Previously, in Fenix 8: reaffiming Garmin’s doom and Apple Watch Ultra: Yes, Garmin is doomed, I discussed Garmin’s future from a tech-investment perspective. But let me take it back to a more practical user’s discussion… using Athyltic over Garmin’s built in features. When I switched from my Garmin Fenix 6 to my Apple Watch Ultra, I still wanted to have the training stats offered by Garmin. Athlytic came recommended, so I tried that.…
Read more »(My previous entry): Apple Watch Ultra: Yes, Garmin is doomed Fenix 8 announced Garmin announced the most recent iteration of their Fenix line this week: the Fenix 8. Garmin makes great fitness watches and the Fenix 8 seems like a nice high-end fitness smartwatch. Many YouTube reviewers immediately posted (nearly identical) reviews raving about the same set of features (from Garmin’s PR kit). If someone likes the Garmin ecosystem, or needs a fitness watch that can survive an ultra marathon, all other considerations aside, the Fenix continues to be a good product for that.…
Read more »A few weeks ago, I was in Zurich and was reminded once again that are watch stores everywhere in Switzerland. Obviously Swiss mechanical timekeeping is a legendary though significantly outdated1, concept, but as I was jogging by a few, I wondered “Seriously, who buys these anymore?” Bit of history: I’ve long thought watches looked cool. I had the original (and now cool again) Casio watch when I was a kid and the Casio calculator watch.…
Read more »On Hacker News, someone asked if people are still using Pascal in 2023. The responses were mostly of the “of course, Delphi!” flavor. But one response stood out to me, and it was bemoaning that the constant HN hype of new languages that ignores “boring tech” the industry is using the majority of the time (Java, Python, C++ in roughly that order). I sympathize with the commenter’s point because HN commenters generally continue to have a quite naive view on languages and frameworks.…
Read more »(My new entry): Fenix 8: reaffiming Garmin’s doom Note: I originally drafted this for a small group of friends, But I converted this to a blog post because tech reviewers seem to think the Ultra fails to kill Garmin. This is the counterpoint review, with a software person’s spin on it. Summary The Apple Watch Ultra is a great device, and is the best fitness device I’ve ever owned. It brings all of the fitness features I need in a package that’s extremely useful for the 60-70% of the time I’m not exercising or sleeping.…
Read more »Today marks yet another sad milestone in the COVID-19 fight, where the US government has decided to “pause” allowing willing adults to receive the J&J/Janssen vaccine “out of an abundance of caution”. This is despite only 6 people having clotting issues. In fact, the odds of the clotting issues naturally are apparently similar. So I want to talk about out of an abundance of caution. This phrase has become popular with politicians during COVID-19.…
Read more »I recently upgraded the family Canyonero to a more recent model. The old one was a 2009 model, so I decided I wanted a newer one with better gas mileage, bluetooth audio, Android auto, and other modern features. This car beeps at every possible thing that can happen during normal operation of a car. Get close to something, cross over a line on the road, etc. I pull up behind a car in a drive-thru line and it starts beeping.…
Read more »Update: It’s been brought to my attention that I left out discussion of the contentious PS5 SSD technology. I should have mentioned it. Believe it or not, my intention here wasn’t to make a flame war. The demo looks cool, but I don’t have much of an opinion on it except to say that consoles can generally offer a more optimized platform for developers than general PC hardware. And since that platform is standardized, developers can micro-optimize over the lifetime of the console.…
Read more »I told some friends tonight about an idea I had years ago: disable copy-paste for all software engineers and you’d improve code worldwide overnight. Cut-paste is still totally cool. Feel free to refactor and move code around. But copy-paste… well, it’s just deadly. Copy-pasting leads to so many bugs, unmaintainable codebases and general code bloat. If everyone was forced to think more building reusable abstractions, these could be avoided. An example of a critical error probably (I don’t have proof) caused by copy-paste would be Apple’s SSL Key Exchange bug.…
Read more »2015 is coming to a close, and although it wasn’t a specific New Year’s resolution, I was able to get fit this year. Here’s what worked for me, it may not work for everyone, but I hope it helps give you ideas. I call it “The Peter Drucker Way” thanks to the apocryphal quote of his “What’s measured gets managed.” I started this process with a lot of myths in my head:…
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