From having these to this;

Thats it - no other words 😍

This post links in with Travel because again it refers to the sense of having no time, but also it shows what happens if you update software without keeping an eye on the changes … the theme I used no longer builds with the version hugo now installed hugo v0.136.5+extended darwin/arm64 BuildDate=2024-10-24T12:26:27Z VendorInfo=brew and there are so many errors and elements broken due to internal hugo changes I’m not even sure I could update it. So either I revert back to level of hugo which works or I try out something new - new it is.

Time is a commodity which seems to be scarce at the minute, need it to update my projects upon which some of the content of this website rely and of course my own education but due to various reasons and maybe a lack of drive on my part has meant nothing new has been written.

Plus work travel took a good chunk of time away with among many smaller trips to various locations, a long one of two months based in Silao. Long hours but an awesome set of people helped make the situation weirdly enjoyable despite the circumstances and we achieved a tremendous result given the timeframe.

I wrote quite a long post here about Light pollution & energy consumption which linked into my assertion that there’s not enough darkness in the world. The premise of it was, to turn out street lights and it is possibly coming to pass with councils starting to turn lights out. OK it is a cost cutting drive but that was also a major part of my posts and if done right, in the right areas its only going to be a benefit. This article posted on the BBC News website entitled “Why are English councils turning off street lights?” https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0mzkgxr22po.amp seems to indicate that councils are either starting to switch off between specific hours or dimming both of which are good. I travel a lot and the number of roads I drive on across Europe which are dark compared to here is incredible. Our world is built on consumption of energy and short sightedly pushing people into electric cars is not the answer for either global warming, light pollution or energy consumption.

I passed my bike test early ‘97 then later that very same year in a monumental moment of stupidity highsided, flying several car lengths down from one side of the road to the other. Needless to say I did not bounce, getting strapped to a spine board, moderately re-arranging my right shoulder sufficiently well that it was several inches lower than my left & damaging the nerves¹ Did it put me off? Well if it did this post would be a lot shorter and contain no images so no there is nothing like riding a bike - to bastardise old **Swiss Tony** … riding a bike is like making love to a beautiful woman you and the machine moving together leaning over together, feeling the environment, the heat, the noise … get it right and magic happens get it wrong and theres all sorts of squeals and pain. So on a bike we have all the sensations driving a car just does not bring, being part of the environment and the journey, shutting out all the mindless noise and drudgery making the commute to work a joy and not a chore.

Its interesting to me that society or rather the portrayal of modern English society is one where the class system of the Oliver Twist era and before no longer exists or has been eroded to almost non-existence. Bollocks. The number of poorer people going to the alleged “elite” universtities is minimal but I agree that the internet has muddied the water, allowed those with talents to broadcast themselves to a wide audience and earn in some cases significant money but they are still a rarity and have they crossed the divide or simply created another class?

In light (no pun intended) of the last post not enough darkness it was quite suprising to see more stories on the subject of light pollution filter into my news-stream, from the effect on cougars hunting in the western US to reduced pollination, affected sleep cycles and more. Although the dark sky movement has been going for a long time and reading through its site you can find out about the effects of light pollution on animals and humans, energy waste and more I guess we need people to stop being afraid of the dark but it would seem there could be a push to make artificial light a form of environmental pollution the same as other forms that we naturally consider to be pollution. For me this can only be a good thing, as i mentioned in my earlier post the benefits of simply turning the lights off could be immense.

I’ve often been heard muttering the phrase “there’s not enough darkness in the world” most who hear it tend to assume i’m talking about we need more death,pestilence, war, famine etc all the “bad” things rather ironic given the COVID situation but i actually mean its too bright. For a man that loves the sunshine i also embrace the night and i prefer working in the dark or reduced light environment not nightshifts though i’ve done my fair share of those, in the office i’d often be first one in and the lights would remain off until the second person arrived, at home i never turn on the main lights unless there is a need & by this i mean looking for a needle or a genuine situation where light bright enough to blind for a few moments should one care to look directly at it, is required.

Currently as of Thursday 21 May 2020 @ 16:09 there has been for the UK 36,042 deaths associated with the virus, 250,908 lab-confirmed cases and for the rest of the world inc UK data its 5,067,579 cases & 332,711 deaths ¹. So its a very real threat and has had a significant impact not only on families but countries with some close to the brink of bankruptcy and being forced to chose letting people live in lockdown and to continue the disease control measures or sending them back to work and possibly die. Despite all this, for me personally, the enforced lockdown has been brilliant.

So during this lockdown amongst other things i decided to re kick-start all projects which had either lay in waiting or been put on hold for more time, for example some of what was on that list was

• DONE convert old mac mini to OMV5 server
• DONE install syncthing under OMV
• DONE get my orgmode agenda automatically rebuilt & setup sync to my phone
• DONE setup motioneye on a RasPi to monitor my bike
• TODO re-write dragelec the home monitoring system
• TODO sort photos, improve Affinity workflow
• TODO misc python scripts to mimic a second brain
  • basically these are scripts which pull data from various sources and output to a journal so for example i use Tasker to track start & end of car journey’s which gives me time spent plus GPS coords

There are other jobs but one i had been putting off was a new domain as my current .eu one may end up being taken to the bottom of the garden and shot because of brexit, i also wanted a more controllable, more orgmode based blogging experience but a wise man once said “Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving” ¹ and i can fully agree, I started this journey with some knowledge of hugo, reasonable orgmode knowledge and little if any CSS & to be blunt I feel like i’ve been dragged by my testicles backwards through a privet hedge by a small bearded dwarf with penchant for dense privet, what i thought would be a relatively simple transition turned out to be taking the red pill down a sewer of broken themes, conflicts and my own lack of understanding of both hugo and how to write in orgmode for ox-hugo. So i am back where started, scratched, a little bloody but wiser and with a significant amount of respect for Kaushal who not only wrote ox-hugo but this theme i’m using.

