Monthly Archives: September 2014

One wheel, two wheel, red wheel, blue wheel.

So, yeah, tonight I bought this.
Kona Mahuna

Yes, I just bought a new, high-end unicycle a week or two ago, but after dislocating my kneecap running yesterday (and listen, kids, you don’t know pain until you dislocate your kneecap while running, and then pop it back into place on the next stride – the crack was so loud, it startled the girl on the treadmill adjacent to me), I won’t me uni’ing for a little bit. So, sit on my huge fat ass, or find another activity. And a thousand of my dollars later, here we are.

It’s a 2015 Kona Mahuna, and so far, I love it. Because of the aforementioned knee, I didn’t ride much tonight – just enough to get the feel of it. Bikes sure have changed since my last one. Active suspension, 27 speeds, hydraulic brakes & shifters, lightweight aluminum frame – sheesh. Sure, I could have gone the $200 route at the sporting goods store, but homie don’t roll that way. And the guys at the bike shop are super knowledgeable, and that has value to me. Didn’t try to up-sell me (because, you know, you can spend ten large on a bike, toot-sweet), built it and set it up to match my size. A good experience.

So, let’s ride!

2 Miles

So, at the gym this morning, I walked a half mile at 4.3 MPH, then ran a solid 2 miles, with no rests, at 6.5 MPH, then ended with another 3/4 of a mile at 4.5 MPH. While this may not seem particularly earth-shattering, it is a personal best. And considering my wonky ACL and the shredded quadricep I suffered in the spring, I’m not going to complain.

And speaking of personal bests that no one cares about except me, this happened yesterday:

10millionThat’s 10 million steps since I started keeping track in mid-June of 2013, a little over 14 1/2 months ago. And about 6100 miles in that same time frame. Not bad. Not too bad at all.

And since I’m patting myself on the back, here’s the other significant totals:

Best one-day step total: 91425
Best one-day miles total: 67.55
Best hike: 20 miles
Pounds lost: 60 lbs

Yeah, that’ll do, pig. That’ll do.

Suunto Ambit3 Peak

Suunto Ambit3 PeakSo, I received my Suunto Ambit3 Peak GPS Sport watch. After some initial struggles getting the performance I expected from such an expensive piece of hardware, I think I’ve got it functioning the way it’s supposed to. Just required a little tinkering – however, the tinkering I figured out on my own, so I wanted to post my findings here in case anyone else has similar issues. The problem I had (and the Google keywords) will be: How do I improve the GPS accuracy of my Suunto Ambit3?

Basically, the problem I was experiencing was that the GPS was unreliable – it would make wild swings off the route I knew I was on (and I was dual-mapping with Endomondo, for comparison purposes). These were recorded simultaneously:

maps-sm

As you can see, the Endomondo map follows the roads pretty closely, while the Suunto Movescount map really goes all over the place, with wild spikes as shown in the 1:00 position. Here’s why: In Movescount, the GPS update interval for each activity can be set to various times to conserve battery life. The default is a new “ping” every 60 seconds. By contrast, the iPhone (and therefore, Endomondo), pings continually. By going into Movescount and altering the GPS ping interval from the default 60 seconds (which provides about 24 hours of battery time) to 30 seconds (15 hours), now the map is much more precise (different route shown below):

suunto-map-mtncreekroad

Presumably, if I wanted an even more precise map, I could drop the interval to 10 seconds or even 1 second – but 30 seconds seems to solve the issues I was having.

Now, hiking!