The Water
Timelapse with a still camera and long exposure to give a different feel than we are used to.
The Casio GBD-200-1 and similar watches is a watch that counts steps and tracks runs. It communicates with the Casio Move app to provide you with a log of your steps, runs and progress. From what I gather it uses the phone to plot the GPS points of your run.
I could use the term activity, rather than run but this watch assumes that all activities are runs, and there is no option to change this. This watch does not track heart rate or any other data. It provides simple information, for people who do not need much information. It does provide you with progress after a week of use but that’s with Vo2 data. For that you would need to import data from another device
Importing data from other devices is easy, if you do so manually. You can import more than one activity at once. They are added to the log. Over time you earn achievements for distance, training 30 times and more.
What differentiates this device from others is that it is not a conventional fitness tracker that your recharge every day, week or month. This is a watch that you wear and it counts your steps per day. It shows you how one day compares to the next. If you go running then it expects you to do so two times a week and will count steps and duration. It will then provide a map of the run in app, not on the watch.
Until this watch I tracked almost every sport I did, whether it was a walk, bike ride, sail, parapente, cycling or other. With this watch there is a limited battery life of one year, in theory. This means that if I use it like a sports tracker I will kill the battery much faster. On the flipside it could encourage me to track less. The routes are always the same, so step count is enough.
Devices like the VivoSmart 5 are slightly cheaper but the battery lasts for 7 days before you need to recharge, and both fitbit and Garmin step counters have batteries that tend to die after a certain amount of use. This means that you’re happy with them for a year or two, but then the battery dies and you upgrade. This is great for Garmin and Fitbit, but not for the environment. With a Casio watch it’s easy to swap the battery at almost every watch shop around the world, since they have been around for so long.
I see two use cases for such watches. People who are brand new to fitness and activity tracking, who want to experiment with the functionality of such watches, and long distance hikers. The app is focused on people who are brand new to sports trackers, as is shown in the achievements and initial training plan. This is reinforced by the lack of heart rate tracking.
On the flipside I think that for long distance hikers this could be an interesting device to use, either in solitude, or as a backup. The way I see myself using this watch is as a step counter from day to day, and a running tracker, if I take up running which I doubt, with the Garmin Instinct Solar or Apple Watch series Four as proper trackers for cycling, running and new walking routes.
I love tracking my activities but what I dislike about Suunto, Apple and Garmin is that they track you 24 hours a day and none of them communicate the data between each other, so you feel the need to wear all three. I hate that sensation. The casio provides a step counter and watch for normal times, and the other three watches can be used for various sporting activities, and stored when not in use. I feel that these watches have become too invasive, both in the data they collect and the compulsion I feel to have 24hr data.
For a long time I thought Casio were cheap watches. As a child I loved them, and wore plenty of different types. As an adult it’s when I took up scuba diving that I wanted to wear a watch, and from that I played with various sports watches. Eventually I reached a peak, with the Spartan, and now I’m climbing back down, and playing with Casio watches once again. They’re simple, light, and their batteries last for years, not a day, a week or a month. Once you put them on you can forget about them. They are also a lot cheaper, You have a good selection from 29CHF up to 150 CHF or so.
The weather was finally dynamic today. The storm warnings were flashing towards Hermance, on the French side of the lake. This gave a nice contrast between the yellow of the Colza fields and the dark threatening clouds behind.
At moments I thought that rain would begin to fall but luckily the doppler radar, and my instincs were correct, so I did not get drenched in rain or pelted with hail. At one point it did feel as though hail could be a possibility.
In the last week or two I have cycled around 150 kilometres, which isn’t bad. It could be better but single rides are around 49 kilometres. Once the ride was 49 kilometres but I saw that I could easily get an extra few meters to make it 50 so I made the effort. The second time I skipped.
My only trips into Geneva this year have been by bike, but only up from the lake, up the Via Appia and then back towards Vaud. No stops in Geneva itself so far. We are still in a pandemic and I am not going to play Pandemic Roulette, as I like to call it. I am not taking risks that are not worth taking.
If you are so inclined you can now listen to Germinal as podcasts via France Culture. Each episode is 28 minutes long so easy to slot into your day, either commuting or doing other things.
During the pandemic I spent a lot of time reading swiss news, to keep up with current affairs. Now that the Swiss government has decided to pretend that the pandemic is over I have stopped reading the RTS info site. There is not much value when they do not provide relevant news and information.
I will update this blog erratically because it’s hard to know when I will or will not be inspired. Today’s blog post is mainly as an excuse to share photographs.
I’m afraid to open the veluxes because of the threat of finding yet another large spider. I don’t mind having to dispose of it, but I hate the idea of having one walking around without me knowing. A great alternative to open windows is to go for your daily walk. You’re far from neighbours, from smokers, from metalworking and more. You are free to daydream. Today the Mont Blanc was clearly visible. The image is at max zoom with an iphone 8+.
Yesterday and today the harvesters are out collecting corn and sunflowers. I captured a harvester as it dumped sunflower seeds into a trailer before moving on to finish the field. It is a shame to miss it at work.
Today I got a step closer to being able to control WordPress more proficiently than I can at the moment. With hierarchies related to taxonomies via specialist post creation. Coding your own post types and your own taxonomies gives you enormous control over what you can do with WordPress. I have projects. I know how I want to use this newly acquired knowledge.
This website will be overhauled. The static part will be moved into the CMS, and the CMS will behave, as the old website did, but with ease of new post creation and more. The challenge is in updating to new technologies, and using this process as a learning and consolidation phase, as I did with CSS and other technologies over the years and decades.
I don’t feel comfortable writing about my trials and tribulations on Linkedin because it feels as though you need to be at your peak, rather than as a between achievements point. With the blog, I can document the learning curve, and the progress I make as I work towards acquiring new skills, in my efforts to build a different career path than the things I have done so far. I also have a project to work on in my free time, aside from the website. The second project is ambitious, and useful. You will learn more, as I get ready to reveal more.
Sometimes we walk in the rain and the snow and we get soaked by the weather. Today I drank a litre in an hour and a half of walking. The air temperature is around 31c.
I decided to walk from clump of trees to clump of trees. It’s possible. If I had walked in the direct sun I would have needed to drink more than I did.
31 might seem warm but we had 37 for days in a row during previous years. This year has been gentle.
Translated from French, Sport the nicest of meetings reminds me of the legend that is told in Il Nuovo Cinema Paradiso. In Il Nuovo Cinema Paradiso we hear about the guy who waits outside a woman’s window for one hundred days and nights to show his devotion to her, and in the end he loses interest.
This is following the same theme except that rather than a man lusting after a woman it is the other way around. Instead of a woman using crappy dating apps and other rubbish she sees someone she finds visually appealing and so decides to take up running. At
Eventually she excels beyond the group and she pulls alongside the guy, just long enough to make us believe in the stereotypical ending but nope, she pulls ahead and continues running. You take up sport because you want to seduce but eventually your passion for the sport takes over.