Connected Watches and Psychological Profiles

Connected Watches and Psychological Profiles

Byrichard

Connected watches know everything about us. In theory they listen to us 24 hours a day for years in a row. My Apple watch has been on my wrist for over four years, every single day. It has been for swims, runs, rock climbing, via ferrata, office work and more. 


The watch knows how much I walk, when I get up, when I go to sleep, how well I wash my hands, how exposed I am to noise and much more. It also knows whether I am moving energetically or lazily. It knows if I am walking faster or slower. It also knows how rested or stressed I am, by looking at heart rate variability. 


Some people will look at the two paragraphs above and think “I don’t want this”. 


The Suunto, Garmin, Casio and other brands I have used measure walking, sleeping, and more but not in the way that Apple does. Apple theoretically knows a lot more for two key reasons. The first is that the Apple universe includes your laptop, your phone, your watch, your tablet and your keys and other possessions. Apple has access to almost every aspect of our lives. 


I bring this up, not because of a sense of paranoia, but simply because there is an article about this on the RTS website after some uni students wanted to know more. They asked people hundreds of questions to get a profile. They then tried to correlate that data with watch data to see if the watch could help establish mental health via a watch. They don’t say anything about brand. 


What makes this report especially interesting is that these are conclusions from fitness trackers, rather than high end smart watches. 


Some things are obvious. People who go out on a friday night are considered extroverted, people who sleep little and move more regularly are considered nervous and more. This is nothing that we wouldn’t expect to hear. 


If we look at the bigger picture, at big data, then this could be interesting. By tracking enough people over time it could be determined whether people are becoming happier, sadder, more nervous, less nervous, about to commit suicide and more. There are reports of how connected devices showed signs that someone was beginning to fall sick, with COVID, or other diseases. 


Steps, sleep and heart rate are just the tip of the iceberg. Most watches collect more than this so they know more. 

A Weekend Walk During a Pandemic

A Weekend Walk During a Pandemic

Byrichard


Today I went for my daily walk and I saw a shape. I thought, “That looks like a fox” and as I approached i had a doubt about it being a dog and I felt fear but I continued forward anyway. Eventually the fox noticed me, looked at me and then fled the other way. This is good news. This means that the fox was healthy, rather than rabied. It also means that I can keep being relaxed about seeing foxes.


Plenty of flowers in a field


At this time of year fields are filled with flowers by the thousands and if you walk around the right fields you hear the buzzing of bees. I didn’t hear them today. Summer heat seems to be back now. The thermometer is going up to 26 to 27 degrees. Warm enough to cycle in shorts and not feel cold. This is a nice time of year for such sports. I have cycled 100 kilometres so far and tomorrow I expect to add another 20 to 30 kilometres so I will have reached my pre-pandemic goal for the first time in two or three years. I haven’t cycled seriously since I broke my arm.


I have now completed 50 percent of The Complete JavaScript Course so I am finally closer to the end than the beginning of this course. I feel that I am learning new and interesting things, as well as consolidating knowledge about other topics. What I am learning about JavaScript can be found here. This is sorted by learning, rather than projects. I keep this as a notebook rather than a repository for others to use. When I am confident about the projects I am working on I will share them in an organised manner.


Coquelicots, and the Alps

Documentaries about JavaScript Frameworks

Documentaries about JavaScript Frameworks

Byrichard

Within the last week Honeypot Originals have released a number of documentaries. Each episode covers a different JavaScript Framework. So far that have Vue.js, Ember.js, Elixir and GraphQL. Each of these documentaries is about half an hour long and interviews some of the key players. What is nice about these documentaries is that they take names and projects that may be familiar to us, but add faces and context to them. I have heard about some of these people via podcasts and more. With these videos I get to listen to them, and watch them explain the importance of their projects.


Vue.js: The documentary from Vue.js: The Documentary by Honeypot Originals


After watching these videos you may get a better understanding of why you would, or would not want to study a specific language. It takes a project from just being a name in the title of a video to something less abstract.


The video about Vue.js cleared some of my hesitancy about studying the framework. Hearing about how the Laravel and other communities grew to be interested in the framework is interesting. It seems like a worthwhile alternative to React and Angular, the two giants in the space.


When I watched the video about GraphQL I didn’t really get the answer about why I should choose it over JSON. So far the answer seems to be “because it only returns the data you want to use. I will need to spend time trying to understand what its key selling point is.


I wanted to take a break from the usual studying habit today, to have a rest day whilst still moving forward.


I am now fourty percent through a Udemy Course to master javascript and I am struggling more, now, than before. It isn’t easy to master such a complex subject. I should practice more, from outside of the course. I thought strings would be simple but there are details that I need to explore further.


That’s it for today.

Learning About Service Workers

Learning About Service Workers

Byrichard

I am currently learning about Working With Service Workers. Service workers allow you to make a website faster, for those who visit a website more often, or offline, in situations where connectivity may be unreliable. Some of the code used can be found on my github page. MDN Web Docs also have useful information about working with service workers.


