Author: wjl

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Hoping that they’re okay…

Just watched stage 5 of the Tour de France Femmes race, and saw a pretty severe mass crash some 6.7 (or so) kilometers before the finish.

Sadly, neither the French TV nor the German commentators (on sportschau.de) stayed with the affected riders, so I had to look it up elsewhere, in cyclingnews.com, where they wrote:

“Among those worst affected by the crash were Pfeiffer Georgi (Team DSM-Firmenich-PostNl) and Ruby Roseman-Gannon (Liv-AlUla-Jayco), with the Brit unfortunately having to abandon the race due to her injuries. Georgi was one of two riders who had to go to hospital after the race, alongside EF-Oatly Cannondale’s Magdeleine Vallieres.”

The official site lists Pfeiffer Georgi, Magdeleine Vallieres, Spela Kern, and Ruby Roseman-Gannon, the first three of which are listed as “DNF”. So let’s hope that they’re okay, and not hurt too much…

… I find it sad if the results of a race seem to be more important than the wellbeing of those who crashed. But maybe that’s just me who’s missing some empathy here…

Anyway, and as always, thanks for reading.

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Perhaps the best choice for Linux newbies?

I have a sister who still owns an older notebook which runs Windows 7, and a friend from England who just moved from a Windows 8 to a Windows 10 machine. Both machines wouldn’t run Win11 I guess, tho I didn’t ask. You don’t recommend that to friends anyway.

So what to recommend? Linux of course, yes, but which one? Liam Proven (and many others) think it’s Mint. From his article in The Register, let me just cite these two sentences:

“Linux Mint remains the most sensible, pragmatic desktop Linux out there.” and, a bit further down, “If you have an aging PC that can’t run Windows 11, this is the one to try.”

One remark tho: Mint’s website, documentation, and all are really cool as well – as long as you speak English fluently enough. Maybe the user base could be much bigger if these pages were localized, like Debian’s for instance? Just saying…

For my late brother, using Debian – with a little help of myself – wasn’t a problem, but for any beginner who doesn’t have more “expert” friends or relatives, Mint might really be the sensible choice for now. Try it in a VM if you have the resources to do so, and if not, have a look at the Live image which you can start from a USB stick. One thing it *does* have as an advantage over its grandma Debian is the possibility of an OEM install (like “Mama” Ubuntu offers as well), so I could offer an installation to my sis or to close friends…

Anyway, have a look. It’s better than Win11, as are all other Linux distros.

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Congrats, Tadej!

Congratulations go out to Tadej Pogačar for his third win of the “Grand Tour”, as the “Tour de France” is also called. Congrats as well to all other riders. There’s also a nice interview and “Cafe Ride” which Matt Stephens did with him some 7 months ago, and in case you’re interested in his bicycle, have a look at how it’s built for him. The estimated costs of those parts sum up to the equivalent of your used Toyota btw…

As always, thanks for reading.

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Half a year. Two million steps.

On January 9th this year I’ve bought that little step counter, and one day after that, which is now half a year ago, I installed Gadgetbridge on my phone to keep track of everything without sending all my data into anyone’s cloud. The first days I more or less played around with the software to see what it could do, and in the beginning I wasn’t sure how many steps a day would make sense, so I started reading about that. I started with some 6000 steps a day which was the default setting on the device makers’ software, corrected that to 8000 steps a day later which was recommended as the perfect in-between measure for the 60+ year generation. But end of January, I finally settled on a daily minimum of 10000 steps.

And I kept that minimum since 164 days now, so my grand total since I installed the counting software is now a bit more than two million steps, or with my average step length of 75cm, around 1500km:

So in case someone wants to follow that example, expect to have some 4 million steps after the first year – if you can keep up and do this every day of course. And if you look at my last blog post, I think I’ll add some kilometers on a bicycle to that as well.

Anyway, and like always: thanks for reading.