I finally replaced my old phone last week and opted to go with the S9+ because it has the built in Heart Rate Monitor (HRM). This was useful for being able to measure Heart Rate Variability (HRV) without needing an external, specialized HRM to do so.
I was also intrigued by the HRMs purported ability to measure blood pressure, which is a new feature. In the past you needed a blood pressure cuff to measure blood pressure.
Here is what I have learned so far:
There is only one app (as of this writing) that can use the blood pressure technology for the built in HRM. That app is the My BP Lab app. You can find it here. This is a wellness focused app (akin to Welltory), so it does other things in addition to measuring blood pressure. The app used blood pressure along with other health/stress informaiton you provide to make lifestyle and wellness recommendations. I don't have any recommendations yet, so I don't know how well it works. You can use the app without the S9 HRM, but you need some other way to measure your blood pressure.
The sensor currently requires you to input an initial blood pressure reading from an external source at the same time that you take your baseline reading using the HRM in the device. Without the additional baseline reading it can only measure differences in blood pressure as a % change from the baseline.
The ramificaiton of number 2 is that it isn't really capable of measuring blood pressure, it's measuring something and then it can measure differences from that. Those readings and changes can be interpreted into a blood pressure reading as long as you have an initial reading to go along with the baseline. It's still neat in my opinion, just something to be aware of.
It may that this changes over time and as they collect more data (from Quatified Self nerds, such as myself) they'll be able to do blood pressure directly. I'm interested to find out.
I've been using the app for about a week and I had to do one recallibration using my Qardio blood pressure cuff.
The early morning reading I got from the app seemed off to me. I double checked with another device and it was off. So I re-baselined in the app. The app allows you to do this, which seems like a good feature and also possibly a bit telling.
I don't know how it handles previous measurements if you do a rebaseline. It certainly seems to call their validity into question. I'm pretty sure that, at least for the app's purposes, it is going to assume their correct and keep them around. I don't have any reason to feel that other, earlier, readings were off. They seemed in line with what I got with Qardio throughout the day, though I wasn't comparing them side by side every time.
Yes, I own a Bluetooth blood pressure cuff. Why wouldn't I?
Today's lesson: always be smart before you're stupid. This helps you prevent some damage from your stupidity. If you're stupid first, anything can happen.
For the first time in a good long while I missed my evening meditation because I was repairing this site. Sorry if you cam here and got the 502 Bad Gateway message.
I started an upgrade process as I was leaving work, but by the time I got home I realized I had done something bad.
Blog site down. Bad Gateway! Bad! Bad, naughty, awful, shameful gateway:
Then my kids had scouts and I didn't really get to jump in and fix it until about 8:45 PM.
The solution for me was, ultimately, not to fix it. I have backups of everything, and I am not a Linux admin or even much of a user anymore. What I needed to do was:
Start a new VM from my backup disk image.
Delete and reimport content in ghost.
Zip images on old VM and restore them on new VM.
Change the DNS entries to point to new VM.
Shut off old VM and release the IP address.
All of this should have taken about 20 minutes if I did it right the first time.
It took about an hour because I had to figure several of the steps out along the way.
It's kind of amazing that you can do this. You do need to be careful with backups - make sure you have them, make sure you back things up frequently and before you do anything dumb.
Always backup before you do ANYTHING that's dumb.
But once you have your backups, and once you have reached a state of self-awareness that allows you to ensure that you make them before making mistakes, the cloud makes the world a very simple place. Kudos Cloud Makers (Google in particular) you saved me a lot of time. Also, Ghost - their backup and recovery worked pretty well. I shouldn't really have had to do steps 4 and 5, but it was still pretty painless.
I'm a little sad that I couldn't fix whatever problem I created, but sometimes you must cut your losses and provision a new VM.
This is why Amazon doesn't get prosecuted for monopolistic practices, but Apple did for price-fixing on books. Amazon lowers prices (good for consumers, bad for competitors) and Apple was trying to raise them (bad for consumers).
The European Union would look at this differently. They say that one company possessing too much market-share is inherently bad for the marketplace.
Can you really trust an Amazon to keep having a focus on low prices? What about when there is no more competition?
To answer that question I found one more article. You have to dig, but it's there at the bottom of the top paragraph of page 4:
Basically, you can trust them if their anti-competitive (but pro-consumer) price lowering has to stay low because any raising of prices will result in new players immediately entering the market.
