Today with Tomtom Go you pay 20CHF per year for the maps and traffic information. When I first bought the TomTom Europe apps for iOS and Android they cost about 170CHF an operating system. If my memory serves me well traffic information would cost an additional 100 CHF per year.
As a result of the high cost for traffic information I was in the habit of using Waze. As long as you have a data connection you get maps and traffic information for free. It would save you 270 CHF initially.
When you live in the french speaking part of Switzerland you are just minutes from France and within hours you can be in Germany, Austria and Italy. As a result having maps pre-loaded in to your navigation is useful. That’s where Tomtom at 20CHF per year becomes interesting. The maps available are for individual countries, for Western, Europe, Eastern Europe, the whole of Europe, The Caribbean, North America and South America. Each of these maps can be downloaded ahead of a trip and used.
This means that once you’ve paid your 20 CHF you have maps for the world, not just for your daily commute.
I am so convinced by Tomtom’s new philosophy that I have uninstalled Waze and will now use Tomtom primarily and Google maps as a backup.
If you’re looking for an interesting food experience then you should drop by Laguna, a tropical restaurant a few minutes out of Geneva. There’s a meal there that’s really good called la plancha. The concept is simple. Food is laid out buffet style so you chose the ingredients you want and chose from onions, lettuce, coriander before selecting the types of meat. The meat on offer when I went to was lamb, beef, horse, pork, and chicken.
Once you’ve filled your plate with all the ingredients you go over to a large metallic platter where the chef will prepare the food you’ve selected as you wait. Once it’s ready you go back to your table and enjoy the meal. You can repeat this process as often as you like.
The clientele is also interesting, being a mix between parents and young children, couples, and more. It’s in a relaxed atmosphere where you hear the birds tweeting and nature rather than urban sounds. You’re also surrounded by furniture from tropical locations.
The food is good, the atmosphere is good and the type of people make this a nice evening place where to get a nice meal. I’ll be thinking of going there more than once.
Grasshopper is a Google app to teach adults and children about Javascript. It provides people with short, easy to understand modules to get a grasshopper to do things.
The curriculum is divided into seven modules. These are:
Fundamentals
Fundamentals II
Intro to Interviewing
Array Methods
Animations
Animations II
Using a Code Editor
Intro To Webpages
So far I have only played with part of the fundamentals course. You don’t need to write much code. You can select which function and variable you want to use, rather than typing lines and lines of code.
This is the type of app that you can use almost anywhere, and anytime you have a few minutes free.
One of the challenges, when you want to learn a new programming language, is to set up an environment before you start playing with code. That can be a long process and it’s easy to lose interest before you have even written two lines of code.
With such a simple app you don’t need to set anything up. You can play with code, see what it does, and then try something more complex. You can familiarise yourself with the language before you install a development environment on the machine you use.
As soon as the app is installed on your phone you start learning.
I currently have a web server running on the n95 but it’s only active when I have free wifi. It’s to see what capabilities there are and so far it’s good. It’s a little slow though.
I stopped playing Ingress a few years ago because of how much time it requires. I have started going on Ingress walks again – a 12km path to level 13 in yesterday’s case, because I’m combining the daily walk that I would do anyway, with listening to podcasts and audiobooks, anyway.
By walking and listening to audiobooks and podcasts I am constantly learning about new things. Recently I’ve been listening to current affairs podcasts, I listened to 13 minutes to the moon, I listened to podcasts about the Swiss Watch Industry and more. Every walk is a journey in learning. I also learn about the fifty objects that made the world and more.
I also listen to books when I walk. These aren’t the most inspiring of books but four of them were free, as part of the books I get by being an audible member via Audible originals. Every walk I go on is an opportunity to learn, without feeling that I am not as productive as I could be.
According to my blog stats, I should have lead with writing about the game Ingress, which I took a break from for years, because of how much time it takes to level up, especially when you live in the countryside.
Luckily as time has progressed so has the ability to suggest and have new portals approved. A 12-kilometre walk had three or four portals. Now it has twenty or thirty. This means that during a walk in the countryside it is worth playing Ingress. Going to a polluted city is no longer required. Even country bumpkins like me can play and progress.
By having portals in the countryside it also opens up the prospect of Ingress bike rides. Last week I cycled from Nyon to Rolle, and from Rolle I went up into the vineyards and I destroyed and captured portals. My health benefited because it was a 40km bike ride with four hundred meters of climbing in between vineyards and some of these climbs are steep.
