… that each time she turns on the TV, I see either politicians, or cops in a series. Seems we Germans love to be ruled and punished…
Half a year. Two million steps.
On January 9th this year I’ve bought that little step counter, and one day after that, which is now half a year ago, I installed Gadgetbridge on my phone to keep track of everything without sending all my data into anyone’s cloud. The first days I more or less played around with the software to see what it could do, and in the beginning I wasn’t sure how many steps a day would make sense, so I started reading about that. I started with some 6000 steps a day which was the default setting on the device makers’ software, corrected that to 8000 steps a day later which was recommended as the perfect in-between measure for the 60+ year generation. But end of January, I finally settled on a daily minimum of 10000 steps.
And I kept that minimum since 164 days now, so my grand total since I installed the counting software is now a bit more than two million steps, or with my average step length of 75cm, around 1500km:
So in case someone wants to follow that example, expect to have some 4 million steps after the first year – if you can keep up and do this every day of course. And if you look at my last blog post, I think I’ll add some kilometers on a bicycle to that as well.
Anyway, and like always: thanks for reading.
Links from Wednesday, July 3rd, 2024
Our “Tagesschau Online” has a wonderful feature of Larry, Chief Mouser of Downing Street 10 today. And they also inform us that from today, those plastic caps on bottles *have to* be fixed (instead of avoiding plastics at all).
Hessenschau reports about a rental company who has to pay a ticket for a falsely parked e-scooter.
And the Kontext:Wochenzeitung from Stuttgart writes about an Italian company whose workers took over since about three years now, still fighting for justice, and against vulture capitalism. The same magazine has a peace speech from 85 year old pastor Paul Schobel.
Thanks for reading (if you speak German or are willing to have those texts translated).
Edit:
And before I forget it, here’s one more. The current Tour de France bicycle race reminded me that I finally want to buy a bicycle helmet. My wife & daughter both wear theirs since – like – forever; I was the only silly one refusing to ever consider one of those life saving tools until now. And I’ve found a video from “Anke is awesome” which I found both funny *and* informative, even if she’s advertising a bit too much for my taste. Still well done, so thanks Anke! Now at least I know more about “Mips” 😉 And to save Anke’s reputation, she writes in her video notes: “Loudly presented by @anke_is_awesome Surprisingly supported by Specialized, Rapha, Shimano, Bike Components, Oakley, Fidlock, Ortlieb, Komoot und Wahoo Spread by Gran Fondo Cycling Magazine und Bergwelten Magazin”
What is wrong with you people?
Just read this in a review of a computer game:
“…you’ll never fail to smile when it clicks and you start smashing skulls and landing final blows”
No wonder that our world is as f’d up as it is, if “smashing skulls” is considered as fun… and no, I won’t even link to that article.
Youtube is messing around with ad-blockers again
Time to consider some alternatives, isn’t it? Have a look:
Here’s an example of some cool music which you also can find on federated networks (another Peertube instance):
Even if all you want is to host some audio content, there’s for instance Funkwhale which was shown in the first of these two videos. Have a look at them.
I’m really considering of moving all my Youtube stuff over to Peertube, so that viewers don’t have to watch ads which I cannot prevent. Time to stop all of this nonsense.
Like always, thanks for reading and viewing.
An excellent comment on the problems with the so-called “Artificial Intelligence”
Read Liam’s take on The Register before considering to even use something called “A.I.”
Some pictures and thoughts, end of March 2024
Okay, only one picture of the cat this time, a black & white one again, with her sitting outside on our veranda:
Bella, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2023
This month I got into a cat fight again, for the second time, and also for the second time I’ve got some marks to show. The first time was in the beginning of this year when the neighbours’ cat bit me in the foot, this time it was Bella who was scared enough to really bite my hand. “Only a scratch” I thought after the bleeding stopped, but then the hand got swollen, and I had to see the doctor to get another tetanus shot (after 20+ years), and had to take antibiotics until yesterday. This is what my hand looked like after my second visit to the doc, taken with my mobile phone:
It’s much better already, but like my wife said, that should probably teach me a lesson… 😉
Other than that, I still walk and have my little step counter on while doing so. And Gadgetbridge gets better and better and with each version it supports the device a little more. I started playing around with the software in January, but since end of January I also set my goal to 10,000 steps a day, which I’ve kept since then. This is from two days ago:
Not a miss since 60 days, and a total of some 800,000 steps since I use this software, which with a step length of pretty much exactly 75cm translates to 600km until now.
Not as much as Andersen’s Knud (from his “Under the willow tree” or in German “Unter dem Weidenbaum”) who went from Kjöge (near Køge in Denmark) all the way to Nürnberg and Milano and half way back) but seeing a radius of 600km from our place still makes me kind of proud:
If there would be a straight way to walk, I would have reached Vienna by now (Aaahh, Vienna, that reminds me of Billy Joel’s famous song about it – read the story here or listen to the original here).
Or I would be short before Genova by now, or – if you’d grant me a ferry ride since I can’t yet walk on the water – London. Pretty cool thought. So I’ll keep walking (Billy Joel has more songs about cool places, how about “Zanzibar” for instance? And yes, I know that he probably didn’t mean the island in this song, but still) 😉
Anyway, in case you’re a Christian I wish you Happy Easter, and in case you’re Muslims then Happy Ramadan instead. For all others, like always, have fun, and thanks for dropping by and reading.
Some pictures and thoughts, end of February 2024
So it’s a leap year again, and today is the leap day. Cool for those who are born on that day, they don’t age that fast 😉 Anyway, here are some photos of our cat, in the order that I took them during the month:
In other news, this month was also my birthday. And I’ve got a nice surprise present: the latest novel from Haruki Murakami. Cool; many thanks again! It’s wonderful like most of his work.
