A Week and a Half With The Garmin 45S

A Week and a Half With The Garmin 45S

Byrichard

I have spent a week and a half with the Garmin 45S and it doe what I expect the Garmin to do, but with more regular charges. The battery is rated to last for a week working as a watch and up to 13 hours working as a sports tracker. You can track your workouts with GPS, GPS and Galileo or GPS and Glonass.


This watch is designed for running, rather than walking or other sports, so it provides running data that is easy to read, whilst running. At the end of the run it provides you with useful data, as you’d expect from such a tracker.


It does track walks but it does not track hiking. If you buy this watch as a hiker then you will meet that limitation. Another limitation is that it does not count how many floors you go up, or down, so if you’re working on keeping a streak then you will lose it.


GPS satellite acquisition seems slower than with the Garmin instinct but I have not timed both to see whether this is an impression or a reality. It could simply be that the display is different.


After a week and a half of wearing this watch I only miss one thing that the Garmin Instinct has. Floor climb counting. If the Garmin 45s has that feature then I would quite happily swap out the instinct for the 45s. It’s simple, it’s light, it’s cheap and it seems dependable. The feature that has me sticking with the Garmin forerunner 45s is that it measures VO2 max with every workout.


The reason I want to run and cycle more, is to see that my fitness is growing, not declining, and with walking fitness apps like to make us feel that we are losing fitness, whereas with running and cycling the opposite is true.


Casio VS Forerunner 45s


For about 100-150 CHF you can either by a forerunner for as little as 99 CHF or a casio for between 100-150 CHF but the casio will map a workout via the phone and count steps internally, without measuring HR, despite the app having vo2max. If you’re getting a fitness tracker for a child, or beginner I would go for the Forerunner 45s because it’s cheap, and delivers on what you want from a fitness tracker.


And Finally


The natural instinct is to go towards the higher spec, newer devices. The reality is that if we’re running, and walking for half an hour to an hour and a half a day the 45s will do what we want it to for half the price, and two thirds the weight. It is a small watch that fits smaller wrists. With the Suunto Spartan Wrist HR you say “I’m sporty, with the Apple Watches you say “I’m an apple drone”, with the garmin instinct you say “I am sporty” and with the Garmin 45s you say “My watch fits under my shirt sleeve at work.”


In conclusion, for the price of a fitness tracker you can get a running/walking watch that tracks your sports and displays that information on the device, as well as on the Garmin Connect app and website. Although this is a cheap watch, compared to others, it delivers more than fitness trackers. Remember, the cheaper the device you buy and play with, the sooner you can swap it for something better later on.


I would use the 45s for daily walks and runs, and for bike rides and proper hikes I would use the instinct Solar.

My Lack Of Interest In the Apple Watch Ultra

My Lack Of Interest In the Apple Watch Ultra

Byrichard

I see people are training for ultrarunning events, scuba diving and more with the Apple Watch Ulta, but I feel no interest in such a watch. The first reason for my lack of interest is that the watch is stupidly expensive for something that lasts just 30 hours on a single charge. I would expect a watch to last at least three or four weeks between charges, and at least a week with daily use. The Ultra does neither.


The second reason for my lack of interest is that Apple watches are fragile. They are not protected from being bashed or knocked when climbing or doing other things. I broke one screen. indoor climbing. With Suunto watches I climbed for years with barely a scratch.


The Third reason is that when you’re diving in cold waters you want a big, clear, easy to read display that is reliable. I trust Suunto to make reliable dive computers, but as a secondary device. My primary device was a Mares Icon HD. This is a large, clear, easy to read dive computer. This is from a few years ago. The point is that for cold water diving I want specialist gear by specialist device makers. It has to be trustworthy.


