Of Photos, Aperture, and Sliding Between Volumes

Of Photos, Aperture, and Sliding Between Volumes

Byrichard

Over the years I have used Aperture, Picasa and the Apple Photos Apps. In that time they have organised my files chronologically, automatically, as soon as I took pictures, in some cases.

What They Do

Aperture was well behaved. It would organise photos by year, by month and by day, so it’s easy to migrate a library from drive A to drive B. Apple Photos on the other hand makes a pig’s breakfast. It renames the files with a chaotically huge number, and then moves files into folders from 0-9 and then from A to F or some similar chaotic mess.

The Issue.

If you want to migrate an aperture or Photos library from one volume to another it will take hours, despite there not that being much data. That’s because Aperture and Photos create preview files of different sizes, caches and plenty of other files. The result is that you’re not moving x number of photos and one or two json files with the appropriate metadata. You’re moving 200,000 files within that library folder.

The 500 Gigabytes of photos that you want to move, and that would take up to five hours to move, if they were just photos in folders then take 24 hours or more.

The Cause

There are two principle reasons for this collection of aperture libraries. The first is that for a while I had a mac book air for daily use, and a mac book pro for video editing. As a result I had two libraries simultaneoulsy. The second reason is that I would backup the laptop to external hard drives every so often, and in doing so I would have several versions of my photo libraries.

Time machine is also partially responsible because it creates multiple copies so you need to reconcile the differences between versions, to avoid losing files that are not backed up.

The Solution

If you have aperture libraries that have not been converted to Apple Photos folder structure then you’re in luck. In my case I opened up each library and moved the folders containers from within the package to an external folder structure where I kept the chronological organisation. I methodically worked my way through several years of photos within half an hour to an hour, and then told Finder to move the files from Drive A to Drive B. It told me “about one hour remaining” so I took the time to write this blog post.

In the Mean Time

One of the funniest things I have noticed, while playing with my video and photo archives is that I have not seen some people that I have forgotten many of their names. It is for this reason that I need to keep at least one Photos photo library, until I have renamed faces that are recognised on Immich, or PhotoPrism, before deciding what to do with the old Photos libraries.

The Next Stage

Out of curiousity I tested to see whether I could import the experimental photo folder structure into photos and I saw that I can, and that duplicate detection works.

Combining Old and New

At the moment I have three photo libraries. I have the Google Photos and mobile phone based on on PhotoPrism. The next photo library is the one that I got out of extracting photo galleries from Aperture and Apple Photos. The final library is the one that is based on the files and folders that I have from storing files manually, outside of Photo management apps.

The next step is to clear a four terabyte drive. It will be dedicated to photos and audio books. PhotoPrism will take care of the photos, and AudioBookShelf will take care of the books.

Why I Chose Four Terabytes

I want room to expand. When experimenting with one terabyte I found that my photo library immediately fills the entire drive and when I tried with two terabytes I feel that with audio books I will be tight on space. With four terabytes I can have one terabyte for photos, one terabyte for books, and two terabytes for the libraries to grow, without having to swap the drives.

The other reason is easy backup. I plan to free storage space on at least two four terabyte drives with the newest being the primary drive and the older one being a backup. If one fails the second one will take its place.

The final reason is price. Four terabyte drives have the best price. They’re cheaper than smaller and larger drives per terabyte.

And Finally

In the past we would go out, take photos and video and when we got home we woulc create a folder with the name of the activity. Over time we would have plenty of folders but everything was organised, by default.

In the modern era our phones and cameras do all of this for us. They add the date, the location and more automatically so we don’t organise anything ourselves. The result is hundreds of folders organised by year, month and day, but without any further information. That chaos makes it so that we need Photos, PhotoPrism and other solutions. They “organise” our files.

Conclusion

Photos, by Apple, and other apps ingest our images and organise them out of sight, which is great when we’re using their apps, but awful when we’re trying to use another software solution. It makes sense to have a drive with two folders. Photos and videos, with everything organised by year, month, day and project or activity name.

