The COVID-19 Dynamic European Restriction Map

Byrichard
Reading Time: < 1 minute

COVID-19 rules, restrictions and regulations are dynamic and changing much like drone rules. In Europe before you fly you should visit the local flight rule maps, to see where current restrictions are.

Information ranges from “You need third party insurance with coverage for up to two million in damages” or “In a town you are allowed up to this altitude, outside of a town, to that altitude, and in these regions you have a military flight corridor, thus a flying ban.

COVID-19 is a rapidly evolving situation so it would make sense to keep a Google Maps layer up to date with current information.

This information could be

  • prevalence of the virus
  • whether the number of cases is rising or declining
  • whether there are barriers or restrictions to entry
  • What are the curfew hours
  • What establishments are authorised to open
  • Where are the closest COVID-19 testing locations
  • Where are the closest Vaccination points
  • What is the hospital bed situation for COVID-19 situation

The demand for such a service is currently world wide and long lived. The motivation for such services may last for at least a few more months, if not seasons and years.

Google, Apple, Facebook, and maybe even Amazon, should work on creating such a service.

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One Hundred and One Posts with Hugo

One Hundred and One Posts with Hugo

Byrichard

I was using Day One to blog but I found the process slow and clunky. I then switched to writing blog posts with VIM and that sped me up by a lot. I then switched to Hugo and VIM. Now I use VS Code with Front Matter to generate the pages, and then wrote plenty of posts using VIM. Now I’m still using FrontMatter CMS but with VS Code without touching VIM.

I didn’t fall out of love with VIM. I ran out of writing inspiration so I spend an hour or two trying to think of something to write, and by the time I decide to start writing I have chosen not to use an app that is surplus to requirement.

I really like blogging with VS Code, FrontMatter, git, and git ftp push because I don’t need to login anywhere, I don’t need to wait for wordpress admin panels to load, or other slow and clunky things to happen.

Fast and Efficient

The Workflow

  1. Create the Front Matter with FrontMatter CMS
  2. Add the tags
  3. Write the blog post
  4. Proofread
  5. version control with git
  6. Hugo – to create the publish files
  7. cd public – add the publish files to git
  8. git ftp push

And you’re done. It might sound like a lot of things to do but it’s actually very quick and efficient. The faster you can type, and the faster the whole process goes.

Slow and Clunky

WordPress

With WordPress you need to go to the URL for the blog, load wp-admin, load the new post page, write the post, add the image, add the tags, add the category and then publish. All of this takes time. You also need to scroll and navigate to the right parts of the right pages. WordPress now feels slow and clunky, especially with all the bloat wear that has been added.

And Finally

I much prefer Hugo to WordPress now but I still use both, due to legacy. I no longer use WordPress tags. The Fediverse takes tags and turns them into hashtags and I have a deep hatred of hashtags. On web forums and well designed sites you have threads and categories.

Hashtags made sense, in the age of Twitter by SMS, but Twitter by SMS died years ago. Bandwidth is also no longer an issue so the practice of using hashtags is obsolete. I can’t control mastodon instances, to display tags as I think they should be tagged, so I don’t bother with them on WordPress. It saves me five or so seconds and it avoids frustrating me when I see my posts on the Fediverse.

If you want to get an idea of WordPress scale on the Fediverse follow the hyperlink. 46,000 authors, 2.9 million posts and 2460 wordpress instances, so far.

Waiting For Progress Bars To Be Full

Waiting For Progress Bars To Be Full

Byrichard

There was a time when I spent eight hours a day transferring footage from Beta SP, DV, DVcam, DVCpro and other tape formats to a digital format to be part of a media asset management system. A 63 minute tape would take at least 63 minutes to digitise. Back in those days we moved video files in real time.

When streamling live content I would wait for several hours for the program to end. I would watch basketball, curling and bobsledding, biathlon, but also NATO press conferences and more. You had to be there, ready to react if there was a problem. This was before YouTube streaming standardised things. I would set the akamai end points and start the encoders and recording, and then wait.

At the same time I would often have to wait for files to be transferred from the local computer to an FTP account. Sometimes this would add an hour or two to the shift.

Later on it was waiting for data to move from one drive to another. When I left for my walk today it said that I had about four hours left. Now it tells me that I have about two hours left. On a mac two hours means less than three hours and four hours means less than five. You add one hour to get a better estimate of time remaining.

