I have 100 move day goals reached. The difficulty of this goal depends on how high you set the bar. If you set the bar at two hundred calories a day then the goal is easy to achieve. If you set the goal at 500 or 600 calories then the achievement is slightly more interesting.
I would have reached it sooner if the screen on the apple watch had not broken and if I had not had a few sub-goal days over the last three or more months. I set the goal high enough that I would need to walk for more than two hours a day to reach it. On the bike I reach it within 40 to 50 minutes.
I still haven’t had a perfect month. To have a perfect month I would have had to burn 550 calories every day for a month. I’d tease myself by saying that I set the goal to high but I reach it almost every day. It’s fun to set it high enough for it to be a challenge. It would be cheating if I set it lower.
Despite its simplicity these goals and medals are having a positive impact on my fitness habits. Sometimes I reach the goal by sitting very little. On days when I go for long hikes or cycle I double or triple the move goal so I exceed the requirements of this badge.
On other days I burn less than 200 calories over the day and I rely on the evening Zwift session to get myself over the daily goal. This habit is great. Earlier this week the CDC issued a statement that people should do any form of exercise for two and a half hours a day. They even removed the requirement for it to be in ten minute or more sessions. I exceeded this requirement by five and a half hours a week over the last four weeks.
Monthly challenge
In August the monthly challenge was to double the move goal eight times. In Octobre the challenge was to do 27 workouts in a month. In November the challenge is to move 189 kilometres. If I put the road tyre back on the rear wheel of my bike then this is an easy challenge to reach. My bike rides range between 20-50km a ride. If virtual bike rides count then I would have achieved this goal days ago. As things are we’re half way through the month and I have just 80km.
The Garmin Vivosmart 4 is the first activity tracker that I see tracking descent as well as ascent. It is yet another fitness tracker and in theory I had no need for it as my Suunto Spartan Wrist HR Baro and my Apple Watch Series 4 do almost the same thing.
I was curious to play with this device for two principle reasons. The first of these is the body battery functionality that looks at the energy we use during the day and the sleep we get at night to say whether we need a rest day or not and because I wanted to fill the daily activity metrics in the Garmin connect app.
Some of you might like this fitness tracker because it looks tiny on the wrist, is waterproof and because the battery lasts for days rather than hours. This means that you can hike for several days and track your activities before you need to recharge it. it automatically detects walking and other sports.
Ups, downs, and intensity
At the moment when I sat down to write this blog post I had walked down 29 floors and walked up 25. A floor is usually a standard three metre elevation change. This is a nice feature because when you’re hiking in mountaineous places it’s nice to see the full vertical movement, i.e. 54 floors today. When you’re hiking you will see why descending is just as interesting as ascending.
Intensity minutes are good too. According to this article in the Guardian: “A Public Health England survey last year found that people in England are becoming so inactive that 40% of those aged between 40 and 60 walk briskly for less than 10 minutes a month.” With a cheap device like the Garmin Vivosmart 4 and the Garmin Connect app people will see that the standard intensity goal per week is 150 minutes per week. That’s around 22 minutes a day. The article goes on to say that training as an athlete is not what improves overall health but rather the habit of walking from 15,000 steps a day onwards.
I am currently reading “The Story of the Human Body” and this book, which looks at human evolution, also explores the importance that movement has on the health of individuals from our species. Many modern diseases are due to how sedentary we have become. By walking and by being active throughout the day we alleviate many health issues because we our bodies have not had time to evolve to the lives that we currently live.
The energy imbalance
Humans evolved from hunter gatherers and their bodies were optimised for a diverse diet of fruits, vegetables and meat. The shift to agriculture diminished the diversity of foods we ate and led to certain health problems. The shift to industrialised societies led to more health problems, some of which were mitigated by advances in healthcare and medicine. The move from industrialisation to office work led to yet more health problems and evolutionary mismatches.