In so doing we can see in the finder, which files are duplicates, or missing, within seconds. We need to organise our files, and software should just help us look through our archives.

Apple Vision Pro Stagnation

Apple Vision Pro Stagnation

Byrichard

People want us to see the Apple Vision Pro VR kit as revolutionary but it isn’t, for a simple reason. Several years ago I was going to the World VR conference and loved playing with various VR kits but they almost all had the same problem. They cost an arm and a leg to buy.

The HTC Vive was an alluring device because of how well it worked and how good it felt but it was made unreachable by its price. The same was true of the Oculus devices, except for the Oculus Quest 3. This had the best price of all. It came with a cost. The Facebook environment. If Facebook can mind duck us(intentional spelling) in two dimensions then imagine how much worse it will be in AR.

The Apple Vision Pro has the same problem as all the others. It will cost 3600 USD or more. This is too expensive. It’s yet another VR device that is pricing itself out of the market for normal people.

VR is a fantastic medium and I love using it, but it’s far too expensive. In some cases you need to spend 800 CHF on a phone, and then yet more on the headset adaptor to wear the phone within the VR headset.

For VR, AR and XR to be interesting they need to be made affordable. They need to cost 200-300 francs, like the Oculus Quest 3, but without being within the Facebook ecosystem. I would have bought the Oculus Quest 3 a few years ago, if it was independent, rather than owned by Facebook.

In a few months, when Apple Vision Pro start selling we will hear the evangelists sing praise for the device but they’re singing praise because they’re among the privilieged few, either to have access through their job, or with the financial situation to spend thousands of CHF on a headset.

And Finally

Some people hate VR and AR because they feel that it isolates people. Others hate AR and VR because it makes them feel sick. Yet more people think that wearing a headset will cut people off from their environment. I see the appeal in AR/VR and XR. What bothers me is that every company makes it unaffordable.

For VR content and games to become more popular AR/VR and XR need to be affordable. Apple, HTC Vive and Occulus aim for the unaffordable portion of the market. We need something affordable. Apple would be revolutionary if it made things affordable, rather than for the wealthy. VR has been around for decades, and it is still priced out of peoples’ reach.

Apple and Dongles

Apple and Dongles

Byrichard

Several years ago I broke my most important rule. Never take a laptop with you that you are not willing to carry at all times. I had a Mac Book Pro stolen and this was extremely frustrating. The reason for which it was frustrating is that this Mac Book from still had normal USB ports, an SD card reader and more. New Mac Book Pros have four USB-3/Thunderbolt 3 connectors.

Thunderbolt 3 Nuissance

Some people love this, because it’s smaller, lighter, and faster but I hated the move because it meant that all my hard drives needed a dongle to work. All my charging cables for watches, cameras and more needed a dongle to work. You need a dongle for a wired connection and you simply always need a dongle. What’s worse is that you don’t need one dongle. You need two or three, or more.

Easier to Lose

You need to keep track of the dongles. Sometimes they’re in one room, or drawer, and if you use them every few days or weeks they like to vanish so that instead of just plugging in a device you need to find the dongle, plug the USB cable to the dongle and the dongle to the laptop.

Fast Drives but Slow Dongles

Yesterday I plugged in a USB C drive to one port, and a USB C flat adaptor drive to the apple dongle with the other. The transfer speed was much faster but I didn’t test whether the difference was due to the dongle I was using, the Apple dedicated USB dongle or the other third party option for most drives.

I should do a read/write speed test with both dongles to see if there is a difference between dongles, or I’m using slow, old drives. As I write this I’m transferring 900 gigabytes from one drive to another and it will take “about 4 hours”.

Bring Pi

Linux reads Mac OS Journaled and APFS drives when configured. Instead of blocking a mac in time and space ato run for hours it makes sense for a Pi to do this chore. A Pi is not fast. It doesn’t matter if you’re moving files from an APFS volume to an ExFat or Ext4 drive.

