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.
Yesterday I went on an Ingress bike tide that passed by bison. I went from Nyon to Mies and from Mies up towards Gex, and before getting to Gex, I turned towards Divonne where I met an Ingress player before heading home, as the sun was setting.
I went out in the morning, dressed warmly. It was warm. Warm weather means less clothing on the bike ride. With such a great opportunity I decided to go for a bike ride.
I set off with no destination in mind so I skimmed Nyon and went by the lake road. Cycling along the lake road is good because there are cycle paths for almost the entire length. The drawback is that the bike lanes have obstacles. In some places the paths are not cleaned as often as roads, in others, you have road works and in yet more there are cycle lanes but the transition from one surface to the other is not smooth. In one case you would have to stop and lift the bike onto the cycle lane.
As I cycled I hacked certain Ingress portals along the way, linking, and liberating others. As I was hacking one portal after Mies, someone on a bike asked me if I had a pump, so I cycled back to where I had been and lent it to them. After a few minutes, the flat was resolved and I could continue on my way.
I could have continued cycling towards Geneva, but as I saw a snicket I chose to go up the path. It took me to an unusual place. I think it is a place for camping trailer homes and fair equipment that is stored when not in use. It’s right by the Centre Sportif De Versoix. It’s a road I have seen plenty of times but never explored.
On the Route de La Viellie-Bâtie I saw bison grazing. I didn’t expect to see them there. They are usually in another field close to the motorway and airport. As I continued along this path I followed the cycle route signs and ended up on a narrow metalled path that took me by walkers.
At the end of the path, there is a barrier and I saw three or four old people making their way towards the barrier. Rather than wait for me to pass they lethargically walked through and I had to slow down and wait for them to pass. If I was in a group of pedestrians, I’d like to think we would let the cyclist pass, rather than force him to slow down or stop. When you are flâneurs what rush is there to get from A to B?
There is a fun segment to ride on a bike. It requires a short climb on the lake side of Cessy before a nice descent towards Tutegny. As there was no traffic I enjoyed riding fast along this segment.
When I got to Grilly I went along the Cycle route 7. This is an old train or tram track that has been surfaced for walkers and cyclists to go along. In theory, it’s a cycle lane but on a Sunday this isn’t the case. Between dog walkers and walkers you’re on a bike ride rather than cycling as a cyclist. I don’t mind slowing down for children on their bikes, or parents with children. I mind adults taking the entire road. I cycled slower than usual along this segment.
One or two weekends ago I was in Divonne on foot to play Ingress and field. This time I was on a bike. Playing Ingress on a bike is great. You can get from one point to another very fast and you can go down roads and other paths that are closed to cars. Instead of a 10-minute walk, it’s a two-minute ride. It’s great for hacking some portals and destroying those controlled by the opposition.
I know of people who like to play Ingress in a car, rather than on foot when the space between portals is long. I prefer the bike. With a bike, you’re having a workout, whilst playing the game. You can get between villages in an instant and so cover greater distances. This is useful when portals are spaced widely apart.
Someone was active in Divonne at the same time as I was riding through and after a few minutes of talking, and sharing keys he asked: “Can you go and link these two portals?”. With a bike such favours are quick.
By cycling frequently I increase my endurance. By combining Ingress I take different routes than I would if I was on foot, by scooter or by car. I get to know the local area and I see changes. I headed home, not because I was tired, as I have been on other rides, but because I wanted to be home before the sunset. I need to find a way to fix the front light to my bike. I could simply wait for the long summer days instead.
I stopped playing Ingress a few years ago because of how much time it requires. I have started going on Ingress walks again – a 12km path to level 13 in yesterday’s case, because I’m combining the daily walk that I would do anyway, with listening to podcasts and audiobooks, anyway.
By walking and listening to audiobooks and podcasts I am constantly learning about new things. Recently I’ve been listening to current affairs podcasts, I listened to 13 minutes to the moon, I listened to podcasts about the Swiss Watch Industry and more. Every walk is a journey in learning. I also learn about the fifty objects that made the world and more.
I also listen to books when I walk. These aren’t the most inspiring of books but four of them were free, as part of the books I get by being an audible member via Audible originals. Every walk I go on is an opportunity to learn, without feeling that I am not as productive as I could be.
According to my blog stats, I should have lead with writing about the game Ingress, which I took a break from for years, because of how much time it takes to level up, especially when you live in the countryside.
Luckily as time has progressed so has the ability to suggest and have new portals approved. A 12-kilometre walk had three or four portals. Now it has twenty or thirty. This means that during a walk in the countryside it is worth playing Ingress. Going to a polluted city is no longer required. Even country bumpkins like me can play and progress.
