Weekly Head Voices #116: Nothing much to see here, please move on.

This WHV is all about the weeks from Monday January 30 to Sunday February 12, 2017. I’ve mostly been in heads-down mode on two projects, so this post will be shorter than is usually the case.

I had my very first beer after the 30-day long Experiment Alcohol Zero (EAZ) on Friday, February 3. It was a good one:

EAZ has taught me that it would not be the worst idea to limit alcohol consumption slightly more.

Read More

Android vs iPhone performance: A quick note.

I’ve been spending some time doing research on the relative (perceived) performance of flagship Android phones compared to iPhones. I will probably not write the extended post I was planning to, as it seems that it’s hard to answer this question scientifically, and, perhaps more importantly, it makes people Very Very Angry.

I would still like to leave you with some interesting reading material. Hence this quick note.

From this discussion post (December 2016) by CodingHorror, aka Jeff Atwood, one of the two founders of the whole StackOverflow empire, where he measures the relative performance of his discourse web-app, the following choice quote:

Read More

Critical Thinking 101: Three super easy steps to spot poppycock on the internet.

Today it happened again.

A Lie Can Travel Halfway Around the World While the Truth Is Putting On Its Shoes

(quote not by Mark Twain, origin quite interesting)

Someone on facebook forwarded an article that was full of badly written and utterly unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about topic X. (topic X could be anything: politics, health, whatever)

To me, it was instantly clear that the article was 100%, undiluted, hogwash.

Now you probably think that I must have decades of experience separating the internet wheat from the chaff.

Read More

Weekly Head Voices #115: So much Dutch.

Monday January 16 to Sunday January 29 of the year 2017 yielded the following possibly mention-worthy tidbits:

On Saturday, January 21, we had the privilege of seeing Herman van Veen perform live at the Oude Libertas Theatre. The previous time was a magical night many years ago in the Royal Theatre Carré in Amsterdam.

Herman van Veen is a living, extremely active and up to date legend. To most Dutch people you’ll ever meet he is a formidable part of their rich cultural landscape.

Read More

Samsung Gear Fit 2 voice guide at intervals not working at all: The Fix.

Update 2017-05-02: As reported by Kjetil in the comments, if you update the Health apps in the GEAR category of Galaxy Apps, this should fix the problem without having to change your phone’s language. I’m keeping the rest of the post here as a record of events.

This is a really short note to help other people trying to get their broken Samsung Gear Fit 2 voice “guide at intervals” to work.

Read More

Weekly Head Voices #114: So you know what I did last summer.

WELL HELLO THERE FRIENDS FROM THE BLOGOSPHERE!

It’s definitely time to get out a Weekly Head Voices, so that we can all feel nicely up to date. This post covers the period from Monday December 5, 2016 to Sunday January 15, 2017, which is ever so slightly *cough* later than average.

My excuse is: SUMMER HOLIDAY.

If you have not yet read my 2016 to 2017 transition post, this is a gentle reminder to make some time to do so. There’s some backyard philosophy in that post that you might find useful.

Read More

Fixing the Samsung Gear Fit 2 GPS lock delay when running without phone

For the past few runs, I noticed that my Gear Fit 2 would only lock onto GPS after more than 0.5 km. By “noticed”, I of course mean “got super frustrated with and considered briefly throwing the gadget onto the ground and arranging for its utter disintegration through repeated jumping on it”.

Besides losing the first 0.5 km of my run data, the pacing information, delivered via synthesised voice, would be wildly inaccurate for the rest of my run.

Read More

Deep Work: A welcome kick in the butt.

Based on this tweet by Enrico Bertini:

… after having been successfully primed by this one some weeks ago (because locals!):

… I bought and then devoured Deep Work by Cal Newport in two to three sessions.

Read More

The 2016 to 2017 transition post.

Following the rich tradition over here of year transition posts, having just rounded off a brilliant outdoorsy take-your-mind-off-of-everything vacation with friends, and also inspired by wogan.blog’s nicely personal 2016 review post, I decided that a farewell-2016 how-you-doin’-2017 post was in order.

By the way, by rich tradition I mean that I wrote the grand total of one (1) similarly titled post previously, as the year ticked from 2009 to 2010, and at least one other, disguised as a weekly head voices, as we entered 2012That last one is worth another read, early 2012 cpbotha had some really good tips. There might be more such posts, this blog has been around for more than 15 years and much of what I’ve written is not available from my short-term memory, which is nice.

Read More