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The Curious Step Miscount Due to Walking Sticks

Byrichard
Reading Time: 2 minutes

Yesterday I walked with hiking sticks and whereas one watch told me that I had 13,000 steps, or so, the other said I had 9000. It is the second time that I notice such a difference in step count. 

Walking stick step count. The count is lower than without walking sticks
Walking stick step count. The count is lower than without walking sticks

The first time I noticed this issue was a few days ago, after a similar walk. I knew that the walk was over 10,000 steps so when I saw the low count I thought something was wrong, but didn’t worry about it. It happened again yesterday. I went for an 11 kilometre walk that should be at least 12,000 or more steps but it was undercounted by at least three thousand steps. The Apple watch had over 13,000 and the Garmin Instinct Solar had 9000. 

The normal walking step count
The normal walking step count

I have a theory about what is causing this issue. When you’re walking normally your arms swing for every single step. When I walk with hiking steps I usually take two to three steps in between stick strikes on the ground. This results in one step being counted for every three or so steps. It seems to happen when I am in the walking, rather than hiking mode. By resting my hand on the sticks for a few steps at a time the watch counts that as a single step. 

It doesn’t stop there. I also noticed that the step per minute count was a fifth of what it usually is. Usually my step count is around 100-120 steps per minute. In this case, just twenty steps per minute. 

The simplest solution is to shorten the walking sticks to match your walking pace. With long sticks you will take four or five steps between lifts of the sticks. With shorter it might be half as frequent.

I can run two more experiments. With the first I can measure whether walking stick length has an effect, and then I can test whether walking in hiking, rather than walking mode changes the result. 

If you’re not a habitual walker like me, and if your step count is important, then walking with sticks may give the illusion that you are lazier than you are. This isn’t an issue, since distance is measured. If you’re trying to beat a walking record then the Apple watch might be a better option, as it seems to count steps more accurately, even with hiking sticks. 

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Corporate Social Responsibility and Apple

Byrichard

I have read numerous articles and I think that Corporate Social Responsibility and Apple are hot topics at the moment. When it was found that European firms were cheating on their emissions reports it was a great scandal and the European and German automotive industries took a financial hit. Their cheating cost them billions. In the US people were financially compensated whilst as one article put it Europeans got a plastic tube.

We should look at the Apple Back taxes story within the context of Brexit, the rise of the far right in a number of countries and the emerging popularity of Trump within certain sectors of the American voting public. The group anonymous is defending the rights of the 99 percent. They protest against Wall Street and the abuses of corporations and the wealthy.

When houses in the US were foreclosed because of the bubble bursting because of complex dividends those who suffered were the poor and the middle classes because they borrowed money at a rate that they could not pay it back. A number of documentary makers have explored this issue and there have been talks at the Graduate institute and other places.

Apple is currently making billions per quarter and that money is being stockpiled in offshore accounts so that neither the US government nor the European union can get to it. Other writers and journalists have written about this extensively. The perspective that I want to take is a moral one.

Apple products are expensive, they can cost twice as much as their android equivalents. People in the European markets are paying for these products. They pay the country’s VAT along with the product’s cost. They are contributing to the local economy.

Tim Cook argues that what the European Commission is doing is a “load of crap” and that it is abusing of its power. From an ethical and moral point of view though it is Apple that is being unethical and amoral. They are part of the economy. When they sell products they make huge profits that are taxed at less than one percent. 12 billion dollars could do a lot of good within the European Union if and when it is recovered because it could contribute to the road networks and transport infrastructure. It could contribute to housing, education and much more. In contributing to the economy those billions that Apple owes in back taxes could improve the quality of life of millions.

They hide behind the mask of job creation. They believe that because they contribute to the creation of 6000 jobs in Ireland that their corporate social responsibility stops there. It does not. Apple must be ethical enough to pay taxes like every other business is expected to do.

In effect Apple is providing a concrete example of what Brexiters voted against, the corporations syphoning off money to the detriment of living conditions of many populations around Europe. If corporations are allowed to make billions in profits without paying taxes because of creative accounting then society as a whole suffers. It also ferments resentment and encourages people to vote for the right.

In my opinion, based on the reading of numerous articles and watching many documentaries Apple should agree to pay the 14 billion as a gesture of good will and as a Public relations exercise. Imagine what a positive effect those billions would have for the European Union as a whole. Imagine how much social good having that money re-invested would do.

I believe that Tim Cook and Apple need to pay these back taxes to diffuse the tensions caused by austerity movements across Europe. A wealthy, rather than austere Europe could buy more Apple products. Other corporations would also benefit directly from people’s increased disposable income. A few weeks or months ago I watched a documentary about how the United States benefited from corporations paying their fair share of taxes.

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.”

JSON-LD and a Walk

JSON-LD and a Walk

Byrichard

A conventional tech blogger would usually just write about JSON-LD and completely ignore the fact that they went on a walk. I like to combine the two. JSON-LD, short for JSON Linked Document is an agreement for certain data fields to be used for specific purposes. The idea is to standardise terms within a database to make the sharing of data easier.


When you work with databases and data it is important to define what the schema will be. A schema is like a template but with data fields. It is an agreement, or requirement to have specific data about a product, asset or other.


