This morning I toyed with the idea of wearing a proper winter cycling top. Instead I settled for a thermal layer, the usual top, sleeves, and a wind blocker. These weren’t enough for me to feel warm. 10°c The temperature has dropped. it was 10°c this morning and I was cold when I set off and I seriously considered turning back for another layer but thought that if I did, then when it gets really cold, I won’t have anything warmer to wear on bike rides.

Recently I noticed that with the iPhone 14 checking notifications is a challenge. You have to really want to see notifications for them to show up. In some cases I find that they are automatically bypassed by the current iOS. Whilst this might seem problematic, most notifications, in 2025 are a waste of time. They are duplicates from Strava, Linkedin, Udemy and plenty of other sites. If these sites are sticky enough, then we will see the notifications on the site, while we’re sitting at a computer, so we don’t need them to appear in our phone notifications.

Years ago, when we were on web forums with a dozen or more people we knew each other. Over time web forums and chat rooms became bigger, as more people adopted the World Wide Web. In the process we went from being part of several niche web forums to being part of MySpace, Friendster, Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku, Plurk and plenty of other sites. As the number of people on these networks grew exponentially, so our social networks grew exponentially.

Those of us that are geeky, and old enough, will remember when apps were local and we saved data to internal and external hard drives. We would take photos with a camera, or a phone, and once we got home we would download them to our computer, using apps like Picasa and iPhoto. Both apps would help us to organise them chronolgically, and eventually by location, people in photos and much more.

I was perfectly happy hiking in solitude for years in a row, but eventually, as normal life returned, after the pandemic I felt a sense of isolation, especially on weekends. I would see groups walking together and I longed to revert to that habit. Eventually I did and now for more than a year I have been on regular group hikes and bike rides. I enjoy group hikes and bike rides but as an introvert I usually don’t start speaking with people near the end of an event, and if the event comes to an end then I usually don’t see people again for weeks, or even months.

When I think of going to the Roche Au Dade via ferrata I often think “but it’s far”. That’s when I am going by car. I think the same when I consider going to St George, Fort L’écluse and other places. The paradox is that when I think of going to these places, by bike, now, I don’t. When you go somewhere by car, it costs money, and time. By bike it costs time, but that time is the experience.

This morning I set the alarm to wake me at five but I didn’t get up. I felt tired and decided I need sleep more than a bike ride. I don’t know whether I am affected by the seasonal change, or whether I am still tired from this weekend. Waking at 4am wasn’t that hard on Friday, but after cycling hard on Saturday, and hard on Sunday I need time to recover.

Over two or three years I have been playing with Immich. In that time I have exported my photos from two or three phones multiple times. The reason for me importing photos multiple times is that every so often I update immich and something breaks. It is at this point that I reimport libraries yet again. From One Pi to Another This morning I swapped from one Pi to another because the other Pi has an NVMe drive attached to it.

Mt Tendre via Rolle For a year or more I had been tempted to cycle up to the Mont Tendre and on Saturday I got the opportunity to try that ride with Tête de Course, a Nyon cycling community and café/restaurant. The route went from Nyon to Rolle, and then from Rolle upwards towards Aubonne and then upwards towards Montricher. From Montricher you have the climb to Mont Tendre. In theory this is a quiet road with limited cars.

This morning I woke at Four, before birds started to tweet, and before the sun started to rise. I woke so early, not to deice planes, like I did years ago, but to go for a group run with five hundred and fifty other people, in theory. In practice I think some people paid to participate but failed to wake up. Wake Up and Run, in Switzerland, is based around a simple concept.