martinjy.com — Martin Young’s blog

I’m not as fast a runner as I thought I was

When I ran the Human Race my SportBand told me I’d run 11.1km, which was a bit weird, given the race was only 10km. So on Monday I decided to check and recalibrate it. Here’s how.

1. Turn on your SportBand and run a set distance at a steady pace. I ran exactly 1km (courtesy of the km markers around The Tan). Don’t run again until you’ve completed the calibration process.
2. When you get back to your computer, plug in your SportBand and upload the run to Nike+ as normal.
3. When the upload’s done, click the Nike+ symbol in your menu bar (Mac) or system tray (Win) and choose Settings.
4. Go to the Calibration tab. Your calibration run will be staring you in the face.
5. Adjust the value of your run.
6. Hit Done.

The calibration screen

My 1km run was recorded by the Nike+ sensor as being 1.07km - 70m metres over!! I guess that goes some way towards explaining why it recorded the Human Race run as 11.1km instead of 10.

Unfortunately it also means that I’ve been running shorter distances than I think I have, and my average pace is slower than I think it is. Today I ran 7.8km in 41m 37s, which is 5m 20s per km. Last week that would have been 8.35km at 4m 59s per km.

Even though I’m slightly annoyed about the inaccuracy, it’s my fault for not calibrating when I first got it, I guess. Still, I’m glad it’s done now - after 19.6km of the half-marathon I’d have been looking for the 21km finish line ……….

An engaging video about the Polaroid SX-70

I love the segment in the middle that explains the inner workings of the camera.

Take the cheesy 70s elevator music away and this video could have been put together last week. This camera is enjoying a resurgence - snap one up now even if you’re only slightly interested.

Google Chrome launches via comic book

I’m not sure I like Google’s choice to launch their new web browser via comic book.

On the plus side, the format was easy to read and understand. I know more about browsers than I did before. Also, the unusual launch will create a heap of buzz and I’d expect it to garner more traffic than a standard blog post with dot points, particularly from non-techies.

But, on the negative side, it took me 20 minutes to get through it. There are 38 pages, my internet connection was slowish this morning, and it gets a bit heavy in the middle when it starts talking about garbage collection and execution stacks.

Maybe a short and long version could have worked better? Simple stuff about speed, user experience and security in the short version to convince us to switch from our current browser, and the more techy stuff in the long version for those inclined or bothered to read it.

One last thing - I didn’t see anything in the comic about HTML/CSS standards. Maybe that means “naturally we adhered to those so we won’t bother writing about them”, but my experiences designing email templates that work properly in Gmail make me think otherwise. Time will tell.

Excerpt from page 3

Link to comic

Things Touch syncing, my home WiFi network and Airport Extreme

Things Touch 1.1 was released a week or so ago via the App Store. And lo, there was much rejoicing in GTD land, as the 1.1 update delivered seamless syncing via WiFi with the Things Desktop application.

Except that I couldn’t get it to work.

I had the latest version of Things Desktop installed, and the latest version of Things Touch on my iPod. I followed the instructions for setting up sync - but it gave me nothing. A donut.

So off I tootled to the Cultured Code / Things forum, where I noticed that whilst around 10% of posters were having similar problems to me, 90% were happily syncing their little hearts out. That frustrated me, obviously. I asked a few questions, responded to a few answers, and tried everything to get my syncing to work. In no particular order, I:

• uninstalled and reinstalled both apps.
• restored my iPod and reinstalled the Touch app
• disabled my MacBook’s firewall
• added Things to the firewall’s list of incoming services
• added my Touch’s MAC address to my WiFi router
• rebooted my WiFi router
• disabled security on my WiFi router
• rebooted everything, multiple times
• tried various combinations of all of the above
• and so on

Once or twice I managed to successfully pair the Touch with the Desktop app, but the joy of sync only lasted 10 minutes or so, at which point either no further syncing occurred, or the Desktop app showed me an “unable to sync” message.

Four hours is a conservative estimate for how much time I spent trying to get Things sync to work. @#*%!!! I’ve got better things to do with my time.

For the record, my home WiFi network was run from a Belkin Wireless G Router, with a second identical router set up as an Access Point in a different part of the house. Ignoring the fact that it took me almost two days to set that up properly (thanks for nothing, Belkin documentation people), my Touch, MacBook, Windows laptop and iMac have never had any problems accessing the internet or talking to each other. The nifty Remote app on my Touch could control my iMac’s iTunes library, I could easily fileshare between the MacBook and iMac and PC, I could print from the MacBook and the PC to the printer connected by USB to the iMac, etc. etc.

Yesterday I decided to take the somewhat extreme step of ditching my Belkin routers in favour of an Apple Airport Extreme + Express set up. (I wanted one anyway so that I could hook up a USB hard drive, get AirTunes going, and upgrade to WPA security from WEP, but Things sync was the tipping point). I also bought a Lexmark WiFi printer.

Literally 15 minutes after getting Airport home it was all working perfectly. Seriously. It took me longer to take the Airport Extreme out of the box than it did to get a new wireless network going and to set up Things syncing. (The WiFi printer took a bit longer though - when are Apple going to make a printer?)

I really don’t consider myself an Apple fanboi. But I will tell anyone who asks me about their stuff that not only does it look and feel good, but it simply works out of the box. You’ll even enjoy setting it up and taking it out of the box. Detractors always say that Apple stuff only works with other Apple stuff, but in my experience Windows stuff only works with Windows stuff, so what’s the difference?

The lesson I’ve learnt? If your core machine is a PC, don’t buy Apple stuff. If it’s a Mac, don’t buy PC stuff. Note that I’m talking about hardware here. The days of file compatibility problems between Macs and PCs are long gone … if you’re using recent software.

I’m off to sync some stuff. ;-)

How to respond to criticism

This is all over the web today - some guy discovered that in Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08, a PlayStation/XBox/etc game, you can hit a shot while walking on water. He made a video of the “glitch” and posted it on YouTube. Here it is.

EA Sports, the makers of the game, responded with a video of their own.

Nice!

The Hold ‘em Poker iPhone app is a HUGE battery bandit

I’m hooked on the Hold ‘em Poker right now - playing it almost non-stop on the am and pm commute - but it seems to be a big drain on my Touch’s battery. Two hours of gameplay and the battery indicator is in the red.

There isn’t much I can do about it except play it less, I guess!

P.S. This post was written on and posted from the Touch via the free Wordpress app. Works well.