The fourth reason is that there are perfectly suitable devices for between 100-350 CHF. You don’t need to spend more on a watch than on a fragile device. I want something that tracks my daily walks, hikes, runs and bike rides, without worrying about it breaking. Cheap devices have plenty of functionality. I’d even toy with the idea of getting an Apple watch SE, because cheap watches last as long as expensive watches and some devices are bought for three or four years of use, not a lifetime.


The fifth reason is that a touch screen is often not useful when hiking, diving and more. You need buttons because you can navigate by memory, rather than by looking intently, and because with buttons you don’t need to take your gloves off to use the device.


The Final reason is that Apple watches are designed to make you want to swap them out every second or third year. If you buy the top of the range watch this year then next year or the year after you will want to swap it out, and then again after that. It’s better to buy a watch at a reasonable price, that does what you want, that will least three to four years. The Series four lasted four years. The Suunto Spartan lasted until the strap started to break and the battery started to decline. The Ambit three lasted for many many happy years of use.


If we were not in a pandemic, and if life was normal I’d be focused on doing a variety of sports, and I wouldn’t be so distracted by devices. I’d get the gear I need for the sports I want to do, and I’d do them. My desire to experiment with a variety of devices is due to the pandemic. In better times I would be focused on driving hundreds of kilometres a month, to do things. Not at the moment.


And Finally


I get pleasure from looking at the breadth and diversity of options. If I choose the cheaper options then if I play with them for a year or two, before moving on, then I do not feel wasteful. Three or four years ago I was tempted to get a cycling computer but resisted that urge because I don’t have the use case for it. I do love to cycle but sports watches do the same, and more. They are not dedicated to a single use.


I Want to Dump WordPress for Laravel
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I Want to Dump WordPress for Laravel

Byrichard

For at least a year I have been annoyed with WordPress, not because it went from the classic editor to Guthenburg but because it now uses React and I hate the idea of using React because it was a FaceBook project. I don’t trust Facebook and I don’t want to use anything related to them.


I don’t want to use FaceBook because it reminds me of the life I don’t have, Instagram because it switched from being a network of friends to a network of spam, WhatsApp because it’s owned and controlled by FaceBook so privacy is at risk, and finally React because it is part of the FaceBook universe.


I was tempted by the Occulus Quest a few years ago but I didn’t buy it, because it would ingest me into the world of Facebook. If Facebook, now Meta, was caught being unethical and immoral, and said sorry, and did something to fix the situation, then I would rethink how I feel about the company. The reality is that when they’re caught being immoral they just wait until we forget about it. That’s not how a social network should be, especially one that experimented with making us feel negative, and was caught helping with spreading disinformation to the right people to get Brexit to succeed, and Trump to be elected.


But What About PHP?


I know that some of you will ask “But if you refuse to use React, why don’t you feel the same way about PHP? PHP was developed in part by Facebook years ago, but it came of age when I didn’t have a negative opinion of Facebook yet. I don’t want to use React because I don’t want to make it easier for Facebook to have a monopoly on the World Wide Web.


I also feel happier learning to use technology where I am not competing with everyone else. I still studied Vanilla JavaScript via several courses and understand how most functionality works, even if I can’t write the code from scratch without help.


Back in 2004 and earlier I was playing with every framework I could find, installing it, seeing what I could do, and then moving on. I found WordPress and my learning reached a plateau. During the pandemic I started to study how CSS and other technologies worked until I found that PHP and Laravel feel intuitive compared to other technologies. I wanted to use Angular but I got stuck, so I learned Vanilla JavasScript, then Python, and then PHP, and finally laravel. With PHP and Laravel I got things to work without struggling.


I did get stuck with Laravel, with permissions, which is why I studied “Let’s Learn Laravel: A Guided Path for Beginners. I am at section 15, “Deploying To A VPS”. After that the course will be done. I still want to follow courses on how to make Laravel secure. My goal is to make my website a showcase of my understanding of Laravel.


