My Week with the Fitbit Force

[caption id="attachment_13117201768" align="aligncenter" width="560"] My wife's Fitbit Force (she didn't return hers as I did). It's displaying the number of calories she's burned today. The Force comes in two colors, black and "slate" (which is like a teal). Buy it on Amazon for $130. Photo courtesy of my wife.[/caption]

When I first read about the Fitbit line of fitness trackers, I was vaguely interested in them. I felt like they were cool enough but nothing I was particularly interested in. Then I read that they could monitor sleep patterns. That piqued my interest, since I'm just not very good at sleeping. If competitive sleeping was an Olympic sport, I would be so bad, I'd be the last kid picked in gym class.

So, I've been interested for a while in better understanding how I sleep. So, when my wife decided to get the Fitbit Flex, I thought to myself how much better the Flex would be if it actually functioned like a watch, as well. So, I took another look at the Fitbit line and found the Force. I decided to get one and my wife decided to exchange her Flex for one, as well, since I did the work of tracking two down at a Best Buy here in the city.

The End and the Beginning of Google Glass

[caption id="attachment_13117201712" align="aligncenter" width="960"] Self-Portrait with v1 Glass[/caption]So, for me the lure of Google Glass was threefold. First, I loved the form-factor and have long believed it would be the future of computing. Second, getting picked as one of the first 10,000 people to be allowed to purchase Glass was a big deal to me as a tech fanatic. Third, it would be a blast living on the bleeding edge of a genuinely new technology.

And it was a blast--I'd put on my Glass and I felt like I was living in the future looking at everyone else still living in the past. In the beginning, almost seven months ago for me, the sky was the limit with Glass. Google had said we should experiment and do what we wanted. As tech fanatic and a purely amateur hacker, I started scouring the wilds of the Internet for instructions on how to sideload full Android apps onto Glass so I could do more than the paltry Glass OS would let me do.

TheGlassLog: My Most Favorite Thing About Glass Right Now

[caption id="attachment_13117195925" align="aligncenter" width="300"] You're lookin' at it! And so am I--sort of...[/caption]

So many people out there seem to think that Glass is supposed to be some perfect device. After all these months of it being in the hands of thousands of people (many of whom are writing on the web about their experiences) the media and some non-media types on the Internets are still expecting to be "blown away" by Glass. Simply, Glass won't blow you away unless you are reeeeally easily impressed. I'm not and wrote about the thing I hate most about Glass last week (You can also read my initial impressions of Google Glass, good and bad, as well). It's definitely easy enough to see the potential of the form factor, but the ONLY thing Glass does really well right now is take photos and video. Google would have you believe that it also allows you to share them with ease, but really, it only allows you to share them with people you know on Google+ with ease. Sharing with everyone else is kind of a pain in the ass.

So, is the camera my favorite thing about Glass right now?

TheGlassLog (TheGlassLog) Day 1

[caption id="attachment_13117195671" align="alignright" width="300"] My wife and I sitting in the lobby outside of Google's demo stations on the 8th floor of the Chelsea Market here in NYC.[/caption]

Immediate positives:

1) Glass is very cool. This platform, as expected, has a LOT of potential. Currently, it feels like much of the world is right there, waiting for your eyeball. Though, sadly, it's not as easy as it should be to get at it.
2) It's the Wild West in here--everything is rough around the edges and harder to use than the smart phones we're all comfortable with now. This makes it more cumbersome to use Glass than a smart phone, but it's also much more exciting to use it. I feel like anything is possible it's like living on the frontier.
3) Glass is super-comfy to wear. As of Day 1, I had no problem wearing it for hours. I had no headaches, no dizziness, and no discomfort at all.
4) It works well with Dropbox--but only when I connect it to my Mac. Strangely, Glass doesn't mount like removable media and my Win7 netbook refuses to see it or my Android phone or my DSLR because the MTP drivers won't load. The latter isn't the fault of Glass, however.
5) While the battery life doesn't weather Google+ Hangouts very well, it does recharge pretty fast. It's first recharge took just a few hours.
6) It was super-cool to watch a video from CNN on Glass. It was like the news was breaking on my face.


Immediate problems:

Clay Shirky gets so much right but kinda still misses his own point...

Shirky does not own a television. Americans watch, collectively, two hundred billion hours of television a year, and if online social media diverts even just a fraction of that time, he argues, that has to be a good thing. “As I say in the book, even the stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act. And I’d still take the most inane collaborative website over someone watching yet another half hour of TV.”

via guardian.co.uk

I was tempted to quip to the entire article since there were several moments where I had issues with both Shirky and the Guardian journalist—but the above excerpt narrowly edges out the rest as bugging me the most.

To the above, I say the following:

1) seriously? No TV at all? You *never* watch movies or TV shows at home?  See, to me, saying “I don’t own a TV” doesn’t mean anything if you do watch TV shows or movies at home.  Hell, you could have a giant iMac with a TV tuner attached and have DVR software record every episode of “Wife Swapping” and you could still sound all cool and hip by saying “I don’t own a TV.”

2) And Clay, you’d seriously take ICanHazCheezburger over 30 minutes of Mythbusters? I wouldn’t and this speaks to the point the Guardian journal lets you make toward the end of the article:

“…The whole, ‘Is the internet a good thing or a bad thing’? We’re done with that. It’s just a thing. How to maximise its civic value, its public good – that’s the really big challenge.”