We have the ability to ingest more energy than previous generations and we have the ability to save energy thanks to cars and other technologies. It is now easy for us to spend hours at a time sitting. This means that we consume more energy than we need.
By moving every hour, and by practicing sports as simple as walking at a brisk pace we give the opportunity for our bodies to do what they were designed for. I recommend reading the book as I’m doing a poor job of explaining the theory behind why physical exercise is so important.
Step Auto Goal
The Garmin Vivosmart 4 detects how many steps you do on a daily basis and according to this adjusts the goal for the following day. In less than a week the goal has gone from 5000 steps in a day to 6000 and today up to 7430. I took 12,939 steps so far today so I will have a new goal for today. The advantage of such a system is that it adapts to what we do on a daily basis, rather than a static goal.
Apple watches have the same feature but rather than measure steps it measures calories burned. This is interesting if you do a multitude of sports, like cycling where “steps” can be low despite a high energy expenditure. I put a fitbit tracker in my trousers when cycling to get a more accurate step count. This isn’t ideal but it works
Limitations
Activity trackers do not have a way of converting exertion whilst cycling into “number of steps taken”. I’d love to go on a one hour bike ride and for that hour of cycling to be counted as a certain number of steps. It’s superficial but frustrating to see that you have 2000 steps for a day despite cycling 30+kms, especially if there was a lot of climbing
The second frustration is that Fitbit, Suunto, Garmin and Apple all count steps but none of them speak with each other. This means that if you want to feed each network you need to carry a device from each brand. I don’t want to wear an Apple Watch Series 4 when I’m climbing because I know that their screens are not well suited to this sport. I don’t want to wear the Suunto Spartan Wrist HR Baro to work because it doesn’t fit under my shirt sleeve. I have no problem carrying the Garmin Vivosmart 4 in any context because it’s tiny. Its limitation is that it has limited functionality, especially when you like to work out.
Conclusion
The Garmin Vivosmart 4 is a small fitness tracker that is easily worn alongside the Suunto Spartan Wrist HR Baro for days at a time. It provides a lot of data to the user without requiring an entire wrist. It is no wider than bracelets supprting a variety of causes. With being so small you can easily wear it beside your watch or hidden under a sleeve during the winter months.
This is a device you can forget about for five to seven days a week. If you’re the type of person that wants a smart device but without the tedious task of taking it off to shower every morning, and taking it off to swim, and taking it off to charge on a daily basis then this is better than the Apple watch. Add to this that the screen is small so you won’t be distracted, especially when you’re driving. The series 3 and 4 have that drawback.
If you’re really adamant about it not distracting you you can even turn off haptic feedback and just check it on the phone at the end of the week. This being said you can also check it every morning to get an idea of how well you slept without sharing your bed with a phone. It also tracks you in those moments when you’re walking around the office or home without the phone, giving you a more complete appreciation of how much activity you are up to.
I’m on the Apple Activities March Walking Challenge this month. The app has decided that I must walk or run 298 kilometres. It’s an average of 9.6 kilometres a day. This is both easy and challenging at the same time. Walking 10 kilometres takes about two hours.
When I had a broken arm I walked more than two hours a day, because I had nothing else I could do. I also walked that much because I couldn’t bike, take the car or drive the scooter. As a result, I needed to walk for everything.
My arm isn’t broken anymore. I’m happy to do two hours of exercise a day. I like to devote some of that time to cycling. Cycling 300 kilometres for me would be around 10 bike rides. I would complete the challenge in 12 hours or less.
App Weaknesses
Last month the challenge was to reach 500 Calories per day for 28 days out of 29 and I would have reached that goal if it hadn’t been for making the mistake of uploading a workout from Strava to Garmin. By doing this the app decided that instead of burning 1200 calories according to the Apple Watch activity app I had done just 220. Instead of being angry or frustrated I simply decided to take it easy for the rest of the month (a whole two days left).
The problem with the Apple watch is that you have no way of saying “use this data, not that data. If you make a mistake you have no way of undoing it.