Legacy Devices

Over the years I have had USB A, B and C devices with various adapters. I have also had Firewire 400 and 800 drives, as well as Thunderbolt 2. The firewire drives and Thunderbolt two drives become unusable due to the move away from one standard to another. Luckily drives often come with two or three standards, and the aim should be to migrate from old drives to new drives every few years. Old drives can be backups, and new drives can be the working, drives, until they are retired to backup status in turn.

 And Finally

In the good old days I would plug my drives straight into the computer and move data between drives. Now that I need to go from drive, to USB-C cable to dongle, to computer, between two or more drives I find that transfer speeds are very slow and I suspect that it’s the third party USB-C dongle that is slowing things down. Tomorrow I can recover my second dongle and test to see whether my suspicion is correct or not.

Time Machine Backups

Time Machine Backups

Byrichard

Yesterday while freeing space on a number of drives I found that one failed to mount so I had to use the recovery tools in disk utility to get it to mount. The process took a few minutes. Once this was done I decided to move all data from that drive to a safer place. In the process I came across the frustration of backup.backup, or some similarly named folder. It’s the time machine backup folder.

The Problem

The problem with Time Machine backups is that they assume that you want to recover data straight from Time Machine on another mac, rather than directly from the file system. At first I tried to delete program files and other folders that I didn’t want to backup. That failed. I didn’t have permission. I tried to sudo into the drive but that didn’t work either.

The reason for which I wanted to tidy up the backup, to keep just the files I wanted to keep is that there are gigabytes of program files and others, that have no value to me. It’s my personal folder that I wanted to recover. If I could delete all the rubbish surrounding my files I could have just moved the files of value.

I couln’t do this so I went into time machine and noticed that I could mount this old backup from 2009 or so and use it as a current backup disk. Before doing that I backed up my current files.

Once I had backed up my current files I went back and mounted the old drive to the backup tool but couldn’t see the files. I considered running a backup but chose not to because initial backups take hours and I didn’t want to spend hours backing up to a drive that I wanted to remove from circulation.

The drive is only one terabyte, and is an old dinosaur from another age of hard drivess. The noise it made yesterday exhausted me. I was happy to turn it off when I had achieved most of my goals last night.

In Brief

When you’re consolidating drives there is a chance that you find a lot of extrenuous filess such as program files, render files and more. These take up terabytes of space and prolong transfer time. By making file systems as lean as possible, before consolidating files from external drives to a centralised system it pays to remove as much chaff as possible. System files can easily be 80 gigabytes depending on how many programs you install

The Slow Solution

I had two options. I could have copied my user folder for each backup to the secondary drive but that would mean several gigabytes of files with only incremental changes. Instead I went to a full system backup. These usually start with “macintosh HD” rather than “username”. I went in and backed up the pictures, downloads and one or two othr folders from the most recent full backup and oldest full backup.

Ideal Solution One

The first ideal solution is to be able to get admin access to the hard drive and remove all program files, all system files, all users that I am not interested as well as all “noisy” files that I know are either backed up or no longer needed. Ideally I would be left with the pictures folders, and when it’s tidied up I would copy files from 2005 to 2005, 2005 to 2005, and so on, until all files are consolidated in a primary folder, rather spread across secondary folders.

Ideal Solution Two

In theory Time Machine is designed so that you can go to Time Machine and find files within a specific folder over time. This would make backin up all images easy, just copy all, and reject the duplicates. Within 20 cycles you’re up to date and you’re done.

In practice this works once you have synced files and folders between the current mac and the old backup and this takes hours. In this context it’s faster to do things manually, especially since you may lose the very files you’re trying to save as the oldest backup gets squashed by the new files.

Time Machine and Drive Durability

I have been using Time Machine to back files up for several years now and in that time I have had several drives either overheat and fail, before recovering, or failing and requiring a reformat. Yesterday the drive that failed was a Time Machine backup drive. By this I mean a normal drive that I used for backing up, rather than the propietary solution.

Silver Lining

Swapping between Time Machine Backup drives is easy. It takes a few seconds. This gives you the freedom to backup between two or three backup drives. If one drive fails then you can fall back to one or two others and lose a week of data, rather than a few months.

