Farcebook

Tag: Fitbit

  • DofE 2024

    DofE 2024

    Where I probably walked more miles than the children, and everyone got very very muddy.

    Last weekend was the annual Duke of Edinburgh silver expedition, and once again I was herding children around the Yorkshire Dales. There wasn’t any snow this year, but it was raining and there was plenty of boot-sucking mud.

    Normally I spend the weekend bored, sat in a car watching kids roam the countryside using a Spot tracker in each groups’ bags.

    This year, they decided they wanted to go off-piste and discover the wilderness by themselves. And I got to do my steps stomping about trying to find them.

    Some of these miles were earned simply walking around the campsites, or trekking off from a convenient carpark to find a path junction where I’d planned to meet the kids. You can do a lot of steps if your toilet is a five minute walk away. It kind of shows how sitting still at your desk really isn’t a healthy lifestyle. You don’t need to stride off across the countryside to get some exercise, just put things out of arms reach so you have to get up and move a bit more.

    You also see some quite amusing things on your wanderings. I wonder what the story behind this road sign is…

    These lot probably know… They know everything. They’re probably reading this blog post right now.

  • DofE 2023

    DofE 2023

    It’s late April which means once again I enter the national cat-herding competition. The challenge – set 13 students off on three days of camping and walking to complete their silver Duke of Edinburgh.

    Since this is no longer the 1980s and simply kicking kids out of a minibus and saying “see you on Sunday” is frowned upon things are more precise and organised.

    We kick the kids out the minibus with a GPS tracker in their bag and say “see you at the camp!” instead. We then follow them about the countryside using the GPS trackers to see where they’re going and checkpoints to .

    If the trackers can’t get a signal or our phones have no mobile broadband we then start having to do it old school, predicting how far along their routes they are and finding the closest road to that point to go and wait.

    The kids think it’s magic that we just appear seemingly from nowhere. I appear to have perfected the art of arriving at a checkpoint exactly as they do. Almost like I’ve been sat in my car just the other side of a wall waiting, looking at the trackers. Although sometimes it is just good timing and coincidence.

    Risk assessment – Risk: Students might get lost. Mitigation: Watch students with tracker, drive around country lanes like a local trying to catch them when they go off course.

    Risk: Tracker doesn’t work. Mitigation: Estimate where they probably are, go a bit further along, begin a determined Fitbit pleasing route march/jog up the route until you meet them. This never works, but does guarantee that once you’re about 10 minutes from your car the tracker does update and the kids are stood by your car looking puzzled.

    This is a spring/summer activity, so obviously it was snowing on the practise expedition wasn’t it.

  • According to Fitbit, gardening is cycling

    According to Fitbit, gardening is cycling

    One of FitBit’s more useful features is its ability to automatically detect exercise. I think it uses a combination of your heart rate and how the device is moving.

    The pattern of motion and heart rates must be categorised by FitBit so the app can tell the difference between “swimming” and “running”, etc.

    It’s not a precise system though. Yesterday I went skating for a few hours, and then spent the afternoon working on my allotment.

    I can see how walking and skating are similar. They both take relatively low amounts of effort and have a rhythmic stepping pattern.

    Gardening and cycling though don’t seem that similar. Then I remembered I spent a while using my awesome battery powered rotavator to turn over some of the ground, and I guess the shaking of my arms and the effort of trying to stop the thing escaping looks a bit similar to a bike rolling along a dirt track.

    This is a bike now. Probably not comfortable to sit on!
  • “Good” Morning?

    “Good” Morning?

    I sleep with my FitBit on. Every morning it tells me how well I slept. For those with other devices (or none!) the way this works is by monitoring my heart rate, motion and blood oxygen level. It then does some magical maths to arrive at a score out of 100.

    In FitBit land, a score of “80” means you had a “Good” night’s sleep. In the real world, 80 is not a good night’s sleep. Ever woken feeling like someone filled your head with sawdust and you put the kettle in the fridge? Yeah that’s 80.

    Supposedly I also sound like a warthog that’s being strangled. FitBit doesn’t tell me this, my other half does.

    So I did some Googling and amongst all the snake oil quack medicine websites out there, and websites for apps trying to sell you a subscription to their dubious systems I found the good old NHS website.

    Feed it your height and weight, it spits out “you are overweight, lose five kilos”. It also shows you a free app you can use to help with that. I probably should cut out the excessive sweet things, and I’m quite sure if I went to the doctors about this their first advice would be “get more exercise, lose some weight”.

    That doesn’t solve the bit where I feel like death in the morning though. It might do in six months, but not tomorrow night. One website I found did mention propping yourself up on pillows. It also recommended stupid things like sticking a tennis ball to your back – the snoring happens when I roll on my back. I’m not taping a tennis ball to myself every night. I’ll forget to take it off and go to work looking strange.

    I can use more pillows though. It was a bit weird the first night, but last night seemed more comfortable. And also reports of their being a warthog in the house have gone down.

    I feel less like I’ve been resurrected against my will too (this is why zombies are angry, they were woken up too early) and my mouth doesn’t feel like the cats have used it as a litter tray, so maybe it spent most of the night closed.

    Further testing will continue. I have apps that collect data and make graphs.

  • New Year’s Resolutions

    The normal gag is to say “1080p” or “4k”, but I think I’ll go for a nice plain VGA. Nothing too ambitious, something I will actually manage to achieve.

    Let’s make the challenge for this year “being more healthy”. I do a lot of sitting down in front of computers, or in front of the telly. I also do a lot of eating of things that are possibly not the best for you. I should probably do less of both.

    In an attempt at making this so easy I can’t fail, I’ve gone and bought a treadmill. It’s in my house, it’s not piled with junk being a bad table. All I have to do is switch it on and be a human hamster.

    I just need something to distract me from the mind-numbing boredom of staring at the wall. I’m not quite invested enough in it yet to pay for one of those game based apps, but before Christmas I was using it while watching YouTube and that seems to work.

    I’ve found I get bored after half an hour though. I can force myself to do an hour, but it’s not fun in the slightest, it is a proper endurance thing – and not an endurance thing physically, it appears I can walk at a brisk 6k/hr with no effort. The endurance is all mental. Its. Just. So. Boring.

    I’m not running on my treadmill though, I like my knees and also it’s upstairs and I don’t want to annoy next door. Treadmills are a bit thuddy when you get going.

    As far as eating better things, I’m making an effort to eat veg at least once a day and to fill myself up on things like beans, potatoes and rice so that when I see the tasty looking chocolate bar in the cupboard I’m less likely to eat it on my way back to the living room.

    I’m not going to count how many calories go in my mouth though, that gets a bit obsessive and you end up filling your phone with apps that just want to sell you subscriptions to health plans. I’ve got a fitbit, I’ll put numbers that it tells me in here occasionally.