The weather
We just had two days of rain and today is sunny. When it’s raining the appeal of going for a walk is lower. Going for a walk involves dressing for the rain, not being able to see or hear as well as usual. It also involves feeling the cold wind. Luckily when I was facing into the wind for one leg of yesterday’s walk I was on the last stretch, and I was warm from walking.
I wore my hiking boots. The beauty of hiking boots is that they’re waterproof and you can walk through puddles and streams without getting wet. I did walk through streams and puddles. I enjoy it. I had walked through mud. My excuse for walking in the stream of water by the side of the road was that it would clear the mud off of them before I walked back into the apartment.
One of the paradoxes of apartment cleaning is that it’s always done on the day when you’re most likely to walk in the mud and bring some back in. When mud is wet it stays on the shoes. The next day, when you’re running down the stairs, as usual, you dump a nice trail of mud behind.
Routing (pronounced rooting, not grouting).
I considered changing my routes. I would walk through muddy bits at the beginning of my walks and the clean ones, on the way home. This minimises the quantity of mud on my shoes when I get home. The second option is to wear the hiking shoes I keep in the car, on muddy days. Bringing mud into the garage doesn’t matter.
Methods
Ten kilometres a day – two hours of walking
Ingress – either by completing missions or by participating in an event
Peak days – walk 20 kilometers on some days
Running – running the same distance takes less time, but impacts the knees
Walking ten kilometres a day can be achieved either by simply spending as little time sitting as possible. We easily walk ten kilometres a day during a conference. We’re even likely to walk the equivalent of twenty kilometers
Ingress Missions and days are a good way to stand, and walk for hours at a time. In both cases, you’re covering reasonable distances.
Peak days are those where you walk twenty to thirty kilometers on one day, and bank the distance, so that on other days you can devote time to other tasks, such as writing blog posts.
Running is a good way of covering bigger distances in the same amount of time. It requires the right surface and shoes.
The futile Challenge
At the end of the day, the challenge is futile. If I cycle thirty plus kilometers I’m challenging myself to climb up hills, I’m challenging myself to sprint as fast as cars through villages, and sometimes I keep up on 50 kilometer per hour sections. If the weather is good cycling makes more sense.
I should achieve the challenge quickly, and get back to cycling.
Indoor Climbing and the Apple Watch are a bad mix. They are a bad mix because the Apple watch has an unprotected glass screen. The screen is so exposed that last Thursday I shattered the screen without realising until I got home and tried to use it but the capacitive screen did not respond.
At first I couldn’t see anything so I tried to feel it with my nail (whatever is left of it after an evening of climbing) and I could hardly feel anything. Eventually by trying to look at the surface with light from different angles I could see two distinct cracks in the screen splitting the screen in to three distinct segments.
If I was your average smartwatch user I’d say that this is normal because smartwaches are made to be intelligent, not solid. I’d then point you to the fact that I have had suunto diving watches, Suunto feature watches and then Suunto Flagship watches such as the Ambit 2, 3 and then the Suunto Spartan watches. The Suunto Ambit 2 and Ambit 3 survived years of climbing, both rock climbing and via ferrata.
My Apple Watch Series 3 was “accidentally damaged”, the way Apple describes the condition of my watch, after just three climbing sessions. I had bouldered once, climbed once indoors, and once outdoors without issue. It’s when I went climbing indoors the second time that I must have done something to hairline fracture the glass.
In my humble opinion, with over 700 tracked activities with Suunto devices without issues, Apple is fatally flawed. In my opinion a smartwatch should be designed so that the screen is protected. The screen should be designed to survive what life has to throw at it. My Suunto Ambit 2 and 3 have had countless impacts on rocks over the years. You can see on the bezel of my Suunto devices that they have countless scratches. The glass however is fine. You need to look carefully to see any sign of scratches.
It is with this in mind that I strongly feel that Apple should take responsibility for making a device so mediocre that it gets cracked while climbing indoors. Indoor climbing is on wooden panels and fiberglass holds. It’s not on granite or other hard rock surfaces. A watch screen should survive this environment.
