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Today I went for a short walk in the Jura with minimal shoes and I felt fine. The shoes, despite being thin soled, felt fine on the dry dirt paths. They do get wet when walking in dew covered grass but that’s what you would expect so that’s acceptable. 

When you’re wearing minimal shoes you can be barefoot or with socks but both the shoes, and socks dry quickly when there is so little fabric. That’s the bonus of minimal shoes. The other benefit is that they’re light and responsive, so I felt comfortable for the entire walk. They feel natural. 

Catching the train to Geneva and back to Nyon costs about 14CHF per day, depending on whether you have paid 180 CHF for the half fare or not. In contrast two Continent GP 5000 tires cost about 110CHF and you can go to Geneva and back a few hundred times. 

Place Des Nations with the broken chair, and the fountains

Most shoes are designed to protect the heel with a cushion of air or material that absorbs heel strikes, before they are transmitted to the rest of the skeletal system. With barefoot shoes, especially the Vapor Glove 6 those heel strikes are not absorbed. You feel the force with which your heel is hitting the ground. 

Winding Up

I tried three walks with the Vapor Gloves. I decided to try purchase and try the Trail Glove 7 as a result of my Vapor Glove experience. I like the Vapor Glove shoes but I was worried that if I used them too often, too quickly, I would end up with a fracture or pain. The Trail Gloves are great because I get the “barefoot shoe” experience, without the unforgiving heel strikes. 

For years now the noise in this village has been frustrating me. It is the noise of industrial cutting. The noise of an angle grinder on metal, of a circular saw on bricks, stone and wood. It is the constant wail of a circular saw cutting into something, every few seconds, or minutes, for hours at a time, for months at a time. 

It is the reason for which, instead of opening windows I turn on a fan and swelter in summer. It is the reason for which I don’t open the window and close it at night. It is the reason for which I have gone from having windows open the entire time there is daylight, to keeping them closed. 

When looking at Codeberg as a European alternative to github I came across mentions of Pelican, a static blog generator. Yesterday I spent several hours setting it up and playing. Whilst playing with it I saw some opportunities. 

By default Pelican is designed to have one category per blog post. For small websites this is fine. It encourages people to focus on three to five topics, and ensure that each topic is clearly visible in the nav bar at the top of the page. 

Yesterday my intention was to cycle along the Voie Verte from Crassier to Grilly and then back down towards, the lake, along the lake and end up back in Nyon. I didn’t follow this plan through. I was thinking “I don’t want to do the steep Mies climb so I’ll go to Nyon, but on the way to Nyon I thought of going to Prangins. In Prangins I then decided to head to Aubonne. In the end I did ride to Aubonne. 

Within the last two days I saw a headline that is either amusing or tragic. The headline is that Instagram is creating a twitter clone, or even a Twitter competitor. This is amusing, or tragic, because Twitter and Facebook have always been competitors. You had the network of strangers that became friends, with Twitter, and the network of uni friends that became estranged years after graduating with Facebook. 

Chronological

Both of them had chronological timelines with people conversing with each other. One was about events, pictures and more, and the other was about chatting, between tweetups. 

If you follow chatGPT and AI courses you will often come across the term “Prompt Engineering”. Prompt Engineering is the art and science of writing instructions so that AI understands what you would like to do. With time and practice you can be as specific as you like. You can fine tune your request until you get precisely what you are looking for. 

**The Limit of chatGPT. **

“As an AI language model, my responses are generated based on a mixture of licensed data, data created by human trainers, and publicly available data. These sources may contain publicly available information up until my knowledge cutoff in September 2021. It’s important to note that I do not have direct knowledge of specific data gathering practices or the individual sources used to train me.”

There was a time when I would change the rear tyre regularly. I was changing from an indoor trainer tyre to a road tyre and back regularly. I developed my skill at this art and then the pandemic occured and I stopped changing tyres as regularly. Recently I went for a 74km bike ride and when I checked the tyre a day or two later I noticed that the rubber was gone and the fibres were showing. I went for one last bike ride, and then I swapped the old tyre for a new one. 

Some of us remember a time when you could get roller skates that fit shoes. Moonwalkers have the same idea, except that the goal with their project is for the wheels to be powered, to drive you forward at a maximum speed of 11 km/h.

Speed Increase Depends on Base Walking Speed

They claim that this would increase walking speed by 250 percent, but I already walk at 5 to 7km/h, so it would double walking speed. Theoretically, this is a fantastic idea because it allows people who walk more slowly to get around more quickly, whilst walking. The drawback is that, as with all these developments, they are designed for urban, rather than rural use. They are designed to speed up getting around for people who already have access to buses, trains, foot scooters and more.