Rain, rain stay away …

A steady, heavy rain. It had rained all night. No matter, walkies needed to happen.

It’s all right when you have the right gear — Barbour raincoat, boots and Akubra hat.

Through the park and the smell of wild garlic hit me. It was not there yesterday in the sun and I thought that all the spring plants were now gone. I was mistaken.

Rain brings out the smells and scents. Hugo, my labrador, was happy. All the dogs we met were happy (though their owners perhaps were not).

Scents are signposts, memories and stories to dogs. The rain had transformed their world to a richer more powerful one.

For us humans, rain on a dusty desert world does the same, washing the grey dust off and revealing colours that we had forgotten about. December 2007 after the rain in the high desert, my world was transformed.

Rain, rain come again …

Lima airport bristled with coca chewing gum stalls. Oh, going to Cusco are you — well you will need this.¹

So chewing gum and rattling with NSAID’s we went to 1500m in the pressurised aircraft and climbed to Cusco. Dodging the peaks, the plane ascended rather than descended to the airport.

To the hotel in the old city and the first of our cups of coca tea. The tea was not piping hot — water boils at 85C in Cusco.

Breathing was rapid and felt strange. My pulse was fast, and I was starting to brew a headache. I was aware that I needed to breathe, but that breathing was strangely unsatisfying.

Walking up a slight incline to the restaurant like a 95 yr old with frequent pauses to admire the scenery was the way to go. Oxygen here was only 67% of the thick atmospheric soup that I enjoy at sea level. Strong alcohol was to be avoided and indeed, I had a light head and a buzz already.

Sleep came with trepidation. Would my headache respond to paracetamol or was it the harbinger of mountain sickness, with pulmonary oedema just round the corner?

The next day was better. I had even survived the night (we had both survived the night). The bus journey to Saqsaywaman took us even higher. Off the bus to walk up the hills and back on the bus to be driven to a few metres shy of 4K in the clouds.

Back down to Cusco and the air felt almost satisfying in it’s tangibility.

By day 3, we were ok at rest, resting pulse and respiratory rate had been restored to that approaching normality.

So we travelled to Machu Picchu by bus and then train, descending all the while to Aguas Calientes at 2.6k elevation — no worries

Quito at the end of the week and 2.8k elevation was comfortable. Our guide explained to the coca hawkers that we were ‘cured’ and did not need his wares.

1. Cusco is 3.4k above sea level, with Saqsaywaman another 0.5k above this ↩

Another time, perhaps the same place

A chance to visit the pyramids in Cairo. I eagerly took it.

Would we see the Sphinx. Yes.

I remembered one of the photos my father had taken when in the RAF in the Western Desert during WWII. It was of the Sphinx and three pyramids

My photo was taken from the same vantage point I believe. Every thing there had changed since his photograph except the Sphinx and the accompanying three pyramids.

Or rather the lake, as there is only one in The Lake District (Bassenthwaite Lake). The rest are Waters, Meres or Tarns.

Autumn in The Lakes is a magical time. Mists, bright sunshine and russet red fallen leaves. Even Robin Redbreast pales in comparison. Sawrey and Hilltop are as usual special places with an innate stillness.

We are joined by a most friendly robin with a pale orange breast. His startle distance is short, perhaps a reflection of his fierce courage.

He is the natural inhabitant of Mr McGregor's garden, rather than Peter Rabbit, or even Mr McGregor.

I think that the case (not a pun) for their use is compelling.

Consider the morning commute to the city on a rattling, noisy suburban train or metro. It's good to zone out with music or your favourite podcast but the wires (you do have wired headphones don't you?) have a mind of their own. All wires have this innate desire to tangle, tie themselves into knots and to snag on to all possible likely objects (and some not so obvious).

The new Apple AirPods (if they fit my ears) may well be the answer I have been looking for.

1. The battery life is plenty for my journey and when I arrive, I can just pop them back into the charging case for another 4 plus hours of listening pleasure
2. The sound quality (though audiophiles may disagree) may well be good enough. It is after all, a very noisy environment that I will use them in. They do have noise cancellation built in. Only use on the metro will tell if they are as good as my Bose in-ear headphones
3. No more stuffing the reluctant headphones and wire into the case as I get ready to leave my train seat. Just pop them into the case and the case into my pocket
4. My iPhone will stay securely in my pocket … no more wires to pull out of the headphone socket by mistake
5. When someone starts to speak to you (and they always do this as soon as you slip earbuds in) then just take one out, the playback is paused. Pop it back again and you are listening from where you left off
6. Maybe they will be good enough to drown out the sound of my Hoover .. podcast heaven

One of those days when the moisture comes at you from all directions. Down, sideways and up.

