Camino 2025

 

Camino Planner: Godesalco.com

Yet another incredible adventure on the Camino de Santiago!

Over seven days last week, my brother and I walked ~165 km from St Jean Pied de Port to Logroño. We faced plenty of challenges, from an extremely rainy and steep first stage—an 8 km climb to a refuge at 800m after a nine-hour journey—to a scorching 50 km final day in 30°C heat. That last day alone set a new personal record for most steps: a whopping 72k!

This experience felt very different from last year's journey. It was a powerful testament to how much my physical condition has improved, and a great reminder that my training and wellness goals are paying off.

As always on the Camino, we met many amazing fellow pilgrims. It was inspiring to connect with those on their full journey to Santiago, not just walking a few days like us.

This journey wasn't about stepping out of my comfort zone, but rather about expanding it. The rewarding feeling of meeting a great challenge is what I've come to know as "type 2 fun."

Here's to a greater sense of well-being and more rewarding adventures ahead!

#CaminoDeSantiago #Wellness #OutdoorAdventure #Gratitude #PersonalGrowth

This was originally posted in LinkedIn

Running and hiking is fun

It's been a while since the last post. Running is going great, I finished the C25K as planned and kept running regularly two or three times per week, at some point starting to do slightly longer routes. And then, all of a sudden, last week I went out for an easy 6 km run, however half way through I decided to make it 8 km and a bit later I thought I may as well do 10 km. Slow average pace of 6'47", pretty constant  pace throughout (max 6'42" and min 6'47") despite a few unexpected ups and downs in the unplanned route. Even better, when I finished, I was tired but not exhausted and definitely proud of myself, quite some progress in the last months.

At the same time I have been doing some longer walks each weekend, around 20 km each, with a full backpack and with repeat ups and downs in Teufelsberg Rodelberg. Training for El Camino!

C25K 2025 edition

I started jogging again a few weeks ago. In fact, tomorrow I will start week 4, so far so good.

PS April 11th: Finishing week six, 25 minutes without stops. From now on, it´s "just" 25, 28 & 30 minutes of running in weeks seven, eight and nine. Almost there and it feels like I could run 30 minutes already now anyway.

C25k Plan | Couch to 5k - C25K Running Program

El pájaro grande se come al pequeño

Muy apropiado en estos tiempos que corren en los que parece que la ley del más fuerte está a punto de imponerse.

Bluesky posts and followers

Now that I am posting a random photo each day, I find myself looking forward to see which one will be posted. A few days ago an old photo got almost 300 likes and yesterday another old photo got also ~300 likes and over 30 reposts. 

I have also been looking at my followers in Bluesky, most of which follow me because of one list I am in.

~1.2k followers. Number of posts of each account is shown both as color map and size of the bubble (also log scale dealing with accounts with 0 & 1 posts as if they have 1.5 posts to avoid minus infinite or zero size).

Insights

~300 accounts have not posted at all yet. They may be new accounts, or they may be lurkers.

About half of the followers have less than ten posts

~80 accounts have more than 1000 posts

1 account has over 25k posts (!) and as far as I can see, it is not a bot.

PS Feb 8th: I will run this as a cron job each week. Let´s see what it looks like in one year time. 

Even more flet adventures

The automated posts of random photos started well, however I wanted to have customized messages for each photo. That means writing a short message for each one. Not difficult, but tedious. Enter Gemini and flet.

I used this prompt to create a skeleton script of what I wanted. Of course the script did not work out of the box even after a few attempts. Still, good enough to start the debugging and make something useful.

I would like to create a flet app which allows the following:

-select folder with images (jpg and png file formats). Do not use filedialog for this. Use filepicker

-for each photo, the user can create image captions which are saved in separate text files (same name as photo, just with .txt extension)

I ended up with less than 80 lines of code to create this mini tool, which made the whole task a lot easier. At some point I may give a try to one of the image captioning ai models in Huggingface. Just not sure I want my photos captioned without supervision and the posted.

PS: I downloaded the Salesforce/blip-image-captioning-base model from Huggingface and gave it a try. Considering the low effort the hit rate is not bad. Still, not something I would trust being posted without supervision. The automated text generated for the five photos above was:

a photography of a rose

a photography of a road in paris

a photography of a clay sculpture of a man with a boxing glove

a photography of a jet engine

a photography of the tokyo tower

PPS: For comparison, I got myself an API key for Google Gemini and used "Describe this photo. The resulting text must have at most 250 characters." Wow. This is not even the latest model, as I used Gemini 1.5 Flash

A single, red rose, partially open, is shown against a blurred green background.  The rose's petals are a blend of deep red and lighter pink, showcasing delicate texture.  The stem and leaves are visible.

A high-angle, long shot reveals a wide, tree-lined avenue cutting through a lush green park.  Vehicles travel along the road, leading toward a distant cityscape under a cloudy sky.  A television tower is visible on the horizon.

A small ceramic figurine, resembling a gnome, sits on a white surface. It has a large red nose, brown body, and a dark green hat.  The background is plain white.

Black and white photo of a large turbofan engine.  The engine's fan blades are prominent, filling most of the frame.  It's displayed indoors, in what appears to be an airport terminal.

Tokyo Tower, a red and white lattice tower, rises above lush green trees under a partly sunny sky.  The tower is partially obscured by the foliage.

P³S 5th Feb: Posts will now have the AI generated description as Alt text

Hello automated posting of photos in Bluesky

I posted a daily photo in IG for a long long time. This time round, I will be posting a photo each day in Bluesky using a script. Plus it is a random photo from a folder containing a few hundred of them, so it is also a surprise for me which one ges published each day. I would love to add Alt text, but that would require to run them all through some sort of AI (aka learning how to automate it). Not quite sure about that from the ethical point of view (plus who says the descriptions will be any good). On the other hand, creating descriptions for hundreds of photos is quite some work. Need to think about it.

More flet adventures

After getting the photo collage desktop app to a reasonable state, I am looking now at using it as a web app, which turns out to be reasonably straight forward, although a few tweaks are required here and there. I got myself a small server in the cloud to do some trials and so far I managed to set up nginx as a reverse proxy, set up certificates with certbot, and set up two separate apps side by side which are launched as services.

Lots of learning. Also plenty of issues to fix so it shows well on mobiles and tablets and to manage upload and download of files. Still, plenty of fun.

Good bye, CalendarPuzzle bot in twitter

 After a bit more than three years, today the CalendarPuzzle posted its last post in Twitter. Sorry for the followers there, I do hope that they will make their way to Bluesky and follow the bot posting there.