Can anyone speak to the reliability of using metropolitan statistical areas for something like this? Having lived across on both sides of the tracks in a few, grouping them for something like this seems like an interesting choice. One that I probably wouldn't agree with, but I'm out of my depth
I had the same problem when I switched off Google. I didn't have a ton of data, and I just wanted content for past search purposes, so I didn't dig into how the data would be transformed but I can at least offer my scuffed solution.
I installed a third-party client (Thunderbird, but I imagine any would work) on a local box, signed in with both emails, and just copied the mail over from one to the other. Low-tech, but it worked quite well. I may have forced some local cache/download for the original email, but I can't recall. I'll check later if it preserves headers and the like. I assume it would, but it wasn't that important to me.
I actually thought about writing at some point about the process of getting off gmail and all the funny things I ran across.
I can't personally vouch for it as I'm still stuck in Google Photos and would prefer to self-host it, but Ente may interest you. Open source, end-to-end encrypted, self-host or cloud.
I'm really happy with Immich & not looking for a replacement. Evaluated it vs Ente in the past & went with it instead - as far as I could tell their apps have the same features & limitations (focus on remote backup & display rather than on local on-device photo management & basic markup/editing).
If (like me) you don't need e2e I can highly recommend Immich for its use-case though.
I'm hardly a serious runner, but I'd say the pros you laid out for Garmin are quite nice, and the cons are inconsequential to your average fitness tracker user. I'd probably argue they're inconsequential to everyone but the absolute elite and, for them, are pointless.
Sleep tracking is hard to action on for the average user outside "you slept this long" and none of the writst-based devices are that good anyway.
Pace to sub 5 is a little more annoying, but probably not useful for the majority considering most people are just running, not craning over their watch the whole time.
VO2 max is also a wild estimate, and I'd hazard it's not particularly accurate for the average person. It's off by close to 20% for me, and I should be a pretty good candidate.
On the flipside, you can get tons of data out of a Garmin that costs significantly less than an Apple watch. Plus, the majority of Garmins sold are fitness devices with some smart features, with Apple watches being primarily a smart watch. While maybe not justified (I think the Apple watch features are quite nice) I'd expect that's a major part of the reason Garmin has the rep it does.
If someone is buying a device to run, most would recommend the cheaper, light, simple, specialized, long battery life watch over the opposite. If you already have an Apple watch, it's probably a no brainer.
For the high-end Garmin devices, it's a little more complex, but not many people are considering a US$800+ device without knowing the nuances of the discussion, or having enough money to not care.
I do think the pace having more granularity than five seconds is important for anyone who's doing any kind of speed work, where a pace off by 5 seconds can result in a fairly significant variance. Admittedly I am not a total novice, but my 5k and 10k pace times are about 10 seconds apart, and I do some interval workouts at 5k pace and some at 10k pace. 5 second granularity doesn't give much wiggle room there! Although of course, GPS and cadence-based paces are also estimates, so maybe the 5 second accuracy is better than 1 second which could inpsire a false sense of confidence in the estimate.
As far as Vo2Max goes, totally agree – my lab test results vary widely from both watches. However, I think that actually makes Apple's 1 decimal place more significant – it has a lot of value in offering a fitness trend, even if it's inaccurate. I might train hard for 3 weeks and see 0 movement in my Garmin Vo2Max, whereas I might see a 0.3 increase in the Apple Watch. This is valuable for even the novice runner.
I feel the important piece to remember with VO2Max estimation is: Its an estimation. Its significant figures [1]; reporting the value to one or more decimal places communicates a level of confidence inappropriate for how inaccurate these estimations generally are. Especially the Apple Watch's; Garmin's is known for being pretty decent, usually +/- 2, but Apple Watch's is all over the place and is infamous for being really inaccurate.
Clamping pace to 5 seconds is a similar idea. GPS isn't super accurate: within 16 feet some sources say [2], though it gets better if you've got dual band, if you're moving; but it gets worse when you don't have an open sky. Just ten feet of GPS inaccuracy over a ten minute mile means your recorded pace is somewhere between 9:58/mile to 10:02/mile. And, experimentally, these systems are way, way more inaccurate than that: on a recent bike ride, with no major sky obstructions, I wore both an Apple Watch Ultra 2 and Garmin Enduro 3; the AWU2 recorded 25.05 miles, Enduro 3 recorded 25.18 miles. That's a difference of ~686 feet; ~27 feet/mile.
That's very true, and I'd love to see some actual documentation on how they get to pace numbers.
I'm in the same boat with regard to 5K/10K pace, but I reckon it's probably not a huge issue in the long run. While plans specify those times, I think it's more about shorthand for effort zone where 5K is "this hard" and 10K is "a little bit less hard".
VO2 max improvement is a good point, though, and I'd probably agree. If I had a hazard a guess, Garmin would say that their training productivity tracker/race estimated are the preferred way of presenting that data. as an aside, I think VO2max has sorta been coopted as a "fitness number" when it actually represents a very specific thing that may or may not be emblematic of actual performance in the majority of cases. It is nice to have a a single value to look at that can sum up whether what you've been doing lately is productive, though.
That could just be me coming from the world of cycling where watts are king and there's far less variability. In my mind, all these running stats are mushy, but that might not actually be the case.
If vo2max is displayed without decimals it would take months to see progress for most people starting running. It’s baffling that they would make such a mistake.
I was considering a Garmin watch, but if they make such a stupid decision regarding vo2max then what other mistakes are lurking in their apps?
I agree with a lot of the other options, but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention one that isn't always obvious.
With all the Big Corp asterisks, Microsoft Business Basic can be a pretty great deal at 6 USD/month. Solid reliability, aliases, (too many) config options, 1TB of OneDrive storage, cloud MS apps, etc.
It is. From my understanding, CPUs execute machine code. Assembly has to be passed through an assembler to get machine code, and that assembler can make other changes as well, so they are not always one to one. Written assembly will usually translate veryclosely to machine code, though.
If you use a password manager (which they say they do) it's much quicker to just save that info and automatically populate it. Doubly so considering the MFA hell they went through.
Too many sites have broken forms. Sure, you can have the card autofilled but maybe it doesn't trigger the autofill for the address or maybe that wasn't even loaded yet. Maybe you can just click there and have it auto-fill but they can be so broken it doesn't autofill completely or fills wrong. Some sites are smart enough to have a checkbox for "shipping address is the same as billing" and others aren't.
When you use a 3rd party payment provider like PayPal it does a really good job of forcing all of this to be automatic compared to things trying to autofill custom forms just because it's integrated by the site instead of the user. MFA hell is starting to erode that actually being easier though and now there is more and more often no simple approach left.
Yeah, CC autofill is nice but fails about 1/4 of the time. It doesn't include the security code either. A few sites will also have finicky inputs, like accepting spaces but rejecting the payment if you use them.
It'd definitely be possible although, if you're not already using a VPN, I doubt it'd be easier. You could do it a few ways, but the gist would be running the VPN endpoint and the web app in the "same place" (same machine, same network, etc.) and restrict access to the web app from anywhere else.
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