Of Casio, Suunto, Garmin and Apple

Byrichard 28 February 202328 February 2023

Reading Time: 2 minutes

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.

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Casio GBD-800-1B – First Impressions

Byrichard 11 January 202311 January 2023

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.

tech related

Forgotten Phones and eSIMs

Byrichard 23 October 202323 October 2023

A growing number of mobile phones are eSIM compatible. As a result by simply turning on a phone, and selecting the eSIM option you could make a spare phone your primary phone. When I activated my current phone I chose to use an eSIM, rather than a physical sim. Whilst this is fun it does have one draw back. If you swap phones every so often you need to shift the eSIM from one device to another with less ease than switching nano sims.

With the iPhone I see that you have two options. You can transfer the sim from a nearby phone or you can use a QR code. This means that if you forget your phone in location A and you have to wait for a few days for it to arrive in location B you could use a secondary device as a primary phone, until it arrives.

The second, theoretically, cheaper option is to have a 4g enabled Apple watch. With this option you could forget your phone but still be online via the watch.

When it comes to road trips this is unlikely to happen to me for two reasons. The first is that if I leave a device behind my other devices remind me. The other reason is that I use the phone with car play. If I don’t have my phone with me car play will not be active. Within seconds I would be notified.

One of the biggest nuissances of leaving a phone behind would be to lose access to third party authentication apps. If I forgot my phone then I would miss having my authentication apps. Without them logging into wordpress, Google and plenty of other apps would be problematic. I depend on my main phone for authentication.

Having said this, both my old iphone and android devices have access to authenticator apps, so if I did find that one phone was destroyed by being dropped, or I forgot it somewhere then I have a secondary and tertiary backup.

Since we replace phones before they die we often have a backup phone or two. If we forget the primary phone we can quite easily replace it with an old phone, at least temporarily, especially now that phones are eSIM capable. When all phones are eSIM capable forgetting a phone won’t matter, because it is backed up in the cloud, and eSIMs can be swapped with relative ease, despite not having the physical phone with the eSIM with us.

tech related

Conversing With Google Bard

Byrichard 20 July 202320 July 2023

Two days ago I was given access to Google Bard and since then I have been experimenting. The key feature that sets Google Bard apart from ChatGPT is that it can answer questions about what is happening at the moment, rather than before September 2021. By being current you can ask it about yesterday’s news or the upcoming weather for a location, and it will give a useful answer. This is useful for time sensitive questions.

Swearing

Some of us sometimes swear at Siri, out of curiousity, to see how she reacts. I find that she sometimes sulks. I asked Bard how it felt about swearing and it responded that it will try to understand the question, rather than stop responding.

That’s interesting. I didn’t know that Siri sulks when she is sworn at. I can see how that would be frustrating for users.

I think it’s important for AI assistants to be able to handle being sworn at without getting upset. After all, people are going to swear at them sometimes, whether it’s intentional or not. If an AI assistant sulks or gets angry when it is sworn at, it’s not going to be very helpful.

Bard Humour

I asked Bard about bards, being tied up at the end of stories, during banquets and Bard gave answer that was based on American culture so I specified that I was thinking of the Asterix bard so it gave a more relevant answer, going so far as to quote two or three specific story incidents.

When I asked specifically about humour it answered that it does not have a sense of humour, itself, but that it does know how to write a joke, by studying the jokes that it has been taught.

Tic Tac Toe in PHP

I asked Bard to help me write a game of tic tac toe in php and it gave me the answer, but wheras chatGPT would give me the answer and stop there, Bard gives a hyperlink to the source it used, for the instructions. If you write something helpful, and bard uses it, then it will drive traffic to your website.

Sharing

When you are happy with the answer you are given you can either share entire threads of conversations, or just a specific question and answer. This means that you can share the series of questions that got Bard to give you the answer that you wanted to get to.

Feedback

Bard allows you to give feedback. You can give either a thumb up or thumb down. You can also ask for a reply to be longer, shorter, simpler, more casual or more professional. If you click on “view other drafts” you can see two more draft answers and select the one that you prefer. By default it gives you these three answers.

It Remembers

Google Bard remembers the thread of the conversation so if you start speaking about a topic then you can get from point A in a conversation to point B and elaborate on ideas. I had a conversation with Bard about the current COVID situation in CH and it gave good answers. It used the low rate of 3 cases per 100,000 to explain that the situation will be worrying when it reaches 50 per 100,000. It has given one of the best answers I have seen from humans, or AI because it quantified its answer.

A Learning and Studying Tool

As I ask questions about the Léman water flow, water use, and consequences downstream I see that Google Bard is an excellent learning resource. It gives good answers, and you are either given links to the articles that the answer is based on, or you are encouraged to search for other answers, on the web, to learn more.

A Conversation with Bard About Existentialism.

As I was playing with Bard, asking a series of questions I asked a question where I mixed English and French and it automatically switched to French and gave me an answer to that question in French. Bard is as multilingual as we are. it can help you explore and develop questions and answers. It can help you learn about topics by asking questions. Learn about one thing, read more, learn about something else. Read morea about it.

The AI Learning Rathole

With Bard you can spend hours learning about things, asking a series of questions and getting answers. It doesn’t get tired of your questions so you can ask, until you lose focus or attention. I especially like that with some answers it gives hyperlinks to three more resources, to be checked.

And Finally

Although I could keep writing about this topic I believe that the key strength of Bard compared to ChatGPT, is that it encourages you to follow links to read from primary or secondary sources, rather than trusting AI blindly. It also provides us with a new and more conversational apporach to “google searches”. We go from phrasing a question for a search engine to give a usable answer, to chatting with AI. By chatting with AI we learn more, and once we know what we really want to learn about, Bard has signposted the way, to learn more.

