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The Apple Watch Series 3
The Apple Watch Series 3 is more interesting than I thought it would be, I like that it plays nicely with Strava and that it is possible to track shorter duration activities without worrying about battery life. I found that it loses about ten percent per hour. This is fine for most people.
Daily goals
Another feature that I like is that it measures daily goals in standing, calories and activity. The standing and activity goals are easy to beat on a daily basis. Standing 1 minute every hour is tremendously easy when you’re not driving or flying. It’s the activities goal that I find most relevant.
With previous devices that I have used, whether Fitbit or fitness apps on android or iOS they usually give you a daily step goal but if you go for a long bike ride or go climbing you will miss the step goal. With calories burned everything you do counts towards that goal.
With the workout
Better integration with Strava and other apps
I would like to see better exportability of data. With the Suunto Spartan Wrist HR
It is for this reason that I track cycling and hikes with both the Suunto watch and the Apple watch series 3.
Other comments
I don’t know what the heart rate variability data means so I don’t know whether to see the data as positive or negative. It is a shame that with most news apps we can read the headline and sub-heading but not much else. I wish that we could type messages rather than choose from presets. It is not as versatile as I would like from such a device.
Assessment
This is a watch perfectly suited to cycling, hiking and other activities as long as they do not exceed eight hours of activity. It is well suited for when you’re walking in town, cycling in the countryside or climbing. Tracking calories, rather than steps, is a great way of giving people sporting flexibility. It’s a practical introduction to sports tracking watches.
FLYER THE ESSENCE OF E MOUNTAIN BIKING
Mountain biking is a sport that is growing in popularity. We see that technology is keeping up with the riders. Between suspension, specialist tires and safety equipment the sport has had the freedom to become more adventurous. Bigger jumps, more travel, stronger components all allow the sport to become more extreme.
Usually there are three ways to get to the top of a mountain. The first option is to ride up but with a mountain bike that can be tiring. I have an area where I can mountain bike near home but it’s a 12.7km ride up with a 10 percent grade. It takes two hours to get to the base. I could of course take the car up and cycle around at the top but this requires removing the front wheel and putting the seats down. Another option is to head to specialist resorts where the remontée mécanique are equipped to take bikes to the top of the slope. The third option is to walk up and push the bike.
In this video we see a fourth option. An electric mountain bike. I like the idea of mountain biking this way. I like the notion that the mountain bike will assist with getting up the hill more efficiently. Several times I have cycled up a 10% gradiant for a distance of 12.7 kilometres. With the mountain bike I use it takes 2 hours of almost non stop pedalling. It leaves me with little energy to enjoy going off road at the top. With a flyer I’d let the bike get me to the fun part and then use my own power to play up there.
I won’t buy one of these bikes but the video is interesting to watch.
I Want to Dump WordPress for Laravel
For at least a year I have been annoyed with WordPress, not because it went from the classic editor to Guthenburg but because it now uses React and I hate the idea of using React because it was a FaceBook project. I don’t trust Facebook and I don’t want to use anything related to them.
I don’t want to use FaceBook because it reminds me of the life I don’t have, Instagram because it switched from being a network of friends to a network of spam, WhatsApp because it’s owned and controlled by FaceBook so privacy is at risk, and finally React because it is part of the FaceBook universe.
I was tempted by the Occulus Quest a few years ago but I didn’t buy it, because it would ingest me into the world of Facebook. If Facebook, now Meta, was caught being unethical and immoral, and said sorry, and did something to fix the situation, then I would rethink how I feel about the company. The reality is that when they’re caught being immoral they just wait until we forget about it. That’s not how a social network should be, especially one that experimented with making us feel negative, and was caught helping with spreading disinformation to the right people to get Brexit to succeed, and Trump to be elected.
But What About PHP?
I know that some of you will ask “But if you refuse to use React, why don’t you feel the same way about PHP? PHP was developed in part by Facebook years ago, but it came of age when I didn’t have a negative opinion of Facebook yet. I don’t want to use React because I don’t want to make it easier for Facebook to have a monopoly on the World Wide Web.
