A single coke will cost 4.50 in a bar. Water could even cost four francs per glass. When you go to the shops do you buy a few litres of Rivella or coke. Do you buy wine, vodka or other alcohols? If you do then you can easily spend thirty or more francs per week, on glasses that will leave you thirsty, drinks that will leave you hungover, and containers that will require you to consider a trip to the recycling centre.
Now imagine habituating yourself to drinking water. “But we already do, you’re the only one that doesn’t.” ;-).
I do drink water, but when I’m out hiking, cycling or doing other sports. I don’t usually drink water at home. I didn’t like the taste of the tap water. That has changed. Now I can drink several litres a day. With the Camelbak Eddy+ and Chute adapters I found that I was still curious about experimenting with the Nalgene bottle. I want it for water purification rather than daily use.
Shield One
For two days I used the Shield One. I like it. I thought that the mouth piece would be uncomfortable to drink from and I thought that the bottle felt heavy for the first two or three drinks. Now I find that the weight is fine and I like drinking from it. It is well designed and easy to drink from with a single hand. This is especially useful for when you’re doing something with your other hand, like hanging off a cliff, or driving a car.
Sigg Original
The Sigg original looks rough on the outside, until you touch it. The surface is smooth. I drank three litres from it today. My impression of it is good. The lid takes a little more time to open than other water bottles. It feels compact compared to the half litre traveller I have but it takes up more space.
And Finally
Switching to drinking water wasn’t difficult. I haven’t cut out the other drinks. I reduced my intake. It feels luxurious to drink water because it is unlimited. Simply open the tap. With Coke, Rivella and any other drinks you need to get them at the shops, carry them up, etc. With water the process is simple. It’s on tap.
Sometimes you go for a daily walk and all the roses are starting to emerge, and these are not tiny ones. These are saucer sized roses. They are mainly growing at the side of orchards. These are Red and pink, but there are other colours, so if I walk in the right places I should find them too.
I could have posted these images to Instagram or Facebook, but I’d rather post them on my own website, for the world to see, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but eventually, three to six years from now. 😉
I hate pandemic weekends because out of pandemic I would be free to do a lot. In pandemic I am not free to do those things.
I will write longer posts when i regain my healthy solitude.
Recently I have started forgetting my phone at home when I go out. I use it to take pictures and for the fitness apps but but not much more now that Twitter is gone and Mastodon and other alternatives are unpleasant.
Pandemics are not fun when you’re surrounded by people living with the delusion that the pandemic is over. We have lived with that delusion for two years.
For a few days I have been playing with Hugo with Markdown and HTML pages. It says that it is “the world’s fastest framework for building websites” and so far I do notice that it has a key strength that I like.
Front Matter
That strength is that with small modifications you can take an existing static website and make it dynamic. Hugo requires that each page has Front Matter.
Front matter is:
• title
• date
• tags
• description
• author
• slug
• draft
• and more. It’s a quick and easy way of organising a website, one page at a time.
Front Matter according to chatGPT is “a metadata configuration section that is commonly used in static site generators like Hugo, Jekyll, and others.” It is placed at the top of a document to provide useful information like post title, publish date, tags and more. The beauty of tags, author and other tags is that they are used to organise data without the need for a CMS back end.
The Niche it Fills
The advantage of Hugo, over a CMS like Wordpress, is that it doesn’t lock you into itself. It allows you to create pages, and to organise those pages by tags, category or other. It allows you, via the layout metadata to specify which css layout a page should use. You can have one website section with one theme, and another section with another theme.
If your website has a section that is about geography, and another about environmental systems. You use the relevant tags for each page. If you click on the geography tag you get a page with a list of all the pages tagged with geography. If you click on “Environmental Studies” you get the content on that topic.
Aside from creating tags you can create a hierarchy. If you write “film/french” it will recognise that you have the tag “film” and within that tag you have the sub tag of french. If you write about french films you can add the tag “french/film” rather than “french, film” and it will create sub-tags. This is an effective means of organising tags.
The Weaknesses
When you create pages their default is draft, which means that you need to change draft to false if you want it to generate pages with the hugo command. When a page is generated it does not switch the draft status from true to false, so you need to tell it to export drafts each time.
When you generate the static website it creates a directory for each page, with an index.html page in each.
The same is true of the tags page generation. If you have 20 pages you will have 20 directories with index.html pages. If you have 100 tags you will have one hundred folders with an index.html file and an index.xml page. If you want to fix this Hugo calls them ugly URLs.
Switching from Pelican to Hugo
Initially I thought Pelican looked like a powerful tool until I encountered the issue with categories being “one per page” by default. The plugin to allow for more was simple to implement but I like to experiment with tools and I found that Hugo is an interesting alternative.
