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FitBit Frustrations

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Screenshot 2016-01-08 08.12.06To my amuse­ment Fit­Bit awarded me the India badge today. I’d earned it by walk­ing enough steps to equate to 1997 miles — the length of India.

They make me smile but I’ve learned to dis­count Fit­Bit’s attaboy awards because they’re gen­er­ally mean­ing­less.

Over the past two years I’ve learned that the sen­sor on my Fit­Bit One is quite inac­cu­rate, at least for the activ­i­ties I pre­fer. It deliv­ers rel­a­tively accu­rate track­ing for a lim­ited set of activ­i­ties like walk­ing or run­ning. I believe its results when Fit­Bit’s dash­board reports that I walked far­ther today than yes­ter­day, but don’t trust the spe­cific counts for any given day or activ­ity.

When I com­pare met­rics (steps walked) between my iPhone 6s and the Fit­Bit One for the same walk or hike, the num­bers don’t agree. I’m inclined to believe the iPhone is closer to accu­racy…

My Fit­Bit is way off for yoga, kayak­ing and bik­ing. It either mea­sures almost noth­ing at all (yoga or kayak­ing), or in the case of bik­ing, mea­sures the rev­o­lu­tions of my foot on the crank rather than the dis­tance the bike has trav­eled.

And last week I learned that my Fit­Bit One is also unable to track my steps while cross-coun­try or Nordic ski­ing.

Was it the glid­ing strides, or did the cold out­door tem­per­a­tures put the sen­sor out of com­mis­sion?

Steps tracked while XC skiing over the holidays

Steps tracked while XC ski­ing over the hol­i­days

Over the Christ­mas hol­i­day week I skied for sev­eral hours each day, a highly aer­o­bic activ­ity, yet my tracked results were scarcely bet­ter than my per­for­mance dur­ing a more typ­i­cal (and sadly seden­tary) work week.

Based on time and effort expended on XC ski­ing, I expected that Fit­Bit would report much bet­ter activ­ity mea­sures than my nor­mal per­for­mance for a week. Instead the daily mea­sures were lack­lus­ter, accord­ing to this chart.

Given sim­i­lar con­cerns about faulty track­ing results, my hus­band gave up on his Fit­Bit months ago.

I know enough about the tech­nol­ogy to real­ize man­u­fac­tur­ers must be will­ing to install more sen­sors, and much higher qual­ity sen­sors, before track­ing devices can pro­duce accu­rate results. An inte­gral GPS com­po­nent is prob­a­bly required too.

So I con­clude: Why spend sev­eral hun­dred dol­lars on a fash­ion ver­sion bracelet or watch style track­ing device when the fun­da­men­tal value propo­si­tion remains so flawed?

Net net: a new Fit­Bit or equiv­a­lent will not be in my device bud­get for 2016. I’m crit­i­ciz­ing Fit­Bit here, but my larger point is that fit­ness track­ing devices, as a cat­e­gory, need sub­stan­tive improve­ments in sen­sor track­ing and report­ing before they’re worth the money they cost the con­sumer.

What Language Lessons Reveal about Culture

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I’ve been work­ing my way through the Liv­ing Lan­guage Span­ish course. It’s a fas­ci­nat­ing peek into Latino cul­ture, based on what the course design­ers have cho­sen as the most essen­tial con­cepts, phrases and vocab­u­lary for begin­ning stu­dents to mas­ter.

These lessons remind me of the impor­tance of fam­ily to Lati­nos and Span­ish speak­ers, through fre­quent exer­cises and quizzes to rein­force the Span­ish words for: grand­par­ents, cousins, nieces, broth­ers-in-law, etc.

Red-Phone

Today’s les­son also reminds me of how much has changed in tech­nol­ogy and telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions, even if the vocab­u­lary lessons lag behind.

When I visit Mex­ico later this month, how many of these words will I need to remem­ber in Span­ish? And how many young Amer­i­can stu­dents even under­stand what these words refer to, unless they’ve seen these peo­ple or objects in vin­tage movies?

  • Oper­a­tor
  • Switch­board
  • Tele­phone booth
  • Yel­low pages

El móvil (cell phone), yes, of course — but tele­phone booth?

Thank good­ness the next les­son will include words for com­put­ers, net­work­ing and com­puter acces­sories.

Staying Warm and Dry in Chilly Weather

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Patagonia-Nano-Air

Patag­o­nia Nano-Air jacket for women

If you read this blog, you know I often post about top­ics that inter­est yoga prac­ti­tion­ers. But not always.

Staying Dry Off the Mat

Yoga is not some­thing I share with my hus­band or friends. Instead we bike or go for long walks.

These are activ­i­ties well suited to the cool, damp fall and win­ter cli­mate here in the Pacific North­west.

They also encour­age social­iz­ing while exer­cis­ing — good for nur­tur­ing rela­tion­ships and well-being on mul­ti­ple lev­els.

