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the things I do outside are not workouts
Tuesday, August 12 2025
Throughout most of the day at work today I buffed and polished my "Noah's Ark" testing data backup program, eventually even adding a feature limiting how deep it goes as it recursively backs up related data.
My newly-discovered ease with building applications in C# with WinForms has me thinking I now have the skills necessary to implement something that has been percolating in my brain since at least December: building an application to replace the Arduino IDE (the "integrated development environment" where I write and edit microcontroller-targeted code). Instead of having a .ino file full of conditional branches executed at runtime based on the configuration (a system that has worked surprisingly well), I could store the configuration in the database and use that information to decide what code to include in the compilation. That would allow much more diversity of device behaviors, since the behavior for any one device would not have to be present in the runtime for all devices. It would also allow me to merge the codebases for decidedly-different variants, such as the SolArk Copilot (which has a fundamentally different polling system) into the ESP8266 Remote codebase. The application would allow me to easily switch between profiles for each device, allowing me to replace my current workflow, which is to manually overwrite the config.c file with different versions that I keep as text files in a special folder outside the Arduino project. In this way, I would be introducing workflow features present in a system like ESPHome, which changes what it compiles based on the contents of .YAML files. But, since ESPHome is not underpinned by any sort of database, it would be much more organized. It would also have a proper GUI.
When I got home from work today, I decided to test out a new smartwatch I'd recently bought on eBay for $50. Unlike $15 smartwatches I've bought in the past, this one seemed high quality, with a bright circular display using pixels too tiny to distinguish from one another and documentation that reads like it was written by someone who understands English. I'd bought it for one and only one feature: the ability to plot my hikes on a map using built-in GPS. This is something I've tried doing in the past using various apps on my phone, but the results have mostly been disappointing when they've worked at all. So I put the watch on before taking Charlotte for an all-trail (no bushwhacking) hike to see what it actually did. We went up the Farm Road to the Chamomile Headwaters Trail (Charlotte chased a deer along the way, though I calmly tried to convince her not to) and then took that to the Stick Trail and then back home. For the record, from the house to the Stick Trail via this route, the watch reported a distance of 0.75 miles. The complete circuit was about 1.4 miles.
Back at the house, I used a phone app called Fitbeing (I'd downloaded the wrong Fitbeing from the Google store on my first attempt!) to see the hike I'd just walked superimposed on a Google Map. The plot looked amazing, though for some reason the only way I could see to export the map was by "sharing" an .mp4 replay of a marker representing me moving along the track I'd laid down.
This showcases how ignorant appmakers believe their audiences to be, assuming they would have no use for a much pithier and computationally-useful list of GPS coordinates. I also find the exercise-centric attitude of the Fitbeing app repulsive; it categorizes maps of hikes as one of several activities possible under "workouts." I would much rather hikes were classified as "adventures" or "forays," since that is what they are to me. Tracking the changing levels of my physical activity doesn't interest me at all.
Another gizmo I recently received (though I've actually been procrastinating checking it out) was a new pet tracker produced by a company called Tractive. We've been disappointed with the data provided by the PitPat tracker Charlotte has been wearing since December, so now that I have a job and we're as financially sound as we've ever been, I figured I could blow $200 on a two year subscription to a tracker that provides real data. I installed the app and tried taking the tracker to the mailbox and back while talking to my brother Don on the phone. (By the way, Don wants to play "Timothy Leary's Dead" — actual name "Legend of a Mind" — at the service for my mother we'll be having in Virginia this weekend, saying that our mother could now be on an "astral plane" and in the process of looking for a new life to live.) When the tracker seemed to precisely place markers on the map in the app, I decided I might have a winner.
So then I looked to see how things looked on the web-based interface, which is also provided. I quickly figured out how to grab GPS coordinates from the API, which means I will have data to do with exactly as I choose, which is huge. (The plan is to integrate it into a tab in my existing ESP8266 Remote Control webapp.) One of the perks of paying for the premium Tractive plan was access to the data, but if I can grab it in real time automatically, that is not something I need to be paying for.
When she visited last week, Fern brought us a big bag of strawberry pierogies that then froze into a solid block in the freezer. Tonight after she got back from pilates, Gretchen wanted to try them. So we thawed them out in the microwave and boiled them up in a big pot of water. Unfortunately, they ended up being a huge disappointment. They tasted insipid, just a simple combination of pasta and strawberry that cried out for something else, like a cream (which we didn't have on hand). Suffice it to say, we'll be sticking to savory pierogies from now on.
I eventually managed to get a .jpg of my hike trace out of my phone (but still no GPS data!). I've altered this image a little in Photoshop to show the distinctions between the Stick Trail (which has a magenta halo), the Farm Road (which has a bluish halo) and the halo-free Chamomile Headwaters Trail. Click to enlarge.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?250812 feedback
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