[Sun Feb 26 17:06:32 CST 2017]

I recently ran into some issues with Samsung S Health, the default health app that comes with the Samsung Galaxy smartphones. For whatever reason, it stopped working with the sensor, so it couldn't recognize when I was walking and count my steps. After struggling with it for a while, I decided to give Google Fit a try. To my surprise, although this other app does have most of the basic functions, it is not nearly as complete as S Health. Instead, it relies on other apps that can hook onto it. However, as far as I could see after trying a few of those apps, most of them just include some basic functionality and then try to convince you to do in-app purchases to move on from there. Not what I was looking for. In any case, one of these apps that I tried was Sleep as Android. Don't get me wrong. The app is cool and all. However, it sucks battery as if there is no tomorrow. You'd better make sure you only run it while the phone is recharging. In other words, quite useless whenever I'm camping outdoors (not to talk about how extremely wasteful it is to suck so much energy just to keep track of your sleep).

Anyways, all this got me thinking if any of this truly makes any sense. I mean, the whole craze over the quantified self. Sure, I can see how it could be very useful in certain cases (athletes, people with certain medical problems, perhaps even the elderly...), but do I truly care about measuring myself all day (or night) long? After all, even though I've been collecting this data for quite some time now, for the most part I never bother to check the long-term history or anything. As long as I sleep my 8 hours (that's what I need to feel relaxed) and walk (or exercise) enough, what do I care? Does it truly make a difference if the average amount of steps I walk is 11,235 or 14,769? I can see how the companies behind this software do have an interest in accessing my data (as they do), but do I truly care that much? As far as I remember, I was perfectly able to live my life without any of this just a few years ago. {link to this entry}

[Thu Feb 16 15:46:15 CST 2017]

Here is a cool website. Radio Garden allows you to listen to radio stations around the world live. The interface is quite simple to use too. Simply rotate the globe, zoom in, zoom out, and pick your location. {link to this entry}

[Thu Feb 16 15:35:53 CST 2017]

Yesterday, El País had a news piece about the return of the old Nokia 3310 cell phone (in Spanish) that I found quite interesting. So, it looks as if an increasing amount of people are feeling sick and tired of the new smartphones and the levels of stress associated to a life where one is constantly available to others and being interrupted by a beep here, a message there (not to talk about the feeling that one always has to check the latest news, the latest Facebook post, or the latest Twitter utterance). So, as a reaction to all this, they are seriously considering a return to old cell phone models that still allow them to easily make (or receive) a phone call wherever they are without all the other problems. There is even something called a Light Phone! Luddites of the world, unite! {link to this entry}

[Fri Feb 10 11:48:13 CST 2017]

For some reason, I had to build and install the latest version of OpenConnect on my laptop running Debian stable (jessie). Basically, I need to use the --protocol option, which is not available in older versions. After downloading the bits from their website, I had to use the following options to get it to build:

# ./configure --prefix=/usr/local --with-vpnc-script=/usr/share/vpnc-scripts/vpnc-script \
--without-openssl-version-check

Notice that Debian jessie installs the vpnc-script file in a location other than the one the configure script is looking for. Hence the option. I also had to turn off the OpenSSL check to build. An alternative, apparently, was to build with GnuTLS, but I didn't try that. In any case, running make check after building passed all the tests just fine. {link to this entry}

[Thu Feb 9 09:51:40 CST 2017]

Here is an interesting video on the concept of virtual reality and what it may look like in the not so distant future:

{link to this entry}