And Finally


Although replacing WordPress with Laravel would be a fun goal to achieve I think that the first step is to turn the static part of my website into a dynamic one. Once that is achieved then I can see whether I want to migrate my WordPress blog to Laravel, or keep things as they are. Security wise it makes sense to stick with WordPress, until I know more.

Learning By Writing despite GPT

Learning By Writing despite GPT

Byrichard

I am old enough to remember a teacher writing on a board or piece of plastic for an overhead projector. “Why don’t you just give us photocopies of what you’re writing instead of asking us to copy down what you’re writing. “Because you will remember it better if you write it down.”


At the time this seemed stupid and a waste of time. Years later I think that we could have been taught to take summarised notes rather than literal notes but that isn’t the point. The point is that learning is as much about writing as it is about understanding the material Every day for weeks in a row I have taken the time to write a 300 word post and it’s difficult. Not only do you need to come up with an idea but you need to develop it into something that is at least three hundred words long.


In my opinion chatGPT is going to lower the quality of people’s ability to write, by doing the writing for them. The process in and of itself is the learning experience. You don’t learn by typing a term in a search engine and reading. You learn by thinking of something, and then putting it into words. You learn by trying to write, finding that you have knowledge gaps, and then reading more, before returning to the document you are working on.


The notion that you can get AI to write essays. academic papers, articles and more, is destructive.It is destructive because writing is a skill that is learned through practice. Writing requires us to learn how to think, elaborate, and then make clear. Writing is about elaborating ideas, and rewriting, to make those ideas clear to understand.


Writing is a conversation that you can have with yourself. There is a lot to be gained by writing, rather than getting AI to write.


I love technology, and I love when it can replace boring repetitive tasks, such as entering data into a database and more. I like when it takes data from a form, and places it into a database.


What I hate about tech like chatGPT is that it is designed to replace human beings with artificial intellgence. It is about generating revenue for shareholders, without thinking of the humanity that is lost by doing away with human writers.


One of the reasons I don’t like YouTube, blog farms, Buzzfeed and other sources of “news” is that they have clickbait headlines and rubbish content. We need humans to write content that we read because human written articles are personal. AI is cold.


Recently tech giants, that doubled their profits from one year to the next, with billions of dollars in cash, or at least savings, fired thousands of people, not because they were running out of cash, or struggling to survive, but because they had to maximise profit, not for the human staff, but for the shareholders.
It didn’t end there. Even the execs are taking pay cuts. We live in an age where companies are making billions, or even trillions in profit, and yet the money only flows one way. If a company is profitable it should be investing in staff, giving them better conditions and making sure they stay.


Instead companies are making record profits, to pay dividends, rather than staff.


We are living in affluent times, but the wealthy benefit whilst the rest of society lives in insecurity. That’s why technology like chatGPT worries me. We live in an age of enormous wealth, but it is being funnelled out of society, into offshore accounts, never to be seen again.


And Finally


Remember “The medium is the message” and “The manufacturing of consent”. If AI, rather than individuals write what we read, then those who control the technology control how we think. Read Mindf*ck and look at how FaceBook played with our emotions. Look at who has bought into chatGPT and you will see why I do not like or trust this technology.


I love tech, when it is developed and controlled by moral, rather than corrupt people.

Five Years With The Suunto Spartan

Five Years With The Suunto Spartan

Byrichard

I have had the Suunto Spartan for around five years, the Apple watch Series Four for Four and the Instinct since November 2021 and I find myself gravitating back towards the Suunto Spartan watch again. I pivoted away from the watch and Suunto because it moved towards WearOS and smartwatches, rather than sticking to fitness tracking.


I was afraid that MovesCount, known as Suunto App now, and the Sportstracker app would both be killed off or allowed to die but this hasn’t happened. I see that Sportstracker and the Apple watch play quite nicely together so if I want the power of sportstracker and the Suunto app I can stick to an Apple watch.


