23/05/2020

The archive contains older posts which may no longer reflect my current views.

# It's way too early to give any meaningful feedback on the Skagen watch but I can give a few first impressions:

  • Sleek. I was right, it's a very simple and stylish design that doesn't try too hard to be anything it's not.
  • Easy to use. Wear OS is pretty intuitive and the rotating crown is very nice to avoid on-screen scrolling with your finger all the time.
  • Time. No, not that it tells the time (it's a watch after all) but that it will take some time to find the perfect setup, the balance of functions vs battery life, the apps that suit me and how I'll use it.

Yesterday, as far as the watch was concerned, was primarily taken up with installing and uninstalling apps and different watch faces (I've settled on A/D Watchface for now), and tweaking the custom battery profile. Obviously all that hands-on time and activity meant draining the battery pretty quickly so I'll have to give it a few days to get a proper idea of how long that's going to last on an average day. I can then start looking at which features (persistent heart rate monitoring, always on screen/tilt to wake/NFC/OK Google monitoring, etc.) have the most impact.

One nice feature in the Wear OS version of the Play Store is the list of apps installed on your phone making it nice and easy to install their watch component rather than having to fiddle around with a search.

I tested the sleep tracking app Sleep As Android overnight (it has a 14 day free trial) which entailed putting the watch on charge before going to bed to ensure it had enough juice to get through wearing it all night with sensors blazing. The built-in 'Extended' power profile turns Bluetooth off between 10pm and 6am to save battery so I had to manually re-enable this for the app to connect to its counterpart on my phone. Tracking my sleep (or lack of it for the first hour in bed) for around 8 hours used about 30% battery which I didn't think was too bad at all.

The watch charges nice and fast so it's okay to then charge it back up whilst getting ready in the morning.

#

"Learning is the difficult work of experiencing incompetence on our way to mastery" - Seth Godin

I feel like I'm doing an awful lot of learning.

As Seth writes "learning opens the door to identity". If we choose to do things, if we become personally invested through choice and not because we are forced, it becomes who we are.

I go to work to pay the bills because society says I should, but that's not me, that's not who I am, it's what I do - a means to and end.

I choose to turn up here on the blog, to write, to share thoughts and ideas, even if it's from a position of incompetence because each time I do it, each time I hit that publish button, I'm potentially getting better, I'm building something that leads towards mastery.

And it's not specifically the mastery of writing or of being the best blogger (I'll never be a Shakespeare or Hemingway or even a Godin) but a mastery of myself and truly establishing my identity, mastery of my own thoughts and ideas and how to share them in the most coherent way.

That's why I'm on this journey.

# Let's Encrypt is a wonderful idea but when your certificate never seems to auto-renew it can be a bit annoying.

# Watch battery check:

9:36 am - 100%

3:50 pm - 78%

9:15 pm - 58%

Even after mucking about with ADB over Bluetooth and doing a couple of installs I still had 42% left at 10:30 pm.

Not bad.

I'll test different settings tomorrow starting with the always on screen/ambient mode.

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