Casual - Justin Foell

At my work we have a thing about giving tacos (🌮) to people when they help you out, do something great or funny – as a show of support. The tacos can be redeemed for prizes or gift cards – and one of those prizes is a Fitbit. I wanted a model upgrade from the ones our company was offering. In November 2020, Costco had a Fitbit Charge 4 bundle for $90.

I brokered a deal with my wife. I’d redeem a $100 Amazon gift card with my tacos and give it to her, and then buy the model I want from Costco.

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Built-in GPS

The reason I got the Charge 4 is because it has a built-in GPS. I don’t like using my phone to record my activities as it drains the battery very quickly. Also my handheld Garmin eTrex Vista GPS is starting to act weird – it randomly turns off sometimes when I’m riding.

Hooking it up to Strava was simple, I did it through the https://strava.fitbit.com/ website. Here’s an article that goes into detail about connecting the two. When you finish an activity, Fitbit automatically transfers the information via the app (including GPS track) to Strava. As a bonus now my heart rate information is sent for more accurate effort calculation.

Battery Life

Since I considered GPS to be a requirement, this is the 2nd best feature. It would be a folly to call it charge if the battery life sucked. Without GPS use, I can easily go a week before putting it on the charger. With GPS use, I’ve found it takes about 10% of the battery for every hour you’re recording activity. By that marker, I’d guess you could use the GPS for 9+ hours before it conked out.

Sleep Tracking

All fitness trackers can track sleep. Along with a great battery life, the Charge 4 charges quickly. Putting it on the charger while I take a shower is enough to keep it topped up. I don’t ever have to take it off for a night to get a full charge.

Water Resistant 50 Meters

I always would put my phone in a ziplock bag while kayaking and still worry that it will make it’s way to the bottom of the lake. Fitbit says you can wear your tracker or smartwatch in the shower, pool and beyond. That should be just fine for kayaking – it will get wet, but it will survive.

Those are the good things, now onto some of the annoyances…

UI Issues

The swipe functions don’t always work as expected, partly because the screen is small, partly because the screen is very tall and skinny.

The most common issue is when I swipe down from the top to get the notification list (to inevitably clear it out). The Charge often thinks I’m swiping to the side because I didn’t swipe perfectly vertical top to bottom.

Another thing I do occasionally is leave the home screen on the weather. It will stay here until you press the watch button – so the next time you wake the screen you can see the weather. You’ll still get notifications on these secondary screens, but once they go away you cannot swipe down to see them again – you must go back to the home screen (clock) and swipe down from there.

Multiple Activities

I realize this is probably an edge case, but I imagine I’m not the only one experiencing this issue. The Charge 4 currently can’t pause one activity and start another. Here’s the scenario: I put studded tires on my bike and rode to the local nature center:

Elapsed Time	Moving Time	Distance	Average Speed	Max Speed	Elevation Gain	Calories Burned
01:13:37 hours	00:10:20 hours	1.04 mi.	6.04 mph	8.72 mph	61.35 ft.	118 kcal

Put the studded tires on and rode to a trail nearby for some snowshoeing

I brought my snowshoes with me, and when I got to the trail, I walked around the park. On the Charge 4 you can pause and resume your activity. This is great if I bike somewhere like the library, I can pause my ride when I arrive, and resume once I head home – then it records as a single activity.

But you can’t start another GPS activity until you finish the first one. Rather than my activity showing up as three (ride out, hike, ride back) I want them to appear simply as two: bike & snowshoe.

So I used my trusty(?) Garmin for the hike and hoped it didn’t turn off on me while I was out.

Elapsed Time	Moving Time	Distance	Average Speed	Max Speed	Elevation Gain	Calories Burned
00:57:56 hours	00:13:30 hours	0.43 mi.	31:07 min/mile	12:46 min/mile	27.23 ft.	29 kcal

Went to Innsbruck Nature Center… Honestly didn't need snowshoes – the trail was already hard-packed from hikers. Was good to venture off of the trail however. Tested out my SCX24 RC Crawler 😎

Verdict?

I looked at getting the cheapish Apple Watch for around $150 and also looked at the new Fitbit Versa 3. While they both have built-in GPS, neither of them were going to match the battery life of the Charge. If it goes on sale again for < $100 I would easily recommend it to anyone looking at a fitness watch – especially for tracking bike rides.

