Running joke: That fitness gadget? It's, er, run out It's a pain in the neck, that's what it is. I know, I know. Call me a Moaning Minnie. Call me a Moaning Lisa, if you like. Call me Kenneth. Call me a cab. Call me (Call me).* Yet another sports fitness wearable I was using has just given up the ghost... or should I say base-jumped off the suspension bridge of angel investment …
I'm surprised you didn't make a reference to the British athlete who 'inspired' the 118 118 runners. You'll have to get a stripey tee-shirt and the goatee will have to go, but at least everyone will see you coming and cross to the other side of the street.
BPFH: "We've built the new product, it's got a little blue light, looks great, and is ready to go..."
PHB: "Great we'll get it on the market tomorrow!"
... two days later.
PFY: "I tried it and there's a bug that causes it to lose connection occasionally."
PHB: "STFU, your fired, we're selling them in batches of 10,000 every hour, get out of here."
Funnily enough I have an "Activity Tracker Pulse Fit" mint in box on my desk right now. It was a free gift from Nutanix for attending one of their webinars, but the Nutanix logo didn't survive the single time it's been out of the box as the logo is printed on the strap at the exact point you need to yank it to seperate it from the watch to reach the USB port.
Think I'll stick to my TomTom, who, although they've exited that market, haven't gone Pete Tong at time of writing.
As a matter of fact, it even discovers on its own that I'm taking a walk and asks if I want to record that for the metrics junkies out there. So I say no, but it's interesting it picks it up.
It even does that with hand washing, and then automatically times the Covid19 20 seconds for you.
As for being obsolete, you may want to pay attention to how many versions Apple presently supports concurrently - v4 is even still in the shops while the latest one is v6..
"As for being obsolete, you may want to pay attention to how many versions Apple presently supports concurrently - v4 is even still in the shops while the latest one is v6.."
Apple didn't even start making watches until 2015, and the fact that a product less than two years old is still in in the shops is hardly a spectactular endorsement of support. I know people still happily using Garmin watches from 2003, while less smart watches routinely last for decades. Apple's reputation for good support is not actually based on them being any good, but rather on everyone else who makes mobile phones being utter shit.
Maybe Apple will turn out to support their watches better than their phones, and maybe it's unfair to criticise them for making their old products obsolete when they've only been making them for a few years and haven't had time to... oh, right, they've already stopped suporting all their watches made before 2017.
even discovers on its own that I'm taking a walk
Hooray, more surveillance!
Personally, I can tell on my own whether I'm taking a walk, and when I've exercised sufficiently.
It even does that with hand washing, and then automatically times the Covid19 20 seconds for you.
So on the plus side, there's no need to behave like an adult. Your nanny-watch will guide your every action.
Wearables: Instrumentality for the willingly helpless.
As it so happens, I know where the off switch is for such detections.
As for the Watch in general, I'd say "meh". I got this as a present, but to say it has changed my life in any meaningful way, no, other than it being a much more posh fitbit. Plus, I have other watches which I like wearing :)
Ian Marshall was a half decent footballer, played for Leicester, then Bolton. He was excused going all the way to Bolton to train when he still lived in Leicester, but had to wear a training app for his runs round the park etc. You can guess the rest - he got a bit bored with it but kept sending his numbers, in till Sam Alladyce phoned him one day to check why they were off the scale. He had to confess that he'd fitted the gear to his dog. Busted...
We see you have been 'marking your territory' at least 6 times today and you were not in the vicinity of a proper facility.
Can we interest you in a real bathroom?
Are you sure it's not just pine "effect", with the ever present chipboard underneath?
Much like the one I have in my study, which is just about big enough to hold a PiTop Ceed and a laptop, if you don't mind one hiding the other.
Not sure I'd want to work at it for any extended period of time though, and it certainly cost more than £1.50 from self-same Croydon store...
Back in the mists of time, IKEA stuff was mainly pine. MDF gradually became more prevalent (even in the early days kids furniture was heavily MDF for ease of making silly shapes, and it gradually spread).
We had a pine dining table from IKEA that we used for many years until we moved house (& with more room could get a bigger table, old one went to a furniture charity so probably still in use by someone)
Caveat: I hate IKEA, other half does not, so I ahve had far too much experience of that store & its products over the decades.
Back in the mists of time, IKEA stuff was mainly pine
Actually, here at the Mountain Fastness we have an IKEA bedframe which is made entirely of dimensional-lumber pine (except for the steel struts and other hardware). It's only four or five years old, so not that far back.
