On low standards

On January 4, 2017January 4, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek2 Comments

I want my Pebble back. In fact, after a week (?) of Apple Watch ownership, I’m kind of tired of Apple as an entity, for the first time in quite a while.

(Before you say it: yes, I’m aware I can turn this shit off. And I’m going to, as soon as I’m done complaining about it. I shouldn’t have to turn annoying shit off. This annoying shit should not happen.)

I am a smartwatch fan, as the three entries under this one that WordPress will select will no doubt demonstrate. I have simple goals for my watch: I want it to alert me when I get an important notification (“important” being determined by me) and I want it to be a watch and an alarm clock, and to have a battery life compatible with being both. I was worried about the Apple Watch’s battery; I plug it in while I’m reading at night and it’s fine, and it appears to be good to go to make it two days without a charge with no real trouble. It’s at 80% right now and hasn’t been charged since last night. That’s fine.

I just got a notification congratulating me for standing for one minute during each of the last twelve hours.

Read that sentence again, and drown in the banality of the universe. And realize that I was on my feet for the entirety of at least seven of those hours. I walked four and a half miles while I was at work, 9000 steps (less than usual; it’s Wednesday, my half day) and collapsed on the couch at home and fell asleep. I didn’t hit either of my “fitness goals.” I can’t set a step goal, which is kind of annoying. I feel like that ought to be available. But I can for damn sure be nagged to stop doing things and freaking meditate like some sort of techno-hippy once an hour and be congratulated at the end of the day because once per hour in the past 12 hours I, I dunno, got up to take a piss or something. But the watch doesn’t notice seven straight hours on my feet.

Bah.

Also, whatever was in the iOS update that pushed out Tuesday bricked my phone, and I was nearly late to work trying to figure out what the hell had gone wrong and restoring my most recent (ie, months old) backup. So I’m not super keen about technology right now in general. But yeah: Bah.

(WordPress probably ought to not choose this entry as another chance to constantly re-add Uncategorized as a category or delete half my tags while I’m adding them. Just saying.)

On having owned an Apple Watch for around seventeen hours

On December 29, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek9 Comments

xNope.jpg.pagespeed.ic.xecQlXJhis My watch, just now, upon having determined via vile sorcery that I was awake but not yet out of bed, just vibrated on my wrist to suggest that I get out of bed and move around for one (1) minute. This is related to my health somehow. I note, looking at it now, that apparently getting up at 3:30 in the morning to take a piss apparently also counted as exercise. It was certainly difficult, I’ll agree to that.

And here’s the real bullshit: I did it. I have left my warm, cozy bed, a bed that had an attractive woman in it, and now I’m up. Because my watch decided to tell me to.

I don’t mind when my watch wakes me up with an alarm; that’s part of what it’s for and I set those on purpose. I’m not sure how I feel about the idea that it basically just told me to get my lazy ass out of bed on a day when I’m not supposed to go to work and don’t have to take the boy to school. Part of me thinks that’s neat and the rest of me feels like it’s probably the first five minutes of a Black Mirror episode about a dystopia.

In which I make poor decisions but am somewhat successful anyway

On December 28, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Work2 Comments

5547000_sd.jpg;maxHeight=550;maxWidth=642.jpeg So I caved and got an Apple Watch. It was an accident, I swear; I went into the store intending to just go on a fact-finding mission, secure in the knowledge that even if I were able to pick out one I liked there was no chance of there being any Series 2 watches in stock, and I wanted to physically put my hands on the watches to see how they felt and how they wore and pick one out based on that.

Well. Uh. Oops. Turns out they had exactly two of the exact one I was thinking I wanted– I’ve ordered a knockoff Milanese loop band (don’t tell anyone) that is literally like a seventh of the price that Apple wants, but the fluoroelastomer will do in a pinch, especially since I like to say “fluoroelastomer.”

Right now I’m a trifle underwhelmed, but the UI is largely responsible for that and it’s gonna take me a bit to learn. We’ll see how the battery life works out. I’ll report back in a few days.

I’d heard from my co-workers that the last week of December was going to be insane, but the same people who said that had been telling me that December in general was better than November. I have sold more furniture in the last two and a half days (I left at 2:30 today, as I usually do on Wednesdays) than I did in the entire rest of the month, and this week is already my second highest week of sales ever, with the weekend left to go, which is utter fucking madness. And that’s without any really big sales; I’ve just had a bunch in the 2-3000 range. Yesterday and Monday I was so busy that I could barely keep up with the customers; it was bloody insane.

I can put up with a little bit more of this, though, if the universe would like to keep sending it my way. It’s a problem I’m willing to put up with.

In which we need to have a talk, #Apple…

On March 10, 2015March 9, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocy8 Comments

First things first. This is my desk:

Now, normally it doesn’t look like this, but I’m trying to make a point, and that is: it is extraordinarily difficult to be more of an Apple fanboy than I am. I literally have one of every device Apple produces, and there are two iPads in that picture. I have so many Apple devices, in fact, that I forgot one while taking the picture– although I wouldn’t have disconnected my Apple TV from my set in the living room anyway– and I currently can’t find my old clickwheel-style iPod.