And since I have more or less everything I need, I didn’t have a real wish list – but also got a Raspberry Pi 5 which I used to set up with a Pi-Hole DNS sink / ad blocker / tracker blocker and a Wireguard PiVPN for the family already. The load (like in top) with that software installed and running is still 0-0-0, which means the machine is just yawning about these tasks, let’s see what else we can do with it. Cool little machine, the CPU is an ARM one like in your typical mobile phone (but 4 cores instead of 8 or more).
Also got the latest updates of Gadgetbridge on my phone which keeps getting better and better together with Xiaomi’s Smart Band 8.
Anyway, and as always, thanks for reading and viewing.
And the best (and most secure) phone is…
No – this is no “best of” list like you find them everywhere, with 10 or more randomly chosen products and “affiliate links” to big online stores. This post is about security, because that’s what matters, not how great a product looks and feels in your hands, or how nice the photos are which can be made with their cameras, or all the new(ish) “AI” stuff built into them.
Since a few years now, arm – together with Google – are developing something they’ve called “Memory Tagging Extensions”, or short: MTE. That’s a mitigation against 0-day-exploits, and thus, important. The arm developers explain it on their blog, and you can also read their white paper about it in case you’d like to know what it is and how it works.
And now you can actually buy the first product which has that built in – and it’s:
The Google Pixel 8 (and The Pixel 8 Pro)
And no, it’s not enabled by default yet (except if you run GrapheneOS instead of Google’s own version of Android), but if you don’t mind your phone to being run in “developer mode”, you can read how to enable it yourself on Google’s “Project Zero” blog.
No silver bullet, that’s right. But both the arm and Google’s developers are to be complimented about that, even the DevOps from GrapheneOS (and also DivestOS) do that – and recommend the Pixel 8 (or 8 Pro) above all other handsets. Security better than that of an iPhone, as was reported elsewhere (but that’s another topic).
Even if you own a Pixel 8 (/Pro) and do nothing, I’m sure that Google’s team are testing it, and that they will activate the feature per default with one of their next (monthly) updates. GrapheneOS, like I wrote above, does use it already, so that’s my OS of choice even on my older Pixel 6a (which doesn’t have MTE built into it, but I’ll still use that as long as it’s supported (July ’27 according to Google, and GrapheneOS supports it until then as well – after that I’d have to change it to DivestOS)).
Oh, and re: support cycles – for the Pixel 8, that’s 7 years, so even if it costs a bit more, I’d most probably choose that one over a Pixel 7a. Let’s see if the next phones (8a and newer) will also be supported that long. So another thing to applaud, and we should avoid waste and that that into account (and no, the “Fairphone” can’t compete on any level, even if that’s theoretically supported a bit longer).
Like always, thanks for reading.
First look: Xiaomi Smart Band 8
Yesterday I bought a fitness tracker. My wife and daughter both have one since long, and I started counting my steps when I first got an iPhone from the company, and later the used Google Pixel 4a from my wife. And while counting steps with a phone is good, and all that most people would probably need, I still also wanted those steps when I do *not* carry my phone, plus having a look at some other statistics like sleep tracking and so on.
Both Mitchie and Zuleikha (or Aki, which she prefers) are using FitBit devices. Mitchie lost her Charge 4 last year and got the Charge 5 soon afterwards, Aki has her Inspire 2 since about that time (or a bit earlier). But I didn’t want to go the Google route, and here’s why. Mike Kuketz, a German security consultant once mentioned an open source tracker software which doesn’t send every measurement to the big clouds for their analysis, so I was interested in that program called “Gadgetbridge” since a while. The best supported devices are those from Huami (aka Amazfit) and Xiaomi which use Huami’s “Zepp” app, but since the last update to Gadgetbridge, even some newer devices which use different protocols are supported – see here.
So my initial plan was to get a Xiaomi Smart Band 7 or an Amazfit Band 7, both of which originally use that Zepp app, and both being able to be used with Gadgetbridge instead. However, at our local electronics chain store, only the newer Xiaomi Smart Band 8 was offered, so I took that one instead. And to make matters short (or TL;DR in “modern” speech): no, I haven’t got it running with Gadgetbridge yet (support *is* still experimental), but I’m still glad I got this one, even tho it feels a bit strange to have a secure system like GrapheneOS, and then to install Xiaomi’s Mi Fitness software onto it – but in the long run, this will most probably change.
So what is it like? Well it counts my steps (and less than the free and open source “Paseo” software on the phone before, but it’s said to be pretty accurate), it also tracks my sleep, counts my heart beats, blood oxygen, and all that stuff – what most of these devices do. The Xiaomi software is pretty colourful, as are the hundreds of watch faces you can install with a single click. Here are some screenshots of the software running on my phone:
In case you want a comparison of some of these devices, here is a German one from FitForFun, and the guys from Heise’s Techstage had an almost similar result. But of course they don’t even think about using said devices with free and open source software, so choose wisely. Of the older generation (compatible with Zepp apps and such with Gadgetbridge, except the Huawei device), there’s also a nice video, also in German, here.
I will report more later, since I have the device more or less since a single day only, and this is my first one (although I can compare it to those FitBits, and to be honest, Aki was a bit jealous about that Goose watchface you could choose for mine)… 😉
Like always, thanks for reading.
Update, later on the same day:
Got Gadgetbridge working by now on the Pixel 6a (had tried it on the 3a before). And I’m still exploring it of course, but here’s a first screenshot from the phone:
So for the moment I’ll have deactivated Xiaomi’s app and this one active instead. Switched the battery usage from ‘Unrestricted’ to ‘Optimised’, because this doesn’t have to be active when I don’t want it to. So let’s see how this develops. But I’m glad that I’ve been successful.
And again, thanks for reading.