Over the years we’ve got­ten pretty par­tic­u­lar about what we wear for long walks or hikes.

Before ven­tur­ing out­doors, we check the weather fore­cast. We pay close atten­tion to the impact a few degrees dif­fer­ence in tem­per­a­ture or humid­ity might make on our com­fort or endurance. We’ve learned to avoid dis­com­fort by ditch­ing out­er­wear that’s not appro­pri­ate for the day’s weather fore­cast or pre­cip­i­ta­tion.

When it comes to out­er­wear, we all pur­sue dif­fer­ent strate­gies.

One friend, who has hiked daily for the past fif­teen years, has invested in an assort­ment of jack­ets, vests, scarves and base lay­ers. She chooses dif­fer­ent sets for each step change in the weather. She has a highly skilled nose for the weather, so she usu­ally picks just the right gear from her large assort­ment. (She also car­ries a small day­pack with backup gear, in case the weather changes dur­ing her two-hour hikes.)

Down Is Not Always the Best Choice

Some of us look for the per­fect com­pro­mise gar­ment — some­thing that spans a wide range of tem­per­a­ture con­di­tions and humid­ity.

Despite the pop­u­lar­ity of down sweaters and jack­ets, I’ve learned to avoid wear­ing them in weather that’s going to by chilly and damp — at least not when engag­ing in aer­o­bic activ­i­ties.

They’re a has­sle to clean so I don’t like get­ting sweaty in my down jack­ets. For me down works best when I have to stand around in the cold weather, or run errands. (You can see why “soc­cer moms” love it so much!)

A New Love

Like my sis­ters and broth­ers I’m cursed with per­spi­ra­tion on long walks. Find­ing out­er­wear that keeps me warm and dry has always been a chal­lenge. Over the years I’ve tried a bunch of high-tech per­for­mance fab­rics, but none have suc­ceeded in keep­ing me warm and dry while aer­o­bic in chilly weather.

This year I’ve found a new love, at long last — the per­fect jacket for aer­o­bic walks on chilly days: Patag­o­ni­a’s Nano-Air jacket.

Although designed for alpine climbers, this jacket per­forms excep­tion­ally well dur­ing 3–5 mile walks up and down the hills that sur­round Seat­tle. It’s amaz­ingly com­fort­able to wear, like a much-loved hoody, except lighter and much more breath­able.

I’m delighted that I stum­bled upon Patag­o­ni­a’s Nano-Air jacket two months ago. It’s made a big dif­fer­ence this win­ter. This plus my Fit­Bit help get my butt out of my office, out walk­ing on many a chilly after­noon. (I’m drag­ging my hus­band along too, so it’s good for both of us!)

My Take

Nano-Air is amaz­ingly breath­able, so I’m less likely to get sweaty on active walks or hill climbs. And even when my arms or trunk do get wet, Nano-Air’s pro­pri­etary insu­la­tion is highly effec­tive at wick­ing away the mois­ture. Such a new expe­ri­ence for me!

Review­ers have com­mented that the wind blows right through it, explain­ing that this is the down­side to its extreme breatha­bil­ity. This is not a big issue for me.

I’ve worn it as is on mul­ti­ple breezy days, but add a light­weight wind­break for windy con­di­tions. Com­pared to most fleece jack­ets, I haven’t wor­ried too much about wind stop­ping. The other day my hus­band put a wind­break over his fleece, and I was happy as could be in the Nano-Air.

The fab­ric is won­der­ful — light as air, stretchy, and soft to the touch. It reminds me of a light­weight silk com­forter, despite being 100% syn­thetic. It’s slim, form­fit­ting, and avoids the puffy look of so many down jack­ets.

Best of all, it’s easy and safe to clean in my washer. I’ve already washed it half a dozen times.

For me, it’s proven to be the per­fect jacket for Pacific North­west walks and hill climbs.

And yes, it’s expen­sive — but you can find it on sale right now, if you look care­fully.

Fitness Tracking: What’s Right for You?

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Fitbit_One_image.jpgA while ago I blogged about early impres­sions of the Fit­bit One, the fit­ness tracker that I’ve used since early 2013. I noted that it was promis­ing, but lim­ited in its use­ful­ness because the Fit­bit One is unable to report accu­rate data on some of my favorite activ­i­ties: yoga, kayak­ing and cycling.

Since then I’ve con­tin­ued using the Fit­bit every­day but remain annoyed at its lim­i­ta­tions. That said, I’ve per­suaded my hus­band and half a dozen fam­ily mem­bers and friends to buy their own fit­ness track­ing devices. My hus­band lost his device, but most of my friends still use theirs daily. He has­n’t replaced his device, which is in itself a com­ment on the fact that it does­n’t work for his pre­ferred activ­i­ties.

Your Conscience in Your Pocket

My friends, sis­ters and I all use our track­ers for sim­i­lar rea­sons: they’re a handy moti­va­tor to be more active, climb more stairs, go for longer walks; or get bet­ter sleep.