I hate IKEA, other half does not
I hear ya, man. Even in the world of flat-pack furniture they're close to the bottom of my list. I don't like the designs, I don't like the engineering, I loathe the instructions.
Apologies to anyone who has already worked this out but:
"Old-style" Ikea = solid wood or high-density chipboard held together with dowels, screws, metal bolt-and-toggle devices and metal bolt-and-cam devices. Lasts a lifetime, almost endlessley dismantlable / remantlable and because it's solid wood it's also customisable.
"New-style Ikea" = chipboard, or more recently that very low-density more-air-than-wood product that looks like ordinary chipboard which has been left out in the rain, laminate surface, held together with some chunky bolt-type thing, maybe some dowels, plastic cams. Will last a good long time if you don't constantly move it about but often begins to chip or crumble if you try to dismantle it, wherupon you will probably also find that the plastic cams are all chewed up and the things from Screwfix which look exactly the same don't quite fit properly.
"Ikea metal" - anything made mostly from metal at Ikea, short of perhaps some kitchen implements or some light fixtures - should be avoided. Screws and bolts are constantly coming loose and the stuff is so thin that it'll bend as soon as you hang that winter coat or load up the tray with today's bag of potatoes.
"Ikea plastic" - short of toys and desklamps, best avoided. They have some lovely-looking drawer units where the unit is made from wood but the insert "school type" drawers are soft plastic and bend just enough if you put anything more than a few socks in them that the drawer will fall out of its runners.
Can you tell we have quite a lot of Ikea stuff at home? Wife has been a fan since before we met, living within easy reach of both the Leeds and the Nottingham stores. I do (or did when I last fitted one) like an Ikea kitchen though. Everyone else moans that there's no "service gap" behind the units, but it's not usually a big problem to re-arrange surface-run pipework to go underneath and as a bonus you get an extra 4" of drawer depth. Don't like the sinks, especially now that they've discontinued their insanely deep "laundry sink".
M.
"within easy reach of both the Leeds and the Nottingham stores"
I don't know about the Nottingham store but I don't associate "easy" with the Leeds store. The last straw was a notice forbidding taking trolleys up to the top deck of the car park. What do the stupid idiots think I'm going to do when the car's up there? Normally I'd have brought the trolley back down but in the circumstances left it up there for badness' sake.
"within easy reach of both the Leeds and the Nottingham stores"
I'll raise the Coventry Ikea store, when it was still open. Stuck in the middle of the Coventry inner ring road, I still shudder remembering my one and only visit and rotating continually trying to find the entrance.
The the store itself, a labyrinth of 3 floors. There were people there who came for nice table lamp 10 years ago, could not locate the exit, gave up, and raised families, scavenging from the left over meatballs from the restaurant. God knows where they ended up when the store was closed down
In all fairness I furnished several flats in my younger days and was quite plead with the results. Nothing IKEA in the house now apart from a couple of kitchen bits.
However the meatballs are great, and, just waiting for travel restrictions to be lifted so I can get a slab of ther excellent Jule Brew - lovely stuff which helps the Scandewegens through the long dark winters and gloomy detectives.
We have some old ikea 'kids toy room drawers' which were definitely not soft plastic. The have a rubber texture and came with screw in metal runners. I use them in the workshop as they are pretty robust. I see what you mean with the new stuff, a lot softer and flimsier.
I may be wrong (I usually am) but my impressions is these gadgets are all initiated by a "Let's think of something we can make money on" process rather than an "I've thought of something good, let's see if we can make money on it".
It's a subtle difference, perhaps. But I think important. Because it means hat the product doesn't start with an actual good idea (beyond the generic one of gathering some dosh).
I blame what I call Sony-Phillips syndrome; all of these 'innovators' want to be the standard for their given niche so come up with some proprietry aspect that is protected by lawyers and only available to others under punishing licence deals, if at all.
Hence back in the day, various video tape formats, followed by laser disc formats etc etc.
IoT promises to be worse by several orders of magnitude.
If some genius comes out with 'One system to rule them all' whereby an app on your phone for example, can communicate/control all of the other Nests, Rings and Hues, he will be buried and suffocated by the pile of writs that will appear instantly.
The innovators of the world don't want to be part of the standard, they want to be The Standard and force everyone else to bow down to it.
Maybe you ought to have a look over at openHAB? Admittedly it's as user friendly as a cornered ferret to get going, but once you've got your head around things it just runs on a Pi.