Curious about Apple


I bought the Series 3, which I broke indoor climbing out of curiousity, and regretted it, and for some reason I was so annoyed with the screen break that I still bought a series four and that has lasted four years, so it outlasted the other watch by four or more years.


Frequent Pair


The Garmin Instinct has a fatal flaw, in my eyes. It often decides that it no longer wants to connect. You need to “pair phone” on a regular basis. This is easy to fix, and takes seconds, but it is a flaw that I have noted with several Garmin devices. If I pair a device I want it to remain paired until I change phone, or change watch. I don’t want to regularly pair my devices. They should be “pair and forget”.


Fitness Focused


One of the beauties of the Suunto App, which is based on movescount, which is based on SportsTracker is that the app is focused on your progression, your efforts, your workouts, your recovery time and your life. Garmin and Apple want you to focus on games, badges, rewards and more. Suunto just gives you a way to track the day’s effort, see how long it will take to recover and then get on with your day. That’s how it should be.


Signs of age


After five years of use the strap is still in good condition except that one of the rubber strap holders has broken off. The battery life is not as good as it used to be. It has one easy to see scratch on the surface. A little paint has been stripped off the top bezel. It isn’t easy to see.


Too Big


The one flaw of this watch is that it’s big on the wrist. When you wear shirts you can’t easily slide it under a sleeve. It’s hard to access under layers in winter. A slimmer watch would be better.


Durability


I use my fitness tracking watches for one to two hours per day. They last for years. My Suunto Ambit 3 is still alive and could still be used. These watches might feel expensive but when you consider that you get five or more years of use the cost goes down to 100 CHF per year. According to Suunto I have 3100 tracked activities and 23,000 kilometres of distance covered.


I am tempted to return to Suunto now that I see the app has survived the transition to WearOS. That’s why I looked around in the first place.

Laravel and Context

Laravel and Context

Byrichard

There is value in studying Laravel and context. By this I mean that over a year ago I wanted to study Angular but after feeling lost in Javascript I decided to take a step back, to study JavaScript. I studied two or more courses over a period of months. I could have followed a single course and claimed that I knew and understood JavaScript but that would have been misleading.


The value in studying two, three or more courses is that each teacher, and each course takes a different approach, and each approach fills in gaps that are left open by others. By studying three or more courses on JavaScript I gained a better contextual understanding of what JavaScript can do, as well as how it works.


Eventually I did return to JavaScript but I encountered another challenge. I don’t understand the error messages yet, because I haven’t come across them. That’s when I decided to circle around and study PHP from the ground up and that’s where I found comfort. I like PHP because errors are clear. They are usually literal. There is an error at this line and it’s easy to debug.


After becoming more confident with PHP I started to rework my personal website so that pages went from being basic html pages that were decades old, with css added recently, they were php pages. Eventually I felt confident enough to step into the world or Laravel.


I began by experimenting with one laravel tutorial on the laravel website, before following the tutorial but changing certain names. It worked well. I was able to create website sections and update content and more. I did get stuck when I wanted to make content visible to non logged in users.


That’s when I decided to follow a course. The course is “Let’s Learn Laravel” by Brad Schiff. It is a comprehensive course, over fourteen and a half hours that teaches you how to create pages, users, models, use middleware, policies, how to create chat rooms and more. On the topic of chat rooms I find it interesting.


He often says “this is outside the scope of the course so I won’t go into the details” but I have already been into depth by following Vanilla JavaScript courses. I would struggle to write the code from scratch, but if I see the code in front of me then I do understand what it does, to some degree. On this specific topic he also points us to node.js packages that do most of the work for us.


The reason I follow Udemy coures, that I buy at 9.99 or 11USD, when they’re on sale, rather than follow hours of courses on YouTube is that they’re comprehensive. They also have to adhere to a certain standard. I also use Linkedin Learning for courses.


