Tomorrow I will write about the Via Ferrata meetup
Tonight I will rest.
On the 10th of May 2023 I started walking the PCT virtually and now I am 94 percent done. I have about 300 kilometres left to walk and I will have completed the entire distance. Some of it was covered walking and some of it was covered while walking. Of course I didn’t walk the actual PCT. I walked it via the Walk the Distance app.
The thing about walking the Pacific Crest Trail virtually is that eventually you forget about it and just keep covering the distance, without paying attention to landmarks and more. I’ve been walking this virtual path for 10 months. I have ‘walked’ 4008 kilometres and passed 469 checkpoints.
At the peak of my walking habit I would have covered this distance sooner, but because of the return of cars and car drivers, and dog walkers, my walking habit has declined. I don’t enjoy playing chicken with cars, and being challenge to overcome my fear of big dogs that are unrestrained. If we were in the pandemic honeymoon I would still be walking five and a half million steps per year.
I like that we can take on such big walking challenges. On one app I am walking the Silk trail and on Walk the Distance it’s the Pacific Crest Trail. On Garmin’s app I am walking the AT. I think that when I finish the PCT I will walk the Continental divide trail.
The beauty of these virtual walking challenges is that I can walk the same 20-40km loops IRL daily, without the walks I’m actually doing being too boring.
In less than a month I will finish the PCT. I think that it will be done within 30 days.
Sometimes a walk above the woods is easy. I don’t mean walking while flying hanging from a parapente. I mean walking at an altitude where there are fewer trees.
The walk from the transmission mast of La Bariellette to La Dôle is an easy walk that I have done many times. Sometimes I have done it at dusk. Sometimes I have done it with snow and sometimes I have done it when I was walking through clouds. Usually people do it when the weather is nice
There are two routes. One Route is safe for children, dogs and people who are not used to exposed paths. It is on the Jura side. The other option is more dangerous because the path is not maintained. If you slip you could fall to your death. There are no ropes, cables or chains to hold onto. When the dangerous option is wet it is slippery.
Today the weather was nice but the visibility was crap compared to what I have experienced on other walks. We couldn’t see the Alps, for example.
It’s amusing because on this walk I heard a lot of English spoken. Usually you hear a lot of French as French speakers enjoy the walk. The only wildlife I saw on this walk were groups of birds going after insects. They were feasting. With good weather the wildlife like to hide from human attention.
This was day five of week three of the Escape plan. I have easily managed to reach the goal as I do fifteen minutes or more of exercise every single day.
The walk to La Dôle is a good way of getting exercise because of how much walking you have to do uphill one way and how much walking you have to do going the other way. If you feel ambitious you can walk from Nyon to La Dôle and from La Dôle down to St Cergue. In St Cergue you can catch the train back down. I have only done the long variant once.
Walking from La Barillette to La Dôle is a seasonal walk. It can only be done when the road to the top is open. As soon as the snow comes the road closes to ordinary traffic and it is cut off from the world. In Winter you would need to do it with snowshoes and the walk would be considerably longer.
This is a nice walk to do during a day off or during the weekend. Some people even use the routes to practice trail running. It’s a 8km circuit and will definitely give you a workout. For walkers it is a nice walk to a nice viewpoint to see the bassin Lemanic.
Long-Horned cows are a rare treat. We usually see short-horned or even de-horned cows in Switzerland. To see longhorn cow is a treat. I took a tiny detour from my walk to get some pictures. I have walked by the field a few times before seeing them close enough to the fence to consider taking pictures again.
One of them started to approach the fence so I moved back. I later noticed that some calves are in this field too.
We are now two days away from the 11th of May when shops will re-open and life gets one step closer to being “normal” again. We are going to be in a dangerous phase of the pandemic for two reasons. The first reason is that people aren’t going to be as careful about who they come in contact with so the virus will have a new opportunity to spread within small communities.
The second reason is that I see people driving two or more hours to do activities in the mountains rather than staying locally. By combining the two the virus may grab the opportunity to start spreading again.
I am not critical of the government. I am critical of the people who are taking liberties that don’t yet make sense. In theory I could be climbing Monday afternoon but I won’t, because I think it would be wise to wait to to three weeks before enjoying such luxuries.
The best sport that we can do for the environment, and for each other’s safety is cycling, whether on mountain bikes like these two people. or on road bikes like others. By cycling we are staying within a three hour radius of home, where our range is limited by our physical health.
It makes sense to continue enjoying what the local area has to offer. By now we should have seen that there are plenty of things to do locally. This is especially true for people who have experienced the pandemic in Switzerland.
Did you find some interesting walks by staying local?
While playing with Nextcloud I saw that the raspberry pi was overheating so I played with a fan for people to cool the device. It worked well, except that when you’re holding a fan you’re stuck holding a fan. I looked at various Raspberry pi cases and decided to get a Joy-IT case with an integrated fan.
The case is simple. It consists of a base plate, a middle block, and a top plate. You put the pi, with the card inside. You then plug the fan to some of the GPIO pins and the fan starts to spin and cool the Raspberry pi beneath. The Raspberry pi went from 50-70°c to 38°c so it works, but it’s noisy. It seems paradoxical that something as small as a Raspberry Pi could end up with such a noisy fan. It’s as noisy as an old laptop or an old external hard drive.