I was very smug when I got the (RF) doorbell to mute the audio systems, so that I can actually hear the thing.
"Being a tech device, it will need separating into packaging, plastics, metal and electronics down at the local dump"
Eh? You just go to the local supermarket and leave the whole shooting-match in the small appliances bin. The one next the old bulbs and batteries bins.
The dechetterie is just for big items you can't fly-tio at supermarkets. Like vacuum cleaners, CRT TVs and ovens.
"Eh? You just go to the local supermarket and leave the whole shooting-match in the small appliances bin. "
Eh? The what? Where?
I use three different major supermarkets on a semi-regular basis and I've not seen a "small appliances bin" although all of them have used battery bins. Maybe this is unique to the chain you use or, unique to your local authority area.
Develop a product, service or app in a hot emerging trend such as fitness
Produce a great kickstarter-style video and make a presentation to one of the numerous vc funders/incubators who will introduce to you some angels after tweaking your plan a bit (for a fee/percentage)
Get angel capital, launch your venture, and hire the expertise you thought you had, but didn't
Get traction and then the first round of venture capital from one of the top VC funds
2 years down the line realise that you can not support the product but you are tied into a 5 year support plan and can not move on to the exciting new COVID-19 tracking app that you are building.
It;s about data. You forgot the data. No one cares about the device or what it does. Data is supposedly valuable. The more the better. What these small companies eventually realise is that the data actually is NOT valuable in way at all unless you have massive amounts of it and can afford to sit on it until either a) it becomes valuable or b) the data fetish bubble bursts.
What bothers me is the nagging thought that in the not too distant future such gadgetry will be nano-scale and consumers (sorry, product), will be encouraged to have such devices implanted in suitable places around their bodies! (with price reductions / loyalty bonuses offered to those willing to have a sponsors tattoo branded above a given bodily location!). In such a scenario quite what you do when fly-by-night outfits go bust and or security / program updates cease, <insert deity> only knows! Perhaps IT will merge with surgery in order to facilitate such real-time real-meatbag tech! Or micro-bots, under the direct control of yer typical IT technician / laptop repair person, will really get under your skin and rootle around in order to fix, replace or dismantle errant nano-gadgets! Then there is the question of all the personal bio-telemetric data going back to some server farm somewhere and being analised by <insert deity> knows who in order to directly send back tailored advertising straight to your freekin' frontal cortex! (whatever). Just a thought.
Reminded me of one of my favourite Bestie cartoons (SFW, if you're wondering): https://twitter.com/bestie_art/status/1044253915506790400
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Some time back, my local council was flogging off all their prefabs as holiday homes, until a mate of mine pointed out they were mostly made of asbestos. Cue a panic to have them removed safely by teams of hazmat costumed demolition guys and desperately trying to track down those that were sold.
There are prefabs left all over the place, and in some cases they are highly sought-after as in general they were designed with decently-sized rooms and generous gardens. What they are not, often, is adaptable.
Just here in Caerphilly there are loads of the things. Google maps references follow:
Here's a whole close of the things, bungalow style, at the time of writing one of the ones in that linked view still has the original corrugated tin walls, though the roof has been covered with what looks like standard concrete tiles, but I know for a fact is actually some kind of rubbery stuff that came on rolls. Here is another street, just up the road.
These streets nearby are "Cornish" pattern prefabs made from prestressed concrete panels with Mansard roofs. Again, I've parked you outside the only one which still shows the original panels - all the others have had cosmetic cladding added. There are thousands more such buildings in use around the country.
In certain parts of the country, prefabricated places of worship were common from the late 1800s onwards and many of these Tin Tabernacles are still in use. Here's one in the Rhondda, Here's another North of Bridgend, and this one - just around the corner from all those prefab houses - I know a little about. The original prefabricated hut came down from Liverpool by train, delivered to the station that gives the road it sits on its name. The place has had two large conventional extensions - one in the 1960s, the other more recently - and the original corrugated iron has been replaced with coated steel panels, but the wooden structure is still there and the place is still in use.
There are even a few - houses and chapels - in museums:
St Fagans Museum in Cardiff has a postwar prefab on display in a slightly different style, as does Avoncroft museum near Bromsgrove which also holds a Tin Tabernacle. The Black Country Museum in Dudley has - believe it or not - a pair of prefab houses built from cast iron panels. Just imagine trying to drill through the wall to fit an outside socket! Blists Hill in the Ironbridge Gorge has a Tin tabernacle too.