My website is decades old, and it has gone from html, to html with CSS, to static php. By learning to use Laravel it will become dynamic. It will serve to prove that I understand what I am doing. It will help to build up my confidence, and my portfolio.

chatGPT, GPT3 and Reading Time

chatGPT, GPT3 and Reading Time

Byrichard

Time for a new discussion to take place. Reading time. Do you read through articles or do you skim them. Is reading the headline enough or do you read every word of the article? I ask because in the age of chatGPT and GPT3 I would ask the same question as I asked about social media.


If you want to discuss ROI for businesses and PR firms or advertisers then you need to discuss ROI for users too. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter wanted to control the timeline by using a “home” feed. The Home feed is an algorithm driven feed that shows you popular content, rather than content by friends, that you and they would converse about. The result is a lonely social media experience. The ROI goes down, That’s why I took a break from Twitter to play with Mastodon and revive my blogging habit.


Now we’re coming to the new discussion, about chatGPT. From the tests I have run with chatGPT it is a glorified encyclopaedia rather than AI. It spits out predetermined answers, rather than showing signs of learning and logic. I played with Copperman years ago, and other projects. With those, the more you chatted with the app, the more intelligent it would become. With chatGPT it always gives standard responses. It’s boring. It has no humanity. It has no character.


Writing is a creative process. You sit there, knowing that you want to create content but you need to spend time thinking of ideas, and then you need to write to the word count that you, or others has set. That process injects humanity into what you write. It also means that someone has taken the time to develop an idea, and maybe even proofread it.


By making it easy to generate content for WordPress and other platforms chatGPT, GPT-3 and other technologies are making it harder to find content worth reading. One of the biggest challenges when looking for content., reviews and information about products is the spam. the boiler plate content that people generate for a Casio watch, or other products.


Content should be written by humans for humans. The more noise we generate by fake AI, the more difficult it will be to find human content, by humans, for humans. That fake AI will also create formulaic answers to specific questions, rather than original content.


I love technology when it replaces the need for humans to do boring and repetitive tasks that can be automated, but something creative, such as writing we should keep humans. One tech mag recently allowed AI to write articles and those articles then had to be proofread and corrected by human editors.


ChatGPT is Hype


Recently I was reading a book about AI and deep learning and it wrote about how there is a cyclical habit of people to say “this is a great step forward in AI” only for interest to flare up, and then die down again as the miracle solution is understood and interest wanes again. chatGPT might seem exciting to some, but to me this looks like a human language search engine, rather than proper AI. Give it random words and it doesn’t do anything. I asked chatGPT “how fast does a squirrel run and it crashed, twice. It isn’t intelligent.

Apple Health Step Data Sources
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Apple Health Step Data Sources

Byrichard

Yesterday I spent some time looking through Apple Health Data Sources. I see that there are plenty of data sources. These are the Apple watch, the iphone, Alltrails, move, connect, stepsapp, pacer, Suunto, Ingress and three more that are marked as inactive.


Move is the app that gets data from some Casio watches. Connect is Garmin connect and gets step data from Garmin devices. If I take steps and they are logged with a casio or a garmin device they do not count in iOS apps but if I take steps with Garmin and Casio devices without also wearing the Apple watch the same steps are not counted.


The Apple Fitness and Health apps have access to all the same data. Everything goes to a central database on the iPhone. It’s from the iphone that the data is not shared transparently between all other apps.


In practice whether you have a suunto, Garmin, Apple Watch or other fitness tracker each device should feed, or retrieve data from Apple health, and each should display that data, regardless of which device you wear.


Whether I wear my Garmin, Suunto or Apple watch I would like all three to access health data transparently so that I can choose which individual watch I want to wear on a specific day. I don’t want to have to wear all three of them. Not that I do. I only have two wrists. 😉 I can only wear two at once.


The privacy argument is moot, because each app can be granted access to Apple Health, and Apple Health can be granted access to each app. This means that all the data is already transiting both ways for all apps.


