The Bison Of Geneva
The Bison Of Geneva and calves
I didn’t get too close to the fence and I stayed on the bike. When I have been on foot they have threatened to charge me. Usually I see them from far away. This time I was close.
Today I saw a strange machine so I stopped to watch it in action. It went over a pile of manure and flipped it around to get air through the pile to help with the forming of fresh manure to spread on fields shortly.
Nextcloud is an open source file sharing solution that has iOS, MacOS, Android, Windows and Linux apps. You can install it via a docker container, natively or via a number of other solutions. For my experiment I installed via Docker on Windows but haven’t done anything with it, and with [Nextcloudpi](https://nextcloudpi.com/). The latter is an ISO image that you can download and install to an SD card using the Raspberry Pi Imager.
It’s easy to take dozens, or even hundreds of pictures in a single day on the mobile phone but it’s a nuissance to download them all locally so you usually use iCloud, Google Photos or some other solution. This is great, for as long as you have enough space on your phone. The moment iOS or Android stops offloading your photos from your device you’re in an annoying situation. Uploading photos to cloud services is painless. Retrieving them is a nightmare, for two reasons. The first reason is that you need to have enough storage locally to download all those files. When you’re on a laptop storage is at a premium.
You could use an external hard drive but it may take days, or even weeks to download all of your files. This means that you need to keep your machine plugged in and downloading for as long as it takes to download those files. That’s where Nextcloud comes in. When it’s working correctly it will download files from your phone, either as you take them, or when you choose to upload them.
It allows you to store and share photos, including encoding and decoding of video files, as well as preparing preview files, reading RAW image files and more. It allows you to have contexts, calendar, time tracker, apps like GpxPod, Tasks and more. It also provides you with an RSS reader, video player, and audio player.
With the photo app you can use facial recognition and other AI tools. As images are added to the galleries it checks for their location and adds them to a map as you would with Google Photos and iCloud. It also gives you the option of adding an exif reader to get more info from your saved files. With the GpxPod app you can download walks, hikes, runs, bike rides and planned routes and view them on the screen. I have yet to play with it properly.
– upload 19,000 images at once. It will overheat the device
– reboot the machine. Having a different ip will get nextcloudpi.local to fail.
– ensure that your machine is called nextcloudpi.local
– use “sudo nano /var/www/nextcloud/config/config.php” to enter the config file and ensure that the ip address is listed. It needs to see that the current IP is a trusted one.
– Go from one wifi access point to another. I found that if I go from the living room wifi to the bedroom wifi it loses sight of the server and fails.
– Allow the Pi to Overheat. If the Pi reaches above a certain temperature the Pi will begin to fail. You need a fan if you’re playing with Nextcloud on a pi, especially when synchronising tens of thousands of pictures.
The system is new to me so I’m micromanaging it as it tries to get through thousands of files. Once it’s up and running it will be invisible and that’s the beauty of such a system. Once the Pi has its own fan it will no longer overheat and if I provide it with WiFi and Lan it should be accessible locally whether on one wifi network or the other.
With some network storage solutions you have the disks and the LAN interface within the same box, and if one fails you might lose access to the drives. With this solution you can attach an SSD or other hard drive to the Pi. If the Pi fails you just replace it. Once everything is running smoothly I would have two drives. The primary drive would be in constant use, and the second drive would serve as a backup.
It’s also low cost. A raspberry pi is cheap, and so are micro SD cards. Mobile phones are usually 128, 256 or 500 gigabytes. With a single SD card you can backup your phone every time you get home, as it syncs the most recent files.
If I was not synchronising a huge backlog of photographs this solution would be up and running. It’s because I’m trying to backup the images that are on my phone that there are teething problems. I edited the config file to recognise nextcloudpi4.local and the two ip addresses the device is currently on. I have it on wifi and lan because I want to see if I can access it from either wifi. If that is the case then I have succeeded and the last step will be to have the Pi in a case with a fan.
