For 92 CHF you can buy the Casio GBD-800-1B from conrad via Galaxus and it will track you steps 24hrs a day and map your walks without you pressing a single button. This means that you can track your life, without thinking about it.
The problem with watches from the last five or so years is that they track steps, heart rate and more 24hrs a day, but need to be charged, and want to know what you’re doing. They invade your life. “Are you walking now”, “you should get up and walk for one minute”, “you should go to sleep.”
Feature Watch
Today I thought of a new term. Feature watches. We have smart watches and more. They try to get us addicted to their apps, and to tracking everything we do. Feature watches are the opposite. You put them on, and in theory you can wear them for three years before you remove them.
When I go for a run I will take the Garmin or the Apple watch, because they track heart rate and provide an idea of the fitness progression over time but the rest of the time I’d be happy with the Casio.
The advantage of a feature watch was demonstrated today. I put the watch on this morning and when I decided to go for a walk the phone’s GPS tracked my movements automatically. The watch tracked the number of steps I took. When the walk the watch synced the step data with the phone app. I had a map of the walk I did, automatically.
Initially I had been tempted by a higher spec casio, specifically the Casio Pro Trek PRT-B50. It has many of the same features minus thermometer, barometer, altimeter and compass but for 110 francs more and it is large. It is nice to have watches that fit under sleeves.
And Finally
Although this watch promotes itself as a step tracker it offers more than that, by allowing you to automatically track walks, hikes, runs and more, without having to press any buttons or pay attention to the walk. It starts when you start, and it ends when you end. I need to experiment with cycling and driving, to see how it reacts in those situations. I am still forming my opinion but so far it feels good.
Recently I started using feedly which is a great tool for managing rss feeds and content into an easy to view form. Connecting with google reader, friendfeed and a number of other surfaces it provides you with three principle displays for viewing the content you have selected to have aggregated.
The first display shows your content by theme. In my case these themes are social media, video, technology, explore, and of course my own content output, to some degree. From this display I can quickly see a number of topics.
The second display is named digest. It displays three of the top unread stories with the title and a quick description of the articles in each category. You can cycle through these articles using the ever popular J and K keys, j for going back, K for going forwards. A counter tells you how many items are left for each category.
The list view gives you a quick headline for every blog post. It’s a quick way to go through your rss feeds. The articles expand to their full length once they have been selected.
Above is what I think is the most interesting feature of all. It’s a demonstration of how feedly is integrated into your every day browsing. Anytime you go to a blog you’re made aware of the conversation that is taking place and how active it is. You may also share that content to a number of platforms, from google reader to friendfeed, twitter and more to add. You can add a note to explain why you think that blog post is relevant to your readers.
Of course the reason I love this application, requiring firefox, so much is that it allows for the entire world wide web to be something your share with those who are interested in where your attention is being drawn. It syncs with google reader, integrates with friendeed and just provides a great all round user experience. I strongly recommend using it.
The Crosscall Odyssey Plus fills two niches. It is a rugged weather proof phone rated to the IP 68 standard and is equipped with dual sim capability. This makes it ideal for the sports I enjoy, mainly via ferrata as pictured below and hiking. It comes with a smaller carabiner than the one pictured below. I swapped it for one of my own.
IP 68Â is a code to determine how resistant a device is to both particulate matter and liquids. 6 denotes that the device is dust tight so particulate matter will not make it’s way in. 8 as defined by the manufacturer denotes that this device can be submerged for half an hour at 1m before damage occurs. If you get caught in the rain or have to cross a river the phone should survive.
Another interesting feature is the dual sim capability. This phone allows for two microsims to be used at once. In my case I have a Swiss sim card and a french one. Both sims are constantly active so you can select whether to make phone calls from Sim 1 or Sim 2. You can also select which sim card is using the data plan.
It runs android 4.3 and works fine with the TomTom app, the ingress and others. I found that battery life is also comfortable. With me as a user the battery lasts for a day.
While I was cat sitting I spent time playing with a Roomba. Most people set the roomba, and let it clean. I don’t. I watch it and I observe how it works, how it goes from place to place and how it navigates, and gets trapped, and procrastinates in one corner or part of an apartment/studio. Roombas are glamourised but I think they are flawed.
Their flaw is that they start from their dock, back and go beep beep beep beep, then they rotate and they start cleaning. So far so good. The issue comes when they hit an object. They start from the top right of a room and they go diagonally to the other side of the room and they hit an object and they turn right.