With service workers you can web first, retrieve from cache and stale while refresh:


  1. With the first option you visit a website and the cache is generated in case the connection is dropped
  2. With the Retrieve from cache it will access the files in the cache, before looking towards the web for content
  3. In the last case the website will load the content it has but will check for new content in the background.


With these three approaches, and with some experimenting you can speed up static websites, and make others available offline if needed.


Aside from helping you to save content locally service workers can also clean up after themselves. If your website is updated or changes you can give a new archive version number and tell it to delete all the others, for your own web page. I have played with static content and will explore more.


I took some time to practice the new skills I learned in this course on my own website, on the local machine. It will take some time to learn the intricacies of how to get this to work correctly. For now I am on a learning curve.


In the process of learning about service workers I also learned about manifest.json and web app manifests. “PWAs can be downloaded in advance and can work offline, as well as use regular Web APIs.”

On The Desire To Change Career
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On The Desire To Change Career

Byrichard

If I had been smart I would have changed career path around 2006-2007 when I was in London surrounded by entrepreneurs and web developers, rather than now during a pandemic. Normally I struggle to find new contracts because of two things. The first is that for camera and editing work there are very few opportunities per year, and the opportunities that do arise have hundreds, if not thousands of candidates so the probability of success is low. The other issue is that because there are few jobs, if you fail you may have to wait months for an opportunity to appear.


That’s why I have spent the entirety of the pandemic reskilling. Every single day I study web development. I have gone from IT support courses, to CSS to HTML, to Javascript to frameworks and back to JavaScript. The journey is long and hard. When I was finally free to study Angular in depth I found that my knowledge of Javascript was not deep enough, so I went back and studied on JS pathway, and now I am studying a second one on Linkedin Learning. My goal is to be proficient. This isn’t a one day goal. This is a journey.


You can follow my journey on github to see what I am learning. One of my side projects, to practice what I have learned is this one. At the moment it is a simple app that retrieves a random image from my instagram gallery and displays it with its title. This self-project is worthwhile because it is easy to follow a course and code along with the teacher. The problem with this is that when there is no teacher, and no model you need to innovate and find your own solutions.


Last year when I tried something similar I found a way to convert from Json to CSV to bring it into Wordpress. Now I am working with Fetch, random number generators to find a post, let to be within the scope of one block, converting epoch time to human readable date and time, and more. If I followed instructions I would find it easy to do, but I couldn’t find any, so I am experimenting with ideas from courses. The next step is to find how to use classes and ids’ to embellish it with CSS.


I started with the random post generator. The next steps will be to use constructors, for each loops, display ten posts at a time, but also to enable finding them by year and month. I can also add more metadata fields than I can with Instagram. I could add country, type of landscape and more. I can practice building a CMS from the ground up. In letters of motivation I wrote about learning about Media Asset management tools from the ground up, and now out of curiousity, that is what I am doing.


It has taken a while to understand how Javascript works, but now that I have I can spend more time experimenting and learning each day. My increasing proficiency will be shown through the projects I build in courses, but also the self-led project.


Sometimes I add comments to commits, to explain what I found hard, and then I show the code that resolved the issue. If you’re curious as to why I would use a self-hosted json file and media files the answer is simple. I don’t need to go through the process of asking for permission to acccess an api to access my own data. For an example of working with ajax and json you can refer to this project.


And Finally


When you work in the media and broadcasting you constantly need to look for opportunities, to face rejection, and continue looking. With the skills I am learning now people are already interested, and that is the reason to change from skills that are less interesting, to those that are.

On Long Drives

On Long Drives

Byrichard

In Switzerland a three hour drive feels long, but in France or Spain it does not. I drove from Switzerland to Spain and from Spain to switzerland. The drive to Spain is easier because traffic gets lighter as you get further south. Most of the time this is true. This time, as I drove from Spain to Switzerland I came across the opposite. From the moment I started driving I encountered traffic.


The problem with traffic is that some people are driving above the speed limit, while others are driving below it. You have to decide whether you want to slow down behind the car that is blocking you, or go out, blocking the fast car behind you. I usually let my speed go, rather than risk a high speed rear collision, flashing lights and other unpleasant behaviour.


This time when I arrived at La Jonquera there were plenty of cars so I stayed in the car and skipped this refueling stop, to refuel at the next petrol station in price. The difference in price was big but I thought that saving time was more important than money. I wasn’t wrong.


At the first péage in France I lost 20 minutes, and then I had regular traffic jams until 20 minutes or so before Grenoble. From there traffic was easy, and I even began to find driving between Grenoble and France easier. I have driven that route regularly enough. It has become a relaxing part of the drive.


This was especially true, because of how quiet the road was compared to the rest of the journey. I drove from around 0910 or so to 2220, so a thirteen hour drive. Yesterday I was tired from the drive.


Horses grazing, with the alps behind
Horses grazing, with the alps behind


Recent Reading


I read two books during the drive. I listened to them with Audible. I listened to The Jewel That Was Ours by Colin Dexter and finished part two of three of The History Of the Ancient World. The Jewel That was Ours is a reasonable book, although I do not feel that it is ideal for road trips. It requires focus and attention, two things that driving in heavy traffic also require.