And Finally

Whilst it makes sense to ensure file integrity if you use Time Machine as a backup and recovery solution it is not as useful if you want to recover files, years after you have switched computers and Time Machine Backup drive. That you need to understand file and folder structure to recover files is sub-optimal, especially since you have so little control.

While Time Machine is used as a live backup, it’s okay. Once it is a dormant archive style backup it should be possible to streamline the folder structure for a human to sort through and tidy up a file system.

Conclusion

PhotoPrism

For a long time we could swap ram and hard drives in laptops but recently you are stuck with the drive that you can afford, internally, and rely on external hard drive for storage of photos and other media files. That’s why self-hosted cloud solutions like PhotoPrism and others are so good. With a Pi running PhotoPrism, connected to a four terabyte hard drive you instantly double what you could store with iCloud and other solutions, and you don’t need to delete photos from a local drive, because if you run out of space on the drive connected to a Pi you can upgrade that drive to a higher capacity, over and over.

Nextcloud

The same is true of Nextcloud. With Nextcloud you can download your documents folder to your own self-hosted version of iCloud and you have a backup of files as soon as you create them.

If we use PhotoPrism for personal photo albums then we free up the space that we would have used on our local machines. If we use Nextcloud then our files and folders are backed up every time we save them as they sync to the cloud whenever required. If your laptop drive fails you can recover from the Nextcloud backup, and if you have iCloud running two, then you have a local copy, a local cloud copy and an external cloud copy.

I would consider backing up from the PhotoPrism Originals folder to Kdrive, for cloud backup. iCloud is okay for docs and more but for photos you need up to two terabytes so kDrive is cheaper than iCloud and Google Drive.

A Forgotten Apple Event

A Forgotten Apple Event

Byrichard

On the Twelfth of September Apple held an event to promote their new iPhone devices and I completely forgot to watch and spoof what they were selling. For years now I have had little to no interest in new Apple devices and watches for a very simple reason. They’re extremely expensive, compared to alternatives.

Years ago I bought a new iphone every year, from the 4 to the 4S to the SE but after that I stopped until I bought an 8+ for drone flying as it had a bigger screen before reverting back to the Iphone SE(second generation). I heard on a podcast that the original SE was the best low budget iPhone so that’s why I took it. I took the second Gen SE because it had the smallest screen.

Too Big To Hold and Use One Handed

The problem with almost all iPhones is that they are large, fragile, and hard to use one handed. This means that you need big pockets, big hands, and a protective case to keep them safe. Small and elegant phones are more interesting. They’re easier to hold, carry, and keep safe. A phone that you can use one handed with ease, is more useful.

Incremental Progress

When the first iPhones came out every new device was priced at an interesting point and the tech was innovative. Now you spend 1000 USD for an incrementally better phone. According to GSM Arena it’s not worth buying the iphone. I don’t want to spend so much money on a device, that if, dropped once, needs to have the screens replaced. The front and back glass can shatter after a single drop.

The Ultra 2

Some people will see the Ultra 2 and desire it. I don’t. Apple watches are fragile. I broke one indoor climbing. I wore Suunto watches rock climbing in the mountains and barely have scratches to show for scraping the watch on real rocks, every weekend. Another issue is the price point. You’re paying 800 CHF for a watch that lasts 36hrs in GPS mode. For 150 CHF or so you can get the Garmin Etrex SE and track for a week, and within a few seconds you can swap the AA batteries that you can buy almost anywhere.

Planned Obscolecence

The other drawback to buying expensive Apple Watches is that if you buy one, you will want to buy the next generation, and the generation after that. It will cost 800 CHF to keep up to date. Do you want to fall down that rabbit hole?

A good App-mosphere

Of course when you’re buying an Apple Watch you’re not just paying for the watch. You’re also paying for the app-mosphere. You’re paying to have access to all of the apps that play nicely, for a fee, with the Apple watch. it’s great to have access to so many apps, but most cost 30 CHF per year, per app. That’s easily hundreds of francs.