By having portals in the countryside it also opens up the prospect of Ingress bike rides. Last week I cycled from Nyon to Rolle, and from Rolle I went up into the vineyards and I destroyed and captured portals. My health benefited because it was a 40km bike ride with four hundred meters of climbing in between vineyards and some of these climbs are steep.
That’s where you see that cycling in Spain has its advantages. I cycled up steep inclines without suffering or worrying I wouldn’t make it. I also cycled up those steep inclines clipped in. I don’t feel comfortable with cycling up steep hills when clipped in because I’m afraid that if I lose power in my legs I will lose forward momentum, not be able to unclip and fall.
Having said this the swiss hills are nothing compared to the Cumbre Del Sol climb. As you cycle up from Mercadona there is one bit of road that is so steep that you can’t start up again. I know because I made the mistake of stopping there and had to walk a hundred meters or so before I found a portion flat enough to start up again.
In Switzerland, you almost never find such gradients on roads, for the simple reason that it snows and water freezes. Snowploughs and other machines need to go up and down Swiss roads.
The graph shows my Ingress progression from 2015 to today.
To get to level 13 I participated in an Ingress Saturday for the first time in years and I participated in two fielding events, to get one of the medals I was lacking the first time, and for the Didact Field Challenge medal currently taking place.
This month I visited 735 unique portals, discovered one portal, collected 4.7 million XM, walked 117 kilometres (low because most of my walking is without playing ingress) and more. I could bore you with the stats but I’d bore myself too. I also spent three weeks in Geneva as part of a favour for a friend so during my daily walks I got back in the habit of playing Ingress.
I don’t make time to play Ingress. I take advantage that my walks and bike rides take me by Ingress portals and play. By combining Ingress with cycling I go down many more roads than I would otherwise go down. I explore villages that I have no reason to stop in. I treat cycling as a journey, rather than a challenge to get segment personal records. I slow down., to experience the locations. It results in me having a more relaxed bike ride.
Ingress walks are also interesting because local people, who know about features that could be portals suggest them, and as a result, we see a portal off to the side of where we’re going, and we investigate. We capture the portal but we also increase our mental map of the area where we are walking.
Ingress, for a while, was a game for people who lived in town and cities. If you lived in the countryside you had to make time to play. Today Ingress can be played in short bursts and yield better results. It has been from a “chronophage” (waste of time/time consuming)activity, as french speakers would call it, to being, for lack of a better word, integral to our daily activities.
The Return on Investment of time, and distance traveled, to play Ingress, even in the countryside has decreased to the point where it is feasible to level up, without devoting half a day. One hour yields the same result.
I was going to take the scooter but it was stuck by three SUVs so I had no option but to lazily give up and go on a 10 kilometre Sunday Ingress walk. I couldn’t be bothered running up to the second floor, getting the car keys, moving the car, getting the scooter out and then moving the car back. This is especially true since it’s going to rain tomorrow.
I do have the goal of having at least one day a week without using an internal combustion engine so by the neighbours each having jeeps/SUVs I reduced my own carbon footprint. Days without internal combustion are always good.
Ingress Screengrab of missions.
My goal was to complete the Nyon by night set of missions. It’s the top line in the screengrab above. It’s a quick set of missions to complete with just a hack but portal for six portals. As the servers were not acting up or slow the time it took to do the walk was enough to complete the six missions. In the process, I captured a few portals and established a few more fields over the city.
While on this walk I listened to the You’re Dead to Me podcast by the BBC. It’s a podcast that explores history in a light-hearted manner. It has a comedian, an expert on the topic of the episode and the presenter. In the episode I listened to they were discussing Harriet Tubman, It’s the little brother of the In Our Time Podcast.
When I was playing Ingress a few years ago I didn’t track the walk with a GPS. I tracked it for this walk. You see that rather than be a large circular hike without overlaps you have the opposite. You see that I walked over certain streets in Nyon two or three times. You also see that there are thorns where I walk to the right or left of my course to get a portal or other.
It’s especially around the Centre of Nyon that you see that I walk through many more streets than usual. On a normal walk, I’d walk from A to B choosing the most direct route. In this case, I go up and down certain streets two or three times.
If you do this without trying to complete a mission it will be even more chaotic as you walk from portal to portal to hack, capture, up, field or other.
During the lull between summer sports and winter sports Ingress is a good way for some people to get out and be physically active without necessarily driving for hours.
Today I went for an Ingress Photo Walk before the rain and I eventually did have to go home because the phone was starting to get wet and there was no urgency to continue playing the game and walking.
I did spot a few things that were slightly out of the ordinary. The first thing was the mushroom beneath. I have spotted a few of these but this one did not have a bite taken out of it. They’re large and flat and you can see the corrugation, or whatever the correct term is, beneath. They have had enough moisture to grow over the last few days.
