Fitness: Geek Style
About 2 months ago I decided that I needed to do something to improve my fitness. I was about 40 lbs above what I consider my ideal weight, and about 20 lbs above my acceptable weight range. I needed a solution that would be easy to stick to, and something that would keep me entertained at the same time. I needed something that would appeal to my geek sensibilities.
Below I will go into a little detail about what I found, and how it works, and how these things interact.
Tracking Weight (Withings.com - $159.99 for scale)
One of the best tips I have had to improve weight loss, is to weigh yourself regularly and record the progress. Enter the ultimate geek scale, The Withings Scale.
The scale is not cheap at $159.99 but it certainly is a great product. It is wifi connected, and it automatically records your weight and provides tools to graph it and produce reports. Setup was incredibly easy, simply connect it via USB to a computer with an internet connection and it took care of the rest. It can track up to 8 people, and has been entirely problem free for the 2 months I have had it. There are mobile apps for Android, iPhone/iPad as well as a web version. These apps all some to have some quirks that I wish they would work out, but they seem to be 4/5. Beyond standard weight, the scale also tracks Body Fat% and BMI. For athletes who have a tough time getting accurate body fat readings, there are various different models that can be used for tracking body composition.
Withings Scale
Tracking Fitness (Endomondo.com - Free)
I have spent this summer doing a lot of biking. Again it is nice to chart and track this information; to do this I have been using an iPhone (and just about any mobile you have) app called Endomondo. This is a free GPS app, that tracks your routes (and calories), in real time while you work out. The usage is simple, you start the app, enter type of workout you are doing, wait for a strong GPS signal and press start. After that you can throw your phone in your pocket or backpack and you are good to go. For the most part it has been very accurate in terms of tracking my location.
In order for it to track your calories it needs to know your weight. Thankfully Endomondo recently announced integration with Withings so your weight is automatically updated in your profile.
Endomondo also offers a variety of social features that allow you track friends, send live pep talks (you can send a message to someone who is working out and it will be read out to them through text-to-speech), and there are various messages.
A sample workout:
Putting It All Together (DailyBurn.com - Free)
To put it all together, I needed something that would track my calorie input, calories burned, and my dietary goals. For this I have been using DailyBurn. It is a general health and wellness site, that does a decent, but not fabulous job at making it easy to track calories. It has mobile apps, and a good webpage that allow you to enter the foods that you eat to track your calories consumed. It has a very extensive database of woods with nutritional information, which makes it pretty easy to track all the calories you consume. For any foods that are lacking, you do have the ability to add your own foods.
As well as tracking your calories, you also enter in your weight, and desired weight and activity level and it will give you caloric consumption goals and a time frame to reach your goal weight. This allows you to know how you are doing in regards to eating the right amount of calories. Thankfully DailyBurn is linked to Withings so your weight is automatically updated.
DailyBurn - Calories Consumed
Beyond daily activity you can also enter exercises that you have done and calories burned. If you don't know how many calories you have burned it will estimate. Unfortunately there is currently no integration between DailyBurn and Endomondo, which is my biggest current functionality gap.
Like Endomondo there are various social features including challenges. One of the nice features of the challenges are that a good number are Everyone Wins challenges. Such as the goal is to lose 10lbs, and everyone who loses 10lbs wins, not just the first person.
Putting these 3 apps together has made it very easy to stay motivated in my fitness endeavors, not to mention tracking my progress towards my fitness goals. For anyone eager to chart and track their workouts and fitness I highly recommend this trifecta of tools.
Ebay Bid Sniping
Do you know what it is? Do you do it?
Sniping involves setting up a software program that will automatically bid on an item at the last second (usually 5-10 seconds remaining), making it very difficult for someone else to get in at the last second and outbid you. It was the wonderful side effect of keeping you from upping your bid to a level you don't want because someone outbid you...
There are tons on the market but this one is free and has worked well for me: Gixen
They have some pay services, but the free has worked just fine for me. I also like that it doesn't require you leaving your computer on with a program running (like some of the other services I have tried).
