Easter Friday traffic heading past Nyon on the A1 motorway

The Futility of Blogging

Byrichard
Reading Time: 2 minutes

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 day 16+ and 5+ year Olds Could Get Boosters And Vaccinate

The day 16+ and 5+ year Olds Could Get Boosters And Vaccinate

Byrichard

This is the day 16+ and 5+ year olds could get boosters and Vaccinate in Switzerland. For 16+ year olds, at least in Vaud, we are now eligible for vaccination, as long as we’re in the country. I am not. I have to wait until I get back. This is a big step forward. Being able to get a booster is good. 5+ year old children should be able to get their first vaccine shortly, although the details are not clear yet.


I wish I was in Switzerland to enjoy the weather. For once, it is snowing, so for once it would be interesting to look at the landscape. I was bored with seeing sunshine every day for years in a row. By the time I get back, the landscape will be boring again. If it wasn’t for the growing number of new cases, I would be driving from CH to Spain on Sunday, not two weeks ago.


Reading


I am still reading every day. I am currently reading a book about the Camino De Santiago. The journey describes quite a few days of rain, and the thoughts of a single woman, on a long hike, for a change. Plenty of books have been written by men. Fewer have been written by women. It is nice to get that perspective for a change.


I usually read until I can’t keep my eyes open, and sometimes I read during the night if I wake up. For two weeks I haven’t listened to audiobooks as I haven’t had moments of solitude. Usually I listen when I walk alone. I still ignore podcasts, I get my news from tweets and news websites. I also get news from sources where I am not forced to spend a specific amount of time. Text is easy to skim quickly.


That’s it for today. I had no daily walk so there is no news on that front.

Running Around in Loops
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Running Around in Loops

Byrichard

Over the last week or two I decided to run and to swim. These are two sports that are easy to do if you have access either to a pool, or the right shoes. Swimming was in 14°c water for 17 and ten minutes. The first time my hands and feet were cold so I wore gloves. It’s a way of enjoying a different sport than usual. It’s a way of using different muscle groups too.


With walking and cycling you use your legs but the upper body doesn’t do much. By swimming my upper body has the opportunity to be kept in better shape.


Running is a very easy sport to do. You need shoes, and the motivation to go for a run. I often feel that I need to do bigger distances than I have the endurance to do. For two runs I went just one kilometre. After that, today, I went for 2.4km. This isn’t far, but it’s better than zero. I also want to preserve my knees. I stopped because I could feel pain in my knees begin.


The Casio Moves app displays run information in a similar way to Garmin. It shows the run with colours that represent heart rate and effort. Blue for easy, green for slightly harder, orange for another zone, and red for a bigger effort. I use the data imported from the Garmin instinct exported as a TCX file from Garmin to the Casio Moves web interface. It takes seconds, and doesn’t require a Casio watch. With Garmin, Apple and Suunto you do not have this option so it’s nice.


And finally, I will try to keep the habit of running at least one kilometre every day or two. It’s an easy habit to keep and it will keep me fitter. The advantage of running, rather than walking is that you cover the same distance in half the time. It makes the daily walk half as time consuming, once I increase my endurance.

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Why You Should Use Twitter

Byrichard

Twitter is a short message that are only 140 characters long. It can be used in three ways. The first is by instant messenger, the second is by text messaging to your mobile phone and the third is via the web interface.

It’s referred to as microblogging, although not by me. I see it as being something more powerful.

The BBC, Google, and other companies have already used it for showing people what the latest news is. Of course, with such a medium you have to be careful not to send too many messages or people will give up.

Where it would come into its element is traffic info, radio schedules, or even event notifications. Imagine that you knew about this before rag week and that many of your friends were members. You could tell them “just finished ragging, on my way back to uni” or “only 20 tickets left for an event”. In other words, you can let people know what an organisation is doing quite easily.

Another way to enhance this is when you’ve got quite a lot of friends and they’re all members. “Hey, just handed in my assignment, going to sit in the grass outside halls, welcome to join” and many people who might have been bored now know where to find you.

Of course, you’re paying the price of SMS (text messaging) if you’re away from the computer but it’s at a local tariff to the best of my understanding. It’s an interesting development, similar to the status bar in many of the current messengers and on Facebook.

Counting follower mass by absolute tweet number

Byrichard

Dear developers,

As the number of people on twitter increases and as people get into the thousands of followers I would like to demonstrate that those thousands of followers does not amount to much. Instead I would like to count follower mass by the absolute number of each follower, added to the number of followers.

In other words if you have ten followers with ten tweets the number would be 100. If you have 1 follower with a thousand tweets then the value would be a thousand. If you have five followers each with five thousand tweets then that would give 25,000 as a value.

The point of this application would be to demonstrate that your follower mass may not be as great as you excepcted it to be. The more active your followers the higher your value on this scale.

If you develop this application let me know 🙂 I’d love to use it.

