I am confused by Apple reading goals because they measure how many days you have reached your goal, as well as how much you read for the current day, but once today is yesterday it loses all of that information. It tells you that you have a. streak but you have no way of knowing anything else.
It would be nice to know how many hours you read per week, as well as how this has varied from one week to the next, from one month to the next, and from one season to the next. With this information you could see whether seasons and other factors affect how much you read. None of this matters, except that because it is tracked it is a shame not to keep that information available for users.
Apple Books has the same flaw as plenty of other Apple Apps. If you live in Switzerland it is assumed that you speak German, and because of this assumption it is hard to browse for English, and even French content. You are obliged to know what you want to find, instead of having the freedom to browse. Apple must lose a lot of business by forcing German language version of content, rather than looking at system settings and using the system default. We’re decades into regionalisation, and yet tech giants don’t cater to people who do not speak the majority language.
And Finally
I thought I was going to go for a walk today but didn’t. I walked to breakfast and back and then spent time standing, so when I saw that it was 1400 I thought that I should go for a walk but didn’t. This is unusual for me. Today has been a crap day. I didn’t get to focus on my goals as I wish I could have. Days like today frustrate me.
Leopards are a strong animal capable of lifting animal carcasses into trees to keep their catch safe. It’s also the new Apple operating system and I purchased it. After taking about two hours to install the operating I’m quite happy with the new operating system.
Safari has had some new interactivity added. With most browsers the tabs are fixed at the top of the page and there’s not much you can do. If you’re in a playful mood then open up safari in Leopard and you can switch the tabs between each other. If you feel that one tab deserves it’s own browser window simply pull down the tab and it goes to a full size browser.
The user interface for the finder is quite a bit more fun. You’ve got coverflow for you pictures. What this means is that you can go through your pictures with no need to open iphoto and other applications. As a result the ability to be disorganised is greatly enhanced. At the same time looking at photographs and documents is quite a bit easier.
The time machine is an interesting piece of software that backs up your data every hour for 24 hours, then every day for a month and after that every week for as long as there’s space on the hard disk. If you’re on a desktop and your external hard drives are always plugged in then this is excellent. If you’re like me and you’re using a laptop the idea is not that great because the time machine is only active whilst I’m taking the time to plug in the hard drive. Setup is really easy therefore anyone with an external hard drive that mirrors the space used on their computer should be able to use it. If you’re using an internal spare hard drive does it work the same way
Items in the dock look the same as in tiger except there is a blue dot at the moment to display the applications that are currently active. The mail application has an RSS feed of apple news, just in case you’d missed the latest. You have both to do and notes included straight within the mail application.
The calendar has had one or two improvements of which the most useful is the pop out when you’re adding an event. In previous versions you would have to go to either side and type in additional information. With this one data input is overlayed over the calendar greatly increasing usability.
The ichat chromakey technology is quite interesting. If you want you can choose any background you want from the database of videos and photographs you have on your laptop. Simply choose the background you want. Move out of shot and wait till it’s seen the image. When you move back into frame you’ve got whichever background you chose. It works moderatly well depending on the type of background you’re using though.
Leopard is a nice operating system with a number of new features that make it fun to try out and use. The way information is displayed is interesting and the additional features like cover flow for document browsing, time machine for backup and more are taking advantage of the fact that people’s use of the computer has progressed over the years. By being better at media browsing the operating system is more intuitive to use. So far I’m happy with it.
This year I am replacing Social Media with Book Reading because social media is no longer a conversational place. It has become a place for sensationalism and the spreading of fake news and emotional news. As a result of these factors the potential gain of new friendships and interesting conversations has declined. For this reason you might as well find some interesting books and broaden your horizons.
I currently have hundreds of books on Kindle and Audible and my collection on the Kobo reader is bound to grow. Recently I read Too Loud A Solitude. This is a book I came across by accident. I was browsing through Goodreads recommendations and it came up. The book is interesting because it tells the story of a person who worked compacting books for 35 years. Every chapter begins with the phrase “For 35 years…”. The journey is an interesting one because we see how someone with a passion for books rescues some before they are destroyed. It is worth reading when you have the interest and motivation.
Another interesting book I read is Tartarin Sur Les Alpes. This book is interesting because of its age. It is about the early days of Alpinism. It speaks of various mountains and locations that are easy to get to today but that were accessed by horse and carriage at the time. It also explores the early days of tourism.
Books require an investment of time of several hours in the same way that television series require. You can read a chapter or “episode” a day or you can binge through them reading several chapters in a single day. They usually require from seven to 21 hours to get through just like television series seasons. It’s easy to lose entire days.
I like e-books and I like audible books. As a result of this I can walk around with hundreds of books at a time and read from one book and then another. It transports me to different time periods and places. For a moment I stop living in the present. With audio books I can drive, hike or walk at the same time. I can be a bookworm without being stuck in a building.
It’s a sunday night in Switzerland and I’m with some friends. Spain were playing Germany and won 1-0, a respectable score. I was there with the phone streaming the celebrations at the Geneva Fanzone in Plainpalais.