Autumnal, but not in a nice way. Not crisp. Not leaf shuffling. Warm and muggy. Like living in a cloud.

The Lion Salt works, adjacent to the Trent & Mersey Canal in Cheshire records the hey day of salt production in England. Salt has been extracted from brine since the Roman times and ever since. Enormous salt deposits from millennia ago lie in two separate layers under the whole of Cheshire. Waster pumped down has dissolved part of these strata and the land above quietly sighed and like a poor sad soufflé has deflated. Water poured into these slow landslips and now forms *flashes*. The Weaver river even flowed upstream for days on end when the land groaned, sighed and sank .
A post industrial landscape that is forever changed.

Go and see the museum and vote for it on the National Lottery website – UPDATE – it won! 6000+ votes and it came top of the list.

Now all it needs is an OO model of the Lion Salt Works railway wagon

Oh the humanity, or rather, oh the possibilities. Baby iPad Pro combined with Apple pencil and keyboard.
The pencil is just what I have always dreamed of. Fine lines in any colour, with no lag and the ability to circle words draw arrows underline and highlight without my large index finger terminal digit getting in the way.

I bought Procreate for drawing and now have to learn the interface. I have had several note taking apps, but all suffered from the large moving finger problem. Fraser Spiers recommended Notability — I have this already and will go back to work on this. I am also interested in going cross platform (Apple platform) with Notes. I have been looking for a replacement for Microsoft One Note for ages and this might be it.

I’m using an iPad Air case as my keyboard/cover has yet to arrive. They have all been sold out. Until then the mint green back cover is on my shelf and I will still have problems finding the black iPad in the house

Once the keyboard arrives, then I will publish from my iPad to this site

PDF Expert, PDF to Text, Drafts & Workflow

What a cracking combination!

Here is the situation. I made a multi page PDF form for data collection about the trips on our shared narrow boat [^1]. This will be passed onto the other owners by email and also pasted into a page on the website. This information needs to be displayed in a simple but effective way, and because not all the owners run specialised PDF software, the best option is plain text. I have automatically embellished the report by the simple matter of adding some markdown formatting symbols ie bold to the PDF form.
This works well in our Word Press site and is easy to read in vanilla text in emails.
There are a couple of other formatting issues — I need to remove a header word, and to colour the “Date of Trip” field in a nice green for the website. This is done by a bit of added html. Unfortunately, this does not help with legibility of the message —

Date of trip:
31/10/2015 — 07/11/2015

It does work though with Markdown preview but not in email. It does work as I wish on the website — so I will keep this.

The problem arises in that is is difficult to extract text from a PDF form, and when you manage this, each page is handled on its own [^2]. The PDF form also needs to be saved as a flattened copy, otherwise nothing appears on the screen.
I used to do this with Good Reader, but each page needed to be extracted, copied and pasted to a document in turn.

PDF to Text app to the rescue [^3].

My workflow is now to populate the PDF form using PDF Expert[^4]
Then using ‘open in’ (flattened copy) copy it to PDF to Text. I can convert to txt with this and then use ‘copy to Drafts’.
The text is then displayed in the fantastic Drafts [^5] app[^7]

I can now adjust the text, delete words etc using a Workflow that is patched together from examples on the Workflow[^6] website. It takes the text, chews them up and spits them back into Drafts. Then one click on a workflow within the program — Command C and my text is copied to my Mac. One further click to paste into email or onto the website. Job done.

[^1]:Oasis Too

[^2]:this really relates to iOS — many desktop PDF programs can extract text, but this is not true in iOS

[^3]:PDF to Text by PDF2Office – the PDF Converter by Recosoft
https://appsto.re/gb/K06CU.i

[^4]:PDF Expert 5 – Fill forms, annotate PDFs, sign documents by Readdle
https://appsto.re/gb/nGcwS.i

[^5]:Drafts 4 – Quickly Capture Notes, Share Anywhere! by Agile Tortoise
https://appsto.re/gb/BTL91.i

[^6]:Workflow: Powerful Automation Made Simple by DeskConnect, Inc.
https://appsto.re/gb/2IzJ2.i

[^7]:buy this at once — it is a no brainer decision