How they turn right changes. Sometimes they turn right and start circling clockwise, and then counterclockwise. Other times they hit an object and go they go across to the other side of the room. Their programming sees them pass by the same corner dozens of times whilst ignoring other parts of the room.
I tried using shoes and other objects to control how big an area they focus on. I tried a bathroom, a small kitchen and a living room. In each case they go over and over the same spot.
I think Roomba should have been programmed to do a search pattern instead. When you’re mowing the lawn as a pattern you start from one side of the garden and you go back and forth, turning 180 degrees when you get to the other side and do a line right next to where you’ve been. In so doing you cut the grass in a short amount of time.
If Roomba simplified the programming they would be more efficient. They would not need to learn the room, they would not need to be “smart”. They could clean a room of any size within minutes rather than tens of minutes.
The video above shows that smart vacuum cleaners take an artistic and inefficient approach to cleaning. They waste a lot of energy going over parts of the room they have already cleaned whilst missing some spots.
The brush at the front also has a habit of flinging dust and larger forms of dirt away from themselves and into a part that was just cleaned. As a result, they may spread some dirt. There should be a way of preventing this.
Due to their programming flaw, Roombas are more fun to play and experiment with than use as a replacement to manually vacuuming a room. A simple tweak in their software would make them more efficient. At the moment they behave like toddlers with a vacuum cleaner rather than teenagers with a lawnmower.
I am currently reading Empire of the Deep, The Rise and Fall of The British Navy and to read it within the context of Brexit is interesting. We already know that the British gave up on the Catholic Church because Henry the Viii wanted to change wives and the Pope said no. (I am oversimplifying it, for the sake of this blog post.) While reading Empire of the Deep I see that the English have a very long history of being at conflict with Europe.
Two or three years ago I heard about a talk that would be given to the U3A somewhere in Spain about the English and piracy and I didn’t think much of it at the time because my knowledge was limited to what I had seen in films and cartoons. Through reading the book mentioned above I see that piracy was an important part of what English ships did centuries ago. They would attack and loot the Spanish, attack the French, try to undermine the Netherlands and their empire, Portugal and more.
At the same time as the British tried did all these things they changed alliances and allegiances according to their goals. What is interesting, and I’m being very broad, is that whilst the Monarchy wanted close ties with Europe Parliament and the Tories, especially wanted war and distance, rather than collaboration with Europe.
As a person who studied 20th century Europe I looked at Brexit from that perspective, so I thought that it was absurd and old-fashioned for England to want to be separate from Europe. I also look at this topic from the perspective of someone living in Switzerland, who sees the limitations that Switzerland frequently faces. If new content is made available via Netflix, Amazon or others then Switzerland usually has to wait an extra two or three years to get the same content. Another example is roaming. Switzerland took an additional two or three years before roaming between Switzerland and Europe was simplified.
The story of our navy is nothing less than the story of Britain, our culture and our empire. Much more than a parade of admirals and their battles, this is the story of how an insignificant island nation conquered the world’s oceans to become its greatest trading empire. Few other nations have fallen so deeply in love with a branch of the armed forces as the British did with its Navy. Yet, as Ben Wilson shows, there was nothing inevitable about this rise to maritime domination, nor was it ever an easy path. For much of our history Britain was a third-rate maritime power on the periphery of Europe. EMPIRE OF THE DEEP also reveals how our naval history has shaped us in more subtle and surprising ways – our language, culture, politics and national character all owe a great debt to this conquest of the seas. This is a gripping, fresh take on our national story.
There are a few parallels to what is happening now.
The quote above looks familiar, but this is a view that was expressed between 1713-1744. It is in chapter 26 – “Heaven’s Command”.
As a person who studied 20th century history I always saw the European Union as a good thing, in order to keep people united, rather than split them up. I saw it as valuable for the preservation of peace, but also because Europe, through the dismantling of borders, gave us an enormous amount of freedom to travel, work and more. It also provided us with a broader, more inclusive cultural identity.
Back in 2000 or so I was struck by two things. The first was that it was impossible to get international news from English news sources. You needed to read Swiss, French or other news sources to get international news. One of the biggest cultural shocks, when I lived in England the first time is that I was labelled, both as French, and as a foreigner, despite having a British passport. I came from International Geneva, where we’re called Internationals, rather than foreigners. We’re also in the habit of learning someone’s nationality and using that as an identifier. It’s a matter of interest and curiousity, rather than a derogatory term.
