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Aliens in the Sewer?

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Suunto PC Pod Review

Suunto PC Pod

The Suunto PC Pod is very small USB stick that allows the Suunto heart rate monitor range (T3C, T4C, and apparently the T6c) to wirelessly connect to your PC and connect to Suunto’s free Training Manager Lite software.

So what does it do exactly and how useful is it?

Having had the T4c for a few months now, I am completely head over heels about it. It has revolutionized the way I train vs just training blindly (but with tons of stats). As you may recall from my review, the T4c has a coach feature which adapts to your training style and recommends what you should be doing to improve.

Well, after you’re done logging all those exercises, you can either leave them on your watch, or you can offload them for further analysis. This is where the PC pod comes into play.

The Training Manager Lite software effectively allows you to keep all of your workouts organized and analyze them in far greater detail than you could in the watch. I have found that it is useful as a visualization tool and as and ongoing log of your activities. Whilst the software is important, I want to focus more on the PC pod itself as there are plenty of other review sites that cover the Suunto software vs the Polar Software vs the Garmin software.

What is worth noting is that the Suunto PC Pod is by far the easiest of all my heart rate monitors for data transfers. Unlike the Polar where I have to align the infrared lights to the USB stick (usually leading to at least one connection failure) the Suunto PC Pod connects wirelessly (via RF vs IrDA) to the watch. In addition, and by far the coolest feature of the PC pod is that because it uses the same protocol that the heart belt strap uses to talk to the watch, you can use it with the software to have a real time monitoring of your heart rate on your PC. In other words, you can use your PC as a heart rate monitor big screen. This is extremely useful if you are doing indoor cycling with a turbo trainer or anything where you want to see things ‘bigger’.

All in all, I think it is a pretty nifty product, it hasn’t let me down yet connectivity-wise, and I’ve been using it to download all my exercises from my T4c for further analysis and logging.

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• Suunto T1C heart rate monitor review (chromewalker.com)
• Polar RS400 Review : A mega heart rate monitor for the new year’s resolutions (chromewalker.com)
• Zagg InvisibleShield Review (chromewalker.com)
• Suunto T4c Review - A heart rate monitor with a coach inside (chromewalker.com)

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Mophie Juice Pack Air for iPhone - OK, but Fragile

Busted...

The Mophie Juice Pack Air is a great product in concept.

With the iPhone 3.0 Software and the ability to play some serious games, listen to music via Bluetooth headphones, and do more imaging, the appeal of a larger battery was very high for me. Not only that, I usually found myself in situations where my battery would die mid-day due to excessive twittering and emailing when travelling.

The Mophie seemed like the ideal solution.. why? well it effectively hugs your phone and provides you with a whole days worth of battery life in addition to the built in one. However, it is fragile. As you can see from the picture… 3 days from purchase and the top bit broke whilst trying to remove it.

To cut to the chase, here are my conclusions on this product:

1. Battery life is extended as if the phone had two batteries of the same size. Roughly what this converts to is that the battery pack dies around 6pm and my iPhone’s battery kicks in. This is under heavy use. not bad, not as good as I hoped.
2. Charging and synching is done via a micro-USB cable, which although somewhat standard, isn’t as standars as mini-usb (or did I get it the other way around). Anyway, point being, it isn’t the standard version that almost all consumer electronics use. The nice thing is that you can tell when it is charging via the LED, which also tell you the state of charge when it is discharging.
3. The top bit is very difficult to remove (and you will need to remove it occassionally, for me it was when I needed to transport the phone at night (when you want less bulk in your pockets).  My top bit broke when I was trying to remove it this morning.
4. Bulk is part of what you expect for an extended battery, and frankly, I didn’t mind it. It made the phone more ergonomic.

Would I recommend the product? Probably not. I like the idea, and it behaves better than some of the other charging solutions out there that protrude from the iPhone, but the quality of this one is just not up to spec. I would perhaps consider their normal Juice Pack. Seems at least like it has less moving parts and more battery.

Update: Just found the replacement top part for the Juice Pack on Mophie’s site. Seems to me like they know this is going to happen. Bummer. Good (that they offer replacement) but Bad (that it breaks in the first place): http://tr.im/oVDt

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• Mophie Juicepack Air Is Thinnest iPhone Battery Extender Yet [IPhone] (i.gizmodo.com)
• Mophie Juice Pack Air is lighter, thinner (everyjoe.com)
• Mophie Juice Pack Air for the iPhone 3G up for pre-order (crunchgear.com)
• Win a Mophie Juice Pack Air battery for your iPhone 3G! (phonemag.com)
• Review: Mophie iPhone 3G Juice Pack air (crunchgear.com)

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Great video of imaginative use for iPhone accelerometer - iSamurai

If you can’t see the video, go to the following link:

iSamurai Demo

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Interesting Cycling Links & Reviews

Just a few interesting cycling links that I’ve read recently:

1) A review of the Polar RS800CX Pro Team Edition

http://www.pezcyclingnews.com/?pg=fullstory&id=7159

2) A comparison of different wheels and their aero vs inertia capabilities

http://www.rouesartisanales.over-blog.com/article-4934445.html

3) A site that highlights lightweight Bikes

http://www.light-bikes.com/BikeGallery/

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• Natty bikewear (blogs.reuters.com)
• Some common causes of bicycle traffic accidents, and how to avoid them (bjsmith.wordpress.com)

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Star Trek Bloopers

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Life after Death and the Future of Avatars

I recently saw the new Caprica TV Show / Movie and was struck by how much they had borrowed the concept of the avatar from the book ‘The Seeker’ where the crew of the space vessel used the avatars of dead people to interact with them.

The premise  is simple:

During your life you create a digital footprint. This footprint is made up of pictures, videos, twitter posts, facebook posts and comments, digg reviews, rented movies via netflix, purchased gadget via Amazon, books read, blogs favorited via google reader, comments left on blogs, etc. This digital footprint could, in theory, be so complete, that perhaps an artificial intelligence engince could extrapolate what the real person would say or do, and hence, the theory of avatars for life after death was born.

<Caprica spoiler>

In “Caprica”, the lead female character dies in an explosion. She had left a virtual character , an avatar, of herself in a game she played with her friends, after her death, her father discovers this avatar and then tries to download it into a new ‘body’ effectively resuscitating his daughter.

</Caprica Spoiler>

In another book, “Altered Carbon”, the concept comes up in a different way, in that people can be ’sleeved’ from body to body, but having their ‘core’ transferred. With the inclusion of ‘avatar data’ you could perhaps even re-sleeve someone that was long dead.

So, in the future, will we be capable of extending the life of someone like Einstein? Perhaps giving them immortality? Although I’m not sure I can say that the sleeving process is one that is feasible, I wouldn’t doubt it if not too far in the future you would be able to ‘guess’ what someone might say or do in a given context if an AI program would use the data collected from the Internet about that person. After all, we all do it to some extent when see what a person’s style is like after reading several of their posts on Twitter, for example. Additionally, reconstructing an avatar to speak about one subject of interest I think will be easier than taking the avatar concept to the point where the whole randomness of a being’s consciousness could be replicated for complete interaction.

Anyway, I was amused to see the concept being used again and again… kind of what like precedes the invention of many new technologies. To quote the song from Highlander: “Who wants to live forever?”

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