With Garmin, Suunto, Google and Xiaomi this is included in the price of the device you wear on your wrist. I would have written Fitbit instead of Google but we know that Fitbit is on borrowed time.

Daily Charging

With the Suunto Peak 5 you charge once every few days. With the Garmin Instinct Solar you can go for weeks without charging, in summer. With the Garmin Suunto 45s you charge every two or three days. Do you want to spend 800 CHF on a watch that needs one and and half hours to charge every single day, for normal use? No other high end watch forces you to recharge so often. Batteries degrade with charge cycles, so you’re going through one charge cycle, per day.

With the Suunto D4 diving watch and Suunto D9 you would charge once every two or three years, by swapping batteries.

And Finally

Not being interested in the latest apple watches and iPhones works to my advantage. I save on time, money and desire. When innovation is not ground breaking it is easier to remain indifferent. I would be more interested in swapping the battery in the current second generation SE than in getting a new phone.

Reverting to a Single Watch

Reverting to a Single Watch

Byrichard

Today I asked Google Bard whether I should wear two watches at a time and it told me not to. Specifically it told me not to wear a Garmin watch, and a Suunto watch at the same time as they may interferer with each other and more. Before the Apple Watch I only wore one watch at time. I wore the Suunto Spartan watch. When I got the Apple Watch I started to wear two watches at a time because they feed two different databases and the data is not shared from one to the other.

That Was Before

Recently, I noticed that Sports Tracker plays very nicely with the Apple Watch so it tempted me to play with Suunto again, but Suunto does not play nicely with the Apple Fitness App. Neither the Apple Watch nor the Garmin watch play nicely with each other. The result is that if you want data from Suunto, and Garmin, and Apple, you need to wear three watches, for the three apps. Since I have two wrists I can feed two services at once. We are forced either to wear two or three watches, or give up on collecting data for one service.

What Bard Thinks

When asked whether I should wear a Suunto and a Garmin Google Bard feels that I should pick just one and stick with it. If I ask it how many people wear two watches it tells me:

“There is no definitive answer to this question, as it is difficult to track how many people wear two watches. However, anecdotally, it seems that the number of people who wear two watches is increasing.”

If you are considering wearing two watches, I recommend trying it out and seeing how you feel. There is no harm in experimenting, and you may find that you like it more than you thought you would.

Why Limit Myself

I am not wearing two watches because I like wearing two watches. I am wearing two watches because Garmin and Apple want to force me to wear their devices in order to get data so that I can use their apps. With Sports Tracker, and the Apple watch I can track what I do via the Suunto App and via the Suunto App, I can update Sports tracker and Apple, but not the fitness App.

Data Clashes

The other reason for which I want to reduce the number of watches I wear, down to one, is that Suunto and Apple Fitness data clash, so after a one and a half hour walk the Apple Fitness app says that I have burned one to two hundred calories rather than the 500+ that both fitness trackers agree with. I look eccentric for nothing if I wear the Suunto watch and the Apple watch together.

Bard’s Opinion

As I wrote this blog post I asked Google Bard a number of questions. In so doing I learned that it discourages you from wearing two different brand watches at the same time due to possible interference and more. If you want advice about which to pick though, it will provide you with what makes them different from each other. Google Bard will provide you with a side by side comparison of the key feature differences between two or more watches.

And Finally

The Suunto 5 Peak will become my primary watch. The Garmin Etrex SE can track my walks and hikes, and the Garmin Explore device can track my bike rides. It’s amusing that in all of this thought and consideration I don’t think of Strava, where all of this data is collected anyway. I lost interest in Strava years ago, when I read about venture capitalists investing millions, because at that point the site stopped being on a human level.

Wearing one watch at a time is fine.

Apple Pure Vision and the Immersive Experience Opportunity
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Apple Pure Vision and the Immersive Experience Opportunity

Byrichard

Memorable VR experiences


AR/VR and XR have been around for years, if not decades. The most unique VR experience I was involved with was people wearing an immersive headset whilst snorkelling in a pool to experience being “weightless” whilst watching an immersive video. 