People love to submit portals and portals add excitement to Ingress. The more portals there are the busier you are. Cities are fantastic places for ingress players for this reason. Geneva, Barcelona, Neuchatel and other cities already have hundreds if not thousands of portals but go to the swiss countryside, the spanish sea side or away from big cities and portals are few and far between. As a result of this rural players don’t have much to do unless they get in a car and create megafields.
What I propose is a crowdsourced portal acceptance system. The system would have two features:
Proximity to other portals. If you’re in the middle of the countryside and the portal is submitted then it is moved to the top of the submission list for quick approval. By getting remote locations to have higher portal density so users are encouraged to become more active. As people see them play so new players are encouraged to join in the game.
The second variable is based on geographic location. If a player in New York submits a portal then a player in Madrid from L9 or above sees the portal submission and decides whether or not it is too close to other portals, whether it is legitimate and whether it is worth validating. If a player from Paris submits a portal then a player can accept or refuse that portal.
Of course the second feature requires for the Portal acceptance interface to be opened up to players of level 9 or higher. The permissions would only be “approve” or “reject”. will allow players to question the submission and let a group of people decide on the future of specific portals.
As Yael Naim’s live performance of Toxic plays from my phone so I’m playing with Blueapple.mobi which “brings internet video and pictures directly to mobile users”. It’s an interesting service that allows you to view videos from a number of sources. You can see some of the recommended videos which are already converted from sources such as CBS or you can search for others. When you find a video that is not converted yet the site will convert the video on the fly and within a very short amount of time you will be able to download it straight to the phone.
This is more interesting than other services where you need to download applications in order for the files to be available. Of particular interest is the feature that you don’t need anything extra on the phone. Just download the video, watch it and then discard it. No waste, no clutter.
Take a look, it could be of interest as mobile broadband prices go down and free wifi become ubiquitous.
Yesterday I took over 16,000 steps. Some of those steps were during a short run from Eysins to Nyon and the rest were during the walk around Nyon and back to Eysins. By the end of the day I had manage to accumulate the step goal of 15300 steps.
With Fitbit and other activity trackers this would be fantastic because you would have met your step goal and you could look forward to meeting the same daily goal day after day. Garmin Connect is different. If you reach and exceed the goal on one day the goal is boosted the next day, and the day after that.
Last Tuesday the step goal was 10950 steps. Yesterday it was 15,300 and today 15,510 steps. That’s an increase of 5000 steps in a week. The issue I face is not with getting to that step count but rather with the amount of time it takes and the fact that cycling and workout intensity are not considered.
I went for two ten minute runs with a three minute break in between today and when I got home I had no spring in my step and I just wanted to rest. I am still getting back into the habit of running so it takes its toll.
I love that it encourages me to take those extra 200 steps compared to yesterday and I love that in theory I could get to the point where the step count requires me to walk for 24 hours to reach it. In practice I want to do other things as well.
In the past I have taken up to 40,000 steps a day on more than one occasion and regularly reached over 20,000. After a hiking weekend the figure will be high, but you’ll be stuck in the office with your daily commute and lunch hour to make up the difference.
The other option is to run. I walk at up to 110 steps per minute but run at around 140 consistently. If I run for as long as I walk I would reach the goal in less time.
When you miss a step goal the counter degrades the required number of steps for the next day. The emotional cost is that you lose the streak. In practice I will lose the streak every Wednesday, as I save energy to go climbing so it doesn’t matter.
Physically I find getting to ten thousand steps really easy. It doesn’t tire me. The challenge when using fitbit was getting to that step count for two or three months in a row. If you’re driving for twelve hours or if you go on a bike ride you miss the goal and you’re stuck with the prospect of going for that many days+1 to beat your old goal. The better you are at reaching your goal the harder it is to beat it.
The easy option would be to edit the daily goal to a fixed number. I could set it to the standard 10,000 steps and beat it daily or conversely I could do the opposite.
The opposite would be to look at the graph above and to select a daily step goal that puts me above 95 percent of other users. According to this chart if I consistently reached 15,000 steps I would beat almost everyone on the graph. I could be more, rather than less ambitious.
The summer hiking, climbing and Via Ferrata seasons are about to start and already I am in the top eight percent for floors climbed per day. 92 percent of Garmin activity tracker users climb less than 21 floors a day. On a good hiking day I climb the equivalent of over 400. I look forward to seeing the stats over the summer months.
In the last two or three days as I tracked my activities I noticed this anomaly. When I checked the GPX file it seems that Garmin tracks activities automatically and when you’re outdoors it knows where you are. When you go indoors or the signal is lost it auto-corrects the location to a cell tower that it can sense.
The tracker is intelligent enough to detect where we are and what we’re doing but when the GPS signal it auto-corrects to a location kilometres away. This is a flaw. If a GPS signal loses location information it should persist at the last known location until it has a solid fix. If I have such a big fluctuation in a location I usually delete the track. It is worthless.
I would like Garmin to take the data from thousands of fitness trackers and create a formula that automatically degrades or increases step count according to weather, number of hours of daylight and other factors. Imagine if instead of “if user “a*” beats previous day then increase by 200″ it updated or decreased according to whether someone cycled, ran or regularly went climbing. As things are I will never have a seven day streak.
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