On a mac there is a way to get a more granular view of how fast files are moving between drives. Right click and chose get info for the source, and the destination folders. You can then watch as data is moved between the two. When the transfer is finished you can check whether the byte number from Folder A is the same as for Folder B. If it is then you can assume that the transfer was a success. If it isn’t you can spend time finding why there is a difference. In this scenario I am not deleting anything so I will check later.

What I am doing now is time consuming but once I finish moving data from this drive it will be much faster. It’s slow because there are no duplicates yet. Once there are this process will go much faster. That’s the stage I am impatient for.

And Finally

Digitising footage or moving data from one drive to another is sometimes time consuming and boring, as is the case at the moment, but it’s because most of the work was done over the last two weeks. Now it’s about backing up that work. Tomorrow or Sunday I will start consolidating all that data and that will require me to be attentive again.

When I duplicate the eight terabyte drive I will use a Pi 4 for the task. I will set it to run and check it when it’s done.

Sticking with the Old or Trying New Things
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Sticking with the Old or Trying New Things

Byrichard

Yesterday I went for a half hour drive to do a favour, but in arriving where I had to do the favour I found that people were deeply focused and did not want to be interrupted so I went for a walk. I didn’t swap to the hiking shoes that were waiting patiently in the car. I wore my “recycled” shoes instead. I eventually regretted this because the ground that was frosty, also had deep puddles of water and I had to walk through them. Two or three times my feet got wet. While getting my feet wet I was also listening to a Linux Podcast, episode 56 of Linux After Dark and they were discussing whether people like to adopt a system and stick with it, or whether they like to experiment and try new things constantly.


I feel that way about watches at the moment. For plenty of people watches are like televisions. “I haven’t owned either for decades, my laptop and ipad are enough.” For years I was without a watch, and without a TV. As a student I never felt the need. It’s only because people had spare televisions that I ended up with one. I never bought one for myself.


Since I bought myself one or more raspberry pies I have been experimenting with various instances, to see how to set them up quickly, and experiment with implementation and more. In the process I am learning skills that I had not experimented with in years. One of these is to flash a USB key with a version of Linux and rebooting a PC from the USB key to run linux. It worked so well that now I am fighting the desire to install Linux over Windows and have the windows machine become a Linux machine.


Watches


Suunto, Casio, Apple and Garmin make watches, and each one tries to quantify the wearer, so it feels as though the wearer must wear all three or four brands to get complete data for all four platforms. but to do this makes us eccentric. The simplest workaround is to track with one device, and manually update all the others.


Whether you wear a Casio, Garmin, Apple Watch or Suunto is also about something else. User Interface. The Garmin Instinct and Casio g-shock watches look tough/solid, while the Apple Watch and Suunto Peak 5 look more fragile, more elegant. The other difference is that the Garmin watch is solar powered and can last for weeks in summer, whereas the Apple Watch and Suunto Peak five can last for a day, or several. The Garmin watches can last for years, by default, because they use mobile phones to do the hard work. They just count steps and time.


Personal Technical Debt


I like the idea of Personal Technical Debt. The concept exists for IT and programming. Writing code is one thing, but updating it later on is a challenge. To give a simple example, if you write a static website by hand then every page that navigates to other pages, needs to updated every time a new page is added. If you use Hugo or another static website generator you see this with every build. My blog is both on wordpress, and as a static site. As a wordpress blog it’s slow and clunky to update because of all the bloat wordpress has added over the two and a half decades that it has been around.


In contrast with Hugo you write you page in markdown, add the categories and tags, run “hugo” and fifteen seconds later the site is ready to publish via GIT FTP. I spent months updating my static site to PHP before being sidetracked by Hugo and blogging.


The New Machine Routine


A while ago if you started to use a new machine you would need to log into all your sites, across several browsers. When I did this once or twice a year it felt slow and uncomfortable. Now that I slide between web browsers fluidly the time it takes to be up and running in Chrome, Firefox or other, is a few minutes. This is because my personal technical debt is low, and because it has become routine to slide between browsers, whether different versions of Chrome, Firefox or other.


