Sticking with the Old or Trying New Things
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Sticking with the Old or Trying New Things

Byrichard

Yesterday I went for a half hour drive to do a favour, but in arriving where I had to do the favour I found that people were deeply focused and did not want to be interrupted so I went for a walk. I didn’t swap to the hiking shoes that were waiting patiently in the car. I wore my “recycled” shoes instead. I eventually regretted this because the ground that was frosty, also had deep puddles of water and I had to walk through them. Two or three times my feet got wet. While getting my feet wet I was also listening to a Linux Podcast, episode 56 of Linux After Dark and they were discussing whether people like to adopt a system and stick with it, or whether they like to experiment and try new things constantly.


I feel that way about watches at the moment. For plenty of people watches are like televisions. “I haven’t owned either for decades, my laptop and ipad are enough.” For years I was without a watch, and without a TV. As a student I never felt the need. It’s only because people had spare televisions that I ended up with one. I never bought one for myself.


Since I bought myself one or more raspberry pies I have been experimenting with various instances, to see how to set them up quickly, and experiment with implementation and more. In the process I am learning skills that I had not experimented with in years. One of these is to flash a USB key with a version of Linux and rebooting a PC from the USB key to run linux. It worked so well that now I am fighting the desire to install Linux over Windows and have the windows machine become a Linux machine.


Watches


Suunto, Casio, Apple and Garmin make watches, and each one tries to quantify the wearer, so it feels as though the wearer must wear all three or four brands to get complete data for all four platforms. but to do this makes us eccentric. The simplest workaround is to track with one device, and manually update all the others.


Whether you wear a Casio, Garmin, Apple Watch or Suunto is also about something else. User Interface. The Garmin Instinct and Casio g-shock watches look tough/solid, while the Apple Watch and Suunto Peak 5 look more fragile, more elegant. The other difference is that the Garmin watch is solar powered and can last for weeks in summer, whereas the Apple Watch and Suunto Peak five can last for a day, or several. The Garmin watches can last for years, by default, because they use mobile phones to do the hard work. They just count steps and time.


Personal Technical Debt


I like the idea of Personal Technical Debt. The concept exists for IT and programming. Writing code is one thing, but updating it later on is a challenge. To give a simple example, if you write a static website by hand then every page that navigates to other pages, needs to updated every time a new page is added. If you use Hugo or another static website generator you see this with every build. My blog is both on wordpress, and as a static site. As a wordpress blog it’s slow and clunky to update because of all the bloat wordpress has added over the two and a half decades that it has been around.


In contrast with Hugo you write you page in markdown, add the categories and tags, run “hugo” and fifteen seconds later the site is ready to publish via GIT FTP. I spent months updating my static site to PHP before being sidetracked by Hugo and blogging.


The New Machine Routine


A while ago if you started to use a new machine you would need to log into all your sites, across several browsers. When I did this once or twice a year it felt slow and uncomfortable. Now that I slide between web browsers fluidly the time it takes to be up and running in Chrome, Firefox or other, is a few minutes. This is because my personal technical debt is low, and because it has become routine to slide between browsers, whether different versions of Chrome, Firefox or other.


With the Raspberry Pi Imager app you can instantiate a new server on an SD card within minutes, and it will be ready for you to log in via SSH whilst connecting to wifi with no user intervention. This is great because you can setup a headless system in a location with no monitor or keyboard.


Devops


When I started following courses on JavaScript, Ruby, Ruby On Rails and more I would get instructions on how to setup an environment and I wasn’t familiar with the process so I had to follow the instructions attentively. By trial and error, as well as repetition the process became relaxed.


I find that, as I become more comfortable with doing things from the command line, I find docker walk throughs more frustrating than helpful. This is because I want to get instructions on how to setup the environment fully, without the overhead of docker running in the background. On a 2016 mac book pro docker slows down the computer.


And Finally


When we do something two or three times we need to follow the instructions when we get stuck. If we set the time on a casio watch several times then it becomes habit. If we implement Linux instances on SD cards and experiment until we break things, then we know how to do things, without breaking them, in a production environment. If we change web browser once every few months or years it can take a while. If we do it several times a month it becomes second nature. That’s what experimenting is about.

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.

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.

