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Showing posts from December, 2018

Running like an Ethiopian champion, Garmin style

After a few years of not paying attention to my sport life I decided to see how well I fare measuring what can be collected with a sport watch sensors - heart beat, distance, speed, pace and (bonus) my sleeping patterns. After a few deliberations I acquired a Garmin Vivo Active, first edition and started to use it. On that path I discovered some shortcomings which became annoying and funny sometimes: for sleeping you had to start/stop the cycle in order to have a relevant time frame after running a few laps, sometimes, I forgot to stop the timer and jumped in a car and drove home. The smart watch could not detected the speed change and sometimes I ended up with a few good tens of kilometers on my running book. My friends called my "the unknown Ethiopian champion runner of Toronto" whenever an update of the firmware occurred, my customized screens disappeared the wake-up function/ring is effective only if you sleep with the watch; there is no sound but mostly a trembl...

When lifetime services means something else

Or read the small print before you buy  I am in the same cohort of adults as you, probably: with limited time for vacations, I am planning almost every day for seeing, sucking up scenery, tasting food or wines or having fun in a memorable way. Rarely there is a moment where playing by the ear is on my schedule. Often times I am forced to improvise as my plans are totally screwed by inevitable mishaps. And here comes one of my reality encounters with what is a map in our days and how different than reality it is.One hand driving, one eye on map and one eye recording the imagery, brain where are you ? In today over-scanned/over-visited/over-blogged/over-you-tubed world to be driven in a dangerous or unknown place by the technology seems like a dystopian event. And still, that happened to me. Garmin has an interesting policy regarding their own GPS devices - the maps are free for LI(F)E. What is not known, but hidden in the bottom of the license agreement, is that the l...