For me it’s like hav­ing a fit­ness con­science in my pocket — a daily reminder that my desk-bound daily work is not healthy for long peri­ods of time. Fit­bit One has been a good start, but its days are num­bered.

Change Is in the Offing

It’s clear that the fit­ness device indus­try is on the verge of a big tran­si­tion point, trig­gered by Apple. This is a make-or-break moment for smaller play­ers like Fit­bit.

Apple Watch imageIf you fol­low this arena at all, you know that Apple is about to dis­rupt the health and fit­ness mar­ket with its IOS Health app, the improved motion track­ing capa­bil­i­ties of the new iPhone, the new Apple Watch and its strat­egy for HealthKit.

You can expect a whole ecosys­tem of health and well­ness apps to be built around the Apple Watch, IOS devices and the HealthKit ecosys­tem. Major play­ers are already work­ing on them behind the scenes.

As a sig­nal of upcom­ing change for today’s fit­ness incum­bents, online pun­dits are now writ­ing that Apple plans to remove devices (like Fit­bit) from the Apple Store if they remain incom­pat­i­ble with HealthKit. Typ­i­cal Apple: “You either play by our rules, or you don’t get to play the game with us in our global mar­ket­place.”

If you’ve fol­lowed the iTunes and iTunes Store play­book, this is a defin­ing moment for devices that choose to remain incom­pat­i­ble with Apple’s strate­gic software/ecosystem moves…

As a high tech indus­try mem­ber I pre­dict that we’ll see lots of interim con­fu­sion and con­sumer frag­men­ta­tion until the ecosys­tem shakes out. Most likely Apple and Google will con­tend for the lead posi­tion as the cor­ner­stone for health and fit­ness man­age­ment via con­sumer devices. In the mean­time con­sumers will buy today’s devices, not real­iz­ing they should really be think­ing about whose ecosys­tem they feel most com­fort­able join­ing. Many will unknow­ingly choose a device, only to learn that it’s incom­pat­i­ble with their Apple or Google ecosys­tems.

What’s the Right Fit for the Next Gen Tracking Device?

Every time the tech indus­try goes through one of these upheavals, you see com­pe­ti­tion between two dif­fer­ent philoso­phies: the “all in one” (we do every­thing) approach ver­sus the spe­cial­ized devices opti­mized to do one or a few things excep­tion­ally well.

I find myself won­der­ing which alter­na­tive will win out, and which will be best for me.

The Apple Watch and IOS 8 devices like the new iPhone 6 are con­tend­ing for the lead “all in one role” — at least for widely prac­ticed, main­stream fit­ness activ­i­ties that are easy to mea­sure.

I have no infor­ma­tion that would lead me to believe that the new Apple devices, ver­sion 1.0, will be designed to sup­port yoga or kayak­ing. Cycling is more main­stream so it’s more likely to be sup­ported early on. So that leads me to sus­pect I’ll be rel­e­gated to buy­ing assorted spe­cialty devices, the ones that inte­grate with HealthKit and my iPhone 6.

Given my pre­ferred phys­i­cal activ­i­ties and the dif­fer­ences among them, I’m likely to pre­fer a small unob­tru­sive device that inte­grates with HealthKit and sends data to my iPhone. That said, the device would need much more motion-related smarts than is avail­able with my cur­rent Fit­bit One.

Here are some of the require­ments for my ideal tracker:

  • It would be small and easy to wear (or hide) for yoga classes at my local stu­dio.
  • It would be savvy about yoga poses and their rel­a­tive effort or energy expended.
  • It would make more intel­li­gent guesses about the dis­tance cov­ered when cycling and the rel­a­tive effort expended to cover that dis­tance (speed, hills climbed, etc.)
  • It would be water­proof or come with a water­proof pack­ag­ing option, for peace of mind while kayak­ing.
  • If I were younger, I’d want a device that knows the dif­fer­ence between walk­ing, hik­ing, run­ning or jog­ging.

Yoga Is Special

Woman in Yoga Tree PoseMy cur­rent options are far from meet­ing these require­ments, espe­cially for yoga prac­tice. The Fit­bit One has proven to be use­less for yoga.

The ideal device would be capa­ble of detect­ing and mea­sur­ing dif­fer­ent kinds of move­ment and posi­tions in space while doing yoga poses. Upright or inverted, for starters… Surely a head­stand or shoul­der stand, even though motion­less, should count as more dif­fi­cult, con­sum­ing more calo­ries, then stand­ing upright in Moun­tain Pose. After all it takes more energy to bal­ance upside down on one’s head and hands than it takes to stand upright in a more nor­mal pos­ture.

Even though my iPhone 6 has decent built-in track­ing capa­bil­i­ties, bring­ing a mobile phone into a pub­lic yoga stu­dio is a huge no-no. If the Apple Watch makes noises for incom­ing phone calls, it too is likely to be banned from stu­dios.