That’s where you see that cycling in Spain has its advantages. I cycled up steep inclines without suffering or worrying I wouldn’t make it. I also cycled up those steep inclines clipped in. I don’t feel comfortable with cycling up steep hills when clipped in because I’m afraid that if I lose power in my legs I will lose forward momentum, not be able to unclip and fall.
Having said this the swiss hills are nothing compared to the Cumbre Del Sol climb. As you cycle up from Mercadona there is one bit of road that is so steep that you can’t start up again. I know because I made the mistake of stopping there and had to walk a hundred meters or so before I found a portion flat enough to start up again.
In Switzerland, you almost never find such gradients on roads, for the simple reason that it snows and water freezes. Snowploughs and other machines need to go up and down Swiss roads.
To get to level 13 I participated in an Ingress Saturday for the first time in years and I participated in two fielding events, to get one of the medals I was lacking the first time, and for the Didact Field Challenge medal currently taking place.
This month I visited 735 unique portals, discovered one portal, collected 4.7 million XM, walked 117 kilometres (low because most of my walking is without playing ingress) and more. I could bore you with the stats but I’d bore myself too. I also spent three weeks in Geneva as part of a favour for a friend so during my daily walks I got back in the habit of playing Ingress.
I don’t make time to play Ingress. I take advantage that my walks and bike rides take me by Ingress portals and play. By combining Ingress with cycling I go down many more roads than I would otherwise go down. I explore villages that I have no reason to stop in. I treat cycling as a journey, rather than a challenge to get segment personal records. I slow down., to experience the locations. It results in me having a more relaxed bike ride.
Ingress walks are also interesting because local people, who know about features that could be portals suggest them, and as a result, we see a portal off to the side of where we’re going, and we investigate. We capture the portal but we also increase our mental map of the area where we are walking.
Ingress, for a while, was a game for people who lived in town and cities. If you lived in the countryside you had to make time to play. Today Ingress can be played in short bursts and yield better results. It has been from a “chronophage” (waste of time/time consuming)activity, as french speakers would call it, to being, for lack of a better word, integral to our daily activities.
The Return on Investment of time, and distance traveled, to play Ingress, even in the countryside has decreased to the point where it is feasible to level up, without devoting half a day. One hour yields the same result.
Computing is mobile and as I sit in the garden to type this post someone else is currently streaming some lions live from his mobile phone. It’s not about you sitting at a desk and typing, now it’s about going out, having a nice day and sharing it with others as they enjoy their day.
Several years ago I needed to download TomTom and I needed the latest map updates if I wanted to drive from Switzerland to England or from Switzerland to France, or to Spain. Thanks to roaming I now have a much broader choice.
TomTom was good in another era, when we had to pay roaming fees. We downloaded the relevant maps. We set off, and the GPS would guide us from A to B and that was that. I tried doing the same with Waze, hoping that the entire map would be downloaded when I set off, only to find that eventually I went off of the downloaded map and I had no more information due to a switch from Spanish to French roaming on a Swiss contract. I made it home, but it showed the limitation of roaming at the time.
Recently I drove from Switzerland to Spain, using roaming, but this time with 30 gigs of data on the current contract. I used just 200 megabytes, according to my recollection, with no issues. This was with Waze. Waze and Google maps are the same today, so I could just cut the middle app, and go straight for the behemoth. I can also play and experiment with Apple maps. They have had time to fix teething problems.
The issue that I have had with both TomTom and Waze is at night. Neither of these apps automatically switches to night mode. I couldn’t find that option. Driving at night, with a map in daylight mode is inconvenient. This is a good reason not to use both of the traditional apps, and move towards Apple Maps and Google Maps. Both have plenty of settings to make navigation less distracting.
I want to support TomTom Go because it is 12 CHF per year, and it’s European, but I can’t find a way to pay them directly, rather than going through Apple so I may drop them when the contract runs out. As to Waze, I lost interest the moment it was bought by Google, since it meant that we were helping a wealthy behemoth, rather than a small startup.
I have been playing with GPS since I was a child, but initially I was using hiking GPSs with no proper display. I then played with car GPS before moving on to mobile phones, and since a few weeks I have been playing with in-built GPS. I find the in-built GPS experience is easy, and I like that the passenger, I haven’t had a passenger, since we’re in a pandemic, can set up the routing options from the comfort of the phone. Concurrently, I can set off the nav system from my home, and then walk down, plug in the phone, and then use it for navigation, from A to B.
Back in the day I sometimes printed out instructions, to navigate… things have really changed since then. When you’re used to GPS apps navigation is simple. Now to play with two new apps, and see how they compare to the two apps I have prioritised, until now.
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