This does not mean that I don’t like the case. I do. I think it’s great that it is so simple. You don’t need screws. You just put the card into the Pi’s card slot, put the pi on the base plate, put the middle sandwich part over the USB and ethernet adaptor, you then plug in the fan to the GPIO pins, and put the top on.
In my case I found that the fan seemed to be blocked so I improvised a solution to keep the fan from hitting the Pi and now it’s happilly spinning and cooling the Raspberry Pi. For 11-12 CHF you don’t expect it to be as silent as newer mac book pro.
As I write this post I’m playing with the time tracker app in Nextcloud. With the app you can provide project names, and then you can specify the task that you’re currently doing. I created an IT project, and a blogging project. Now I’m tracking the daily blog post time spent, and when the post is finished I can stop the timer, and see how I have spent the morning.
I think the fan on this case is so noisy that it would fit right into an air conditioned server room, but it’s too noisy for a living room or bedroom. I need to place it where it won’t be so disruptive.
In normal times we can walk along clean paths, without walking through the mud because we can walk within a meter or two of people. During a pandemic though, the recommendation is to be at least two meters from people. Many agricultural paths are not that wide, especially when people walk two or more abreast.
This means that if we’re walking alone either we have to give in to not respecting the two meter rule or we walk in the mud, fields, or other. It also means that rather than take the usual walking paths that we have taken for years beforehand we are now migrating to the edges of roads.
We are exposed to the cars driving too fast and too close. We are exposed to grass that has grown tall, and thorns, and the noise of car tires on tarmac. Before the pandemic I would not have noticed that noise, but now I can’t stand it. The sound of tearing, ripping or similar sound. The sight of people staring at their phones whilst driving too close to us, in their cars.
Over the last eleven months I have found a route that I like to walk, where I don’t need to avoid people, avoid the noise of cars, avoid having to overcome my fear of dogs, and in most cases, avoid having to backtrack to avoid walking within two meters of people.
Of course I am eccentric. We’re in the eleventh month of a pandemic. I have spent this time in pandemic solitude and it has had an impact. I question whether the passion and pleasure I take in walking along quiet routes is a coping method, a way of dealing with the solitude, of being solitary rather than lonely.
Recently I learned that a cleaner complained about the mud I brought back into the building but this year has been quite wet. I also found that the quietest, safest walking routes, are also the muddiest.
The school where I went as a child was built between 1901 and 1902. As a result of this it had metal projections near the entrance so that you could scrape your shoes before you went into the building. Those are not present on modern buildings.
Modern buildings, and modern carpets are designed for car driver dirty feet rather than rural dirty feet. They are decoration rather than of any use. We live in an age where despite being parents, with young children, many people have grown out of the habit of dealing with mud. We live in the tyranny of the car driver. An entire building’s footprint is devoted to cars, but nothing is kept to clear muddy shoes of mud.
One of the issues with modern expectations is that people get into their car, drive to do their walk, and then drive home. If you leave your home without taking the car, then the absurd reality of getting muddy shoes, and for the shoes not to dry and flake before you get home is alien.
In a normal situation either mud would flake from my hiking shoes into the boot, or they would flake as I drive the car home, on the driver side floor. Cultural norms have forgotten that there was a time when getting home with muddy shoes was ordinary.
I took a picture of a building where people would come home with muddy shoes. Society says that it wants us to reduce our carbon footprint but muddy shoes are a distant memory. Society has forgotten about the habit of walking locally. Society has forgotten about the need for proper shoe cleaning options by the door.
I did try four solutions. The first is to find a puddle, and try to evacuate the mud from my shoes that way. It does work to some degree, but then you leave a mess of wet, rather than dry mud. The second option is to walk during a rainy day. The advantage of rainy days is that your shoes are cleaned by the rain constantly, so you often get home nice and clean. The third option is to walk on a snowy day, as the snow will wear away the dirt and mud from your shoes. The fourth option is to scrape your shoes with a pointy thing. I tried with a screwdriver and with a bike tool for removing tyres.
Although it may sound counterintuitive I found that the best way not to be have muddy shoes is to walk on a rainy day because the rain will drain away the mud and dirt. It may seem counterintuitive but rain really is the best. The second
Spending time outdoors and coming back muddy is nothing new. It has been part of my character for less time than I can remember. I see no problem in a little bit of mud because mud is very easy to clean. It’s especially easy to clean when it’s dry, rather than wet. When I started to make a conscious effort not to bring mud back into the building one day I noticed that instead of nice, healthy organic mud, one day we had the dirty traces of petroleum based wet dirt on the floor. We had pollution from too many people using cars.
As messy as mud may make hallways look I think the black traces of carbon rain is worse. The door mat is good at pretending that the problem doesn’t exist, but when you see the traces after a day of rain, you think “If only it was mud. If only I picked up a shoe and noticed a spider scurry away.”
As unsightly as mud is, things can live in it. Nothing lives in the polluted water, from a car based way of life.
I’d like to conclude with “I did think of taking my shoes off as I came into the building, to avoid muddying the floors, but then I thought of everyone else not doing that. I also thought that it’s a shame that other people do not get muddier shoes, because then I would regain my freedom. Walking in the mud is a freedom that we have lost over the centuries.
It is not unusual for me to take my trousers off when I get home, and to rinse them in the shower, like I used to do after going scuba diving.
If I was a cleaner I would have said “Since the floor gets messy so quickly it may be worth me coming two to three times a week to clean up.”
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.