UP to 72 hours

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Since I care more and more about my health, I started looking at health gadgets. Fitbit looks popular but Jawbone UP got my attention. It's new and the concept looks great: a bracelet that you don't need to be aware of. Unlike Fitbit, you don't need to remember clipping it to your clothes because you don't take it off.

After its launch, most reviews were positive. Then something just went wrong. People started reporting their UPs are dead after several days of use. I doubted if I should buy one but I still wanted to take the risk, so I bought one.

Now I've been using my UP for 72 hours and luckily it's not dead yet. I love using it though there are minor problems.

The good parts are it does encourage me to take more walk and track my meals. These two are very important to me. I'm spending too much time sitting and I'm eating too much, which make me uncomfortable. Reminding me every 30 minutes of sitting makes me leave the seat and refill my cup. Tracking meals helps me understand in what situation I might eat more than I should.

The sleep tracking satisfies my curiosity but that's all of it. I can do nothing to improve my sleep quality. I don't have an experiment plan to explore what affects my sleep yet.

The bad parts are it only tracks arm movement and it's not accurate in all circumstances. Workout tracking only tracks activities involve arm movement. Push up tracks nothing while brushing my teeth looks like some intensive workout.

Overall, I still like my UP and wish Jawbone could make it better in the future.

P.S. Because Beijing is covered by hazardous haze I only do indoor workout. That means GPS tracking is meaningless to me. I'll try that when I get back to Guangzhou.

Posted via email from Cat Chen's Posterous

Unboxing Xiaomi Phone

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Just photos. No test. Maybe next time. Because my friend wants this phone really bad, I will give this one to him and try to get another as my Android test device.

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Unboxing Shengda Bambook

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I should have posted this two months ago. I can't comment on this product because I don't use it by myself. I got it by giving a speech in a Shengda sponsored event and then I gave it to my parents. It seems my dad enjoys its Chinese text-to-speech feature a lot.

Posted via email from Cat Chen's Posterous

Unboxing Sennheiser PXC360BT

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I just received my new gadget today. It's Sennheiser PXC360BT headphones. I bought it for its active noise canceling. I want to know if it's effective on a plane. I will field test it on my way back to Canton.

The box is not big, and you can see the headphones inside with a paper box underneath. The headphones come with a removable battery, a Micro-USB connector, audio cable, and all kinds of adapters. They are put in the traveler's bag inside that paper box.

The battery was empty, so I charged it with my MacBook Pro over the Micro-USB connector. I didn't finished the charging within an hour long lunch, so I need to measure the charge time in the future. I tested it via Bluetooth with my iPhone and also via audio cable with my MacBook Pro. The sound quality is good to me and it feels comfortable to wear.

Pairing the headphones with iPhone is simple and straightforward. Press and hold the Bluetooth button and you can connect it on the iPhone. The iPod app treats it like an AirPlay device so you can easily switch between internal speaker and Bluetooth headphones.

After lunch, I've tested it on the subway. Wearing the headphones will reduce the noise. Enabling active noise canceling will further reduce low frequency noise. With both Noise Guard and Talk Through enabled, you will hear people on the train shouting to each other in front of you. In their perspective, it's just talking. With low frequency noise canceled, it sounds like shouting.

So far, I've noticed two small problems with Sennheiser PXC360BT. One is that when charging and listening over the cables at the same time, static is noticeable. The other is that when Bluetooth is interfered sound will jump. If it's interfered for several seconds, iPhone treats it as AirPlay device disconnected and then pauses the music.

Posted via email from Cat Chen's Posterous

Merging Two English Blogs

I have two English blogs now. One on Blogger and another on Posterous. I wanted to post different things on different blogs. Posterous should be more light-weight and photo driven. However, I don't post often so I can't differentiate two blogs.

I just (eventually) started my Cantonese blog. For Cantonese input convenience, I type on my iPhone and then post it to Blogger via Posterous. That means I have the same Cantonese content on both Blogger and Posterous. (I will hide one in the future to avoid duplicated content.) so I think using the same method for my English blog should be feasible.

After merging two blogs, I don't have to worry about differentiation any more. I don't have to think about which blog to post depending on the type of content. I can focus on writing instead of tools. If I'm with my Mac, I will use MarsEdit; If only my iPhone is available, I will use Posterous. No matter what I use, all content merges to my Blogger's stream.