The second most interesting video 360 experience was a ZDF volcanic explosion where you could watch a volcano explode, as if you were in Pompei. You could follow the projectiles as they flew by you. You could watch the pigeons take off and fly away. 


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rXyGAySHTA


The third immersive experience of note was where we sat in wheelchairs, with a VR headset on and we saw the world through the eyes of an old person in a wheel chair. We could see people “talk” to us, as if we were the main character. 


Price as a Barrier to Entry


The Pure Vision headset by Apple is exhorbitantly priced. A few years ago the Quest 3 headset cost about 340 CHF and could be used for gaming. The Apple headset costs 3700 USD. Samsung headsets in contrast cost the price of a mobile phone and a headset. 


The Affordable Options


VR headsets that are mobile friendly cost just 20-70CHF depending on the size of the phone, and the quality you desire your headset to have. Apple’s is way out of people’s acceptable price range. 


Patent Monopoly


One of the most worrying things about the Pure Vision demonstration yesterday at WWDC was the mention that they had over 5000 patents. Some might think “Youpie, that’s a lot of innovation” but I see this as monopolistic and destructive. The more they patent indiscriminately the more they will prevent innovation by others. I would own a Quest 3, if Meta didn’t own Oculus. I don’t trust Meta with Immersive experiences, and I don’t like how Apple charges exorbitant fees. 


Always Worn


From the demonstration of the Pure Vision headset it seems as though Apple wants us to immerse ourselves into XR for extended periods of time, to browse photos, videos, and work in AR. They seem to want us to edit video in augmented reality, rather than on a screen. They want us to be fully immersed, to the point that when we’re talking to someone, the display becomes transparent, rather than have us take off the headset. 


Film Watching


They demonstrated how the headset fades the background to “nice colours” or some similar kitsch. They also promoted that we can make the screen for movie watching as big as we want. When I heard this I thought “Imax VR experiences”. With 23 million pixels you could probably watch Imax quality content from the comfort of your airline seat, should you have such a desire. 


Solitary


One of the key issues I see with the Pure Vision headset is that it will isolate us from the world we are in, encouraging us to spend more and more time alone in a virtual world, rather than in the real world. I see this as great for people who live alone, but awful for family, love and other aspects of life. If you’re watching a film with a VR headset then you’re alone, unless they code in a way to be with others. 


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uplqiPYGOvs


Irony


It’s ironic that just as Meta gave up on VR/AR/XR apple brings out a headset that would help get people immersed. 


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdDkfZlnjjo


The Mobile Office


The Apple Pure Vision headset was marketed as a remote work tool, as well as a work tool. the idea is that you organise your work space within the immersive VR goggle experience. Video editing in VR could be interesting because rather than get a large screen, you simply set up the timeline, player and program screens as you want them to be. In theory you can edit 360 videos whilst immersed in VR. They didn’t explore typing and writing, but I did get the impression that they want us to navigate through the environment either through gestures, to grow or shrink windows, or voice, to tell Siri and the VR environment what we want to see. 


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlhymliR7mo


Looking Forward to the PureVision SE


Although Apple haven’t even started to sell their PureVision headsets yet I look forward to the PureVision SE alternative. This version should be more affordable and more interesting for normal people. By normal people I mean people who buy a fragile glass headset rather than an electric bike. I want the PureVision SE option to be affordable, maybe even existing mobile device friendly as we have with the Samsung Gear solutions. 


An Increased Demand for Content


The PureVision headset should come out in the beginning of 2024 which means that for the rest of the year we should be working on 360 videos and other immersive experiences. Now is the time to make sure that when the headsets come out, our content is there, for people to enjoy. YouTube videos, netflix content, amazon prime, and others should know work towards 360 video experiences, like the porn industry has already made available. 


The one drawback to porn and the PureVision goggles, is that there are plenty of cameras, and if it uses gestures, then self-gratification may not be ideal. 


And Finally


With good battery life, simplified typing and good gesture controls PureVision and similar products could replace laptops and desktops, and if not laptops and desktops, then external screens. In my experience VR is a lot of fun to experience but it does cause fatigue, and that fatigue means that we use it less than we would otherwise. 


