Tech Related

Our mobile phones are almost always near us, or on us. The only time we don’t have our phone with us is when we’re scuba diving, driving, unless we count Waze as a game. When I am home alone I usually don’t play mobile phone games because I’m distracted by other things. 

One of the flaws with plenty of games today is that they are pay to win, or pay to play. I don’t like this model. I also don’t like games that require you to follow instructions, rather than play and experiment. I want to play, not follow instructions. 

Garmin have had challenges for years. Most of them have been about distance, or vertical climbing. Now they have new Expedition challenges. Each expedition is named after an expedition or adventure by the same name.

List of Garmin expedition challenges

The Camino De Santiago challenge is a challenge to walk 784 kilometres. The Denali challenge is to climb 6190m. There are two Mont Blanc Challenges. The Mont Blanc challenge is to climb 4808 metres whilst the Mont Blanc Circular (Tour Du Mont Blanc is to walk 160 kilometres.

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.

Yesterday afternoon I was looking at the GPS track for a run I did with the 45s and I was struck by how wide of the mark it was, compared to the same run with the Garmin Instinct. With the Garmin instinct the GPS track fits like a rail to the satellite and road map. With the Garmin Forerunner 45s it is quite a way out.

How Big Is The Difference?

With the Garmin Instinct GPS track you can see so precisely that you can tell which side of the road I was running on, as well as when I switched from one side to the other. The GPS track is highly aligned with the walk or run.

I am confused by Apple reading goals because they measure how many days you have reached your goal, as well as how much you read for the current day, but once today is yesterday it loses all of that information. It tells you that you have a. streak but you have no way of knowing anything else.

It would be nice to know how many hours you read per week, as well as how this has varied from one week to the next, from one month to the next, and from one season to the next. With this information you could see whether seasons and other factors affect how much you read. None of this matters, except that because it is tracked it is a shame not to keep that information available for users.

I have spent a week and a half with the Garmin 45S and it doe what I expect the Garmin to do, but with more regular charges. The battery is rated to last for a week working as a watch and up to 13 hours working as a sports tracker. You can track your workouts with GPS, GPS and Galileo or GPS and Glonass.

This watch is designed for running, rather than walking or other sports, so it provides running data that is easy to read, whilst running. At the end of the run it provides you with useful data, as you’d expect from such a tracker.

I see people are training for ultrarunning events, scuba diving and more with the Apple Watch Ulta, but I feel no interest in such a watch. The first reason for my lack of interest is that the watch is stupidly expensive for something that lasts just 30 hours on a single charge. I would expect a watch to last at least three or four weeks between charges, and at least a week with daily use. The Ultra does neither.

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 am old enough to remember a teacher writing on a board or piece of plastic for an overhead projector. “Why don’t you just give us photocopies of what you’re writing instead of asking us to copy down what you’re writing. “Because you will remember it better if you write it down.”

At the time this seemed stupid and a waste of time. Years later I think that we could have been taught to take summarised notes rather than literal notes but that isn’t the point. The point is that learning is as much about writing as it is about understanding the material Every day for weeks in a row I have taken the time to write a 300 word post and it’s difficult. Not only do you need to come up with an idea but you need to develop it into something that is at least three hundred words long.

I have had the Suunto Spartan for around five years, the Apple watch Series Four for Four and the Instinct since November 2021 and I find myself gravitating back towards the Suunto Spartan watch again. I pivoted away from the watch and Suunto because it moved towards WearOS and smartwatches, rather than sticking to fitness tracking.

I was afraid that MovesCount, known as Suunto App now, and the Sportstracker app would both be killed off or allowed to die but this hasn’t happened. I see that Sportstracker and the Apple watch play quite nicely together so if I want the power of sportstracker and the Suunto app I can stick to an Apple watch.