A snow covered path with footprints, between two fields
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StepsApp

Byrichard
Reading Time: 3 minutes

Walking and taking steps could be seen as boring. It’s something we do every day, without thinking about it. At conferences we can easily take 20,000 steps a day, when we’re standing for the entire day, with barely any opportunities, or need to sit, except when eating or getting from A to B. The Steps App is a way of seeing step counts in a variety of ways.

With the insights tab you have information about your best week, month and year. It shows you theoretical distance, time spent stepping, theoretical energy burn, and floors climbed, with compatible devices. On my best week I climbed 253 floors, walked 118 km over 24hrs 39 mins and burned 6243 kcals. My best step day was on the 23rd of August 2018. I took 40,142 steps. That was a theoretical 31.3km over 6hrs 45 and 188 floors.

During my best month I walked half a million steps. 453.7km over 90hrs20, climbing 655 floors. This was my walking habit during the pandemic and the reason for such a lot of time walking wasn’t because I was doing anything interesting. It’s because we were in self-isolation and I was using the Apple Watch calories burned per day to indicate how much exercise I should do. The result is a month where I walked for three hours a day for an entire month. One could argue that this isn’t such a good memory.

Badges for Steps per day and total steps.

It’s more fun to look at the pages above. I have walked a million steps 16 times, five million, three times. I have walked at least 5000 steps 1292 times and 10,000 steps 743 times so far. This is fun because it shows how consistent my walking habit is, and how regularly I reach each goal/landmark.

Step count by year
Step count by year
The peak walking year. Five and a half million steps
The peak walking year. Five and a half million steps

And Finally

The longest streak badges
The longest streak badges

They allow you to see your longest steps, calories, distance, duration, floors and superstreak. These are both excellent and crap. Step streaks are good when you’re walking but doing no other sports. If you cycle, climb or do other sports there is a good chance that you will your streak., That’s why the steps streak is just 34 days but the distance streak is 252 days and the duration streak is 918 days, and floors is 390. If you limit yourself to steps then you can only take steps, and nothing else.

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Tap Water, Hollow Fibres disagree with Calcar and a Barrel According to WaterMinder

Tap Water, Hollow Fibres disagree with Calcar and a Barrel According to WaterMinder

Byrichard

Today the Service Industriel de Nyon, SI Nyon, sent an e-mail saying that tap water is one thousand times more environmentally friendly than bottled water. Bottled water is sold at between 20 to 90 centimes per litre and tap water is sold at about 0.1 centimes per litre. It is 200 to 900 times cheaper.


Depuis maintenant cinq ans, ce déficit hydrique se répète et influence notablement le niveau de la nappe phréatique et le régime des sources. Les étiages enregistrés se sont avérés une fois de plus très bas durant l’été et l’automne. Ainsi, en 2020, les sources n’ont participé qu’à hauteur de 48% de la consommation. Les apports de la SAPAN se sont révélés très élevés (34%). La nappe phréatique a également été très sollicitée (18%).

SI Nyon: À propos de l’eau potable dans la région de Nyon | SI Nyon


In 2020 4 million metres cubed of drinking water were distributed via the network. thirty four percent of that water came from the lake, fourty eight from springs, and eighteen percent was taken from the water table. SI Nyon says the same thing as I do. They wrote “les étiages se sont avérés une fois de plus très bas durant l’été…”. Etiage is water level in French. I had to look it up. I don’t remember this word. In English it is baseflow, or drought flow: Baseflow – Wikipedia.


Calcar, the Sawyer Squeeze and BeFree


I have now played with three nanotube filters and each one of them has the same problem. If you run Swiss tap water through them, and then do not use them for a few weeks they get blocked. Hollow fibre might be good in soft water, but in hard water, as in Switzerland, you’re better off with the Katadyn Hiker Pro or similar technology. That’s why I have upgraded my water bottles to wide mouth options. I can use them to either carry dirty water, or fill them, without needing three hands.


Although the Katadyn Befree is 20 to 30 CHF less, if you need to replace them every year, then it makes sense to get the Hiker Pro, or higher end water filtration system. I tried backflushing the Sawyer squeeze but the flow is still bad. Filters that last for as long as you use them daily are great, if you’re hiking for months in a row, but filters that work consistently, despite occasional use, are better.


A WaterMinder Barrel


According to the WaterMinder app I drank over a barrel of fluids. I believe that to be around 159 litres. My current streak is 23 days of drinking an average of 2.62 litres per day. I am hydrated.


And Finally


We are on day 573 of this pandemic and apparently people have not heard about the vaccination according to at least one individual. How? We’re in a pandemic. The entire world has stopped. How can you not have heard about the vaccine? How isolated are you? How disconnected?


I hope to be more inspired tomorrow. I might be in the pre-trip duldrums for the next two or three days.


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.



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Using leopard as an operating system

Byrichard

Leopards are a strong animal capable of lifting animal carcasses into trees to keep their catch safe. It’s also the new Apple operating system and I purchased it. After taking about two hours to install the operating I’m quite happy with the new operating system.

Safari has had some new interactivity added. With most browsers the tabs are fixed at the top of the page and there’s not much you can do. If you’re in a playful mood then open up safari in Leopard and you can switch the tabs between each other. If you feel that one tab deserves it’s own browser window simply pull down the tab and it goes to a full size browser.

The user interface for the finder is quite a bit more fun. You’ve got coverflow for you pictures. What this means is that you can go through your pictures with no need to open iphoto and other applications. As a result the ability to be disorganised is greatly enhanced. At the same time looking at photographs and documents is quite a bit easier.

The time machine is an interesting piece of software that backs up your data every hour for 24 hours, then every day for a month and after that every week for as long as there’s space on the hard disk. If you’re on a desktop and your external hard drives are always plugged in then this is excellent. If you’re like me and you’re using a laptop the idea is not that great because the time machine is only active whilst I’m taking the time to plug in the hard drive. Setup is really easy therefore anyone with an external hard drive that mirrors the space used on their computer should be able to use it.  If you’re using an internal spare hard drive does it work the same way

Items in the dock look the same as in tiger except there is a blue dot at the moment to display the applications that are currently active. The mail application has an RSS feed of apple news, just in case you’d missed the latest. You have both to do and notes  included straight within the mail application.

The calendar has had one or two improvements of which the most useful is the pop out when you’re adding an event. In previous versions you would have to go to either side and type in additional information. With this one data input is overlayed  over the calendar greatly increasing usability.

The ichat chromakey technology is quite interesting. If you want you can choose any background you want from the database of videos and photographs you have on your laptop. Simply choose the background you want. Move out of shot and wait till it’s seen the image. When you move back into frame you’ve got whichever background you chose. It works moderatly well depending on the type of background you’re using though.

Leopard is a nice operating system with a number of new features that make it fun to try out and use. The way information is displayed is interesting and the additional features like cover flow for document browsing, time machine for backup and more are taking advantage of the fact that people’s use of the computer has progressed over the years. By being better at media browsing the operating system is more intuitive to use. So far I’m happy with it.

Caution: Bees

Caution: Bees

Byrichard

Caution Bees


I could have been closer to take a picture but I don’t want to run the risk of taunting Melissa, the bee, from Greek Mythology. I don’t like walking this close to hives.


You see plenty of little flecks flying around and you know that’s you’re going to cross their flight path. None of them showed an interest in me luckily. I don’t remember seeing them there before.

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