I love to walk and cycle every day. I love to walk from home and not touch the car. This morning I refuelled the car and it cost 90 CHF for 44 litres or so. Every single time I refuel the car I get a shock. Petrol is expensive, and yet people drive every day.
Usually I go for five days per week without touching the car. I walk from home and back. This saves on driving time, parking and petrol. I come up against a clear frustration.
When I drive by some communes and villages, for example between Gingins and Cheserex, or between Reverolle and Hautemorges I see a wide pedestrian band where people can walk, far from cars. Imagine the luxury of walking two or three meters away from a road, rather than in the wet, muddy grass.
Yesterday on a stretch of road that is no more than 700 meters long I had three, not one, not two, but three cars that drove too fast, and too close. They did this without needing to. If a car is coming towards them, and they can’t avoid me, then I will walk into the grass, because there is no choice in the matter.
Yesterday, a nun, I believe, a white van driver, and a third person drove too fast, too close, without driving to the other side of the road as they passed me. European law says that people must give one and a half meters between cars and cyclists, but also, by empathy, with pedestrians. These people don’t. They just drive on top of you. They want to scare you off the road, and it worked. I did step into the mud when one homicidal person endangered my life.
When I drive I always treat pedestrians and cyclists as I would like to be treated. I give them one and a half meters, as required by law, but I also slow down to a humane speed, as I pass them. I don’t want to intimidate people. I want to show empathy. The more people walk, the fewer cars are around, and with fewer cars, so traffic decreases.
I have been frustrated with how cars behave around pedestrians and cyclists for years, so it can’t just be fatigue and overtraining. I still think that fatigue and over-training play a role. If I was less fatigued, if I was going for shorter walks, then the selfish behaviour by car drivers wouldn’t be so toxic. Of course it’s not just physical fatigue.
Often when I hear a car I go half a meter to a meter into the grass, or even muddy fields, to give space for cars to pass. They thank me but I very often want to flip them the bird. I’m not giving them space, out of empathy. I’m giving them space because I am tired of having cars driving too fast too close, on agricultural roads. It’s not that these people are fast on main roads. They’re fast on agricultural roads, where cars should not be. There is nowhere you can walk, in Switzerland without escaping from cars.
There are two awful roads, for pedestrians. On one road there is plenty of space to walk, but rather than place a walking path they put bushes, to stop people from walking. This forces people to walk on a busy road where people are driving above the speed limit. If you walk on the foot path you have your back to the homicidal drivers.
On the other road there is plenty of space where a foot path could be added, for pedestrians to walk comfortable between two villages, without being exposed to homicidal car drivers. Yesterday on one bit of road three cars in a row drove too fast, and too close. If I slipped and fell, or fainted, they would run me over.
I saw a woman walking down that road with a pram yesterday. There should be safe options for people walking between villages.
With a small investment farmers could make walking between villages more pleasant. We could walk away from busy roads and farmers could benefit financially from turning a metre wide band of land into a walking path for pedestrians and cyclists. The space is there, if only someone had the vision.
The walks around where I live are nice, but there are two roads that feel really dangerous, especially when the grass is long, and after a few hours of heavy rain. It’s unpleasant to walk half a meter from where people are driving at 80 kilometres an hour. It might not be intimidating for the cars, but it is for pedestrians. I want car drivers to be aware that they can drive more empathetically.
Over the last two evenings I have been attempting to read nested data. I have tried to parse the data and other methods but without success. I have browsed the web to try to find solutions but for now I am getting stuck. Learning is also about trial and error, and knowing where to find the right information. For now I am lost. At the end of this process I will be more self-sufficient.
Learning by watching courses is good, and we do make progress, but it doesn’t require us to think about problems in the same way. We learn to follow instructions but not problem solve, and that’s what I want to learn. So far I have spent two hours on this specific problem, and I could easily remove a few lines and it would no longer be nested. I will persevere.
Since I am trying and failing to accomplish what I am trying to accomplish I am now using comments to mark what I still need to achieve, whilst looking for solutions and ideas.