Mushroom with the Alps in the background
The next unusual site was this burned-out house. It appears to be fresh. I could see a ladder going to the first-floor window.
Burnt out house
The next unusual sighting was fountains with the sign “fountain stopped due to lack of water. You don’t often see this type of sign but due to the lack of rain of this summer, this might not be surprising. It might also be due to a lot of water being used to extinguish the fire, but I have not checked.
Fountain without water due to lack of water
The final and most interesting sight is this one. It takes us back in time to when rural meant agricultural. We see nice wooden doors, aged with time and reflecting a different age. We also see plenty of fresh firewood above as well as the small boxes below. I don’t know whether these were for charcoal or tools.
Without Ingress, I have cycled, walked and driven through this village plenty of times without exploring the small side streets. This time I did and I spotted some unusual sights. What is also of interest is that despite this village being quite small it has a lot of portals.
Initially, I thought of posting these pictures to Instagram but chose not too because I’d rather provide you with the images and their context. We need to go back to writing blog posts and sharing content from our own websites.
Ingress by bike is good when you’re in the countryside because it allows you to travel between villages faster than if you were walking and without the carbon footprint of taking the car or a scooter with an internal combustion engine. It also allows you to stop anywhere.
Distance Covered
In two hours I travelled about 30 km, which by ordinary cycling standards is slow. I like to cover that distance in about an hour and a half or less. I was able to cover at least six to eight villages and visit portals that I would not overwise visit.
New Portal Spotting
During the bike ride I noticed that there were some unmarked portal opportunities. I saw some “borne kilometrique” and border markers that were not listed. The border markers are old stone sculptures where you see VD on one side and FR on the other. In this context FR stands for France, not Fribourg. They’re spaced out regularly enough to be justified as portals.
Undulating Terrain
The landscape here isn’t flat so if you’re cycling to play Ingress you sometimes visit portals that are at the bottom of troughs or other hills. You also need to cycle upwards as much as you cycle downwards. As a result it does promote a healthy afternoon of physical exercise. When you sprint between portals you’re exerting yourself more than if you were looking down at your phone while walking.
Quadlock holder
if you’re playing ingress on a bike holding the phone in your hand is dangerous. That’s why it makes sense to use something like the quadlock bike mount. It’s easy to install on your bike and when you’re playing ingress you clip the phone on, and when you finish it you remove the phone in seconds.
In the past when I’ve played ingress I kept the phone in my pocket and I had to stop to see if I was close to the next portal or if I wanted to navigate. In this case you’re using the Ingress app rather than a cycling app and you spot the field lines and head towards the portal that you either want to capture or link from.
All in all this is a nice way of going for a bike ride somewhere familiar without getting bored by the routine or the 30th time down the same road. It’s a nice way of passing an afternoon.
People are playing Ingress and Pokemon Go in Parallel. Both games use the same geo-located points and walk the same routes. They have the same places to farm and combat. I started playing Ingress again, but only a few minutes here and there. As I play I see new faces and new people at Ingress portals. They are no longer my age or older. They are much younger, in their teens.
Yesterday as the neighbours were having a party I decided to take advantage of the excuse to go out and play Ingress. I went to the four or five portals in my village. At the village church I saw a youth drive up to it on a scooter, farm via the Pokemon Go layer and then leave. Nothing changed on the Ingress layer. No damaged resonators, no upgrades.
I like that people can play two entirely different games at the same location. I see this as the future of geo-located games. I see this as the next wave. The physical world provides the location and then the layer (or game) provides the user interface, the virtual world we interact with. With imagination more and more layers can be added. This will provide people with choice.
The next step is smartwatches and augmented reality goggles. Those who have played Ingress intensively know where all the portals are so they can put their phone away when walking from point to point. The same is probably true of Pokemon Go players. One person wrote that he uses his smartwatch to farm when walking around. Imagine if Google Glass had come out now. If it had come out now, with the Pokemon Go craze people would buy them.
At the moment to play pokemon Go and Ingress you walk in a position, that given time, will turn us in to hunchbacks. Rather than being from manual work in a field or a coal mine it will be from walking staring at a phone. I write this with a certain sense of humour. The market for Augmented reality goggles is ripe. Device manufacturers should grab this opportunity while it lasts.
For months I was passionate about Ingress. I was passionate about the game until fuel costs, parking costs, device costs and time costs were too high. When you play from level one to eight the game is fun. You progress quickly and you meet new people. You discover new places and it’s enjoyable.
As you reach level 8 and above the game becomes more like a chore. You have to walk hundreds of kilometres and you need to perform tens of thousands of actions to progress anymore. Every medal takes time. This time, when you drive from the countryside to a town or city is money.
Imagine doing something different. Imagine writing or taking pictures. Imagine reading current affairs articles or donating time to an event or charity. Imagine what you could walk away with. Imagine what achievements you could tell people about.
