📁 06-23

Busier than normal for some reason. To be honest, I’m typing this entry mostly for the title. So uh, there we go–mission accomplished–cya later.

I may have found something interesting to tinker with, but for the moment I thought I’d share my workflow for this pet project website. You see, there was a Vim markdown document preview issue that inspired me to try VSCode #nerdtree4life. Anyway, till next time

Visual Studio Code(receipts):

Challenger Deep Theme, Code Spell Checker, Dracula Official Theme (current), GitHub Markdown Preview, Markdown Checkboxes, Markdown Emoji, Markdown Footnotes, Markdown Preview GitHub Styling, Markdown Preview Mermaid Support, Markdown yaml Preamble, Remote - SSH, Remote - SSH: Editing Configuration Files, Remote Explorer, Vim (vscodevim), GitLens

Kubuntu 23.04 seems alright so far. Most of the applications I use are either from Snapcraft or Flathub, so I haven’t run into any of those odd issues that sometimes happen with mismatched dependencies. On the plus side, I can now use my Jelly Comb glass touchpad again and one of the Windows games I play doesn’t crash when I tab out of it. Yep.

I’m not sure if the glass of this watch will survive the battery (7000 series glass appears to be 🔗 Mineral Crystal), but at 14 days per charge I was willing to take that risk. I’ve accidentally smacked the watch face against brass door lock strike plates several times and it only has a few scratches. Weak vibe motor though–I would not recommend this watch for heavy sleepers.

I’ve noticed a few missed opportunities though like battery % via voice command and the blood oxygen sensor seems to be hit or miss. And I haven’t researched which weather service backend is used by Alexa (or this version of Alexa). The rain percentage app of the watch consistently under estimates by ~40-50%, and does not understand how to process commands like “What is the surf report for St. Augustine?” or “What is the wave height for St. Augustine?” It may have been a better experience to pair with the Alexa app instead of the Fossil App. It would have been cool to test out some of those neat Alexa skills.

As far as receiving notifications from certain apps this Gen. 6 Hybrid seems to perform admirably. Receiving little vibes on my wrist from AutoZen kept my focus on the route a bit more than without. I just wish I could figure out how to switch off MPRIS notifications sent through KDE Connect. Every time I start a video or change songs KDE Connect pushes a notification, and my watch relays that information as a notification. I didn’t have this issue with my Pinetime watch running InfiniTime. If I play three albums of songs, I will receive three albums worth of notifications (not including resuming from pause notifications). Also, the watch is not running WearOS, so it’s not compatible with Google Play apps built for WearOS. I can see myself checking out the WearOS ecosystem in the future. Lots of interesting apps that would probably be incredible for outdoor adventuring.

With all that said it’s still a beautiful watch. The estimated 14 day battery life is pretty accurate (e-ink display), and there’s no touchscreen to phantom press when it rains or while swimming. And finally I think the Alexa integration is relatively impressive when I take into consideration that I feel like Harold Crick from the movie Stranger Than Fiction while I’m wearing the watch.