I have also continued studying prototypes, factories and more. I see some overlap between this topic and CSS. For those with experience and time both allow for more depth and complexity than is comfortable when you are starting out. The short version is that with prototypes and factories you can cut down on the lines of code in a project, making it easier to read, and lighter.
It is now the weekend but the pandemic is still alive and well. Governments are deciding not to do anything to stop the spread, preferring to tell people that for vaccinated people it’s no worse than the flu, whilst ignoring the fact that children from 0-18 have not been vaccinated. There is a certain degree of indifference by governments that is hard to observe. They expect the next few weeks to be difficult, and that’s as far as their sense of responsibility goes. It is a challenge not to be disappointed by this attitude.
The Microlino is made by the same people that made the trottinette that I loved getting around with when I was unable to drive for a month due to overtaking a slow moving vehicle where I had plenty of visibility.
The beauty of the Microlino is that it’s a small light weight car, where you get in from the front of the car, rather than the sides. The other nice thing about the Microlino is that it has a roof that opens. You can stargaze with your lover, if you have one, or enjoy the fresh air in the warmer months.
The two things I noticed immediately is that the steering feels heavy, but also that the brakes feel sluggish. In the case of the steering weight you forget about it within seconds. This is very easy to get used to. What does get some getting used to is the braking. It feels slower and more sluggish than with other cars so I felt the need to start braking sooner. I did find that I always stopped where I wanted to. I think this is the effect of driving modern cars where braking is really aggressive. This car is gentle. I could think of a better term, I’m sure.
The boot is large enough for your week’s shopping, but too small for a bike. the volume is good, so you can transport things for hikes that are within driving range of the car.
Getting in and out of the car is fun. It is also fun that you have to move the “love seat” as I’ll call it, forwards and backwards, to suit your arm and leg lenghths, to drive, and press the pedals comfortably.
I call it a love seat because it’s a bench and there is nothing to separate the driver from the passenger, hence why it could be called a love seat. It’s a car that encourages a more intimate driving experience than most. At the start of a day of hiking this would be nice, but at the end of a day of hiking this might be sub-optimal.
I personally really like this, car, especially now, in the pandemic era. Now that I don’t drive long distances to do various sports I don’t need a petrol car with a long range. I need something to get me to the recycling centre, and to go shopping. The adventure side of life was killed when people decided to live with COVID, rather than eradicate it.
I like this car because it’s unique, because it’s eccentric, and because it has character. Most cars are dull and boring. This one attracts people’s gaze, without being a friend of carbon dioxide and global warming. It’s electric, so you never have to go to a petrol station again.
Last week it was comfortable and warm so it was tempting to go cycling. This week it has gone back to being cold. Yesterday it was cold and windy and today was cold but sunny. I went for my usual walk but rather than listen to a podcast I watched TikTok videos as I walked at full speed. I am so used to the paths that I do not always need to pay attention.
The paths are dry. It hasn’t rained in days. The rivers are lower than they’ve been in a while and in theory river walking may be possible once again, as long as you don’t mind cold feet.
What was out of the ordinary today is that I saw people walking through fields on two separate occasions. On one occasion it was a trio of older people and their behaviour made no sense to me, for the simple reason that you can very easily walk around the field, and that the field has crops on it. If you’re going to walk through a field make sure that it has been harvested, that it is fallow or that no cows are using it.
I later saw a duo of people doing the same thing on another field and this does seem odd. Why would two groups of people have the same discourteous behaviour of walking over a crop?
Rather than walk along the usual routes I cut through the forest, walking through leaves, over dead branches, between trees and more. I filmed the progress I made. At the moment walking through forests is easy because none of the undergrowth is out yet. Walking between trees is easy, and so is navigating. When the undergrowth grows in spring such explorations will no longer be possible. That is when cycling will be more fun. I look forward to the cycling season starting properly once again. I went to be on the bike, and to explore. I also want to feel that something is finally changing.
I saw a Trio of older women and I thought that they may be having adventures like the three men in Last of the Summer Wine. A trio of friends going for mischievous adventures in nature during their afternoon walks.