Plus, there’s no good way to wear a big phone while wear­ing yoga gear and prac­tic­ing yoga. You can’t read­ily strap the phone to your wrist or upper arm because it could eas­ily get in the way of spe­cial­ized poses or inver­sions. It could smack you in the face dur­ing Down­ward Fac­ing Dog if you hung your phone around your neck. It could eas­ily fall from a pouch onto the floor, and pos­si­bly break from the impact.

The Apple Watch looks like it’s going to be too big to wear to a yoga stu­dio. Plus, it’s too flashy, too eye-catch­ing, designed to call atten­tion to itself — anti­thet­i­cal to yogic prin­ci­ples of non-attach­ment. That’s why some­thing small that could be stowed inside a tank top would be a bet­ter option for yogi­nis who want to track yoga for fit­ness rea­sons with­out call­ing atten­tion to what they’re doing.

Is Yoga That Difficult?

It’s hard to under­stand why there are no yoga-savvy track­ing devices today. Surely, this is an easy prob­lem to solve, given the right math and physics.

There’s a lim­ited “vocab­u­lary” of com­mon yoga poses, and each one is very well under­stood. Many resources have been pub­lished on the sub­ject.

I would think it would be easy to teach the yoga motion vocab­u­lary to a track­ing sen­sor, includ­ing pose vari­a­tions across the schools of yoga…

Something Different Is Coming, Someday

All I can pre­dict at this moment is that some­thing, rea­son­ably soon, is going to dis­lodge my Fit­bit One from my fit­ness wardrobe…

If Lul­ule­mon weren’t so pre­oc­cu­pied with its ongo­ing qual­ity and inven­tory man­age­ment issues, I might have expected a Lulu-branded device for yoga fans. Or maybe Man­duka.

Seniors Deserve Better Options

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Photos of seniors in a coffee shop with a tabletMy 87-year-old father was house­bound today. Arc­tic cold and an immi­nent bliz­zard had caused his favorite weekly meet­ings to be can­celled for sev­eral days in a row.

For most peo­ple this would­n’t be a big deal. Our lives are full of activ­i­ties: work or fam­ily com­mit­ments, social inter­ac­tions, exer­cise, fun, vol­un­teer work — all the things that keep us happy, stim­u­lated and focused out­wardly. If bored, we can go for a drive, head to the mall or take in a movie.

But these can­cel­la­tions are a huge dis­ap­point­ment for my father, now liv­ing by him­self since my mother died six months ago. He no longer dri­ves at night, and lives 20–30 min­utes away from the clos­est city (an hour-plus to Boston, which is largely out of reach these days.) Leav­ing home for social con­tact in a cof­fee shop is a big deal, which largely con­strains him to a breakfast/sandwich shop a cou­ple of miles away.

Mac­u­lar degen­er­a­tion pre­vents him from read­ing the Boston Globe or library books the way he used to on snow­bound days.

He’s lonely, com­pared to his for­mer life, but not truly alone.

He is blessed with many chil­dren and grand­chil­dren, some of whom live nearby. His nearby fam­ily mem­bers are extremely gen­er­ous with their time and atten­tion to his well-being. He sees one daugh­ter almost daily, and has fre­quent in-per­son con­tact with other local fam­ily mem­bers. Those of us who live thou­sands of miles away stay in touch by phone, email or Face­book, or the occa­sional Skype video chat.

Lonely, Coping with Silence

Com­pared to many elders, Dad is not alone or iso­lated, if you look at things from a fac­tual or ratio­nal basis.

But his emo­tional truth says oth­er­wise. He’s lonely, and may go hours with­out hear­ing the sound of another human voice. My sis­ter’s aging dog is his most fre­quent com­pan­ion dur­ing the day.

He lives alone, in a sep­a­rate house­hold on my sis­ter’s prop­erty out in the coun­try. My par­ents moved there when they were no longer able to live inde­pen­dently in their own home. His liv­ing quar­ters are spa­cious, but he is a 20-minute drive from the town where he spent the past 40-some­thing years of his life. There’s no one within walk­ing dis­tance to talk to, dur­ing day­time hours when his chil­dren and grand­chil­dren are away at work or attend­ing classes. This win­ter he is cop­ing with “cabin fever.”

He is starved for what he thinks of as intel­lec­tual con­ver­sa­tion: chances to talk about a movie, last week’s ser­mon at church, an Obama speech, or a book he is read­ing on his Kin­dle. He finds few occa­sions to share moments of cre­ativ­ity (a new poem, a favorite photo or a spe­cial prayer, a child­hood mem­ory writ­ten down as a story). Con­ver­sa­tion and laugh­ter — things that were easy when his wife was alive — are no longer sim­ple, and rarely spon­ta­neous.

Social Technology for Seniors

Unlike most senior cit­i­zens who came of age dur­ing World War II, Dad is pretty tech savvy. He started using a com­puter in his early six­ties, and has twenty years of hands-on expe­ri­ence as a Mac user.

