Archives

A Skateboarding Journey

When I was younger I switched from skiing to snowboarding and I loved the sensations. I loved how quickly I adapted my skiing knowledge to snowboarding. Within hours I felt okay. I often feel that I could have progressed faster if I had been in a group with people who were just experiencing winter sports for the first time.

When I was a child I sometimes played with a skateboard but I just went up and down a street. We played as children do.

Switzerland and Renewable Energy

Yesterday while driving the radio was on. Usually I would turn it off because people usually speak about unimportant things. Yesterday was different. Yesterday someone was speaking about solar power and Switzerland. He said that at the moment just 6 percent of houses have solar panels, when it should be closer to 20-30 percent. He also said that instead of destroying pristine nature we should add solar panels to train stations and other buildings.

Idle Lumber Empire - Thoughts

Many weeks ago I was encouraged to download Idle Lumber, but for weeks I didn’t bother to play the game. I don’t like new games, because I’m old, and I liked games where we bought the game, and then we could play for hours, with no instructions, unless we read the fabulous manual. With modern games they force you to RTFM rather than play and experiment.

Luckily this game isn’t awful, in this respect, so I have played it for two or three days and upgraded to new factories several times. I think the game play is good. It has just the right amount of actions to render it addictive. Until you take an overnight break and find that you need to tell the lumber trucks to go and pick up lumber every few minutes, and then you see that it’s a pay to win game.

A Forgotten Apple Event

On the Twelfth of September Apple held an event to promote their new iPhone devices and I completely forgot to watch and spoof what they were selling. For years now I have had little to no interest in new Apple devices and watches for a very simple reason. They’re extremely expensive, compared to alternatives.

Years ago I bought a new iphone every year, from the 4 to the 4S to the SE but after that I stopped until I bought an 8+ for drone flying as it had a bigger screen before reverting back to the Iphone SE(second generation). I heard on a podcast that the original SE was the best low budget iPhone so that’s why I took it. I took the second Gen SE because it had the smallest screen.

The Environmental Impact of Construction Noise

When people speak about construction they always think of the carbon footprint of construction but I’d like to take a look at the noise footprint of destruction of old buildings and construction of new buildings.

I live close to a quarry. If I open the windows I can hear the noise of tracks grating along as diggers and machines move around and drop construction rubble and other materials either onto the ground, or into the truck’s back. A few days I counted at least eight diggers working simultaneously. That’s a lot of noise.

Barefoot Shoes and Socks

Today I am going to write about something a little different. A few days ago I saw a child with a huge hole in at least one sock and I commented “for once you’re the one with holes in your socks, rather than me. Usually I do have holes in my socks, and when the child noticed he pointed this out in public once.

After this incident I started to throw socks away as soon as they got holes, to avoid such a comment. For some reason it bothered me to have holes in my socks in a context where I had to take off my shoes. That’s not actually what this blog post is about.

Cycling from L'Isle to RomainMotier

Although the ride from L’Isle to Romainmôtier feels easy because I’m cycling slower than my maximum it is still tiring, as is illustrated by two points. The first is that the trip burns 800 kilocalories according to the Apple Watch, which is significant, but also because by the end of the ride I feel tired.

Pace Setting

When I cycle by myself I ride to my maximum, and eventually by the end of the ride I hit the wall, and then I make an effort to make it home. When riding with people on electric bikes, the theoretical limit is 25 kilometres per hour but the practical speed, at the moment is 14 kilometres per hour, including the stop for coffee and more.

Playing With the Switzerland Mobility App

Yesterday I was planning to walk from Nyon to La Barillette but rather than take the usual route that takes me via a set of cabins where there is sometimes a dog I wanted to try an alternate route. In the end I used the Switzerland Mobility app and website because I can trust that the paths they suggest actually exist.

Garmin Explore

At first I was experimenting with the Garmin Explore App and although it does provide us with the opportunity to draw routes it creates a track but we don’t have information about whether it’s on a road, or other surfaces, and we’re not sure that the data is correct.

The Case for Trail Glove 7

Yesterday I went for an after lunch run. It was the seventh of Septembre and despite this I felt myself getting warm. The air temperature is currently around 29°c in September, when it should be declining to 20°c or less. It’s warm, and almost uncomfortable. I don’t know whether it’s because I was running, rather than walking or cycling, or because the humidity is higher. In either case we have had summer temperatures for months now, and the weather never changes. It’s always warm and sunny.

The Eleventy Learning Curve

I have spent several days playing with Eleventy and trying to get it to behave as I would like to and over the last day or two I succeeded, to some degree. Eleventy, like Hugo, is a static website generator. Whereas Hugo is built on Go Eleventy is built on Javascript. In so far as I can tell they’re both working at around the same speed.

Appearance

This blog post is written, first for Hugo, then transferred to my wordpress blog and maybe, in third place it will be added to my eleventy blog experiment. One of the key differences that I see between eleventy and Hugo is how themes work. With Hugo you choose a theme and it is applied to the entire site. With Eleventy you can create a specific layout for each website section along with it’s own css and more, so it is more modular. Yesterday I was experimenting with CSS and eventually I got it to work, but following the instructions for a css file called “bundle” rather than “style” or similar theme name.