The act of putting a VR headset on, queueing content and more is slow and clunky. If Apple has found a way to make this easier, then that will help drive adoption. The Quest 3 was already a good step forward. We have to see the leap made by PureVision. 

Of Casio, Suunto, Garmin and Apple

Of Casio, Suunto, Garmin and Apple

Byrichard

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.

Apple Reading Goals
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Apple Reading Goals

Byrichard

I am confused by Apple reading goals because they measure how many days you have reached your goal, as well as how much you read for the current day, but once today is yesterday it loses all of that information. It tells you that you have a. streak but you have no way of knowing anything else.


It would be nice to know how many hours you read per week, as well as how this has varied from one week to the next, from one month to the next, and from one season to the next. With this information you could see whether seasons and other factors affect how much you read. None of this matters, except that because it is tracked it is a shame not to keep that information available for users.


Apple Books has the same flaw as plenty of other Apple Apps. If you live in Switzerland it is assumed that you speak German, and because of this assumption it is hard to browse for English, and even French content. You are obliged to know what you want to find, instead of having the freedom to browse. Apple must lose a lot of business by forcing German language version of content, rather than looking at system settings and using the system default. We’re decades into regionalisation, and yet tech giants don’t cater to people who do not speak the majority language.


And Finally


I thought I was going to go for a walk today but didn’t. I walked to breakfast and back and then spent time standing, so when I saw that it was 1400 I thought that I should go for a walk but didn’t. This is unusual for me. Today has been a crap day. I didn’t get to focus on my goals as I wish I could have. Days like today frustrate me.

Four Years With The Apple Watch Series Four

Four Years With The Apple Watch Series Four

Byrichard

I have spent four years with the Apple Watch Series Four. Although I should feel the opposite I have found that for most of its life I have loved to hate the watch. The first thing I hate about the Apple Watches is that they’re fragile. I had a series three and I broke the screen while climbing indoors. Watches should never break whilst your climbing indoors. There’s nothing for them to smash against.


Cracked screen on the Series 3


I have climbed with a Suunto Ambit 3 for years with no issues and a Suunto Spartan Baro Wrist HR watch after that with no issues, ever. With the Apple watch a few months were enough. With the Series Four I haven’t broken the screen yet, but that’s down either to not climbing much, or luck.


Non Self-Cleaning


The second thing I hate about the Apple Watch Series Four is that the watch eventually starts to stink. With other watches you can wear them every day for months or years without ever worrying about them smelling. I think it’s due to the thick straps that have a tendency to collect rather than get rid of moisture. Usually dropping the watch into a glass of soapy water for an hour or two resolves the problem. I know, a few minutes would be enough, but I give time for the water and soap to do the thing.


Features Trapped Within Apple’s Ecosystem


Another hate I have is that the data isn’t shared between garmin, Suunto and Apple as it could be. If I wanted to get full data for all three I’d have to wear the three watches at once. That is too much, even for me. I really wish we could wear one watch and have all the features combined into one service.


Rare Use of Apps


The apps I used on the Apple watch are the timer, the time of day, the fitness app, and not much else. I found that the watch is slow for audible books and podcasts. It would take hours to transfer data between the two.


Positive: Slim Watch


Another great feature of the Apple watches is that they’re slim enough to slide under shirt sleeves. With the Suunto Spartan Wrist HR and Suunto Ambit 3 the choice had to be made whether to have them before, or after the button. In a work context slim watches are better.


Positive: Reliable battery


Now for the positive. Four years on and I have never had the battery die during a workout where I did not forget to charge the watch at the regular time, and then wear it for the night and the next day. The battery easily lasted four years, despite two hours of tracking almost every day for four years, if not longer workouts.


Conclusion


When the screen on the Series 3 cracked I experienced buyer’s remorse but bought the Four anyway because I was still curious about the possibilities. I feel that, at 479 CHF the Apple Watch Series Four was not a good deal, for a sports tracker style watch. This is the first watch where I had buyer’s remorse, and I love watches.