When I lived in the South West I learned that you knew where someone was from in England by their accent because of the differences in how words are pronounced. When I lived in London I saw something else. When you hear of Geneva being multicultural you see that all nationalities mix all the time. In London, when I saw that there were communities of one nationality living in one part and those of another in another part I began to call London poly cultural, rather than multicultural. I make the distinction because for me multiculturalism is about everyone mixing all the time. Polyculturalism is where cultures live side by side, but they do not mix once they go back to the area where they live.
Europe is in a unique situation because it is 27 countries, with a variety of languages, cultures and traditions that have amalgamated, and where borders are administrative, rather than hard. We can cycle from Switzerland to France, by accident, and we can ski from Switzerland to France, to Italy without difficulty. We can drive from Portugal to the other side of Europe without showing a passport. In England, you cannot have this experience because you’d have to swim across.
By reading the book above I am seeing England’s attitude to “overseas” from a different perspective. I see that England has a history of wanting to be outside of Europe, of differentiating itself. It also has a history of trying to control trade, either through piracy, convoys and more. Now I understand why England holds on to Gibraltar, and why English people live and holiday around Alicante.
I recommend reading the book, I’m only thirty-five percent in. I am learning from it. My contextual understanding of English attitudes is being complemented by the reading of this book.
These four brands create watches. Casio creates rugged watches with batteries that last for a decade or more, and pair with mobile phones to track walks and more. Suunto and Garmin have fitness/sports trackers that measure activities, whether sailing, climbing, running, walking, cycling, scuba diving or more. Apple in contrast creates fragile, mediocre watches that cost as much as mid to high range watches and yet their battery lasts for one day, if you’re lucky. I even heard that Apple watches with 4g last half a day between charges. Charging a watch twice a day is unacceptable.
The article that triggered this reaction says that the Apple Watch encourages people to spend more on smartwatches, as if this was a good thing. It isn’t. These are throwaway products. The type of people that would buy an apple watch plan to change it every two years.
If you pay 800 USD for a watch I’d expect to keep it for a decade or more, not two watch generations, two years.
I might have bought two or three devices recently and the one that I am happiest with is one of the cheapest options. The Garmin Forerunner 45s. For 100 CHF you have a GPS sports tracker that tracks your runs, walks, bike rides and more. The battery does last for three or four workouts before needing a charge but it gives you all the functionality you need, for a fraction of the price, and it’s small.
I don’t want the Apple Watch to be dominant, because I see it as a crap product, and I feel that such a product pulls down the rest of the market. I slid away from Suunto because of WearOS and I gravitate towards Garmin because it still has proprietary software for the moment. I don’t want a smart watch. I want a sports tracker. I also want it to be affordable.
For a while I had a mac book air and I used it for everything. I saw the mac book air as the machine to use for everything except for video editing. That’s what the mac book pro was for. Eventually I sold the Mac Book Air and then I took the MBP to an event and it was stolen and I found myself without a machine.
I regretted selling the mac book air then, because if I had kept the mac book air then I would not have taken the MBP and it would not have been stolen.
I have looked for cheap, low cost machines recently because I wanted to get a linux box to play with. As it is just to do some simple things I don’t need a top of the range machine. I came across the Acer Chromebook 311 so I decided to play with this machine.
So far I have tried chrome, gmail, the play store, and I took a few minutes to install atom.io, connect it to github and download a repository. I have not written code with this machine yet, but so far writing a blog post is fine. The machine is fast enough and the keyboard is comfortable.
The machine has twenty gigs of storage and it is connected to Google drive so I have plenty of storage. It has two USB c ports and two standard usb ports. These are one of each type on each side. Although internal storage is small it is easy to expand with external disks and drives.
In theory you can monitor aranet devices via the laptop but as my mobile phone and aranet devices are already paired it was buggy. If you pair them then I expect the interactivity to be flawless.
I chose this device for three reasons. The first is that it is the cheapest device they had. The second is that it was available the soonest. The third reason is that it is always good to have a light, portable machine, from which you can work and do things. This machine is easy to put in most bags, take to an event, use, and then return home. With a 15″ machine that is not possible. It gets heavy, fast. When my laptop was stolen a few years ago I had broken my own rule. Never take what you’re not ready to carry at all times, to a conference or event.
I am now at the end of this blog post and the keyboard was fine to type with. It’s quick and intuitive. No hunting and pecking, and few typos. This is a nice, and yet cheap machine. Better than the EEEpc and other options I played with in the past. This cheap machine is usable. I am happy with this purchase.
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