Geoff Jones

Inveterate dabbler in business, travel, gadgets & life

Category: Personal

Southern Upland Way – Portpatrick to Castle Kennedy

IMG_9367Today with George (who I first met 50 years ago whilst doing the Duke of Edinburgh’s award scheme at Parkgate Iron & steel works) I started the Southern Upland Way. This is a 212 mile coast to coast walk across Scotland starting in Portpatrick near Stranraer.

This is the first time I have pre-booked the trains at either end plus the ten b&b’s in between. Another first is I’m  using my new Polar H7 heart monitor with the iCardio app on the iPhone.

icardioWhen we left George’s house in Kendal it was hammering down with rain. However, by noon when we arrived at Portpatrick all was clear but with a very cold wind blowing hard.

The walk is, so far, well marked although with a fair bit of road/track walking today. The moorland bits were very boggy with no refinements such as gravel or paving slabs like on other National Trails. The Via Ferrata bit is a chain handrail alongside straightforward  steps in the rock.

We did 18.38 miles in 5hr 52min + 1hr 35min stops  according to my GPS as we went into Stranraer to grab some fish & chips before our b&b. This is the rather magnificent deluxe Chlenry Farmhouse (which offers a big meal with wine for £35 each…)

Tomorrow is Bargrennan some 25 miles away

All the day’s pictures are here

The trip statistics are here 

The trip on Everytrail is here 

Quantified Geoff

Today I’m off to Amsterdam for the weekend to spend time & learn more about the Quantified Self. Something I have been very interested in since discovering John Walkers original Hackers diet & Eatwatch programme on my old Treo600. This, coupled with the fact I had an eye problem which necessitated many visits to Addenbrookes  Hospital to ascertain if it was genetic or glaucoma, made me realize how important good longitudinal studies are.

The apps and things I currently measure are:

Screenshot_09_05_2013_19_53-3Daily Body Weight

Using Fatwatch (iPhone rough equivalent of Eatwatch) and Withings scales. I now have 1950 readings from the past 8 years from the chart you can see a highly skewed distribution of weights.  One side affect of this is that I now know I have spent 1109 nights away from home in the past 8 and a bit years 🙂 Since I only weigh myself at home!

Screenshot_09_05_2013_23_38Sleep

I tried Zeo & SleepCycle but didn’t get on with them. I now use the Fitbit and Snorelab. Fitbit has an API which enables me to draw nice charts from all the data it collects. The shows shows a normal distribution centred around  440 and 460 mins (about 7 1/2 hours) of sleep in the past 416 days.

IMG_4227Snorelab has no API 🙁 so hard to do nice graphs over many weeks, although I might enter all the data into a spreadsheet by hand. Obviously you can do screen shots like the example shown. All it has proved is that I snore a lot! mainly when I first go to sleep.

 Exercise

Screenshot_10_05_2013_08_51I am a keen walker as you can tell by reading this, and looking at my step counts on the chart.

I did a post on the different ways I measure steps etc here.

Etc

Other things I have measured are:

  • DNA through 23&me,
  • Moves,
  • Daily Mugshot,
  • Blood pressure using Withings,
  • Quicken for home finance.

and probably a few more after the weekend!

 

 

Three Peaks & Three Gadgets

Moves storylineLast saturday Sally and I did the Yorkshire Three Peaks walk. A great walk it was too, especially tagging along behind two members of the LDWA who specialise in 100mile non stop walks. So we moved had a brisker pace and had fewer shorter stops than we are accustomed to with The Cambridge Rambling Club 🙂 The weather was very low cloud with 12″ or so of freshish snow on all three peaks.

The gadgets I was carrying where an iPhone5 with the Moves app running & the route in the Viewranger app (although not tracking). I also had the route stored in my Garmin etrex 20 which was also storing our track as we walked it. Finally I was wearing my trusty Fitbit Ultra.

I’m pleased to say they all worked flawlessly and all their batteries stayed live for the 11 or so hours we were out. I was also carrying my Canon 550D with a 18-135mm lens.

Moves

This is a very nifty app that automatically works out if you are walking, cycling or just sat in a vehicle! It works by using the internal GPS (battery only lasts a few hours) and also the various internal motion sensors. At the end of the day it produces a summary and storyline (see left image). For this walk (and to and froing  before & after) it gave a result of 58,499 steps, 25.7 miles in 10hours 29mins. You can also see the times we summited and the little stops we had.

I now use this app everyday the biggest disadvantage (apart from battery life – which to me is OKish)is that you cannot easily create a database of activity.

I kept the iPhone in an Aquapac case to stop water damage & also took a TeckNeti EP387 7000mAh external battery pack with cable. (Total weight 368gm)

 

 

 

Fitbit

Fitbit data March 16th

As anyone knows both Sally and I are obsessed with this amazing device.

This gave a reading of 60,600 steps, 28.6 miles. 523 floors climbed (5230 feet in normal speak) and 5340 calories burned over about 12.5 hours .  So it agrees very closely to Moves.

 

 

 

 


GPS

Using Ascent OSX app we get the profile and speed as:Screenshot_22_03_2013_14_47

Screenshot_22_03_2013_14_45

This worked out we had walked 24.8 miles in a moving time of 8hr 45min (average speed 2.8mph) with an ascent of 5,579 feet. So the other devices had a pretty good correlation. So the Fitbit really does work 🙂

All my photos of the days walk can be found here.

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