A follow-up to 75+75.

I started trying to ramp things up over my base of 75 minutes of running a week at the end of 2023 - I just thought it was sad to let go all those years of work building up my distance. And on and off I’ve managed to do it. I managed nine Brimmond Hill (24km) runs last year, plus one Bennachie (21km, but totalling around 27km with the runs to and from the bus to get there). This year I’ve managed three Brimmond and Elrick (30km) runs. None of that is possible with a limit of just 75 minutes running.

I still struggle for time for running, especially now the dog is so old and can’t really be left alone for more than three hours at a time, but I do want to try to keep my distance up a bit so I’m trying a new weekly base of:

• 225 minutes running
• 75 minutes of strength/yoga

Roughly working out as:

• Mon: 75 minutes of running
• Tue: 25 minutes of strength
• Wed: 75 minutes of running
• Thu: 25 minutes of strength
• Fri: 75 minutes of running
• Sat:
• Sun: 25 minutes of yoga

Although I could do with squeezing in the yoga in the week so it doesn’t interfere with weekends.

If I am lucky enough to find the time to fit in a long run (two to three hours) then all the better. But if need be I can also split the 75 minutes between mornings and evenings.

This actually only works out as 3% of my time - 75+75 was 1.5% - which still feels very reasonable and non-selfish to me, but it’s not my opinion that matters. Maybe one day I can have 3% of my wage as well, but that’s staying at 1.5% for the next couple of years at least.

My dog walking has rapidly decreased due to the age of the dog. She just can’t walk very far any more :-(. Doing more walks a day, just very short.

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  • push

A brief review. I got this because, as I’ve said before, despite my best efforts to be restrained with my spending I’m not completely immune to consumerism and the pleasures of spending a (small) bit of my wage on myself: £26 on Vinted (although £30 with shipping and buyer protection).

• The top pocket is too small for a phone (very close to fitting my Pixel 7a), but I have got the older model which was released ten years ago so maybe there were smaller phones still knocking about then?
• There is a key clip in the top pocket which seems a bit pointless. I tried clipping my keys to it and they just rattled around. Maybe if your bag is full that wouldn’t happen? But I’ve just gone back to what I always do which is to take one key off my keyring and just take that single key with me when running.
• Fits one bag of Naturo 2kg dog food perfectly. Almost two, but not quite. It just (it was a squeeze, but I got it zipped up) fits 1x Harringtons 1.7kg dog food and 1x Purina Go-Cat 2kg cat food; So should fit 2x Harringtons dog food which is useful (to me)*.
• With a light load it really does lock into place, is comfortable and doesn’t move at all.
• With a heavier load (dog food) it did slide around slightly the first time I used it, but on a subsequent run I realised I could pull it tighter and lock it down (although it was then a little constrictive). Either way was better than trying to run with my none running bag though (also ten years old, but a 20L Case Logic not intended for running at all).
• I struggle to tighten the straps equally and this means one of the ladderlock buckles did start digging into my ribs once - they could do with a bit of padding under them - although it’s also easy to loosen and re-adjust.
• There is no way I can reach around to the side-pockets despite that being the intention - I think this is because it sits higher up on your back. I have to take it off to get to them.
• I should have probably got the 12L one for “running to the shops” runs, but that isn’t really why I got it - I got it for taking food and snacks for longer runs where my daily little 2L Kanken Hip Pack isn’t big enough (great for my phone and couple of butteries or my jacket, but not for a water bottle).
• I’ve used it on a 30k run for chucking my phone, jacket, water bottle and a little packed lunch in and there was plenty of room. Easily comfortable enough that you can forget you are wearing it.
• It comes in a nice bright pink!

* - Confirmed: Easily zips up with 2x 1.7kg bags.

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Some initial rough notes on building HammerDB on NetBSD. It has quite a unique build system - I don’t know if it’ll be possible to make a Pkgsrc package of this. For now I just wanted to see if I could get it to build at all.