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Every year, we put some sort of motorized conveyance under the tree. In the past it’s been an HO scale train or slot cars from my childhood. While I like the nostalgia of them, let’s face it – I’m old which means they’re old. So they’re a little finicky to get working well. Still fun, but this year I wanted to try something new. I’ve always wanted to have an indoor model train layout, but since we don’t have room I turned my thoughts to doing an outdoor layout

But that always seemed extremely expensive. Then a couple ideas came together for me: 1) my #1 Christmas gift item is a 1/24 scale crawler – Axial’s SCX24 and 2) I found a G-scale train set for less than $50. Continue reading →

TL;DR? Don’t read the comments – they’re taking over the internet (and our lives).

Throwing the previous generation under the bus is a major generalization but – OK boomer – hold my beer.

Anonymous Trolling 1990s-2000s

Back in the day if you wanted to start a flame-war or express your true inner ugliness, you did it anonymously or with an unrecognizable internet handle. If you couldn’t comment anonymously, you registered your username as AssClown69 and went about your business.

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One of the most prolific places for public trolling “locally” for me was our local papers. The Pioneer Press website, which publishes online under the misleading domain TwinCities.com, and the Star Tribune site.

The Pioneer Press has gone through a variety of commenting systems. The changes were made to both better monetize all the eyes on their popular comments pages and to (possibly?) help filter some of the “rageaholics”. One ramification of switching commenting systems is that all of the comments (both good and bad) on older stories have been cleansed from their website.

Both papers have wrestled with moderating comments and they’re not alone, this 2009 article highlights some of the steps several local publications were taking:

Newspapers take renewed aim at the comment cesspool

The articles about newspapers trying to wrangle the comment cesspool were published in 2008 and 2009. Meanwhile something else was going on…

Boomers adopt social media

Between 2008 and 2010 social media users climbed 30% for people aged 50-64. It went from a paltry 7% to 37% – over a third of all boomers created accounts, presumably to comment on their grandchildren’s photos. But then they found other places to comment.

With the rise in popularity and adoption of Facebook, several publications switched to Facebook-powered comments. Would the comments section calm down?

Now people would be commenting with their actual, legal full name and possibly an actual picture of their face! As some Pioneer Press and Star Tribune readers lamented, would there be “no fun” in the comments anymore?

Boomers connect

The generation that outnumbered and overpowered their parents from the Greatest Generation was now online in social media. The have anything you want generation turned into the say anything you feel generation.

The early internet trolls, which were seen as fringe zealots – hiding anonymously behind their clever username – were now joined by a majority of boomers.

You know those boomers who would look both ways before telling you a racist joke – they’re now empowered with social media. Anonymity didn’t matter anymore, as long as they could avoid the in-person confrontation. They could spew their hate from the comfort of their keyboard, or more conveniently, from their phone.

They forgot that anything they posted would be recorded on the internet forever.

In 2015, the comments on the Star Tribune go so bad that CenturyLink, an internet service provider, blocked comments from StarTribune.com to their subscribers.

This This American Life episode (also from 2015) about commenting online doesn’t paint a prettier picture.

Thus began a no holds barred approach to commenting on all platforms. On Twitter (which is a dumpster fire onto itself) there’s an account called Best of Nextdoor which highlights the vitriol from Nextdoor.com. How meta.

Nextdoor is a fantastic place to bully your neighbors about issues you don’t want to talk about in-person. Never mind that you’re doing this all under your legal name and also your address. 🤦

Boomers conspire

Social media also has had a dangerous leveling effect where pseudo science and opinion can have as great of an influence as actual science and facts.

In a modern age when a flat-earth theory should be considered ridiculous, we’ve instead given that fringe a better way to connect and fuel their own fire. QAnon was started by an anonymous post on 4Chan – an image site that was dedicated to photochops and memes! Where is the credibility in that? It has baseless conspiracy theory written all over it.

Now it seems that parents ~~who do drugs have kids who do drugs~~ who believe in conspiracy theories have kids who believe in conspiracy theories.

The fact that I am referencing BuzzFeed (because mainstream news are avoiding QAnon like the non-news it is) is bonkers.

A double-whammy

I’m not sure if there is a way out. One mainstream technology pushed by Google called Accellerated Mobile Pages (AMP) has been used proactively to create fake news. It’s like a combination of Phishing and Internet Trolling in one package – make something look official and few will question it – especially if they get their news from Facebook.

I build websites using WordPress professionally, and the mission of WordPress has been to democratize publishing. I can’t help but wonder how many of those fake news sites were produced using WordPress & AMP – it’s terribly easy to set up.