And in finding all those links, I've also just discovered the Prefab Museum. There simply had to be one :-)
M.
P.S. Avoncroft also holds the National Telephone Kiosk Collection along with a working Strowger exchange enabling you to make calls between the boxes. There's even a TARDIS-like police box.
There a quite a lot of companies still making prefab houses, the German Huf house can be very expensive, and there are several companies in the uk doing it. They have been on Grand Designs a couple of times.
If you think about it they are a good idea, build the house in a nice warm factory, prep the ground and it is delivered and waterproof in a day or two then fit it out as needed.
Better than waiting for weeks for bits to arrive while the shell gets soaked in a British winter.
Of course there are various flavours of "prefab" these days. Huf Hause is at one end of the spectrum with the whole thing built off-site and erected on site in less than a week. At the other end are the sorts of houses built from prefabricated wooden panels which are bolted together on site to form the structure, and then clad in <whatever> to make them weatherproof. I often pass flatbed trucks on the M4 carrying these. Even a "traditional" house will often contain prefabricated elements. Roof trusses are rarely built on site these days, for example.
The type we were discussing, put up immediately after WWII in order to alleviate the housing shortage was never intended to last more than 10 or 15 years so the fact that not only are many of them still standing but that some people actually like them as houses is quite remarkable.
M.
> In certain parts of the country, prefabricated places of worship were common from the late 1800s onwards and many of these Tin Tabernacles are still in use.
@Martin - thanks for the phrase 'Tin Tabernacle' - never heard that before. Since you seem to be a 'collector' ;-) here's another one: The Garrison Church of St Barbara's in Deepcut, just up the road from the infamous barracks. There's a nice interior picture as well.
When looking for our first house in N Ireland we walked away from two. The first one we didn't realise was prefab until getting a survey which pointed out that the roof ridge was a steel tube, presumably propping up the gables against each other. Fortunate - it was before the Troubles got under way and I think it was a bit further south in Co Down than would have been healthy for me in my subsequent career. The other was very obviously largely composed of asbestos panels; a pity as it came complete with an Iron Age ring-fort.
OTOH they can be very good properties; an aunt and uncle lived in one for most of their married life until they had to move to sheltered accommodation. The whole street of semis is still there and not immediately prefab unless you're told.
The wonky prefab lab with a metal frame and precast panels was a different matter - a slight shifting of weight on the floor would cause the reading on a balance on the adjacent bench to change.
Back in the early ‘80s I bought a pedometer to better measure my runs with. I went down the beach and measured my stride length and put it in. Then ran with it, problem, I have a long loping running style, the thing would click twice in most, but, not all strides (maybe I was running up a steep hill or turning a sharp corner).
I took it back to the shop and got a credit note. Don’t remember what pointless piece of kit I bought with that.
I tried a GPS tracking app on my phone. There’s a problem with where I run. Big high walls block the signal. Running under things, the rail line, the A road, it loses signal and takes time to regain it. If there’s a sharp corner just after it it draws a straight line from the start to the corner. There were lots of straight lines shortcutting the route which had me running through solid walls, houses, embankments.
I gave it up for a watch with a HR strap and a footpod, a modern more sophisticated version of that pedometer. It handles my stride and measures every one , no shortcuts. So I can’t log my routes automatically for stupid brag points (I’m 55, brag points?) I will live with the disappointment. GPS is not all it’s cracked up to be. Maybe in the midwest prairies, in Dundee, Scotland and environs not so much.
Reminds me of a packrun while i was at Uni, we were running up the local volcanic plug, nice track through native NZ bush. We had a visitor from Georgia USA with us, used to those flat prairies. He found our steep ascent hard and noticed every step, I bet.
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...that facial fungus you're sporting, Dabbsy, is now known as the Cypher, from the Matrix character of that name. And you're a dead-ringer.
Now, try GadgetBridge and never buy any form of fitness tracker¹ that isn't compatible with it, should a piece of idle silicon with a few electrons flowing through its doped bits telling you you're a lazy, balding, obese git like me be your particular vessel buoyancy. Me? The mirror tells me ever day. I need no electronic reminder :-P
¹ The origninal AmazFit Bip was ideal for this before they ruined it by insisting you use their app to pair the bloody things, even if there is a way to extract the pairing key for GB
Having two company provided Max-buzz step counters I understand. Only compatible with their own app, which has a limited shelf life since the free account company provided didn't last more than a couple of months each time, rendering each completely useless because I can't set the clock for midnight. What a pain!
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