Lockdown experiment - could i run ssh and access my phone apparently the answer is yes if using the excellent Termux which i already use for emacs on android

Firstly in termux install openssh with

apt install openssh

Next run ssh-keygen to generate your own access keys at this point you can choose to add a passphrase or not.

The next step is to either create the /.ssh/authorized_keys file or ensure that the id_rsa.pub key is added to it, so first check if the file exists;

I thought it was warm in the garage a few weeks ago but perhaps not as warm as today 25th July 2019. The temperature sensor in the garage recorded 45.11degC and a minimum for the entire day of 17.28degC makes me reconsider keeping the old netgear router in there!

The min/max for the 3 days (ok not full data available yet for today)

on a different note i need to figure out how to link posts, all my files are written in org with the date as the file name 20190727.org and then hugo simply converts them but i still havent figured out how to get a working link from for example the file with the date shown to another dated file

A hot day for the UK - my home monitoring system reports 38.91 in the garage …. so i decided to come back in doors for a short whilst and catch up on some work i’ve neglected.

This is from a walk down the local canal sometime ago, its quite heavily stylised but i like it;

from the same walk just much earlier in the day, a chance photo of canoeists paddling through the mist;

Brrrrr ok we dont have the snow yet here and we definitely do not have the polar vortex weather being experienced in the States but it got pretty cold this morning.

This is recorded by dragelec and is the temperature inside my garage

Yes i cheated, i exported the sql data manually and graphed it in LibreOffice i really need to program this so its automatic but hey thats another task to do :)

Since moving house we have more birds visiting the garden and even a family of squirrels that bound playfully through the trees at the bottom of the garden on the down side there are a few mice and rats which get attracted by the bird food but thats a small price to pay to be able watch all this from the comfort of the house.

After watching them from a distance i decided to set up a little squirrel feed station for when its really icy/cold and it did not take them long at all to figure out there was food available.

There was a time i was quite heavily in to photography, i had my own dark room working mainly in B&W. Preferred landscapes but occasionally did some model work but then i went digital and carried on for a short whilst but i think the magic disappeared.

There was something uniquely magical about watching a print form in the solution how the image gradually faded into view and now everything is instant and before i would think about the image, plan its capture and now boom “oh that looks nice” snap click & discard once its been seen on the computer.

Its been a very quiet period in terms of programming, website updates etc but things have been moving slowly. I was never happy with the home made dashboard nor the background program so over the last few weeks i’ve been (time permitting) changing and tweaking such that the dashboard uses an LCARS CSS template and i’m much happier with it. The python backend has been tweaked and temperatures are moving to an sql storage of values to allow historic data analysis.

I don’t normally post or talk about politics, religion and so on because it is so argumentative and polarising and i’ve met many who are unable to discuss a counter argument or theory instead they simply become enraged and what could have been a reasonable discussion breaks down, but brexit and Syria are two topics where i feel i need to put something down.

Syria - a war which we the UK have helped to prolong, our media is so much of a propaganda machine that it cannot ever be consider unbiased. Where are the facts, the data, the information that shows the Western nations have supported the rebels against Assad. It may well be that he is the dictator that he’s portrayed to be but we cannot sit still and say the length of the war, the violence, the deathtoll are all to be laid at his, Iran’s or Russia’s feet.

Well it has become apparent that i’m an idiot. Firstly somehow in the confusion of moving house it would seem i have left the current clamp attached to the old house mains …. meaning my home monitor/smart meter is now not so smart and i need a new current clamp.

Secondly the python program works ok in py2 not py3 which is strange as i tried to write it in a such a way that it worked for both, and on tests on the original pi it worked ok but after transfer to a new pi with a fresh install of Raspbian Stretch Lite it does not like python3.

Well I knew moving was stressful, moving an entire house on your own (and i do mean solo!) is additionally stressful but actually agreeing on decor, layout, appliances and so on just notches it up to kill me now stress levels.

My grasp of English must be quite limited because apparently the colloqial phrase everything is shit constitutes a meaningful and purposeful way of starting a discussion on the contents of the house it can include items such as the doors are shit which conveniently goes hand-in-hand with there are too many doors (one for each room if anyone’s interested!), floor tiles, bathroom tiles, curtain rails, fireplace, kitchen …. the list goes on but the phrase remains the same.

Well after much deliberation (6 months!) i’ve gone and done it…. today i received an Amazon Echo. I’d read reviews, considered privacy, looked at alternatives thought about if i was comfortable talking to no one .. then realised i’ve been doing it for years

So after about 2min of setup she’s up and running, location in the house is still to be defined but seeing as i’ll be moving later this week it don’t matter but it works. Quite simply, it works. I had doubts about accent recognition, was it worth it and so on but eventually i followed a time worn principal of fuck it this same principle saw me twenty years ago leave home to buy a fridge freezer and return with a motorbike or more recently go food shopping and bring back a TV.

Information overload - over the years i’ve collected terabytes of data in different forms, books, cd’s, pdf’s, word documents, emails and so on. Finding that one bit of critical info is a pain, my work laptop has over 45g of standards, specifications and so on all stuff that should be referenced yet because it is often buried in subdirs or perhaps i’ve given the document i created a title which made sense at the time but months/years later means nothing i cannot find that which i need.

Well its done, the move to hugo has been started. Cannot say it is finished because there will be errors and always something to learn but i’ve removed wordpress and copied the hugo generated files to the host and thats now being served. Hopefully it will mean more updates (like this) but also clearer content besides as mentioned before i like the “old” feel as it harkens to the early days of bulletin boards (fidonet) and the young internet when the content to bullshit ratio was significantly different.