This is my current watch:

The only difference here is I have a leather strap on mine, as the rubber one my initial Pebble came with broke in half a couple of weeks ago.

I do not want an Apple Watch. Ordinarily (some of you will laugh at this, but I swear that I at least think it’s true) I do not believe my opinion to be a bellwether of broader reality, but I have to believe that if I don’t want an Apple Watch, then no one wants an Apple Watch. I own every device that Apple produces and am at this exact second wearing a smartwatch, a device that I have on multiple occasions referred to as my favorite tech purchase since my original cell phone back in 1998-99 or so. I am a white male with sufficient disposable income, a demonstrated interest in tech gadgets, and a distinct preference for Apple hardware. There literally cannot be a more accurate picture of the target demographic for this item than I am.

And I have no interest in this thing.

It gets worse. There are two watches in this picture. I have preordered one of them.

The watch on the right is a Pebble Time Steel. It will cost me $270 at the end of the month when the Kickstarter finishes and Pebble actually charges me. It comes with a backup strap made of metal in addition to the leather one, and is made of stainless steel. I’ll get it, if I remember right, at the end of June. Maybe July, I’m not sure. My current watch will be fine until it shows up.

The watch on the left is an Apple Watch Edition and it costs SEVENTEEN THOUSAND FUCKING DOLLARS.

I love you guys. Truly. I do.

But you are out of your fucking minds on this one.

In which I like things

On December 1, 2013December 1, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews3 Comments

You knew this already: I bought a Pebble smartwatch, intending to let it and the Fitbit Force battle it out for wrist supremacy and then to decide to keep one of them. The battle was swift and decisive; the Pebble won.

Here is what a Pebble does: 1) It is a watch, which displays the date. It has a variety of watch faces that you can choose from or switch on the fly by pushing a button. This last feature is pointless but kind of fun. 2) It has a backlight activated by an accelerometer; I flick my wrist and the backlight comes on. The time is displayed constantly, like a regular watch, unlike on the Fitbit, where you have to push a button to get the time to display. 3) It does silent vibrating alarms; in this it is more or less exactly like the Fitbit. Implementation for this is better (you can do it from the watch instead of having to use a separate app) but it’s still kinda gimped; unlike the Fitbit, however, the Pebble people are aware that their alarm is gimped and are vocally and repeatedly promising to fix it up soon. 4) When I get a notification on my phone, I get a vibration on my wrist and the notification displayed. In the case of text messages, it generally displays the whole thing; everything else is truncated a bit.

I cannot really express how much I enjoy these latter two features, folks. I don’t like alarms in general; I don’t like being woken up by loud noise and my phone beeping constantly gets on my nerves. Now, I’m fully aware that I could just keep my phone on silent and check it periodically (or, God forbid, ignore it) but I’m a bit too tied into my little digital world for that. Silent wrist alarms are perfect– my phone hasn’t made a sound since I put this thing on, because I put it on silent and am relying instead on all my alerts getting piped to my wrist. It’s subtle and me “checking my phone” is no longer as disruptive to things going on around me as pulling my phone out might be. I love it. The only way it could be better is if it had a microphone built in so that I could do voice texts as responses.

Two more things, actually: it also has 5) apps (supposedly; I haven’t actually checked this feature out) and 6) it can remote-control all the music apps on my phone– which sounded useless at first but comes in surprisingly handy when I’m driving; I can check my wrist to see what song is playing (much less disruptive than looking at the phone) and I can pause when I want to, which is actually easier than fiddling with the volume button on my dashboard.

Drawbacks: it’s clearly first-gen tech in a couple of ways; the display isn’t great (but the battery life is) and it’s dropped connection with my phone once in the couple of weeks I’ve had it, for no clear reason. They make a big deal about watch apps; they don’t seem terribly useful or I’d have downloaded it by now. And I had thought it was capable of duplicating the functionality of the Fitbit– counting steps and sleep tracking– and it doesn’t, at least not without one of those apps I haven’t downloaded yet.

That said? Once I figured out that I walk a good 8000-9000 steps a day during the week (about 3.5-4 miles, if I remember right) and substantially less than that on the weekends, the Force kinda stopped being useful. If I want to walk more, I need to… walk more. I’ve got a baseline, which is useful, but beyond that it’s not good for much. Sleep tracking, too, is neat at first until you realize that you already know how much sleep you get or don’t get and quantifying that isn’t terribly helpful.

Winner: Pebble. No damn contest.

Also: I hooked up the PS3 yesterday, and The Last of Us, or at least the first couple of hours of it, is fucking amazing; if it keeps up this level of excellence it will be easily worth the cost of the system. Since I also got a code for a free month of PlayStation Plus, and can therefore get Shadows of the Colossus for free (I’ve never played it; something I’ve been wanting to fix for years) I think I can safely feel good about this purchase even before getting to the Batman game, which I won’t like as much as many others have but will be well worth the initial cost of free.

See, I’m not negative all the time!