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Of Casio and Smart Watches

Byrichard

Over the last five and a half years I have tracked every walk that I have been on, and I have tracked about five and a half million steps per year. That’s a lot of steps and a lot of going around in clrcles. Going around in clrcles makes tracking walks with smart watches/gps watches less interesting. That’s probably why I have been distracted by Casio watches.


I haven’t been distracted by the 300-600 CHF watches. I’ve been distracted by the 30-50CHF ones. The simple watches that people of my age wore as children. These are simple, easy to use watches that have batteries that are meant to last for 10 years between battery changes. Compare that to one day for the Apple Watch and 30 days for Suunto and Garmin watches.


There is something cosier about a watch that doesn’t speak with the world, a watch that tells the time, has an alarm or five, one or two time zones, and that familiar beep beep, that is turned off, but could exist, should we want it back.


With this watch you get 10 years of battery life, an alarm clock and you know the time of day. It fits under your shirt sleeve with ease, and you can forget you’re wearing it until you need to know what time with it. For six CHF more you can get this one, with world time, and a timer. Timers are most useful when you’re cooking, to know when to do the next step.


The pandemic affects us in strange ways. I didn’t expect to rekindle my interest in simple casio watches but for some reason the pandemic has. For three years, over this pandemic I have walked in circles, and my interest in that data has waned, so simple watches have re-awoken simpler desires for simpler watches.


Don’t be mistaken though. These are simple, limited watches and I want them to do more, but conversely I like the idea of wearing a watch for as long as I want, without having to recharge it. It doesn’t nag me, unless I tell it to wake me up, or to tell me that 20 minutes have elapsed.

Taking a Break From The Apple Watch

Taking a Break From The Apple Watch

Byrichard

Yesterday I decided to take a break from the Apple watch for up to a week. I am tired of two behaviours. The first of these is the watch’s habit of saying that I did not stand for two or three hours in a row. I know that I have. I need to stand to cook, or to brush my teeth and other tasks. It also annoys me that if you bend your arm it counts that you sat down. Bend your arm to check if you have been standing for at least one minute and it resets the counter.


The second flaw comes from the monthly challenge. The challenge for this month is to do 4900 minutes of exercise if I remember and this is absurd. It will always push you to strive more, to reach further and to work out harder. It lacks flexibility.


If the workout goal is 4900 minutes, then that’s over two hours per day. In theory that’s a nice challenge, but in the long run it leads to exhaustion. Last year, I would let the app tell me to do up to 600 calories or more of exercise a day. That goal led to me exhausting and fatiguing myself because there are no breaks. It pushes, and pushes. It doesn’t think “You need to rest” or “you did sport A rather than sport B so we will adjust the monthly goal. It’s AI, without fatigue built in.


The other challenge, having three watches with three ecosystems. There is little to no interoperability. The steps aren’t transferred from Suunto to Apple from Apple to Suunto. Garmin wants other data than the other two. To feed all three databases you need to wear three watches. It would be nice to sync the data between the three without thought. This would give us the freedom to slide between platforms. This would give us the opportunity to wear a single watch.


Running Up Four Floors at a time, Walking Two Hours A Day


I almost never walk up the stairs, especially a single step at a time. I always run up them. I run up at least two steps at a time and I sprint three or four floors without getting winded. I also walk from one and a half to two hours a day. The Apple watch tells me that I didn’t stand for two hours in a row. If I don’t stand for one or two hours it is because I am studying or working. By telling me to stand the watch is telling me to procrastinate.


For clarity, the watch doesn’t tell me anything. I turn off notifications. I check the fitness app to see how the day is going, and that’s when I see that it says I haven’t stood for two hours. That little light blue bar annoys me. I have a compulsion to have a perfect collection of filled bars, every hour.


That’s why I need to take a break from the watch. It makes me care about something that doesn’t matter at all. Standing is a recommendation, for people who need to get into the habit of working out. I don’t have that problem. I can ignore it.


Turning It Off


I looked for an option to turn off the standing trend but can’t. I can cut it down to six hours a day, but the issue is not standing six or twelve hours a day. It’s wanting to have a “perfect” day, and keeping the trend in the fitness app increasing. This benefits my life in no way, so turning it off would be the ideal solution.