As a com­puter-savvy senior, he believed he could eas­ily find a web-based solu­tion for social inter­ac­tions with other house­bound seniors. So he spent yes­ter­day online, look­ing for prac­ti­cal senior-friendly solu­tions.

His mis­sion was to find an afford­able online ser­vice that would enable his church group mem­bers to meet vir­tu­ally on days when weather or med­ical appoint­ment con­flicts pre­vent face-to-face group meet­ings. He’d heard about WebEx, and had pre­vi­ously used Adobe Con­nect at his daugh­ter’s expense. He uses Face­book to stay in touch with grand­chil­dren, so he under­stands what might be pos­si­ble with com­mu­nity plat­forms.

He failed to find any­thing that he thought would meet the needs of his group of seniors…

Senior-friendly Needs

What was he look­ing for? [I’ve trans­lated his require­ments.]

  • An online meet­ing envi­ron­ment that would allow mul­ti­ple peo­ple to talk to each other, and com­ment on what they were see­ing on-screen
  • A meet­ing envi­ron­ment that would enable them to hear each oth­er’s voice in real time, and sup­port a nat­ural con­ver­sa­tion flow
  • A means of tran­scrib­ing or record­ing the con­ver­sa­tion, for peo­ple who can­not attend the orig­i­nal online meet­ing
  • A means of look­ing at, com­ment­ing on, col­lab­o­rat­ing on doc­u­ments, such as a prayer my father had just writ­ten
  • An online place to man­age a stream of com­ments
  • An easy way to find other like-minded peo­ple, inter­ested in talk­ing about sim­i­lar sub­jects
  • A way to man­age group mem­ber­ship and pri­vacy, so groups would­n’t nec­es­sar­ily be open to all-com­ers (for exam­ple, restricted to mem­bers of the same church or senior cen­ter) — a place where they would­n’t feel bul­lied by peo­ple who work at a faster or more aggres­sive pace
  • Keen atten­tion to acces­si­bil­ity, so seniors with hear­ing or vision chal­lenges could adjust the on-screen audio or visual pre­sen­ta­tion
  • Superla­tive usabil­ity for seniors who are far less com­fort­able with com­put­ers than my dad

Not sur­pris­ingly, his search was pretty fruit­less.

Pricing Models Don’t Fit Senior Budgets

Soft­ware that might offer usabil­ity mod­els that would­n’t intim­i­date senior cit­i­zens is gen­er­ally priced for enter­prise bud­gets — way out of reach for seniors liv­ing on retire­ment sav­ings or pal­try pen­sions. Have you ever seen online pric­ing with spe­cial options for senior cit­i­zens or non­prof­its?

The free stuff tended to under­whelm him, due to com­plex­i­ties or usabil­ity gaps. His take was that set-up and sup­port would require on-going help by a tech savvy younger per­son who knows how to talk to his elders with­out being arro­gant or con­de­scend­ing. He lacked con­fi­dence that they could find vol­un­teers will­ing to help a bunch of old­sters like him.

He had a hard time believ­ing his church would be open to even think­ing about spon­sor­ing online meet­ings, for fear it would fur­ther deplete atten­dance by aging con­gre­ga­tions on Sun­day morn­ings. (We chat­ted a bit about dis­rup­tive inno­va­tions, and the fears of pow­er­ful incum­bents… But that’s another story.)

Our Under-served Elders

The irony is, seniors who feel lonely, iso­lated, lack stim­u­la­tion or intel­lec­tual chal­lenge are eas­ily prone to depres­sion or ill­ness. They become vul­ner­a­ble when they lose their sense of well-being or feel they can no longer con­tribute in mean­ing­ful ways to a com­mu­nity.

So they’ll go on yet another set of meds, or decline to the point where they need med­ical inter­ven­tion — which will cost tax­pay­ers even more money to sub­si­dize Medicare and Med­ic­aid.

These are our par­ents and grand­par­ents. Surely they deserve bet­ter.

One day we’ll be in their shoes too… By that time I sure hope soci­ety has fig­ured out ways for seniors to con­nect, to chat, to share — even when house­bound due to bad weather or fail­ing health.

What Does Family Mean to Facebook?

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I have long sus­pected that the peo­ple behind Face­book have a pecu­liar under­stand­ing of rela­tion­ships.

Imag­ine my sur­prise at being unable to con­firm my hus­band’s request to add me as a mem­ber of his fam­ily. Why? Of all the many rela­tion­ship options offered, “hus­band” or “spouse” does not appear. Step­brother, cousin (male) are included as options — but no hus­bands!

Give me a break, Face­book! This is insane.

Image of Facebook timeline activity

Fam­ily mem­ber request

FitBit One: Not Quite There

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Moti­vated by a new Fit­Bit One activ­ity tracker, I ended my work­day yes­ter­day with a lovely walk around Mer­cer Island. It was a great time to be out walk­ing: ideal tem­per­a­ture (<70°), golden late after­noon sun­shine, bloom­ing roses and aro­matic laven­der every­where. My typ­i­cal day fea­tures a yoga prac­tice — beau­ti­ful in its own way, but lack­ing the out­door sen­sory delights of warm sun­shine and flow­ers bloom­ing.