How do you see it going? It doesn’t seem to be getting any better from my vantage point 😞

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On carpet tracks, the owners are very particular about what traction compound you’re allowed to use. Rightly so as the tire rubber and compound ultimately work their way into the (expensive) carpet. On dirt and clay it’s not as regulated for club racing because it’s just dirt! This has unintended consequences… One popular “tire sauce” is liquid wrench. You can even find it listed on the pros setup sheets. While I admire the inventiveness, take a look at the Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS). With warnings like Use only outdoors or in a well-ventilated area and Causes skin irritation, it makes you wonder if there’s a better way. When using liquid wrench I would wear nitrite gloves to make sure it’s not soaking into my skin. Wearing gloves for tire chemical treatment is generally a good idea, but if I can also avoid irritating fumes, even better. Continue reading →

My wife got me this hard cider kit from Brooklyn BrewShop for Christmas:

Unfortunately apple cider was very out of season at the time. As we get back into the height of cider season, I want to tell you how easy it is to make hard cider with three (3!) ingredients and have it ready to drink in about a month.

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Equipment

The Brooklyn BrewShop kit is an easy single fermentation kit that contains a gallon jug, airlock, siphon, sanitizer, and enough yeast to make three batches.

The only other thing you’ll need are bottles. I like the swing-top E-Z Cap bottles. You can get them at your local brew shop.

Ingredients

Like I said, this is super-simple, there are only three ingredients:

Apple Cider with no preservatives (no potassium sorbate or sodium benzoate)
Champagne Yeast – the kit includes 3 packets of Red Star Premier Cuvee yeast
Honey or Fizz Drops from your local brew store

The Cider

Finding apple cider with no preservatives can be tricky. I’ve noticed that almost all ciders use it. Luckily, the SugarBee brand, which is available at my local grocery store, contains no preservatives. And it makes fantastic hard cider!

Brewing

Brewing is as simple as pouring in room-temperature cider and adding yeast. You should follow the kit instructions to make sure your equipment is sanitized. But it’s really as easy as pouring in a gallon of cider and a packet of yeast.

Put the airlock on and set a reminder for two weeks later. Maybe give the bottle a light shake after a week to re-activate any live yeasts that have settled to the bottom.

Bottling

After two to three weeks of fermentation, we’re ready to bottle. During bottling, we want to make sure a majority of the yeast stays on the bottom and doesn’t get transferred during the bottling process. You should be carefully moving around your fermenter to keep things settled.

Before bottling, we need to decide how you’re going to add the priming sugar – are you using honey or fizz drops? If you’re using honey, follow the instructions and heat it with water. Then you need to combine it with the cider.

Since you don’t want to stir the cider in the fermenting vessel and get all the yeast off the bottom, you either have to:

Siphon the cider into a sanitized bucket or pot and combine with the priming sugar OR
Put equal amounts of priming sugar into your bottles.

If you’re using fizz drops, just add a drop to each bottle for 12-16oz bottles – the E-Z Cap bottles I like are 16oz, and a gallon of cider fills eight (8) of these.

Either way, watch this video on How to Bottle to get used to their simple (but effective) siphon:

I suggest following their instructions by trying out the siphon with some water first. It goes fast, so you’ll want to know how it works before spilling your precious cider (that you’ve waited weeks for) onto the floor, making a huge sticky mess.

Pro-tip:
I like to keep the jug or bucket on the counter and put my bottles on the dishwasher door while it’s open. That gives me the elevation I need for the siphon to work, and if I spill it will stay in the door, and go down the drain once I close the door when I’m done.

Bottle Conditioning and… drinking!

Leave the bottles condition at room temperature for two weeks. I like to put my E-Z Cap bottles back in the box they came in. The box will make sure no UV light gets to our cider, which can impart off flavors.

After two weeks I put one bottle in the fridge to test drink. I’ve never had to condition longer than two weeks, but in the spirit of science we must test! Once I’ve verified that the carbonation is good, I put them all in the fridge to prevent further fermentation (which can lead to explosion).

When you pour, go slowly and use the shoulder of the bottle to trap sediment (excess yeast) before it goes into the glass. Alton Brown does a darn good pour here:

There it is, from the package to your glass in one month. It’s super-easy and has turned out great every time I’ve done it.

Have you found any other brands of no preservative cider you like? Let me know in the comments!

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Justin Foell

Technology, Bicycling, Hobbies, Kids, Life.

Category Archives: Casual

Fitbit Charge 4

Built-in GPS

Battery Life

Sleep Tracking

Water Resistant 50 Meters

UI Issues

Multiple Activities

Verdict?

1/24 Scale Christmas

Whatever happened to anonymous trolling?

Anonymous Trolling 1990s-2000s

Boomers adopt social media

Boomers connect

Boomers conspire

A double-whammy

TDK Traction Compound

Super Simple Hard Cider

Equipment

Ingredients

The Cider

Brewing

Bottling

Bottle Conditioning and… drinking!