Cheap Curiousities and Expensive Ones

Cheap Curiousities and Expensive Ones

Byrichard

Mobile Phones


We are in a pandemic and I am between contracts, two reasons for which having an interest in the latest mobile phones is a futile pass time. I tried to revive my old Android phone and succeeded. I sometimes find it hard to get the phone recharged, and when it is recharged I need to keep it charged. This time I had a bonus problem. No data connection



I tried to connecting to wifi, no luck. I tried using the mobile phone’s data connection, no luck. I tried using one phone as a hotspot. No luck either. Restart the phone, no luck. In the end I tried a factory reset and the problem was resolved. Data worked both on wifi and 4g. The phone is old, but at least it allows me to play with Android when I want to.


Nettle Tea


I read that Nettle tea tastes of various things, honey, grass, slightly minty, spinach and more. The combination of those tastes didn’t sound appealing, except for mint and honey. I also wanted to see what they taste of. I spent an entire 2.95 for twenty tea bags and I tried it. When it’s dry it smells like hay, and when you smell it in boiling hot water it smells quite bad, like fish, or some other unpleasant smell. I then tasted it and it tastes like it smells when it’s dry. Hay. It’s like drinking the smell of a barn. You can see why people mix it with other flavours. Now I have one less thing to be curious about.


Jungfrau Tea


Jungfrau Tea, named after the mountains is made from seven herbs. It is made from a combination of round leaved mint, citrous thyme, orange mint, fennel seed, Lemon balm, Achilles Yarrow and mauve. I am confused by the lat one. The taste is definitely different. It has texture and I consider that it could almost be good. I have not added sugar or anything else and it has had time to sit so I may not be getting the full experience.


For more info


The Pandemic


I try not to write about the pandemic too much. We are stuck in a loop where governments make mistakes, and people who don’t follow international news go along with it. We are four or five waves into this pandemic in Switzerland and it is only possible to remain positive if we expect little from our governments. England, Switzerland and Sweden have governments that are trying to ignore the problem, and pretend that it is endemic as soon as possible.


Meanwhile in most of Asia the pandemic is under control and there is less human suffering. Europe and the US are suffering, and yet other nations are not. Some people say that it is because in the West we have selfish cultures where the individual is put on a pedestal and community is ignored, while in Asia there is community spirit, and this helps to control the pandemic.


Either way, Covid-Zero should be prioritised over the fool’s errand of endemicity.


Now you understand why I avoid writing about the pandemic.

Setting Up AudioBookShelf

Setting Up AudioBookShelf

Byrichard

I have been an audible member for years at this point and in that time I have “bought” hundreds of books. I write “bought” because I payed for a Platinum account for years and got credits and got the books with those credits. Over the years I have collected more books than I can read in a year.

That library lived in the cloud, rather than my devices, for years. I would download the books I was listening to but not those that I had finished, or would read later. That’s because laptops and mobile phones have smaller hard drives than I require for my books.

OpenAudible

The first step when backing up audible books is to download them. The second is to strip them of DRM, and before you tell me off for being like a pirate I will correct you. I bought an MP3 player but because it doesn’t support AAX files I had to find a way to make the content that I own, legally, playable on a cheap mp3 player. In the process I stripped the DRM because I had no way of playing the audio files otherwise.

It’s because Apple, Audible and Sandisk do not play nicely that I had to strip the DRM. If they played nicely I would not have stripped files of DRM.

AudioBookShelf

AudioBookShelf serves as a site/service that makes it easy to catalogue your books and listen to them from your phone, laptop, desktop tablet or other. An Android App exists, but the iOS app is only available via Testflight.

The app can be installed as a docker container within minutes, and then you can point it to the folder where you store all your audiobooks. I write audio books, rather than Audible, because you can download audio books or podcasts and add them to your instance of audiobookshelf, to listen to files, streamed, or downloaded.

Listen Tracking

As you listen to books with this app you get to see how many minutes you listened per session, as well as which book, and for how long. If you use the app for more than a year you get the summary of previous years of listening.

Cover Art

The app gives you the option of looking for book cover art from a number of different audible libraries, depending on language and country, but also from open library and other sources.

Multiple Accounts

You can add as many accounts as you like with this app. The admin account can also create libraries either for individuals or to make it easier to differentiate between open audio books, audible, or other providers.

If you have a spouse, or children, or both, or live with others you can share access to this library. You can choose whether people can read, download, upload and more. This enables people to add the books that they want to have available via this website.

Podcasts

The app supports podcasts. If you add the OPML file of your podcasts it will automatically retrieve the latest ones, for you to listen to. I have yet to test this feature.

And Finally

So far I have listened to an hour of audiobooks via this website/instance and it works well. I tested it via firefox on iOS and via the web browser on the laptop and it works very well. As you listen on the phone you can see the progress bar update on the laptop and vice versa. You can seamlessly switch between devices.

The advantage of such an app is that you can share books, without giving people the files. They can then listen to audio books and their progress is kept between devices.

One of the key nuissances with audio players is that they do not usually keep track of progress. With this app you do, so you can switch between books and it will remember where you are.

The other advantage is that each listener is independent so you get listening stats for yourself, but not others.

So far I am happy with my experience.

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