Fitbit_One_image

A Likeable First-Gen Device

There’s a lot to like about the Fit­Bit One — that is, if your daily activ­i­ties are the kinds of things it was designed to track. It’s great for active peo­ple who walk, hike, jog, climb stairs, etc.

I like the imme­di­ate feed­back on the dis­play — you don’t have to log in to a web­site just to see daily stats. The recharge­able bat­tery lasts for sev­eral days.

It syncs wire­lessly via a USB don­gle attached to your com­puter, or via Blue­tooth to iPhones, iPads, Android devices and so on. After sync­ing your tracker, you can go online to view fit­ness sta­tis­tics dis­played on your per­sonal dash­board.

Here are some of my stats from yes­ter­day’s walk. Nice, but not what you’d see from a seri­ous ath­lete. Not too bad for some­one with a deskbound job and long work­days…

Fitbit_Dashboard

Mer­cer Island fea­tures lake views, walk­ing trails with stair­cases and lots of hills, so I earned a badge due to my hill climbs. The walk itself was less than 4 miles, so no badge… The peo­ple behind Fit­Bit sent an “attaboy” email this morn­ing, to encour­age me to be more active.

Not Designed for Yoga Practitioners

For peo­ple like me, whose well­be­ing or fit­ness régime cen­ters on a daily yoga prac­tice, the Fit­Bit One is far from ideal.

When wear­ing yoga tops and tights, there’s no safe place for a fit­ness tracker. A well-rounded yoga prac­tice is likely to involve bal­anc­ing on most of the places where you might think to attach your tracker. It would­n’t be smart to risk weight-bear­ing activ­i­ties on a pocket con­tain­ing a $99 device.

Wear­ing a tracker around your neck looks dorky. Plus, the tracker would be dis­tract­ing if it flopped against your face or neck when you’re inverted. Hide it in your shelf bra? High risk that it would fall out dur­ing down­ward fac­ing dog, head­stand or shoul­der stand…

Wear it in the wide wrist­band? Dorky. Maybe if you’re one of those guys who warms up (shows off?) with a bunch of Marine push-ups before yoga class, wear­ing the tracker on a wrist­band would be a plus. But for women decked out in Lul­ule­mon, there’s no good place to attach a fit­ness tracker.

The other day I enjoyed a 90-minute yoga class in a heated stu­dio — a very vig­or­ous prac­tice — 2 pounds lost in 90 min­utes. I chose not to wear the tracker to that class, so there was no record of my activ­ity. There­fore my Fit­Bit One logged that day as largely inac­tive… Not true, but there is no way for Fit­Bit’s dash­board to dis­play yoga prac­tice activ­i­ties.

I plan to exper­i­ment with my tracker dur­ing some home yoga prac­tices, to see if I can stand it when doing yoga. Maybe I can over­come the dork fac­tor…

There are other capa­bil­i­ties (such as track­ing sleep pat­terns or the silent alarm) that I haven’t tried.

For now, my assess­ment is that the Fit­Bit One is good at what it does, but not so good for track­ing what I do… Despite those lim­i­ta­tions wear­ing it is sur­pris­ingly addic­tive…

Update:
For amuse­ment I some­times put the Fit­Bit in the wrist­band holder and wear it while prac­tic­ing yoga at home. Despite a vig­or­ous one-hour flow prac­tice, it will mea­sure just a few steps — noth­ing that’s close to rep­re­sent­ing the energy expended dur­ing that yoga prac­tice. My con­clu­sion: next-gen track­ers may have more sophis­ti­cated motion sen­sors that work bet­ter for yoga, but the cur­rent options are lim­ited.

Communicating with Your Own Voice

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Using Siri

With a new iPhone 5 on the Ver­i­zon LTE net­work, I’ve been exper­i­ment­ing with Siri for sim­ple tasks and infor­ma­tion requests. Get­ting dis­ap­point­ingly mixed results. Until I learned how to get the best results from Siri, I found myself wast­ing time try­ing to cor­rect Sir­i’s mis­takes. But when she works prop­erly, it’s delight­ful.

microphone iconWhat I’ve learned is that my nor­mal speak­ing voice and cadence cause Siri to make too many errors. To get the best out of Siri, I’ve had to learn to slow down, speak more sim­ply, use key­word-style dic­tion, and enun­ci­ate more clearly.

I try to avoid flow­ing sen­tences or words that sound as if they run together. As a result my inter­ac­tions with Siri sound some­what robotic, but they get the job done…

As an exam­ple of cadence prob­lems, when I asked Siri to launch the web page for Ama­zon’s wine store, Siri heard “swine,” and dis­played a Google search results page with infor­ma­tion about pigs.