1. See github changes
2. Need to install 7-zip: sudo pkgin install 7-zip
3. Need to install tcl 9 (just for the header file; Since HammerDB is actually building tcl this step feels superfluous, maybe the header is available locally when building and I just haven’t found it yet?): sudo pkgin install tcl90

4. To build the pgtcl package need:

    export PG_CONFIG=/usr/pkg/bin
   

5. I had to set this to get it to find my include files:

    export C_INCLUDE_PATH=/usr/pkg/include/python3.12/:/usr/pkg/tcl/9.0/include/:/usr/include/
   

   The last /usr/include/ isn’t actually required, but I chucked it on there for good measure

6. And for the pty.h requirement somewhere along the way, we actually need util.h so I had to symlink:

    sudo ln -s /usr/include/util.h /usr/include/pty.h
   

7. To actually build:

    cd /home/simon/Code/github/TPC-Council/HammerDB/Build/Bawt-2.1.0
    ./Build-Linux.sh x64 Setup/HammerDB-Linux.bawt update
   

   For now I’m just stealing/tweaking the Linux files instead of adding BSD ones.

At some point whilst trying to get things to build I did this:

    sudo ln -s /usr/pkg/bin/python3.12-config /usr/pkg/bin/python3-config

But on a recent rebuild to check through this post this step wasn’t required (I deleted the symlink before rebuilding) and I can’t recall why I did this in the first place. But leaving this as a note just in case

Running the builds

Basically you need to copy and extract the build somewhere:

cd ../BawtBuild/Linux/x64/Release/Distribution
cp HammerDB-5.0-Dev-Linux.tar.gz /to/somewhere/else
cd /to/somewhere/else
tar xvzf HammerDB-5.0-Dev-Linux.tar.gz
cd HammerDB-5.0-Dev-Linux
./hammerdb

I haven’t been able to get the prod one to work yet - for sure it’s got to be linked to “linking” and something has been stripped that shouldn’t have. Not too bothered about figuring this out yet because the Dev build does run!

For the cli the (default) tcl one works, but the Python one (./hammerdbcli py) doesn’t - I’ve done some initial debugging (editing and putting print statements in; another benefit of the Dev build is you can just edit the “built”scripts) and it’s something to do with not being able to find tclpys even though it is there.

Before going down the building route I did have a brief play with the pre-built binaries and NetBSD’s Linux emulation, but:

/home/simo...-ubuntu-22  $ ./hammerdbcli
./hammerdbcli: /lib64/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.33' not found (required by ./hammerdbcli)
./hammerdbcli: /lib64/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.34' not found (required by ./hammerdbcli)
./hammerdbcli: /lib64/libm.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.35' not found (required by ./hammerdbcli)

I.e. I didn’t have a modern enough glibc available, I only had 2.15 from the Suse Linux Compatibility package. I could, in theory, have tried tracking down a more modern one (because that’s how it works), but it felt easier to try to get the build working.

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For a long time I’ve toyed with the idea of replacing Simplenote with a Fossil repo of text files, more from an “owning your own data” point of view than anything else, but more “recently” since I stopped using Vim and switched to Helix. It’s probably not happening any time soon as Simplenote is still too convienent on mobile, but I thought I’d have a little play just because Fossil’s auto-sync is really neat.

1. Created a repo on my (this) server, but a private one for now, not public
2. Cloned that via ssh to my local machine: fossil clone ssh://me@linode/Code/fossil/repos/notes.fossil

3. Then added a little “hook” to Helix via my mksh config like so:

    function hx {
      /usr/pkg/bin/hx $@
      if [[ $(pwd) == '/home/simon/Code/fossil/checkouts/notes' ]]
      then
        if [[ $(fossil extras) != "" ]]
        then
          fossil add $(fossil extras)
        fi
        fossil commit -m 'Auto-sync notes'
      fi
    }
   

   The idea being that if I am editing a note and then exit and save, Fossil will then automatically sync changes, including adding it if it’s a new note. The only downside to this is that if I suspend Helix (Ctrl+z) then that also triggers this and if I resume (fg) and then quit it won’t automatically sync.

4. So I’ve also added a keybinding of fs to Helix to manually trigger a sync:

   [keys.normal.f]
   s = [":write", ':sh if [ "$(fossil extras)" != "" ]; then fossil add $(fossil extras); fi; fossil commit -m "Auto-sync notes"']
   

   (Slightly different syntax as it’s sh as opposed to mksh)

I can’t see me fully switching from Simplenote yet as I don’t have a good mobile solution (apart from using a sftp client on Android… hmmm… maybe), but it’s interesting to play about.

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  • program