Nov 14

Fitness apps for Android with Polar HRM compatibility

It’s late 2012.

Given the obesity epidemic here, (and more to the point, in the US), you would think that there would be a glut of fitness apps for your phone that worked with a chestband (or armband) heart rate sensor.

But no, there’s really not too many.

And not many reviews, either, so I’ll test them for you and write them up here :-)

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Jan 16

Moving to Gmail? A first look @ Postbox

I’ve been an Outlook/Exchange user for years. Plenty of years. A couple of years ago I used Gmail for a year, and I really didn’t like it much at all, as it was seriously underpowered for professional use, but my hosted exchange had gone walkabout. (I kept getting promised it was “almost there”, so I kept hanging on waiting for it. Silly of me.)

But a hosted Exchange server is expensive ($250/year expensive), and Gmail has apparently improved, so it’s time to investigate a move.

However, I’ve still got a major problem with Gmail – I really don’t like doing email in a browser at all, which is a bit of a problem given Gmail is built around the browser.

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Oct 31

New computer build speeds

Shot a media conference yesterday with a mate, and it was good to see a bunch of people I hadn’t seen since I finished my AFL job in February.

Shot the 1D and the 1Ds – images HERE.

It was somewhat dim, with just some light through a side window – shot the 85/1.2 @ 1.2 at about 1000 ISO (1Ds), and the 70-200 @ 2000 ISO. (I had the Quadras with me, as we’d shot some headshots of the bloke being announced an hour before the presser so they could use them in the media release, but had forgotten to take a 550. Sigh.)

Anyway, got them back here and ingested them

44 1Dsmk3 images
48 seconds to ingest
86 seconds to render 1:1 (1.95s/image)
2:14 total

31 1DmkIII images
26 seconds to ingest
44 seconds to render 1:1 (1.42s/image)
1:10 total

Those timings don’t make much sense, but that’s what I measured.

But the real saving is when processing – everything happens instantly, no lagging, and it speeds things up immensely.

Also, I exported some 640px long-side images for my food blog, and I told it to export eight images to the HDD, then turned away to look at my email in the second monitor. It pinged, and I looked back to see what the error was. No error, just finished…