During the World XR Forum I had to carry six or more Oculus Quest devices from a car to the conference centre and then help with setting up at least one of these devices. At first I thought it was like most VR headsets where the phone is the display.
In reality, the Oculus Quest is a self-contained VR headset driven via an app from the mobile phone. Once the Oculus quest and the mobile phone are paired you can play with content and use it. This is great because it no longer requires a high spec computer, it has no cables and best of all it’s affordable. At 400-500 CHF it’s affordable within most geek budgets.
The pole Vault/Barrier to entry is now just a skip and anyone can experience VR games whether on Android or iOS.
If you leave the controllers on a desk as you set up it is easy and intuitive to pick them up without taking the headset off. When you’re starting a session you can draw the outline of the room and mark where the walls are. In doing so you can set it up safely within seconds rather than minutes.
It also fits within a small box so you can carry it with you when you travel or when you’re doing things. In theory, you could hike with it and use it in a refuge. In practice, it’s better to use it where power outlets are common.
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.
When you’re hiking, cycling, climbing or doing other sporting activities it is easy to forget to stop tracking an activity. When you’re at home or static this is less critical. When you get into a car after a hike or other activity that mistake will screw up your average speed and other data.
Yesterday I realised that I had forgotten to stop tracking on my Suunto device and on my apple watch. With the Apple watch this was less important because it logs individual climbs. With the Suunto device however it tracks the speed of the drive as well as the increase and decrease in altitude.
Strava has two options to fix this mistake. Split is good for running and cycling activities. It allows you to split and then delete what you do not want to keep. Crop allows you to select the in point and the outpoint of an activity like you would if you were editing video.
In the image above you can see the track from the climbing gym towards the motorway. Initially I adjusted the sliders simply to remove that segment but noticed that there is a more precise tool.
With the climbing profile view you can see each climb as well as the difference in altitude as you drive from the car park to the motorway. I deleted the superfluous data and pressed “crop”. I then had a clean export of my activity.
This is a quick, intuitive and useful feature to know about. It allows you to keep a more accurate record of previous activities and a more reasonable track of distance covered over the last week, month or year. Some day I might go back and clean up previous activities.
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.
No wider than cause supporting bracelets
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 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.
An easy goal to reach, one days with the move goal achieved.
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.
I want to discuss Planned obsolescence as fragility. In the days of Nokia you could buy a phone and give it to a teenage boy and expect it to survive without breaking. I know because I was a teenage boy with a Nokia phone. So were plenty of my peers. It was more likely that someone would lose or drown their phone than break it. I only broke one phone display in those days and that took some effort.
Ingress
A few years ago I was playing Ingress and I managed to shatter three screens in quick succession and it was frustrating but it was due to me walking while playing ingress. I replaced the screens three times before I bought a rugged crosscall phone that was designed to withstand falls, submersion and more. I didn’t use it for long because I had connectivity issues. These were android devices.
Lifeproof, Otterbox and Quad lock
When the risk of breaking phones increased so did the need for protective cases. I have used lifeproof cases for iphones, otterbox for iphones and a blackberry device and quad lock for the most recent iphone. I use these cases because dropping a phone just once will shatter either the front panel or the back panel. It’s for this reason that I used an iphone SE for more than a year. You can break the screen but you can’t break the back.
I thought another iphone wouldn’t fit with the protective case within the clasps of the DJI drone remote control so I took it out of it’s protective case. Within 30 seconds the phone fell to the floor and the rear glass shattered. I promptly put the phone back into its case.
On the one hand brands like Apple say “Look at our beautiful device devices, they’re so sleek and elegant” and then you shatter one of the screens within days of getting it and you think “What is the point of elegance if it shatters?”
The unfinished device
The Unfinished device I am thinking of is the Apple Watch. As I mentioned in an earlier post I have had at least half a dozen fitness watches and two diving watches. My Suunto Ambit 3 came with me for three years of sporting activites without showing any real signs of wear and tear. The straps are fine, the screen is fine. The only signs of wear are on the bezel that protects the screen and this is key.
Most luxury watches use sapphire glass and despite the rugged qualities of this glass they protect them with a protective bezel. If you’re climbing and hit the watch against rocks, metal rungs, door frames or other surfaces the bezel keeps the glass safe.
I know for a fact that my suunto Ambit 3 took rock impacts straight to the screen as I climbed but the glass is concave, sloping inwards from the centre to the bezel. If it suffers an impact it is designed to survive.
The Apple watch has an unprotected glass screen that is flat. It is unsuitable for climbing because when you’re climbing your wrists hit rock, metal, resin hand moulds and ropes or cables. Whereas Suunto watches are designed for rugged sports Apple watches are designed for park runs and boardrooms. You find articles like this one about how to protect your apple watch when doing sports. To me the notion that you would need to protect a sports tracking watch is absurd. The whole reason for a sports tracking watch is to be light and tough, to survive indoor climbing.
In indoor climbing the materials you come across are wood, metal and resin hand holds. They’re not granite, limestone and other forms of rock. They’re soft and forgiving.
I have a theory that the hairline fractures that appeared on my screen after a fourth session of climbing with this watch were caused either by A) the rope somehow whipping the screen and fracturing it or B) When going from one hold to another I applied pressure to the screen at just the right angle for it to shatter in two places, splitting the touchscreen in three.