The biggest waste of time with the game of Ingress is farming. Farming in the game refers to hacking portals to get weapons, mods, shields and more. I find farming to be the most boring and tedious part of the game. You spend two or three hours farming and within twenty minutes your stock is empty.
Imagine if you had used that time to go for an energetic bike ride.
On Linkedin and Facebook people believe that mobile phones are making people less sociable then they would be if phones were not around. They believe that the world in which we lived before mobile phones was an open and sociable place where everyone communicated with everyone. These people are forgetting the social context that brought them Home Alone, Problem Child and other films.
Society and social interactions have always been about finding the people whom you appreciate and those whom you prefer to keep away from. In the age before mobile phones I remember watching films and cartoons where certain characters were ostracised for being different. These people were seen as isolated or loners. Society does not like these people. We see it conversation and we see it in films.
If a group of people in the physical world does not want to spend time with you, does not want to listen to you because your passions are incompatible with theirs, because your tone of voice is not right then that is their right. These people though, are not satisfied with excluding you from their conversations, are not satisfied with having their monologues and showing no interest in you. They will go a step further. They will prevent you from entertaining yourself.
One of the most common forms of entertainment when people are not fully engaged with groups is the mobile phone. Mobile phone use is stigmatised by a lot of people. Just a few weeks ago I took a chance and met with a new group. As I am an ingress player and as I had nothing positive to add to the conversation I took the opportunity to farm from two portals that were in range. As I live in the countryside Ingress “farming” is a treat and I took advantage of the opportunity.
I was listening to the conversations taking place on both sides of me. On one side it was the stereotypical “What do you do?” International community conversation and on the other they were discussing a few topics. One of these topics was music festivals. I have had a lot of fun at music festivals but I also have some views that I share with facebook friends rather than the wider world as it would see me ostracised.
As I drove home from the meeting above I got a text message and felt that it would be bad. I read it when I got home and left the group. I won’t be told how to behave by strangers. I won’t be judged in a town by a group of people who hike and do via ferrata. If you participate in both of these sports there is a good chance that you will appreciate my company. When I am in the mountains one of the cameras I carry around is out but my mobile phone is in a pocket until I get to the end of the activity or the car.
I love the paradox. The paradox is as follows. Every user is in the Google Plus community, every user converses with other players in Google Hangouts and every player meets other players in the real world. The mobile phone is a link between those who are not present and those who are present. In effect whether you converse with these people from a computer, by mobile phone or in person changes little.
Last week at the end of one operation to field over Yverdon with blue fields and another operation to field another city a phone call was made via google hangouts and we all answered and put the phones to our heads for a conference call. Instead of the mobile phone isolating people it is doing the opposite. It is uniting people.
Look at the conventional social interaction. When two normal people call each other the people you’re with are isolated for a period of time. It’s the same when people in face to face conversations start talking about mutual friends, certain types of activities and more. Sometimes the conversation that two conventional people are having is more likely to isolate the people you’re in the same physical location with. More often than not small talk is frustrating because A) you don’t know whom they’re talking about and B) you don’t know the context. As a result small talk is less polite than mobile phone use.
I love the mountains and I enjoy via ferrata and hiking when it’s with the right people. I also enjoy spending time with ingress players. With these three groups of people I feel that I can be myself. I spend no time acting and performing. They appreciate the real me. Â When I go to towns and listen to normal people small talk I get bored and I feel isolated. It has nothing to do with the mobile phone and everything to do with the difference in interests and passions.
If we don’t have the same interests and passions then don’t blame mobile phones for our lack of conversation. Either we find something we are both passionate about or we co-exist in the same space without talking much… Sometimes the inability for people to accept silence when they are not alone encourages others to be alone.
This weekend teams of Resistance Ingress agents from Fribourg, Lausanne and Geneva met in Fribourg to neutralise and capture all Enlightened portals. Some teams were on foot to liberate portals from the centre of the city. I was with the bike team and we took care of liberating all of the portals on the outskirts. It involved cycling up and down hills, a thunderstorm and being rained on.
I really enjoyed being part of the cycling team. It’s a fantastic way to get around and it’s a good way of seeing a big portion of unfamiliar cities with a minimum of effort. My team members were on electric bikes and I was on a mountain bike. This was great for me. I had to work hard to keep up with them. This was a good workout. There were moments where I generated up to an estimated 1300 watts of power for very short bursts and got the fifth best time on a segment.
I enjoyed this experience so much that I would love to do this again in other cities around here. Cycling gave me a workout and playing Ingress gave me time to recover. It seems that if you’re creating fields having a bike is ideal. You can get almost anywhere from anywhere within a city within minutes with a minimum of effort. By car this would be dangerous and impractical and on foot it would be slow and impractical.
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