The Strength
I want the flexibility of a CMS driven website without being stuck within Wordpress or another CMS. This tool gives me the features of a CMS without the limitations. As i add Front Matter information to each page, so it becomes easy to index every page and update navigation one final time, rather than every single time small changes are made.
Partial Templates
With Hugo you can create partial templates, as you can with Laravel and other framework tools, except that with this framework html and markdown are used. The learning curve is more gradual.
The Sitemap
A nice feature of Hugo is that it generates a sitemap with information about the location of each file, when it was last changed, the change frequency and priority. In this way Google and other search engines may quickly see what has changed and when.
And Finally
If your website is already written in HTML it makes sense to find a tool that will connect all the pages together, for navigation. The CSS, JS, and html stay the same. It’s just the framework behind the scenes, connecting everything efficiently.
The Pandemic is alive and well and I am still walking around in circles. I would go for bigger, more interesting adventures but no one is publicising those events until after the fact. During a pandemic it helps to be misinformed, an alcoholic and a festival goer.
If you like real sports, like climbing, cycling, group hikes etc then you have to wait for months, or at this point, probably years, for the pandemic to end. Last year when the government made the mistake of opening too early you could believe they were silly. By making the same “mistake” again it starts to look like government policy. That leads to the obvious conclusion that at the current level of incompetence the pandemic will never end.
The way that countries around the world are making the same mistakes, in the same way, at the same time, is leading people to discuss whether eugenics is being experimented with. I prefer to think of it as incompetence, rather than deliberate.
Israel, England and the United States are clear indicators of what Switzerland can expect from the pandemic and yet they fail to take the lessons and warnings on board. Instead they let the situation degrade and get worse. We are now at 20+ percent of ICU beds taken up by COVID patients, out of 79 percent occupancy, according to the RTS.
The Swiss have a strange threshhold limit. They prefer for it to reach a certain critical limit. I’m impatient for the next soft lockdown, as that is when the numbers will decrease again.
For two days I have played with the Garmin Instinct Solar and I already see a niche for it. If I want to be like every other reviewer I will say, “use the expedition mode for up to 127 days or hours of battery life, but I won’t because I think there is another more interesting niche. Activity tracking, without needing to take off the watch for weeks or months at a time. With Suunto, Apple and other devices you need to remove a watch at least every three or four days to recharge it, which means that you have a gap in heartrate and activity data.
With a watch like the Garmin Instinct Solar you can track your days for 25 days in a row without recharging. In summer, in theory you could wear the watch and it would charge as you’re eating lunch or walking on the beach or sitting at a terrasse in the mountains. I really like the idea of going back to watches that we can wear for weeks, without having to take them off.
I tried using the watch in normal mode yesterday, and wore it overnight, and by the next morning it said that it had six hours of power left so I had to charge it. I tried with the morning sun but it didn’t work, so I tried with the mid morning and afternoon sun and that was better. I had to recharge it from a power socket anyway.
26 Days of Tracking
Today I put the watch into normal mode for a run, and then as I walked I tracked hiking, for a little bit, before switching to just counting steps and charging with the Autumn sun. When I got home it was at 25 days of battery life from 26-27 days. Four weeks of battery life, with the Autumn sun.
What makes this solar watch stand out is it’s price. It costs 298 CHF. Compare that to the Casio hr1000 Solar watch that cost up to 1000CHF a few years ago, and the Garmin Pro Fenix solar that costs about 800 CHF.
Power Hungry GPS
The problem with GPS technology is that it uses a lot of power, so for a solar powered watch to work effectively the solar panels would have to be quite a bit bigger. That’s where a solar powered activity tracker is brilliant. The watch can do a lot more, if you want to charge it every day, but if you don’t, then simply keeping track of your steps will be enough, along with heart rate.
Power Modes
You have expedition mode, for 127hrs of battery life, You then have battery saver where the heart rate monitor and phone connection are turned off for 70hrs. You then have jacket around 40hrs I think and normal that is about 30hrs.
Smartwatch: Up to 24 days/54 days with solar* Battery Saver Watch Mode: Up to 56 days/Unlimited with solar* GPS: Up to 30 hours/38 hours with solar** Max Battery GPS Mode: Up to 70 hours/145 hours with solar** Expedition GPS Activity: Up to 28 days/68 days with solar*
The Apple Watch needs to be charged every day. The Suunto that I have needs to be charged every second activity, especially after over three years of daily use. The Garmin Instinct Solar, in the right mode could go for three or four weeks without needing to charge, and in the middle of summer, could recharge, at least partially, while you are active.