The display itself is fine. The only reason I noticed the damage is that the touch screen failed to respond.
Take it off
The most absurd suggestion to not damaging a sport apple watch is to take it off when you’re exercising. If you buy a sports version of the apple watch is taking it off a viable solution? If that’s the solution then buy a suunto or a garmin. They cost the same, have good battery life and they will survive any sport you can survive. Just google search broken suunto screen. A search for broken Garmin screen will yield broken screens.
The protective sleeve
If a solution to protecting a device is a protective sleeve then it is an unfinished device. Your biggest fear with a watch should be that the screen gets scratched as you use it over the years. It shouldn’t be that you shatter it while climbing indoors.
Conclusion – Buy a case
If you buy an iPhone you should automatically get a case. With Apple’s current design philosophy you should not buy an Apple watch until you can buy a protective case for it. The new design philosophy for mobile phones, watches, and as of yesterday laptops is to push the boundaries of survivability to their limits. I hope that the trend to make things more fragile goes away.
After just three climbing activities the Apple watch screen broke, rendering its smart features unusable.
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.
When I lived by the seaside in England I was told by one of my flat mates that they had seen a rat go into my room and I don’t remember how I felt about it. Rat traps were soon placed to catch them. A few years later I saw a flat mate have the comic book reaction of fear upon seeing a mouse and I found it deeply amusing. I was also surprised by how ugly that mouse was.
When I was younger I remember walking through a museum with exhibits of how people would catch mice in the olden days. The one that I remember is one that would drown rats and mice. There is a channel on youtube celebrating the art of catching, mice, gophers, rats, voles, moles, yellowjackets etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqTh4HzDmQ0
The trap above is an interesting series of traps that eventually see a mouse make its way into the rear bucket that can either be a live trap or a drowning trap.
Rat traps are not just to get rid of pests. They’re also a way of catching food as in the example below. This trap is designed so that you can capture rats alive. It’s an unexpected type of trap.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRmIChz3Wg4
If you have mice in your office you can get the rubbish bin trap. It keeps them alive and you can dispose of them in a place where they will not come back to the building.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mm_3Lot8p8c
He tested an 1876 live catch mouse trap and it works well enough except that when too many mice are in a small enclosed space for too long they fight for their own survival.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqj7NqzXsmg
There are plenty of traps spanning centuries of development and innovation. It’s interesting that traps from the Ancient world and Middle Ages can be reconstructed and used today. It’s also interesting to see how ideas that originated in Medieval Europe can be updated using a 3D printer and proved to be effective.
If I ever find I’m in a place with a mouse problem I will know what to do.
This morning I was listening to podcasts with the Apple Watch I have. I like that I can listen to podcasts that play straight from the watch because more often than not I have the watch on my wrist almost all the time. This means that I no longer need to keep the phone in the same room as I am in but it also means that I can leave the phone to charge in one room while roaming around.
I liked the move from wired to wireless earphones because it meant that I could finally stop getting the wired cables caught on door handles or other objects. It meant that I could leave the phone on a surface while walking around.
I would often step out of Bluetooth range as I moved between floors but also as I moved from one room to another. To resolve this issue I would try to keep the phone on the same floor as I was on.
Now that the Apple watch plays podcasts, and theoretically audiobooks, I can play them straight from the watch and stop worrying about moving the phone to the place where it covers the greatest area. It means that I can leave the phone to charge.
It also means that when hiking or doing other sports I can keep my phone in a bag and control podcasts from my wrist. I can choose which podcast to listen to, adjust the volume and skip the tabloid parts. This is especially relevant now that Apple wants to make phones that are as big as paperbacks, phones that no longer fit in pockets, phones that are so fragile that the less you handle them, the more likely they are not to have a smashed front or rear screen. I have yet to smash a screen because I was listening to a podcast or audiobook so that point is moot. 😉
You remember the old saying. The best camera is the one that you have with you. Today the same can be said about “edit suites” that you carry in your trousers or jacket pocket. I’m speaking of edit suites that work with your iphone or ipad. Lumafusion is one such example.
It differs from other mobile editing solutions in a number of key ways. The first is that it allows you to edit on a timeline with three video sources at once This means that you have more control. It allows you to split audio which allows you to overlap sound from one clip to another and provide a better finish.
This includes the option to add graphics, idents and other visual content. It allows you to provide a finished product, ready for broadcast or distribution.
Another nice feature is that you can record your voice over directly to the timeline once the edit is finished. This means that vloggers and people who like to record commentary rather than natural sound, can capture natural sound, and add commentary later.
I played with this editing solution with footage shot on an iphone SE at a music festival as well as other footage shot on an iPhone 8 Plus. The edit suite was my iphone 8 plus while lying on a couch.
I like this editing solution because it allows for a high quality turnaround of mobile phone footage for a number of platforms without carrying a laptop. This is ideal for hiking, climbing and other types of video content. It costs 20 CHF so once you’ve spent several hundred on an iphone it’s cheap. ;-). It allows export in h264 as well as h265.
Caveat
I tried importing greenscreen footage via Google drive from a PMW-200 that had been converted to mp4 but the video codec was not recognised. I have yet to try greenscreen quality.
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