Replacing the watch screen via Apple would cost 230 CHF without taxes, possibly about 250 CHF with taxes. The watch itself cost 397 CHF new. It goes without saying that I did not ask for the unit to be fixed. It is because of Apple’s poor design that this watch suffered damage and it is Apple’s responsibility to replace the unit free of charge.
I didn’t drop it, I didn’t smash my wrist against something. I didn’t even know the unit was damaged until I got home and tried to use it. Fitness tracking watches should not be this fragile.
Since the start of the year I have been running regularly. Yesterday I went for a run and I found it easiser than other runs. It might be thanks to the audiobook, on the one hand, and to consistent training on the other. I am not pushing hard. The training program is a 5k programme over twelve weeks. I don’t need twelve weeks for this. I was a runner before. I don’t care about beating distance records or other things.
My primary goal is not to write “I didn’t feel my shin splints today” or “This run really hurt”. I want to run, without pushing my body to breaking point. I also want to run and feel comfortable. I want to allow my body the time to adapt to the sport, rather than pushing too far, too fast. If and when I can run five kilometres comfortably my one hour walks will take half an hour and my one and a half hour walks could take fourty five minutes. It’s not that I don’t like my long walks. It’s that I want to feel that my fitness is improving rather than stagnating.
Lifehacker currently has an article about “walk score and quality of life. I don’t like that there are so many roads with people who show apathy to cyclists and people walking by the side of the road. I walk into fields and I get thanked. I don’t walk into the fields out of curiousity. I walk into the fields out of fear and fatigue of cars skimming by me too fast. That’s part of what motivates me to run. Running is a sport where you can easily get away from cars.
I don’t need to take the car to go for a run, and I don’t need to buy anything extra for the scooter or car, if I want to run elsewhere. Although everything seems to indicate that the pandemic is over I am not convinced, so I prefer to run outdoors, away from people, to be safe. I value my health, and I enjoy walking and running locally. The pandemic has shaped how I think of sports, and which sports I would consider doing.
Yesterday it snowed for several hours and that snow was covering the path to my house. When I saw the ground turn from asphalt black to grey, to white I decided to go and start clearing the snow. It’s easy to clear snow when you have three or four centimetres, rather than more. At first it was light and easy to move so I cleared the path once, and then a second time, and then a third, and by the third I decided to stop. It had become a sisyphean task. It was falling as fast as I was clearing it.
Eventually I got around to spreading salt but because it had got wet it was clumpy and very hard to spread as efficiently as when it’s dry so in the end I didn’t spend too much time on it. I could have got away with not using any salt because within a few hours the snow turned to rain. I could have ignored the falling snow and the problem would have solved itself.
It was never about clearing the snow. It was about having a different workout than usual. It was about seeing an opportunity to have an upper body workout for free. It’s easy to walk, run or cycle. Sometimes it’s just as good to shovel snow, even if it was going to be melted by nightfall.
Eventually I was going to go for a walk, but because the snow was still falling I shovelled more snow. By this point it was wet and heavy so I eventually felt that I had reached the limit of my endurance and stopped. I was frustrated by the clumpy salt that was hard to spread because I was worried that the snow would freeze overnight and the ramp would become a rink.
Experimenting with Plex
Recently I have been listening to various Linux podcasts and I kept hearing about Plex, a video streaming service, and self-hosting solution. Plex is both a self-hosted media server as well as a film and television streaming service. Yesterday I watched Breaker Breaker as well as Ice Pilots NWT. When I watched Ice Pilots NWT on the laptop I had no ads but when I watched Breaker Breaker on an iOS device and Apple TV I did. I’m not sure whether it’s because of content type of viewing platform.