With the Raspberry Pi Imager app you can instantiate a new server on an SD card within minutes, and it will be ready for you to log in via SSH whilst connecting to wifi with no user intervention. This is great because you can setup a headless system in a location with no monitor or keyboard.


Devops


When I started following courses on JavaScript, Ruby, Ruby On Rails and more I would get instructions on how to setup an environment and I wasn’t familiar with the process so I had to follow the instructions attentively. By trial and error, as well as repetition the process became relaxed.


I find that, as I become more comfortable with doing things from the command line, I find docker walk throughs more frustrating than helpful. This is because I want to get instructions on how to setup the environment fully, without the overhead of docker running in the background. On a 2016 mac book pro docker slows down the computer.


And Finally


When we do something two or three times we need to follow the instructions when we get stuck. If we set the time on a casio watch several times then it becomes habit. If we implement Linux instances on SD cards and experiment until we break things, then we know how to do things, without breaking them, in a production environment. If we change web browser once every few months or years it can take a while. If we do it several times a month it becomes second nature. That’s what experimenting is about.

Of Casio, Suunto, Garmin and Apple

Of Casio, Suunto, Garmin and Apple

Byrichard

These four brands create watches. Casio creates rugged watches with batteries that last for a decade or more, and pair with mobile phones to track walks and more. Suunto and Garmin have fitness/sports trackers that measure activities, whether sailing, climbing, running, walking, cycling, scuba diving or more. Apple in contrast creates fragile, mediocre watches that cost as much as mid to high range watches and yet their battery lasts for one day, if you’re lucky. I even heard that Apple watches with 4g last half a day between charges. Charging a watch twice a day is unacceptable.


The article that triggered this reaction says that the Apple Watch encourages people to spend more on smartwatches, as if this was a good thing. It isn’t. These are throwaway products. The type of people that would buy an apple watch plan to change it every two years.


If you pay 800 USD for a watch I’d expect to keep it for a decade or more, not two watch generations, two years.


I might have bought two or three devices recently and the one that I am happiest with is one of the cheapest options. The Garmin Forerunner 45s. For 100 CHF you have a GPS sports tracker that tracks your runs, walks, bike rides and more. The battery does last for three or four workouts before needing a charge but it gives you all the functionality you need, for a fraction of the price, and it’s small.


I don’t want the Apple Watch to be dominant, because I see it as a crap product, and I feel that such a product pulls down the rest of the market. I slid away from Suunto because of WearOS and I gravitate towards Garmin because it still has proprietary software for the moment. I don’t want a smart watch. I want a sports tracker. I also want it to be affordable.

Experimenting with the Photoprism App

Experimenting with the Photoprism App

Byrichard

While playing with Nextcloud I found a serious flaw. If you add images via the command line from one directory to another, and then delete them, then their ghosts remain in the timeline. By ghosts I mean references to these files in the CMS and there is no quick way of removing them. You need to remove them individually and that’s time consuming. That’s why, when I was trying to find a solution I came across Photoprism.

Photoprism is a photo management app like Lightroom, Google Photos, iPhoto and plenty of other app. It is open source and can be installed quite easily using this Raspberry Pi Solution. With less trial and error than with Nextcloud I was able to get it up and running within an hour or so.

My first try was wwith a slow 16gb card but that took ages so I thought that I would set another card, this time with 512 gigabytes of storage going overnight. In the time it took me to heat dinner the card was ready for me to experiment with and my first impressions were good.

I tried to upload a few images from a PC, and then from the mobile phone via a web browser before playing with Photosync.The beauty of Photosync is that it will upload even when the phone is sleeping, or another app is open. I let it synchronise photos while I slept, and as I went shopping for bread for a Fondue later today. The moment it seemed to lose momentum is when I got back to the parking after shopping. That’s where I lose the mobile phone signal. As I wrote this, after fourteen or so hours of working almost non stop the files were synced between the phone and Raspberry Pi 4 2gb. They recommend using a Raspberry Pi 4gb or higher but for the sake of tests it seems okay with a lower spec machine.

Indexing

With this app you need to tell it to index photographs. This doesn’t happen automatically.

It can recognise people, create labels/keywords for images, moments, places and more. It also gives you a log of everything it’s doing, from indexing photos to adding locations, to adding keywords, to asking you to name faces that it recognises. Remember that this sits on your personal device, and does not need to ever touch the cloud, if you do not want it to.