I think that listening to books where you can half listen are better suited to long drives. Big Mile Cycling by Sean Conway was a better choice for the drive down. I will see about finding similar books for my next long drive.


Recent Listens


Today I listened to two Le Cours De L’Histoire podcasts. One was about Cretinism and Iodine deficiency, and the other, which I still need to finish is about vertical exploration of the mountains. For a while I found that I had no interest in listening to podcasts but for once I felt ready. I try to find pandemic friendly content, that explores ideas, concepts and history, rather than self-pity. I don’t think self-pity is the right term, but something along those lines. I like to read and listen to things that distract me from pandemic solitude.


JavaScript


It has taken a while, and some effort but I finally feel that I am getting to understand JavaScript better, and that I am more confident with it. I am not rushing, but rather seeing the code, and re-writing it with my own terms, words and more. I am pushing the envelope slightly, to deepen my learning. Today I played with encoding letters to learn about functions. Tomorrow I will experiment with something else.


And Finally


Tomorrow I get my booster, so we will see how it affects me. I want to eat a raclette, to see whether my dreams are more interesting, afterwards. 🙂

Good Cycling Weather

Good Cycling Weather

Byrichard

View of the Alps
View of the Alps


Despite people doing what they can to keep the pandemic going, by not vaccinating, by not wearing masks, by not minimising social interactions, by avoiding busy shops we are in a 3000 new people infected per day routine in Switzerland. For some reason, fatalists and others have taken the decision that the pandemic can’t be ended, and that we might as well live with it.


For my entire life, I thought that people wanted to cut a pandemic short. Rieux was rational in my eyes. During this pandemic, we see that Rieux is a rare person. Most people find a hole in the wall, and they just leave, without a sense of responsibility or morality. The pandemic is a crisis of morality and responsibility. Everyone speaks about rights, but they forget that rights entail responsibility.


Cycling


I didn’t know that digestion and cycling could have such an effect on each other. I was cycling straight after eating, and I felt weak in terms of power, and I was struggling to go faster. By the end of the ride, I seemed to have more power than at the start. It’s interesting to see such a change. I didn’t look at the difference in heart rate.


Studying


I finally finished a JavaScript course, after taking a break to read around the subject. I feel that I am in a better situation now. I do get some of the concepts. Now it is a matter of consolidating that knowledge by practising.

Learning Node.JS and Bullet Journaling

Learning Node.JS and Bullet Journaling

Byrichard

For a while I have wanted to learn Angular, Laravel and other frameworks but I felt overwhelmed so I decided to learn JavaScript but then I found that I had gaps in my knowledge too, so I went over to Node.js. Now I feel that I am starting to understand more. I understand the context better. I understand the underlying code better. I have spent enough time studying around the subject that I have gained the contextual understanding not to be completely lost.


With HTML and other technologies you can build and fail, and build again and fail, and eventually you will get what you want. With Javasscript, and to some degree with CSS too, you need to understand what you’re doing to see a result. You need to find code, tinker with it, and get it to do what you want. It takes trial and error, and hours of experimenting in some cases.


That’s why you watch courses. With courses you have it explained to you. You then try to copy the code without inserting errors, and then you debug until you have found all the typos. Plenty of people will say that you’re not meant to just copy code. My aim, in having examples explained to me, is to gain a contextual understanding of how to do things, and how they work. The aim is to become self-sufficient enough to write my own functions and applications.


Bullet Journaling


I have known about Bullet Journalling for years but I have had no or little interest in it because it seemed like an archaic way of keeping track of tasks, projects and more. Yesterday my curiousity was woken again so I have decided to play with the concept. I am using an old notebook that I have had for years. I have until January to see if I like the idea or not. I want to see whether it has a positive effect on how I get on with projects.


I will write more, when I have more experience.

Farming In Switzerland

Farming In Switzerland

Byrichard

The Pandemic is alive and well and I am still walking around in circles. I would go for bigger, more interesting adventures but no one is publicising those events until after the fact. During a pandemic it helps to be misinformed, an alcoholic and a festival goer.


If you like real sports, like climbing, cycling, group hikes etc then you have to wait for months, or at this point, probably years, for the pandemic to end. Last year when the government made the mistake of opening too early you could believe they were silly. By making the same “mistake” again it starts to look like government policy. That leads to the obvious conclusion that at the current level of incompetence the pandemic will never end.


A tractor tending to a field with the alps in the background.


The way that countries around the world are making the same mistakes, in the same way, at the same time, is leading people to discuss whether eugenics is being experimented with. I prefer to think of it as incompetence, rather than deliberate.


Israel, England and the United States are clear indicators of what Switzerland can expect from the pandemic and yet they fail to take the lessons and warnings on board. Instead they let the situation degrade and get worse. We are now at 20+ percent of ICU beds taken up by COVID patients, out of 79 percent occupancy, according to the RTS.


The Swiss have a strange threshhold limit. They prefer for it to reach a certain critical limit. I’m impatient for the next soft lockdown, as that is when the numbers will decrease again.