For example for a book you will have


  • Title
  • Author
  • Date published
  • ISBN
  • Publisher
  • Location Published
  • Price
  • Description
  • Synopsis
  • Language and more.


A schema ensures that all fields are entered. This ensures that useful information is either A)Not forgotten and B)All entries look the same on a webpage. If you think I’m verbose look at Schema.org’s entry for book fields. By following these instructions data is interchangeable between all websites, without the need to re-map data


JSON-LD is a lightweight Linked Data format. It is easy for humans to read and write. It is based on the already successful JSON format and provides a way to help JSON data interoperate at Web-scale. JSON-LD is an ideal data format for programming environments, REST Web services, and unstructured databases such as Apache CouchDB and MongoDB.

JSON-LD org: https://json-ld.org/


A Use Case


When I worked as a media asset manager we had to think about how to map data between a media asset management tool and a CMS. This required finding a way to map the data so that it would be compatible between databases. If done well databases can feed themselves, without the need for humans to do the tedious work of data entry, especially when thousands of data entries with dozens of fields each are involved.


On a smaller scale it means that we can create a webpage, setup a schema, add it to the top of the page, and search engines will know what the page contains, more efficiently. On WordPress it works automatically once you add the right plugin.


Experiment with JSON-LD


If you’d like to experiment with JSON-LD then you can try this site. It provides a quick way to enter data, and see the resultant JSON-LD data, which you can then paste in a web page.


The Walk


Today I saw quite a few contrails in the sky as I walked between villages. The weather is windy, but as usual the sun is out. I am going through my usual alternate route these days. It takes me through houses, rather than along the road. It is always worth updating routes, although I think that the new route might be shorter. I see that the route I took today is around 3 kilometres shorter than another. I cheated myself of an extra half hour of walking. It gives me more time to do other things.


A Break From Listening To Podcasts

A Break From Listening To Podcasts

Byrichard

For two or three months at least I have taken a break from listening to podcasts. I used to enjoy listening to podcasts every single day. I would listen when I walked, I would listen on the commute. I would listen when I cooked. During this pandemic, I found that I could stand fewer and fewer podcasts.


Some of them frustrated me because they treated Brexit as if it was something fun, so I stopped listening. Other podcasts tried to speak about pandemic solitude, but these were married people who were simply choosing to self isolate to keep their loved ones safe, rather than real solitude, where there is no end in sight.


With other podcasts, I stopped listening because I thought that what the people were talking about was either irrelevant or not very interesting. According to one podcast app, I have listened to 34 days and 14 hours of podcasts since 2016.


One of the reasons I stopped listening to podcasts is that I wanted to make progress with my reading goal, i.e. via Audible, for Goodreads. Podcasts are interesting, and we learn interesting things, but if we set a reading goal via an app like Goodreads, book reading counts, and podcasts do not.


FOMO is another reason. Fear, or knowledge of missing out. For nineteen to twenty months now we have been self-isolating and group activities have been limited. Group hikes, climbs and other activities, that used to be common are rare. Conferences and other events are now online rather than in meat space. Listening to podcasts reminds us of what Last summer, and this summer, I said that we cut out TV series, films, or any content that affects our happiness. Podcasts were messing with my ability to cope with the pandemic, so eventually I eliminated all of them. Somehow I can cope with books, but factual books. Books that are about ideas and projects, rather than relationships.


This pandemic is hard because we know how to end the pandemic, but due to political interests the measures that would bring the pandemic to an end are being skuppered. The pandemic, with the right leadership could be ended within three or four months, with the right leadership. With the wrong leadership we could be in for 8 more years. I belive that Switzerland does have the wrong leadership for a pandemic.


Today the Right leaning party, the party that is to blame for pandemic measures not being brought to fruition, sent propaganda spreading disinformation about the current Conseil Fédéral. The party that is most vocal about the loss of freedoms, is to blind to see that it is the party that is making this pandemic long and protracted.


I want the pandemic to end, and for normal socialising to resume, even for those, like me, who are waiting for the transmission rate to be down to zero cases for two weeks in a row. For now this looks impossible before next spring so it is another Winter of solitary walks and blog writing, when I am not studying. I am a third of the way through a Web dev course. I am making consistent progress every day. Life moves forward, even if we would like some parts to be enhanced.


As I like to say, Same Pandemic, Different day.

I took hundreds of pictures today so that I could play with photosynth.

Byrichard

Whilst it has been over two years since I last had a windows laptop today I took hundreds of pictures to play with Photosynth, a photo combining piece of software that runs on your machine before being uploaded to the web.

The idea is a simple one. Take as many pictures as you can be bothered and have at least three pictures overlap the same detail. I tried this in three different locations. The first one was a shopping center. I set the n95 to photograph every ten seconds as I walked but soon realised that this was too slow. That’s when I went to burst mode and photographed the main hall where the elevators were, then the view from the parking lot, and finally in a field where the hay was ready for storage.

In each case I took a sequence of 30-150 images at once. I then sorted the pictures out by sequence before letting photosynth do all the crunching. After a while th result came out and I had a 3D environment in which to click from picture to picture to picture.

The link from image to image is usually quite good although make sure not to leave too big a gap between two images as they will be isolated. Time for you to try it out, to have some fun.

Hay

Architecture

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