Where Did My Google Chrome Bookmarks Go?
One of the best features of Google Chrome is that it can sync your bookmarks between instances.
It is super convenient that when I would add a bookmark to my browser at work, it was instantly on my computer at home. One of the other features that I absolutely loved was that all of my bookmarks also appeared in a read-only folder in my Google Docs. This was super convenient if I was on a computer that was not synced to my google account.
Well when Google updated the docs app with Collections as opposed to Folders we somehow lost access to all of the bookmarks. For something that is synced in the cloud, I absolutely need browser based access to it. So where to get it now? If someone has a good way to get browser based access to my bookmarks please let me know.
Eugene Melnyk Wants Chris Neil Banned For Life!
Eugene Melnyk, the owner of the Ottawa Senators, has taken the hardest line stance on head hits of anyone in the NHL. He has recently said that intentional hits to the head should result in lifetime bans from the sport of hockey.
If it's an accidental hit that could be have been avoided, just because you're stupid and you just skated the wrong way, but you hit the guy, fine, 20-game suspension, If it's truly accidental and the guy just ran into you, you know what? Give the guy a break. But, if it's a deliberate hit you should not be in any game of hockey.
Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/sports/Melnyk+wants+head+hunters+life/4446520/story.html#ixzz1Gs90NvNu
Well the now hypocritical Melnyk has one of the offenders, who under his terms should be banned for life, on his own team! Witness two seperate incidents of Chris Neil head hunting:
Well Melnyk should practice what he preaches. If he honestly believes that this sort of action should result in a lifetime ban, then he should at a minimum trade/waive Neil and say that he won't tolerate it on his team.
I’ve Been Crappy/Some Biking
Haven't posted in a while... So wow! JUST WOW!
A Hill in Spain from chris akrigg on Vimeo.
Missing! Google Reader Safety Settings
Google Reader is my favourite web app, well second favourite after GMail. But it is missing a very very key feature. Safety settings!
Google search is smart enough to provide such settings.
These settings are browser instance specific, not account specific. This means I can have different settings at work and at home. What I need is to have this kind of filtering on Google Reader; either to have it intelligently filter items, or to have the ability to mark certain blogs as inappropriate.
Currently I have a NSFW folder in reader, and I put blogs that always or occasionally have questionable content in that folder. I then avoid those items while on public computers or at work. It would be much less painful if that folder just wasn't present on that browser. And they would only show up on my home machine. It would prevent accidental clicks, or curiosity from opening those items.
The Best Way To Tweet Google Reader Items
It is only natural that when you find something interesting in Google Reader (we talked about the benefits of Reader earlier). I have gone through a few different methods of sending these items to twitter. I have finally settled on a method. First I will tell you the shortfalls of different the different methods.
Google Reader - Sent To...
Google Reader added a little send to link that gives you the option to send the article to various different services, including twitter. This method sucks! I am not a fan of the fact that it opens a new window. It took about a day to eliminate this option.
Use An Auto Delivery Mechanism On Your Shared Items Feed
I used this for a little while. It worked pretty well, things that I shared made their way to twitter. It was clean simple and very convenient. What I found was that I didn't want to tweet everything that I shared in Google Reader. I would end up with tweets that looked like:
photo... <some linke>
Ugly tweets, with things that weren't always of interest to my twitter followers. As well I have 3 separate twitter accounts to keep things of interest separate from the individual followers, this really didn't allow for posting to separate twitter accounts.
Final Solution
This final solution is a modification of the of the previous option.
Step 1: Create a tag for each twitter account. Tweet is the tag I use for my main twitter account.
Step 2: Share the feed for that tag. This is done in Reader Settings > Folders and Tags. Just click on the little RSS icon next to the feed to make it public.
Step 3: Get the feed from the tag public site. Just click View public page in the settings and get the feed url from there.
Step 4: Use one of the many feed propagators to auto tweet items from your tag feed. I have gone through quite a few: TwitterFeed.com, FeedBurner.com (there is a socialize feature buried in the settings) before settling on dlvr.it. dlvr.it is by far the most reliable of the three that I have tried.