I also feel happier learning to use technology where I am not competing with everyone else. I still studied Vanilla JavaScript via several courses and understand how most functionality works, even if I can’t write the code from scratch without help.
Back in 2004 and earlier I was playing with every framework I could find, installing it, seeing what I could do, and then moving on. I found WordPress and my learning reached a plateau. During the pandemic I started to study how CSS and other technologies worked until I found that PHP and Laravel feel intuitive compared to other technologies. I wanted to use Angular but I got stuck, so I learned Vanilla JavasScript, then Python, and then PHP, and finally laravel. With PHP and Laravel I got things to work without struggling.
I did get stuck with Laravel, with permissions, which is why I studied “Let’s Learn Laravel: A Guided Path for Beginners. I am at section 15, “Deploying To A VPS”. After that the course will be done. I still want to follow courses on how to make Laravel secure. My goal is to make my website a showcase of my understanding of Laravel.
And Finally
Although replacing WordPress with Laravel would be a fun goal to achieve I think that the first step is to turn the static part of my website into a dynamic one. Once that is achieved then I can see whether I want to migrate my WordPress blog to Laravel, or keep things as they are. Security wise it makes sense to stick with WordPress, until I know more.
As Long as There Are No Clouds
In less than twenty four hours there will be a total eclipse of the sun that will give us a red moon and this should be interesting to see.
Back in 1999 I was in Salzburg for the total eclipse of the sun by the moon. I was almost within the area of totality. It was over 99%.
There is nothing like a total eclipse of the sun. At the start you see hundreds of people go into the square and look up at the sky. You see the moon eating up the sun. Over time you see that more than half is eaten. Then you see three quarters and you approach totality.
At the time I wasen’t spending too much time looking at the process as I was looking for shots for the video. I climbed up the road to the castle and turned around. As I did so I saw all the birds fly away and I saw a grey shadow racing across the landscape. Hundreds of flashes started going off and people started to make noise in excitement. Totality was here.
The light was grey, with no depth, then it was night. As it was night I looked up and saw the corona that forms, where the solar flares are twelve kilometers long, visible because the sun’s main mass is blocked by the moon. Totality is over within a few seconds and day comes back. Many people have enjoyed this event.
It’ll be another century for most people to see the next one.
That’s why I want to see the red moon, that’s why I’d prefer seeing a silver ball turn reddish. That red is formed by the refraction of sun in the earth’s atmosphere being sent to the moon and bouncing back to give us a splendid sight, as long as there are no clouds
Two weeks of recreation
The next two weeks or so shall see me resting but not from media work. There’s a good chance I’ll be working on a project about a Prison in the Lebanon. It was shot a few weeks ago and the person in charge of the project needs help with the editing.
It looks as though it’s going to be an interesting project. I’ve already viewed quite a bit of footage, read the voice over text and discussed the idea. I’ve started to form some ideas of how to create the story and tomorrow this should progress further with me going in to work.
In around two weeks I’ll have an interesting work shift, from 5am to 1300 hours, in other words my work day will be finished when other people get their work day started. We’ll see how that goes anyway.
Ciao for now
Let down by the DJI Go 4 Android app
A few months ago, before the winter months came I was
At some point in
The problem occurs when I try to connect the DJI Go4 app with the remote. At this moment the app refuses to recognise the drone and I’m stuck. I’ve tried resetting the remote, resetting the drone. I’ve tried re-installing the app and I’ve tried Android and iOS devices without any communications between the app and the drone.
If I had had these issues during my previous 90 flights and with a previous version of the app I would assume responsibility. As things are I am not to blame, the app breakers are.
Remember that this is the prime season for someone to buy a new drone and I would be tempted by the air. How can I justify buying a new drone when the old one has a faulty app that other DJI drones use as well?
I would strongly advise people against buying a drone that relies on their