When I ask Siri to find some­thing that is stored on my phone (such as con­tact or cal­en­dar info), I do so using key­words that often appear on the iPhone. So I get bet­ter results when I ask Siri to “call Dad Wilson’s home phone” rather than “call Dad.” Sadly, my take­away on how best to use Siri is that it’s yet another exam­ple of humans hav­ing to learn from the tech­nol­ogy, rather than vice versa.

That said, I’ve found dic­tat­ing text mes­sages via iMes­sage (on the iPhone or my new Mac­Book Pro) to be a lovely time-saver. The con­tent of text mes­sages is usu­ally quite sim­ple, so the lack of com­plex­ity dri­ves bet­ter results with Siri.

Net net: there are occa­sional moments of delight, clear time-savers and con­ve­niences in a nar­row domain, but the over­all results are still under­whelm­ing. Apple knows that Siri is not yet ready for prime time, so Apple posi­tions Siri as a beta prod­uct.

For­tu­nately, tech­nol­ogy lead­ers like Apple and Microsoft are hard at work to find ways that will enable us to speak more nat­u­rally to or through our devices, and get the results we expect.

Microsoft: What’s Cooking in the Lab

Microsoft Research has begun demon­strat­ing a more accu­rate, real-time speech recog­ni­tion capa­bil­ity that also lever­ages machine lan­guage trans­la­tion tech­nol­ogy. Microsoft claims this speech recog­ni­tion approach dri­ves 30% fewer mis­takes than the other tech­nolo­gies on the mar­ket today. This 10-minute video shows Rick Rashid, head of Microsoft Research, demon­strat­ing this tech­nol­ogy. It’s worth watch­ing to see how far they’ve come in the lab.

First you’ll see real-time tran­scrip­tion of his speech (like next-gen closed cap­tion­ing) — amaz­ingly good, but not error-free. Then you see the tech­nol­ogy trans­lat­ing Rashid’s speech into Chi­nese Man­darin; first as writ­ten lan­guage and then spo­ken lan­guage.

What’s amaz­ing is that the spo­ken ver­sion of the machine-lan­guage trans­la­tion attempts to mimic the speak­er’s nat­ural tones and cadences. Just imag­ine the improve­ments when this evolves from the lab to a com­mer­cial qual­ity prod­uct!

I think the Microsoft tech­nol­ogy demon­stra­tion gives us a peek at what the future has in store for us. A world in which we can use our own voice to more accu­rately direct our devices to carry out spe­cific task requests, as well as one that enables us to com­mu­ni­cate with other peo­ple across lan­guage bar­ri­ers.

Zen and the Art of Writing

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Those cre­ative dudes in Barcelona are at it again: they’ve upgraded a charm­ing min­i­mal­ist tool for writ­ers and blog­gers called OmmWriter. Its cre­ators call it “a writ­ing envi­ron­ment.”

If you have ADHD or thrill to the joys of 3‑screen multi-task­ing, read no fur­ther. OmmWriter serves peo­ple who need to focus or pre­fer con­cen­tra­tion when engaged in writ­ing…

It’s also a good option for peo­ple who pre­fer to sep­a­rate the free-flow, right-brain act of cre­at­ing from the more ratio­nal tasks asso­ci­ated with edit­ing.

A Zen Garden for the Mind

Once you launch OmmWriter, there are no dis­trac­tions. All the menus and oper­at­ing sys­tem func­tions hide in the back­ground. Instead the writ­ing can­vas fills the entire screen (as shown below).

OmmWriter

If your sys­tem pro­vides noti­fi­ca­tions, OmmWriter sus­pends those noti­fi­ca­tions until you leave the peace­ful­ness of the OmmWriter envi­ron­ment.

Soothing Sounds and Visuals

OmmWriter launches with a sooth­ing sound­track, one that reminds you of foun­tains trick­ling in a quiet court­yard on a hot sum­mer’s day. The back­ground is mono­chro­matic, gen­tly pleas­ing but with­out call­ing atten­tion to itself.

There are two ver­sions of OmmWriter: Dana I and Dana II. The first ver­sion is free, the sec­ond has a small fee of $4.11. Read the devel­op­er’s “fre­quently med­i­tated ques­tions” for the ratio­nale behind their pric­ing. Theirs is an intu­itive and val­ues-based approach to pric­ing.

The main dif­fer­ence between Dana I and II is the num­ber of audio-visual choices offered (visual back­grounds and sound tracks).

    • Dana I offers 3 audio-visual choices.
    • Dana II enables you to choose among 7 audio tracks and 8 visual back­grounds.

Con­sis­tent with its design intent of utter sim­plic­ity, there are no options for for­mat­ting within the tool. You can’t set font fam­ily or styling choices, use bul­lets or num­bered lists. (You do that later with your edit­ing or blog­ging tool.)

Where Can You Use OmmWriter

OmmWriter works with Macs, PCs and iPad.

This lat­est release has been opti­mized for Retina Mac dis­plays and the cur­rent ver­sion of the Mac OS with its built-in noti­fi­ca­tion sys­tem.

