone drives so no one gets dirty shoes. People prefer noise pollution and air pollution to walking. If road paths were clean of mud, if car drivers didn’t drive homicidally close to pedestrians and cyclists, then there would be no exposure to mud.
Ever since childhood I have had muddy shoes because of my walking and adventures, so it was normal for me to drop mud where I sat, whether at school or sometimes at work. Mud is a sign that people are fit and do exercise. Mud is a sign that people were outdoors, rather than eating Al Desko. Mud is a sign that the weather is slightly wet, and that people do not always walk on the cleanest of paths. Mud is part of life, when you walk in all weather, in all seasons, except for summer droughts. Finding mud then is a challenge.
This problem of mud says something positive about me. The rest of the building live sedentary lives. They use the cars to go to do sports, that are clean, and they come home by car. This means that they never have mud on them because that mud has fallen off either in their cars, or it was never on them.
My mud is fresh, from walking rurally and locally two minutes ago. If everyone was like me they would either see the need for better shoe cleaning options or they wouldn’t mind mud in the corridors. It’s because I am alone in my habits that I can’t play ignorant.
My current solution to this problem is a brush and a skewer in the post box. When I get home I unlock the post box, brush my shoes, skewer the more stubborn mud, and step into the building. I have to be like football players, before they return to their changing rooms. That’s where I got my idea for that type of brush.
According to Strava this was my 140th hike this year and my 83rd week of tracked activity. I don’t know why it’s only 83 weeks. My habit is older than that. When I set off, it was nice weather and warm. I didn’t set off with much because I expected the walk to be short. It was eight kilometres long. Part of the reason for this is that I did the usual detour by the Huguenot route before walking towards the Jura.
Despite the threatening clouds I was not rained on. This time, rain did not start as soon as I got home. The weather is stable for now.
For a period of time I would buy new mobile phones every six months. This was to test new hardware, new operating systems and new versions. Recently mobile phone development has hit a development wall. http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/31/white-nexus-4-available/ of a phone is excellent, if that’s the reason you chose one phone or another. That’s not how I select my phones. Battery life is. For the last two years I have looked at mobile phones and battery life and it has not improved. I like to use my phones as GPS during via ferrata trips, walks and other outdoor activities. Within an hour you are usually down to half a battery or less and by the time you arrive home the phone is dead, unless you get an external battery to recharge the device. The fashion to develop phones that are thinner and thinner with bigger screens is only making things worse. I’d love to see manufacturers once again double phone size and triple battery capacity. I’d like something thick that I could use for a day in the mountains.
Suunto have provided an alternative:
This is a device that you wear as an ordinary watch on your wrist. It has an integrated GPS, pressure sensor and a rechargeable battery. In day to day use the battery loses around 1% of battery charge per day when in normal mode and around 3% per hour of exercise. It takes just a few seconds to get the watch in to activity tracking mode, to pause, tracking, or to stop tracking all together. The data it collects is synced with a computer very easily. If you spend a little extra money you can buy accessories for cycling, for heart rate monitoring, for cadence and more.
Satellite acquisition is fast. Every time you sync the watch and charge it Geo-stationary satellite information is downloaded and synchronised with the watch. This speeds up the time it takes to have an accurate location. It takes around 4 seconds when near the location of synching and less than 30 seconds when 1-200 kilometers away. It’s fast.
The beauty of such devices is that they encourage physical activity. Online you can share your tracks with friends and you can tailor apps to the types of sports you do or goals you set. There are apps for 10k runs, marathons and many more similar activities. Part of the purpose of this watch is to be a fitness trainer and app developers have made a variety of apps for interval training, distance etc.
This watch has replaced my need for a mobile phone app to track the activities I do when outdoors. I can preserve battery life on the mobile phone until I am back on the home cellphone network or using the phone for in car navigation.
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.
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