Another feature that this app has is to detect and flag low quality and low resolution images and this can be a very good feature to have. Sometimes you get junk images from old websites or other directories. This makes it quick to get rid of them.

When Photoprism indexes photos it creates a seperate file with the new file names, creates thumbnails of various sizes and then when it completes its task, or when you stop indexing, it then merges the old index with the new index.

You have the option of a “complete rescan” which reindexes everything or you can choose to “cleanup” which deletes orphaned index entries, sidecar files and thumbnails. It’s because Nextcloud doesn’t have an intuitive way of re-indexing files that no longer exist that I was tempted to try this piece of software.

If I was to change two things with indexing then I would add a status indicator to tell me how many images remain without an index. It runs fine in the background but it would be nice to know how many images remain. I saw that someone else said that they wish indexing would run automaticall, until all images are indexed, and then again when new images are added.

EXIF Data

The app allows you to see image exif data, for example latitude and Longitude but also a title based on the location, iso, exposure, camera used, lens, f-stop, focal length, copyright, subject, description and keywords.

For key wording it uses colours, location, keywords in the local language, such as “Lac”, “rue”, state, country and more. You can add notes and click done if you change anything.

Humour

It has labelled a cat as a dog, human climbers as lizards, a sign for road works as a monument the LHC tunnels as wood.

Filtering

You can filter photos by countries, cameras, newest, month, category, colour, year and more. This makes searching for images quick and intuitive. I also like that it automatically keywords images with the most obvious tags. This allows the human being who is sorting these images to add specific tags, such as people involved, event keywords and more.

Video and Photos

With Nextcloud when you upload videos it doesn’t recognise them immediately so you get a grey box. With Photoprism you see a keyframe and you can then watch the videos within seconds so this tool can be used for photographs and video.

Downsides

Unless you pay 2 USD per month you only have one user, so you can’t have admin as just the admin, and use your own name as a user. This is sub-optimal for security but also for family sharing.

Photosync is also not free. It wants you to pay 6 CHF for the app, and encourages you to pay for Photosync Premium.

If you pay for the bonus features you will pay 6 CHF for the app, 25 CHF for lifetime Premium, and another 2 CHF per month for the right to create more users on your own system.

Google Photo is 100 CHF per year. iCloud is 120 CHF per year. Lightroom is 10 CHF per year to 55 CHF per year.

A few years ago I used Kyno by LessPain Sotware and that is 159 USD per year.

It’s cheap compared to the competition and by using it you’re supporting a European product, rather than American.

And Finally

Whilst Nextcloud is great for file sharing, time tracking, tasks, news reading and more Photoprism is great for managing photographs. It is quick and easy to install on a Pi. You find the URL, you tell Etcher to burn it to an SD card, you put the SD card into a Raspberry Pi and within minutes with a fast card, you can connect either by SSH or by web interface. Within minutes you can be using the Raspberry Pi as a photo management tool locally.

If you install tailscale and Photosync you can be backing up your mobile device images within a matter of minutes and it remembers what has been synchronised, whether you use the local IP address or the tailscail VPN one. When you’re synchronising thousands of files you want a solution that remembers what you have synched.

I was so convinced by Photoprism that I considered replacing Nextcloud with it in the 8gb Raspberry Pi, but chose not to, for now, because Nextcloud has time tracking options that I want to experiment with, for now.

Day 39 of Self-Isolation in Switzerland – Taking Portraits of Cows

Day 39 of Self-Isolation in Switzerland – Taking Portraits of Cows

Byrichard

I spent a few minutes taking portraits of cows during my afternoon walk today. Cows were standing by the barrier so it was easy to go up to each one and take their portraits. It’s not as if our vibrant social lives enable us to take portraits of people when we’re self-isolating. It’s day 39.


Daily walk day 39


Mobile First Website


This morning for three hours or so I continued working on making webpages mobile first and resubmitted them for indexing by Google. In the process I thought about how I have images that I could use to illustrate some of the points about geography, rock formations and other topics.


In the process I realised that some pages have been online for their fourth decade now. They were uploaded in the 90s, the navigation style was changed in the 2000s, they were dormant in the tens, and now in the 20s they’re mobile compliant. A side effect of this is that they now have a page load score of 100.


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