What does all this have to do with technology? Well it helps explain some differences between the US and Europe.
The other thing that is related is that there isn't really a software or online business that isn't susceptible to a new competitor.
To create software you may need software developers and servers, but you don't need other raw materials or a factory, so the cost is much lower than in analog industries.
Software business are inherently winner take all because world-wide delivery is so simple, there are no geographic restrictions on products, therefore the best will win and when they win they will win very big.
But they can only stay on top if the innovate relentlessly or buy companies who do.
Otherwise someone will find away to come along and eat their lunch.
Twitter -> Profile -> Settings and Privacy -> Muted Words
Add -> http
So what does this tell us?
Well, I guess links aren't words, nor do they contain words as far as Twitter is concerned.
It wasn't terribly shocking to me that it didn't work, given all the things that Twitter does with links. We shouldn't be surprised that they do different things and are treated differently.
I wasn't planning to leave the mute on forever, but I did want to see what the sum total of my followed content looked like if you took the links out of it.
I'll have to find another way to do that.
Why does it matter? Well, there are days where I feel like Twitter is the writing assignment and I actually want to say something useful that isn't a link to something else.
I'm interested in seeing who else does that and what they say.
After writing my last post on Seth's blog, I think it is very important for all of us to Think Big and to seek out, encourage, and adopt 'Big Thinking'.
What's the difference you might ask?
Thinking Big is thinking about how we can make a big impact. Many things are changing in the world and every day there are new tools we can apply to do more, make changes, and make things better. It's easy to look around and see big thinking in action:
Smart phones, internet, airplanes, automobiles. Thinking big is identifying trends and figuring out how they impact you and what to do with them. Hey there's a flying carpet and I want to get on that thing.
Big Thinking is understanding the interconnections between things and identifying relationships. In an ever-more inter-connected world, understanding connection can be the biggest of all big things. It is looking at what makes up the trend (or anything really) and seeing if there is a thread in there that you want to grab a hold of and see how it relates to other things. Hey there's a flying carpet. How did they make that thing? I'm interested in that.
Neither of these skills are easy to improve, but it can be done. Both have potential dead ends and frustrations, and you need to improve resiliency and openness to other ideas.
Both are important, but I think the Thinking Big is the more celebrated and that Big Thinking, which is usually quieter, is the one that most needs improving.
Being able to think curiously about common place things (chairs, concrete, people, etc) allows us to appreciate our lives - it also allows us to see the deep connections that can also lead to lasting value - both emotional and monetary.
Want to try a frustrating search? Try looking for companies that can help you incorporate your business on the blockchain or using distributed ledger. What will you search for?
incorporate on the blockchain?
build company on blockchain?
start company on blockchain?
Those are all a bust, because you'll run into a lot of noise about creating blockchain-based products and forming a company around them.
The word you're looking for is 'cryptoshares', but, in all honesty, that won't help you that much either. You just have to google for a while until you come across one of a couple of articles that help get you get oriented in this space.
There's a definite SEO opportunity here.
So, to take some of the pain out of it for you, and to add myself to the list of helpful articles, here are a few companies/projects currently working in this space:
Otonomous offers away to create a distributed ledger-based company, and they can help you incorporate in several different international jurisdictions. It is built on Ethereum.
Counterparty uses the bitcoin blockchain and 'writes in the margins' of bitcoin transactions to build smart contracts. Their software (open source) is the Counterparty protocol, it is Bitcoin-aware and enables these transactions.
CoinOffering uses Ethereum smart contracts to incorporate your business. Their software is also open source, and like the others above, they offer services to help you get set up. Interestingly, they are part of (or somehow related to) Cryptonimica and discuss International Arbitration and Cryptography Centre which is some type of online dispute resolution system. From the outside it appears that the idea is a cryptography-based, online arbitration system or court. Interesting.
OpenAssets is an open source protocol with some reference implementations on github. It doesn't seem to have a service organization around it as the others do. This means you're free to do with it what you want, but you will be figuring it out.
Using the 'judging a book by its cover' system. I've ordered these in level of maturity. Otonomous and Counterparty have actual (non-github) web sites, and Otonomous appears ready to help you incorporate in both the real world and online.
CoinOffering is building up their service, and has incorporated themselves. OpenAssets appears to be just a protocol, for now.
Also interesting is that Delaware seems to be pushing ahead to be the first US jurisdiction to allow this type of online, cryptography-based incorporation.
Jonathan Fries on .
