A few weeks ago Strava decided that it would add AI functionality to it’s app. It is for this reason that I decided to restrict which apps talked with Strava. Now Strava is doing the reverse. It has blocked access to its API so that other apps cannot use its own data.
This, in my eyes is short sighted. Strava is not the primary source of data. Garmin, Sunnto, Apple and others are.
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 Apple Fitness App now has Training Load data. It looks at the workouts you have done over the last 7 days and compares it to the last 28 days. In theory this is interesting but in practice I find it frustrating.
To be specific about what I find frustrating, the Apple watch has more than 1900 workout days to gather data from. Training Today and Gentler Streak both measure HRV and assess whether I am overdoing it, within the zone or slacking off.
Yesterday I went on a bike ride with a Xiaomi Smart Band 9 and a Fairphone 4. I wanted to see two things. The first was to see if the GPS track would be accurate for the entire ride, as well as how much battery power would be squandered in the process. I was happy with the result. After a two hour bike ride I had depleted about 20 percent of the battery since I unplugged that phone in the morning.
I saw that there is a hike taking place nearby. I would have really liked to join it but I would have been participant eleven with a limit of ten people. I wanted to participate because it would have required walking to Nyon, and taking the train de St Cergue to St Cergue and then walking for a few hours, before taking the train back down and walking home. Both my carbon footprint and my travel time would have been small and the environment would have benefited.
Last night I listened to Yuval Harari and Ari Meiber speak about Nexus, the new book and related topics and the concept that I found really stood out is about freedom of speech and volume. Yuval Harari believes that we should be able to share information and lies, but that social networks are responsible for how it is promoted and amplified, how loud the volume of certain ideas is.
“Freedom of speech is very different to control of volume” source because freedom of speech is the ability to discuss without fearing imprionsment but control of volume is how visible, or amplified a post becomes, and whether by encouraging engagement a post is spreading hate or negative messages.
Recently I have been walking and running into and out of Nyon and in the process I have had to cross busy roads regularly and what has struck me recently, especially when running is that people stop to let me cross the road, even when they don’t need to. I really appreciate this.
When you cycle and walk between villages cars skim you, fast and close, and after several years of it I grew tired of it so I shifted to walking towards Nyon, along pavements, and avoiding busy roads when I could.
When I was walking in Neuchatel I noticed something striking. I didn’t see a single advert in favour of expanding the motorways. I expected that the Right Wing friends of Global Warming would push for the expansion of the motorways in Switzerland. That wasn’t the case.
In Switzerland, at the moment, they want to expand the A1 motorway between Geneva and Nyon and I suspect that the Gravière in Eysins was expanded to store all the soil that will be needed to widen the motorway.
Yesterday I spent three hours on a train and hiked for a few hours. I also spent two hours in a museum. During this time I was using the fairphone 4 to listen to an audiobook and streamed media. At the end of the day I think I was at about sixty to seventy percent battery life. The battery has only had three or four cycles so far so you would expect it to last.
If you wanted an iPhone with a terabyte of storage it would cost you 1549 CHF for the iPhone 16 Pro. With the Fairphone 4 128 GB model you would pay 329 CHF for the phone and 101 to 109 CHF for a 1TB card. That’s about 440 CHF and you’d have an absurd amount of storage. Absurd because you never want to lose a device with that much data on an SD card.