And Finally


When you buy a Casio or other watch the battery is expected to last from three years to ten years, and you are expected to replace the battery when it dies. With the Apple watch, now that it is four years old, the next step would be to swap the battery. The Apple watch is now at 70 percent. The battery costs 79 CHF to replace.


When the Suunto battery got low on the Ambit 3 I got a Spartan, but when I replaced the Spartan I went for a Garmin, so I lost the ability to keep my old log going, and had to migrate to the Garmin app. With the Apple Watch we’re on yet another silo. Every brand has a silo. With the Apple watch it’s worse, because you have the fitness app, but then you have all the third party apps. Everything would break at once if you stop using the Apple Watch.


I would love for Garmin, Suunto and Apple wath to allow the free flow of tracking data in both directions, so that I could choose the best device to wear, and the best app to fiddle around with. Strava is the giant in the room, but I don’t want to use an app where I have to pay a premium for added functionality.



Casio and Other Watches

Casio and Other Watches

Byrichard

If we wear a Suunto, Garmin, Apple watch or Fitbit the device wants us to wear it for sleep, for every step we take, every heart beat and more. At the end of the year we do get fitness summaries but related to what we ran, swam, cycled and possibly walked. That means that for 22 hours a day we are tracking our heart rate and more for nothing.


With fitness watches if we track walking and hiking there is a good chance that the end of year summary will ignore these activities. This means that we’re wearing an intrusive, compulsion forming device for nothing.


For some reason I have found my interest in casio watches re-awakened. I cheap models that woke my nostalgia, and then I looked at other models. I came across the GBD-200 before I came across the GBD-800 and I wished I had come across them in the reverse order. The GBD-800 is cheaper and it’s designed for different sport intensities. If you go for a quiet walk you can select one intensity and if you go for a run you can go for another intensity. It doesn’t track heart rate or anything, other than steps.


The GBD-200 is better suited to runners who don’t mind not tracking heart rate, and that don’t mind carrying the phone, for GPS location info.


I’d like to conclude by saying that the Casios I mention are around 40-150 CHF, whereas Garmin Instinct, Apple Watches and others start at 300 CHF and get up to 1000 or more francs. If you’re looking to play with gadgets then casios are nice because they are more affordable, and their batteries last for years rather than a day, with Apple, to a month with Garmin, Suunto etc.


I played with Casio in the 80s and 90s when all of their features were new, and now I am playing with them again because we’re in a pandemic, and we need a way to cope with the never-ending solitude of pandemic life. I also think these would be good gifts for nieces and nephews, as they gather a minimum of data about their users and they are hard to break.

Rest and Recovery Apps

Rest and Recovery Apps

Byrichard

Either you can buy a collection of casios that each have different functions or you can download apps that have a niche purpose. I have been playing with Gentler Streak and Training day. One looks at heart rate and training. The second looks at resting heart rate and heart rate recovery.


According to the Gentler streak app my fitness “seems stable”. It looks at the routine over the last few months and years, and by this metric decides whether fitness is increasing, stable or declining. With the Gentler Streak app I am fine with my routine.



In contrast the Training Today says that I am overdoing it. I have played with the app for one day so I don”t understand the data yet.



I have been going for two walks per day, and on some days a walk and a swim, or a walk and a run, so it makes sense that the app would say that I am overdoing it at the moment. You can smooth by as many days as you like, from none, to several days. You can also adjust the default intensity.


Both apps give different results so they may be mutually exclusive, at least in my case. They’re interesting because they provide you with an overview of fitness over a period of time. Instead of “time” or “steps” these apps tell you about the health impact of training and whether to push harder, rest, or slow down. It is an alternate way of fitness training, without using Strava or other fitness apps.


Both apps are European. Gentler Streak is Slovenian, funded by the European Union, and Training Today is English. With this quick glance of both apps, I prefer Gentler Streak at this point.


I was inspired by an article about this type of app in the Google app where articles are suggested. This is a niche I had not yet played with.