Tracker

Recently people wanted to move from Goodreads to open alternatives to move away from the grasp of Amazon. I wanted to do the same so I moved to two or three apps and used them for a while. I stopped using them for one simple reason.

They don’t have an extensive library of books, so when you start to read a book you can either spend several minutes adding all the information about the book you’re reading into the system, or you can save time and stick with Goodreads. When you’re reading audiobooks and e-books you might not have all of the relevant information.

All climbers are familiar with this. You’re on a climb or a via ferrata and you look up but you don’t see what to do so you feel stuck. As a result you try one hold, and then another, and then a third and eventually you stop. That’s when you remember to look down.

If you look down you see that there is a foot hold 10 to thirty centimetres higher that will give you the extra reach that will allow you to climb onwards. The same is true with tech.

The automatic reflex is to wear a fitness tracker on the wrist so that it may measure heart rate but also so that we may look at the data that it is capturing without using an app. The issue with this habit is that we need to stop wearing a classic watch, as a result.

Fitness trackers want to be worn non-stop for between 3 days to four weeks before giving proper usable data as is the case with the Epix Gen 2 but also all Apple Watches, Garmin devices, Suunto and others.

Most people will automatically get an Apple watch because it can track fitness and do other things. Others may go for a Garmin watch, a Suunto or a Fitbit but if they do then this is for step counting, run tracking, cycling and more. For 30 CHF, at the time I’m writing this blog post you can get the Xiaomi Smart Band 8. It’s cheap, it’s affordable, but it’s mediocre.

Paradoxically what makes it mediocre is not the device itself but rather how Apple iPhones throttle GPS and other feature access from mobile devices. Yesterday I went for a 27km ride but the device counted 600m of travel. It’s missing 26.3 kilometres.