On Activity Trackers
Most activity trackers last from 5 to seven days between charges, when they are new and this depends on whether you have heart rate and o2 monitoring. With the Garmin Instinct you leap up to 68 days over the summer months. In theory you will have no gaps in data, for months at a time. This means that if you’re trying to save on weight, you could travel without the charging cable for weeks at a time.
Should You Get it?
Yes, if you want to track your activities but are not worried about heart rate and using the watch for notifications. It is one of the cheaper solutions, and from that aspect it stands out. It gives you plenty of functionality that you find on higher end devices, without the price. Add to this that plenty of functionality is accessed via Garmin Connect and you have a good reason to get this alternative solution that costs a third of the price.
If you’re replacing a Suunto Spartan Wrist HR because it’s getting a little old then don’t. The battery life on that device is still better or as good, and the screen is easier to read. After a decade or so of using Suunto I find the menus and navigation more intuitive and rational.
My reason for considering switching from Suunto to Garmin is two fold. The first is that suunto is moving over to android, so it no longer has a unique OS, and that it’s move to more colourful displays means that battery life will suffer. They also no longer offer a web interface for the application, so you are forced to use a mobile phone.
I was also curious to play with the Garmin ecosystem. I like to be familiar with these platforms.
And Finally
And finally the best device is the one that can last as long as the activity you do, whether it’s a two hour daily walk, a two day hike or a longer duration journey. Switching from Suunto to Garmin has a learning curvey. The navigation menu is different. Eventually you understand the logic.
Today is the day that Switzerland and Denmark decided to ignore the pandemic. They and other European countries have decided to lift quarantines, remove the need to work remotely and other such safety measures. Health indicators shows that there is a consistent rise in new cases in Switzerland and Denmark. They say it’s over but the graphs and data show that it is not.
Switzerland says that since 90 percent of the population has been exposed to the virus there is no need to worry anymore. Several governments have just decided to wash their hands of the pandemic. This moment is insane. It makes no rational sense to just decide that a pandemic is over like this. I think it will come back to haunt these leaders. I want them to be held responsible for their decisions, several months or years down the line.
This is a frustrating moment because it means that Covid-zero could be years or even decades ago. Going to cinemas, to restaurants, to bars, to indoor events will always carry an inherent risk of danger. This isn’t like the risk of flu or a cold. This is a new disease that the current generation of politicians have decided to live with, rather than eradicate. Remember that the Romans drained the swamps of Rome to get rid of Malaria, so there is no valid reason for 21st century leaders to do the same with Covid-19.
This moment doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense that politicians would choose to let people fall sick, rather than prevent it. It doesn’t make sense that they aren’t losing their jobs. If the 737 Max had its issues today, would anyone bother to investigate it or would planes have been allowed to continue to crash due to that issue with trim that was eventually fixed.
As a media student I have to ask, has the media landscape and the Fourth Estate, become so superficial that politicians, can act or fail to act, in impunity, without consequences for their actions or inactions. England, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland and one or two other countries seem to have no Fourth Estate, to keep politicians accountable. It feels as if the Fourth Estate is failing in its democratic role, of keeping government transparent.
People are angry with what is happening. They feel that they have been failed by their governments. They feel that the governments could and should have done more during this pandemic to keep people safe.
That’s why I would like for leaders, during this pandemic, to be investigated for Human Rights violations. The right to health is in the UDHR and other documents. The Right to Health for Children is in the Charter for the Rights of Children. The pandemic isn’t over by a long shot, but in the meantime investigations should be mounted to investigate whether leaders behaved immorally, and if so to hold them to account.
We can’t control a pandemic, but we can control how we react to it once we have more information.
I just noticed that the idiots have used freedom day:
Les milieux économiques demandent un retour à la situation ordinaire. “La Suisse doit apprendre à vivre avec le virus, sans que les droits fondamentaux garantis par la Constitution ne soient restreints de manière disproportionnée”, avancent-ils, proposant à nouveau un “Freedom Day” (jour de liberté, où toutes les mesures seront levées).
The Freedom Day they speak of is not a freedom day. It is a day to ignore the danger posed by the virus, to risk an inordinate amount of people, to fall sick from Covid-19 at once.
From one day to the next the government has decided the pandemic is over. This isn’t a war. This is a pandemic. You don’t just sign a peace treaty with a virus. The virus will continue to pick us off until moral leaders decide to eradicate it.
I will conclude today’s post by saying that I am sad. I am sad that the government has failed us since June 2020 until today, and that as of today it has decided just to ignore the danger, rather than protect the society it is responsible for. I am sad that there is no end in sight for this pandemic, and I am sad that we have little hope of a normal life, unless we choose to ignore the risk. This isn’t freedom. This is exposure.
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