Files cre­ated with OmmWriter can’t be printed directly from the tool. Instead you save them to one of the fol­low­ing for­mats, for pol­ish­ing and edit­ing in a tool that’s been designed for edit­ing:

    • Text file (.txt)
    • Rich Text File (.rtf)
    • PDF

OmmWriter pro­vides an auto­matic back-up behind the scenes.

    Best of all, OmmWriter offers peace and quiet in an oth­er­wise noisy and dis­tract­ing world.

Migrating a WordPress Blog

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Saying Goodbye to Cutline

For years I’ve used a cus­tomized ver­sion of the Cut­line theme to dis­play my per­sonal blog. In its day it was very sta­ble and visu­ally ele­gant, gar­ner­ing lots of favor­able com­ments on its appear­ance.

Unfor­tu­nately, the Cut­line theme was sold years ago to an orga­ni­za­tion that did not invest in future-proof­ing it… I knew the clock was tick­ing on my con­tin­ued use of this theme, and now the alarm has gone off… My site vis­i­tors have changed, and Cut­line can’t adapt to their needs.

Thanks to Google Ana­lyt­ics, I know that increas­ing num­bers of peo­ple read my blog posts from IOS devices. Cut­line dis­plays OK on iPad tablets, but it’s an eye­strain chal­lenge on iPhones (even with a Retina dis­play).

ipad_photo

Now that 20% of my vis­i­tors access this blog from mobile devices, it’s time to switch to a more mobile-friendly Word­Press child theme and frame­work.

Here’s a quick sum­mary of what I’ve learned while try­ing to find a replace­ment Word­Press theme — sev­eral hun­dred dol­lars and many hours later…

I’ve licensed and tried sev­eral frame­work-based themes that claim to be “respon­sive” — mean­ing, they promise to adapt grace­fully to PC/Mac browser dif­fer­ences and mobile devices of many kinds:

Thesis

As a long-time user of The­sis 1.8 (for a com­pany web­site), I was hop­ing to move up to the new ver­sion of The­sis, which launched this Octo­ber. Unfor­tu­nately, The­sis 2.0.x is still quite embry­onic. While promis­ing, it is poorly doc­u­mented, too time-con­sum­ing for a non-devel­oper to learn — some­one for whom blog­ging is a hobby and not a way to earn a liv­ing.

The new ver­sion does not lever­age my prior expe­ri­ence with the orig­i­nal The­sis frame­work; the pric­ing model for a hob­by­ist blog­ger with sev­eral sites is unat­trac­tive. There’s no stream­lined way to upgrade a site or blog from ear­lier ver­sions of The­sis to the new one.

I played around for half a day, watched sev­eral hours of tuto­ri­als, and decided The­sis is not ready for prime time, except for adven­tur­ous devel­op­ers. Or peo­ple who will earn money help­ing oth­ers learn and adapt The­sis to their needs.

Unfor­tu­nately, my man­aged web host­ing provider has noti­fied me that our aging ver­sion of The­sis is caus­ing per­for­mance prob­lems, so we must upgrade our cor­po­rate web­site. This will force us to exam­ine our web­site plat­form strat­egy, as mov­ing up to the lat­est ver­sion of The­sis is not in the cards.

Headway Themes

I licensed Head­way’s frame­work about 6 months ago, and have poked away at it sev­eral times. Had I fallen in love with one of its child themes, I may have been will­ing to go through the learn­ing hur­dle.

But, like The­sis 2.0, there’s too much work to go from Head­way’s blank can­vas to an ele­gant theme, unless you’re a skilled devel­oper who under­stands the impli­ca­tions of Word­Press’ box model, PHP and CSS intri­ca­cies. I don’t have time to go that deep…

Last week I began exper­i­ment­ing with Stu­dio­Press. It proves to be my most prac­ti­cal option.

StudioPress & Eleven40

This blog is now man­aged using the Gen­e­sis Frame­work and Stu­dio­Press’ Eleven40 child theme. It adapts rea­son­ably grace­fully to mobile devices and tablets with smaller screens. There’s an active user-com­mu­nity sup­port forum, albeit the ques­tions and answers are quite tech­ni­cal.

While I might wish for more UI-level con­trol over the styling, this is good enough. I truly wish it had been pos­si­ble to adapt the Cut­line styling to Stu­dio­Press, but that would have required more of an invest­ment in time and/or money than I’m will­ing to make. So I’ve stuck with the Eleven40 child theme, with some mod­i­fi­ca­tions to the typog­ra­phy.

That said, Gen­e­sis’ lack of sup­port for a custom.css stylesheet makes me worry about future rework when Stu­dio­Press updates the theme. My changes are “hard-coded” into the child the­me’s stylesheet. This will no doubt bite me some­day in the future.

So, many hours and sev­eral hun­dred dol­lars later, this intre­pid do-it-your­selfer now has a blog that behaves grace­fully on the mobile devices that most of my read­ers use.