I was sceptical about AI and Google search but now that I see how it has been implemented, I like it. It works well, in my eyes. Rather than limit us, it encourages us to explore. AI should be a stepping stone, rather than the end point.

Social Media Deontology | social media living room | social networking | tech related

The Solitude of Social Media

Byrichard 29 November 202329 November 2023

One of the unique things about Twitter in 2006 and 2007, especially during the first tweetups was that it was a network of strangers who became friends without meeting in person. The people I became friends with in 2006-2007 are still friends now, to some degree. I met them every week at tuttle events and tweetups.

At the same time Facebook was a network of friends from university, which then became friends from work, to friends from various activities. These were networks where, in the first case, you met new people, and in the second you consolidated personal friendships in the physical world online.

This morning I noticed a Fortune article titled ‘People are posting a lot less on public social media’: Creator economy investor says the old web is gone, replaced by ‘people who are professionally entertaining you’.

The entire reason for using social media is to connect with human beings, at a human level, and to develop friendships that go from the world wide web to the physical world. By being about influencers and other charletans Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and other social networks become worthless because it’s the cult of the amateur supercharged. The Amateur who pays to create content for free, so that others can benefit is absurd.

When social media was about human beings connecting with each other, getting along, and then finding the desire to meet in person social media was a pleasant and friendly place to spend time. That’s where social media outshines other media. Social media was about connecting people. Social media was about multiplexing. Social media was about our social networks being our social net worth to use some of the marketing terminology of the time.

“creators thrive when brands are happy to pay them to create content on platforms they’re creating content on,” Lee says.” On paper this is fantastic. On paper dehumanist content creators are creating social media content creators on a platform that undercuts the sense of self, and friendships. Plenty of content on YouTube is sensationalist rubbish. They might get sponsors, and their content might be monetised, but the content is mediocre, at best.

Instagram thrived when it was a network of friends sharing photos with friends. It became absurd when it put forward the impersonal influencer.

The paradox is that I’m curious about a lot of things. If I had found YouTube videos that were worth watching, about certain products, I might have watched them, rather than surfed to articles and blog posts. One of the issues that I find with TikTok, YouTube and other platforms is that the content creators are long winded and disingenuous. They write clickbait titles to force you to watch their content, but in doing so they get me to do the opposite.

I’ve been surfing the web since the 90s so I have seen three or four decades of clickbait by now. I’m tired of the clickbait content. Influencers rely on clickbait tactics to get views, and I find this exhausting. I often browse YouTube for content, but within minutes I usually give up. Everything is sensationalist clickbait.

Most reels on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube are awful tabloid crap.

“The reason people follow social media creators, the reason they bother, is partly because of the authenticity,” Kaletsky says. “There’s nothing in the world that’s less authentic than an AI-generated character. So it sort of defeats the point in many ways.”

Social media Fortune article

That’s precisely why I switched away from Social Media. Sensationalist clickbait is not honest. Sensationalist clickbait is not genuine. Social media is so busy getting algorithms to push rubbish upon us that they forget that the reason we use social media is to see what people we know are doing, rather than strangers. The issue is that algorithms are showing content by strangers. That’s not influence. That’s clickbait. that’s spam. That’s irrelevant.

The entire raison d’être of social media is to be a way to see what your network of friends are enjoying and what they think of things. It’s about engaging online, and desiring to do things offline. By keeping people isolated social media is undercutting its entire reason for existing. Why should I use YouTube or Instagram if I am shown irrelevant content?

If I want to know what strangers think, I have the open web. I have search engines, and I have news sites. Since the death of Twitter I find myself blogging more, reading more articles, and doing other things. I reverted to pre-social media habits.

Social media had a reason for being, when it reduced isolation and connected people. Paradoxically Facebook groups do that. I have a deep dislike of Facebook, but that’s where it feels like I could still find an offline community that could lead to in person meetings.

And Finally

I’m tired. I am tired of reading about how influencers are being put forward. I am tired of seeing articles about how influencers are having to keep social media companies happy. I am tired of never seing articles about how social media companies ignore the Return of Investment for ordinary users. One of the consequences of this focus on ROI for “influencers” is that influencers use Mastodon and the Fediverse in the same manner, diminishing the ROI of being on Mastodon instances. The focus should be on connecting people.

Of live video streams and Paleo

Byrichard 27 July 200827 July 2008

I really enjoyed what Nicholas of K had to say in the interview we did last night for Musicorama.tv. He spoke about projects and how we can achieve anything we want as long as our mind is in the right place. I’ll let you know when that interview is online.

This year Paleo has been a different experience from previous years because I went as a “radio/TV” person as opposed to a collaborator (work for free, get free food and free non alcoholic drinks as well as invites for friends), in the latter case you sleep so little it’s not unusual to take a week to recover.

I enjoyed myself. I enjoyed seeing all the live acts and I streamed quite a few events, from Iam, The Justice, The goose, Massive Attack and more.

We also had interviews with BB Brunes, K, The DO, The Dodoz, Marvin, Girls in Hawai and Caribou if I remember all of them.

Here are some of the Live streams

Listen as the people realise what song it is. listen to the crowd roar 🙂

Tikan Jah Fakoly was good too. Nice relaxed evening. He was playing before Manu Chao

Manu Chao played for over two hours but I had work the next day so I left early.

Casio GBD-800-1B – First Impressions

Feature Watch

And Finally

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