If you repeat these steps for each of your twitter accounts you can easily tweet items to a specific twitter account.
Tagging items is very quick. When an item is open just hit 't' to open the tag box, then type in the tag corresponding to the twitter account you want to tweet it to.
My iPad Killer App – Video Player
It doesn't exist. *sigh*
The thing that would make me buy an iPad immediately, no questions asked is a video player.
Here is the scenario:
I coach ski racing and one of the most valuable tools (if not THE) most valuable tool is video. I shoot tons of video, and frequently I want to be able to show athletes video pretty much on the spot. Hooking the camcorder up to a TV/monitor is not always an option, but carrying around an iPad could be. Right now, we watch too much video on the 2.7" camcorder screen.
What I would love is an app which would read off the SD card from the camcorder and be able to play/pause (maybe slowmo) the video.
The challenge is that the high-def AVCHD footage from the camcorder is a challenge for even laptops to handle. I assume that the camcorder can handle it due to on-board processing, I doubt that the iPad has the horse power to watch un-edited AVCHD.
Another option would be if I could find a way to use the iPad or other tablet as a monitor for HDMI input, but that isn't an option on the current version.
There seemed to be light at the end of the tunnel in the iPad VLC player. But alas it will not play AVCHD.
Maybe I should look at switching camcorders to one that records to MPEG-4 or something of the like, even though it seems they are rare.
A Rocky End To The Mazda
The Mazda is no more. I can't say that I had a very good time with the car, I had a good deal of problems with it, and the end of the relationship was no different. To explain the ending I need to give a little history.
Leasing It
When I leased the car there was a deal where you could reduce the interest you paid on the lease by putting down multiple damage deposits. What happened was for every damage deposit you put down they would reduce the interest by 0.15%. Doesn't sound like much, but for putting down $3500 in damage deposit, I lowered the interest on the car by 1.5%, which saved me $38/month. If you do the calculation on that amount, that means that I was getting about 13% interest on my $3500.
Anyway, since I actually wanted the damage deposit back, I negotiated something called the Mazda WearCare which allows you to return the car with up to $3500 of damage without being charged for it.
Returning The Car
I was worried that even with the WearCare that I was going to run into issues with some dents to the car. I spoke with a neighbour who happens to work for Mazda, and he had a quick look and concluded that I would have no problems. I got the damage report from the lease inspection and it concluded that there was $1496 of damage to the car. Sounded like I was in good shape. A few days later I get a check from Mazda for $2,859.15 some $640.15 less than I expected. I quickly phoned Mazda and was told that it was due to an improper repair. So what was the repair... well remember this: INCIDENT!? After a few calls to Mazda and having them say that if I had just not had it repaired by the towing company IT WOULD BE COVERED, I finally got them to make some kind of concession.
While they wouldn't refund the entire $640, they were willing to put in half. For a difference of $320, I am more than happy to avoid having to go to small claims court. I will on the other hand be phoning the towing company to attempt to get some more cash out of them. If I can find some time and energy, and actually feel like thinking about this again, I will post to let everyone know how this ends.
Meet Eleanor!
Well I haven't been writing much lately, and this is why. A little over two weeks ago a new member joined the family. Her name is Eleanor and she is a 12 week old Bernese Mountain Dog. She is awesome. She is tiring. Last week she had a bit of a stomach issue which kept her going out about every 1.5 hours. Alanna handles the hours from 5am-730am, and I get the (oh joy!) hours between 12am-5am. Everything in between we split, anyway. Needless to say, I didn't get much sleep.
The last few days she has been doing very very well. Her stomach is all cleared up, which means that now she generally sleeps between 12am-5am, which makes my life much much easier.
The reason that I am able to write this is that she had her first set of shots at the vet today, and to put it plainly, she is pretty effin' stoned. It is amazing how much bigger she has gotten. When we got her two weeks ago she was 16lbs, now she is 24lbs. Anyway, hopefully I can find time to write again sometime in the near future.
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