Plex looks like a great alternative to YouTube. It allows you to watch film classics like Nanook of the North, films from the 30s as well as plenty of films from the seventies, as well as more recent content. It’s divided in two. On one side you have video on demand, where you choose what and when to watch. You also have the Live TV option. Here you can watch Guardian TV, Euronews and other channels. You also have the Washington Post, Reuters and more.
The TV cateogires you can choose from are featured, news, hit tv, crime, sports, Game shows, Movies, action and more.
Plex feels like Satellite Broadcasting used to feel. You have a choice of many genres and hundreds of channels for niche interests. Rather than sorting through clickbait headlines like you do with YouTube you get real content, produced by Television and Film Professionals.
And Finally
When it snows you have a great opportunity to get an upper body workout. At this altitude it’s quite rare, so that’s why its fun. Plex is an interesting alternative to Netflix and YouTube because you have a wide variety of programs to watch when it’s convenient for you.
When experimenting with the Immich iPhone app I found it impossible to upload beyond 15,000 images and I supposed that it was because the phone timed out before it had checked all the previous files before moving on to the last four thousand images. In reality the problem is that Immich downloads the media from iCloud and leaves it on the phone. The result is that if you have one hundred gigabytes of photos on iCloud you need one hundred gigabytes of storage ony your phone.
I only came across this after several attempts. I realised that it was a storage issue because another app said “Phone memory is low, please clear some data, or something to this effect. As this is my old phone I could clear files from other apps to make sense for iCloud to download the last of my photos, to be synced with Immich.
A few hours later I had downloaded and synced all iCloud photos to Immich. I can now delete iCloud images and have plenty of space for future growth. I have the 200 gigabyte plan so it doesn’t really matter.
iCloud and iPhones
My second to last phone as an iPhone 8 plus with 256 gigabytes of ram but the next one was an iPhone SE 2 with 128 gigs of ram. The reason for the downgrade in storage is simple. Two hundred gigabytes with Apple costs 3 CHF per month whereas 2 terabytes is 10 CHF per month. The cost per gigabyte makes the 2 terabyte plan more interesting but the difficulty of retrieving data makes the plan uninteresting. You end up paying 120 CHF per year until you find a way to retrieve that data.
The Shift from Self-Storage to Online Storage
Many years ago Google had Picasa, and Apple had and still have iPhoto. Both apps expected you to store your files locally. With time, as people shifted to laptops so the amount of storage available on devices declined. That’s why Picasa enabled cloud storage, and why Google Photos and iPhotos allow you to backup to the cloud and clear space on mobile devices. With android devices it’s easy to add a miniSD card up to two terabytes. With iOS, but also with MacOS devices getting more storage costs hundreds of francs more.
With Apple you pay 1 CHF per month for 50GB, 3 CHF per month for 200GB, 10 CHF for 2TB, 30 CHF for 6TH and 60CHF for 12TB. By dumping my photos from iCloud to Immich I can downgrade my iCloud plan from 200GB for 3CHF per month to 50 GB for a symbolic franc per month.
iCloud Photos use 135 gigabytes of storage out of 185 gigabytes of storage.
Local Storage and Cloud Storage
If you have one hundred and fourty gigabytes of photos then you need a phone with at least 140 gigabytes of storage but the SE has just 128 gigabytes of storage. The laptop has about 256 gigabytes if I remember correctly.
This means that if you store two terabytes of photos in the cloud you need a two terabyte drive to recover them, whether on your phone or your laptop. Since this costs thousands of francs it makes more sense to have a solution such as Immich, Nextcloud and photosync and Photoprism.
I believe that both Nextcloud and Photosync download photos from iCloud, upload them to their respective services and remove them, whereas Immich downloads them and keeps them in place. With Immich you need to have enough storage on your mobile phone whereas the others adapt.
And Finally
Immich did not give an error message. It just got stuck so I tried over and over without success. It’s because another app said that I had run out of space that I was able to resolve the issue and accomplish my goal of transferring files from iPhoto/iCloud to Immich.
Now is the time to evaluate Nextcloud Immich, and Photoprism over a number of days.
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