Posted via email from Cat Chen's Posterous

Moving Blogs to New Domain

I bought catchen.me last year and point it to my old domain catchen.biz. Now I want to use catchen.me as my main entrance. That means I need to migrate all sub-domains under catchen.biz to catchen.me.

Why did I use catchen.biz at the first place? I wanted to register a domain from Google Apps in order to make sure that my domain is associated with Google Apps. Neither catchen.com nor catchen.net is available so I picked catchen.biz. However, I found out that people don't respond well to .biz domains. When I say "you can find me on catchen dot biz", they will ask "catchen dot what?" Then I understood that I needed to get a easily recognizable domain. That's why I bought catchen.me.

I let catchen.me point to catchen.biz for several months and it works well, but the content stays on catchen.biz. Now I want to move the content to catchen.me and make catchen.biz a simple redirection. I wanted to do this long ago but I'm too lazy to set up an Apache for the redirection. I don't want to touch all those configurations so I kept postponing this task.  Recently I found out that I can do this with pure JavaScript and that's a language I'm comfortable with, so I decided to give it a try.

I wrote a less than 30 lines JavaScript file and push it to Heroku. Then it's done. And it's free! I don't need to maintain my own server. Heroku's free plan should be enough to handle a few request to my old domain. I don't need to know anything about Apache configuration.  All I need to learn is Node.js, but I want to learn it for fun anyway.

So far, I've migrated three sub-domains: english, cantonese, and dotnet. If the solution is stable, I will move chinese, which is the sub-domain with most content.

Blogging with Wacom Bamboo Special Edition

I bought a Wacom tablet last month. This is the first blog post I try to write with it in English. (I've tried that in Chinese.) It's nice to write instead of type, though it needs some training.

Writing in English on Windows 7 requires little training. The initial accuracy is not bad. In contrast, Snow Leopard couldn't recognize my handwriting at all. Experience of writing on Windows 7 is smooth. I can write in my way, which doesn't look good, and Windows 7 can recognize most of them. With some training, Windows 7 can do it better. Less correction is needed after writing several training sentences. And the correction works in a smart way. Windows 7 can remember what you have written even after you inserted them to the editing area, and it provides meaningful options if you want to correct a word. Space will be inserted if needed during correcting and editing. Windows 7 knows what words and sentences are.

Writing in Chinese doesn't include many features in English counterpart. You can't write freely on the baseline. You have to write one Chinese character in one box, and write them one by one. Correction is based on character instead of word. The good news is Windows 7 knows Chinese words and it recognizes Chinese characters by seeing it as part of a word. Snow Leopard doesn't supports Chinese recognition at all. I can only wish they do a better job with Lion.

See My Posterous

I haven't updated this blog for a year. I just don't have enough incentive to write in English. iPhone gave me the incentive to write in English as Chinese input method on it doesn't fit its smooth experience. And Posterous gave me the platform.

It seems Apple doesn't pay much attention to iOS input methods. Chinese input method on iOS doesn't have any intelligence like its counterpart in English. There is no guessing on correction based on dictionary or statistics model. No matter what you type, iOS just pretends that you won't hit an adjacent key. But the fact is you can't avoid making mistakes while typing in such a tiny keyboard. So the process is really frustrating. You need to keep correcting minor mistakes and that interrupts you flow of writing. That's the reason l avoid typing Chinese on my iPhone.

Since I switched to Mac, I tried to find a substitute for Windows Live Writer and then started using MarsEdit. MarsEdit isn't as friendly as Windows Live Writer, but I can have a better control over the source code. Then I started looking for a blogging client for my iPhone and couldn't find any in 2 years. Then Posterous's official client came out last month and I'm impressed by its design and philosophy.

Blogging on a mobile phone shouldn't be too serious. I wouldn't want to spend a lot of time within this small screen adjusting details, so the blogging process should be easy. Posterous has made it so easy to blog on your iPhone. Write some text, add some attachments, and then click "Send". No rich text editing, no photo arrangement, its as easy as writing an email within the built-in Mail app. In fact, sending an email from your iPhone was the recommended way for posting to Posterous prior to the release of the Posterous app.

So I started blogging on Posterous in English since last month. Here is the address: http://posterous.catchen.me. It's updated several times a week and I recommend you subscribing to it.