So, the same can’t be said about TV?  Come on, man—TV, like the Internet, is what we make of it.  There’s a lot of rock-stupid content available for both delivery systems.  Saying one is inherently better than another is simply inaccurate.  I’ve learned plenty from TV—from either watching the Discovery channel, PBS or even regular fictional TV shows.  But apparently, that learning time would be better spent watching “Will It Blend?”

You shouldn’t go after TV with the same black & white attitude that people go after the Internet with.  It harms your argument and wastes your audience’s time (whether they know it or not).

For the record, I own a TV, but I don’t pay for Cable TV.  I choose to watch very little TV that originates “on TV”.  When I do, it’s either online or on DVD.

Oh and that whole “no medium has ever survived the indifference of 25-year-olds” thing—you really think the Television, the radio, or the newspaper, or the Telegraph would not have survived if 25-year-olds didn’t take part?

Yeah, I’m pretty sure they’d all have done OK.  I also don’t think the 25-year-olds of America are going to be responsible for the WSJ’s paywall falling.  I think it’s the WSJ’s greed.  I think everyone would be selling more if they weren’t trying to make so damn much money.

Just my ¥2, of course.

Just to clarify, I generally agree with Clay Shirky and his theories. I also find him fascinating to read/listen to.  However, as with anyone focused on primarily just one thing, I think Shirky’s got a bit of myopia going when it comes to his “one thing.”  I’m not saying he’s wrong, I’m just saying he might benefit from taking a step or two back from the computer display more often.

Scientists working at Edinburgh University have discovered...

“Scientists working at Edinburgh University have discovered a way of transmitting wireless data through lightbulbs, an invention that could revolutionise the way we receive the internet.”

The Herald, 2 May 2010

Scottish Enterprise are backing the development of the new technology through Proof of Concept funding. There will be a prototype built next year.

(via glasgow-effect)

Online Artwork Takes on the Internet as an Accurate Information Aggregator

Click the pic to try it yourself!

The above image was created after entering my name into an online art piece called "Personas." After hitting "return" on my keyboard, a series of interesting things happen. It's hard to really express what happens--nothing mind blowing, but you watch as the above image is created based on data culled from the Internet. The piece was created by Aaron Zinman and the idea is to point out both how capable and how flawed the Internet is in determining who we are as people. Here's what I found on the official project page for Personas:

WHAT IS PERSONAS?
Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab. It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one's aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.

HOW DOES IT WORK?
Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person - to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.

PHILOSOPHY
In a world where fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, the computer is our indispensable but far from infallible assistant. Personas demonstrates the computer's uncanny insights and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name. It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world, where digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant.

Pretty neat idea considering just how much faith is put in this giant network we call the Web. Seems we humans are still necessary pieces of the information-gathering puzzle. Check it out for yourself and see what you learn about the Internet or about yourself (or folks with your name):

http://personas.media.mit.edu/personasWeb.html

Micro$oft Buys Danger--Time to Ditch my Sidekick

Well, I've been debating about going with an iPhone for ages, but the feature-set was just too similar to the feature-set of my Sidekick 3. I can't do anything with the current iPhone that I couldn't do with my SK3, except watch videos and I already have an iPod for portable video watching, so it's not that much of a compromise. However, the screencap above comes from a NYTimes.com article (here: http://www.nytimes.com/…anger.html ) that reports on Microsoft buying Danger, the company behind the Sidekick 3. (Though it's funny how the NYT headline calls the Sidekick a "Smartphone". It's actually not.)

Now, I actually like certain aspects of capitalism. Like the part where competition fosters innovation and low prices for consumers. A company the size of Microsoft just makes me mad because they're not good for innovation or prices. They're just good at being everywhere at all times. Because of this, I do my best to avoid using their products. I don't own an Xbox, I own only non-Windows machines (though I do have Windows on my MacBook for playing my old Tomb Raider games) and I don't have Microsoft Office installed anywhere.

Now, my handy little Sidekick has new parents and it's time for me to start looking to a new phone to meet my portable-Internet-needs. This won't happen any time soon since I'm jobless and the Google ads from my site just aren't paying enough, but I've made the decision.

I'll probably go with an iPhone, though it will have to meet a few requirements before I drop any cash on one:

1) 3g. Just because. I mean, come on--it's the 21st Century and the iPhone should have it.

2) Flash. How can *any* handheld device that comes with a browser NOT support Flash sites and videos in this day and age? Some of my favorite sites use Flash! (Like Utterz.com, Anywhere.FM and MANY more.)

3) Copy and paste. Yep, from what I've heard, the iPhone can't cut and paste. Sorry, I can't have a device that makes me type everything over--especially on a touchscreen keyboard. I need to be able to blog from it.

Here are some things it really should do but are not deal-breakers if they're missing:

a) Shoot video. Come ON, Apple--WHAT are you thinking??

b) Support Skype. JUST GIVE IN.

c) Fix the headphone jack. I never use my "official" iPod ear buds anymore and, from what I've heard, they're the only kind that fit in the iPhone's headphone jack.

d) Streaming live video so I can shoot Utterz videos on the go! (SWEET!)

So, HOP TO IT, Apple!! Let's see that new iPhone model come out before the USGov sends out their $600 rebate checks, OK? Thanks!

Oh and if Nokia comes out with a version of the N95 with a QWERTY keyboard, I just might not go with an iPhone at all. (GASP!)
Mobile post sent by thepete using Utterz.  Replies.