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An inflatable sailing boat.

Sometimes we walk by the sea, after spending months by a big lake. Living by a lake, and the sea are similar.

https://youtube.com/shorts/XsWAjOjk5ic?feature=share

A seaside walk

Recently I have read three out of four DI Barton books and I enjoy them. One of the things that I enjoyed about these books is that I’m interested in both sides of the story, rather than reading about character A but being frustrated when reading about character B. With these books I like both.

The first book is about a seasonal killer, and it moves on from there. I could give more information but I don’t want to spoil the books for you. These books are available via Audible’s Premium plus package, for the first three books, and you need to spend one credit per book for the last three books.

I don’t know whether I’m nervous or anxious about driving from 11-13 hours almost non stop tomorrow. In the past I have driven from Switzerland to Spain, without stopping. In the past we had to stop to refuel but not anymore, not with modern cars. We have to stop for toilet breaks instead.

During long drives I spend my time listening, either to books, or to podcasts. Recently I have spent a lot more time listening to books. I used to love podcasts but they have too many adverts and they’re too long. When you’re catching up on a series of podcasts you don’t want hours and hours of one and a half hour episodes because there is a lot of fill, rather than worthwhile content. I also get information from courses instead.

I’d like to discuss Mastodon, Social Media and addiction. Specifically I would like to discuss how I do not want to invest my time in a social network where people are already discussing social media s if it is an addiction. We have seen that this has a negative impact on social networks. Look at Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and others for illustrations of this.

I do not want to be part of social networks and social media that are viewed as addictive, because it sends the wrong message to users, and potential users. It sends the message that rather than investing time in meeting new people and making new connections, you are giving in to a craving for an addiction. Back in the day I remember when I disliked likes, favourites and thumbs up for a simple reason. It replaced conversation with statistics. “Three people favourited this, five people starred that and 23 people gave this a thumbs up.” Instead of having an exchange of a few sentences we are interacting by likes, stars or thumbs up. This isn’t socialising.

Sometimes you end up walking into heavy rain. That’s what I did today. I looked at the weather and because it was meant to get better over the coming days I assumed that this evening it would get better. Instead, as I walked it started to rain a little more, and then a little harder, and eventually quite a bit harder. Did I get wet beyond the top layer? Nope, but my beanie got a little wet, as did my fleece. My shoes on the other hand were clean, thanks to the flow of water.

The Casio GBD-200-1 and similar watches is a watch that counts steps and tracks runs. It communicates with the Casio Move app to provide you with a log of your steps, runs and progress. From what I gather it uses the phone to plot the GPS points of your run.

No HR tracking

I could use the term activity, rather than run but this watch assumes that all activities are runs, and there is no option to change this. This watch does not track heart rate or any other data. It provides simple information, for people who do not need much information. It does provide you with progress after a week of use but that’s with Vo2 data. For that you would need to import data from another device

Have you considered brushing shoes and mindfulness? I ask because as I have played with the brush, to clear dirty mud off my shoes I have noticed that this is a time consuming task that always takes several minutes, if not half an hour to complete. People stigmatise leaving a muddy trail behind you indoors, but as the last few shoe cleanings have shown, cleaning shoes is more time consuming than cleaning up after muddy shoes, especially when the mud is dry.

I bought the Garmin Instinct Solar because I was interested to see how the Solar option works. As with most watches the solar panels take several hours to recharge the watch, even during summer heatwaves. The Solar part is great, if you’re in Spain and leave your watch to recharge in the sun while you do something else.

This leaving the watch alone for hours, as it charges, is a paradox, since other metrics cannot be tracked, rest, heart rate, steps. They’re all stagnant whilst the watch charges for several hours in the sun. Having said this, if you use the watch as a watch, and you spend the entire day in the sun, then it will fill its role fantastically. I had it tell me that it had 99 days of power, at the current rate of charge and discharge, while in Spain.