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2019 Archives

Cleaning my Runkeeper activities list again

Posted at age 31.

As has my life, my Runkeeper and Fitbit tracking has been a mess for more than a year. Most of my runs have two or even three copies in Runkeeper. My stats have therefore been useless, not that I’ve had time to look at them anyway.

I had been meaning to sit down and document some issues with the Runkeeper-Fitbit integration before I started tracking many GPS activities in Fitbit. I expected I would track each runs with my Fitbit Ionic and the Runkeeper app on the phone, and then delete one, leaving whichever was best. This hedged against GPS breakdowns, which have happened on any device I’ve ever tested. The first problem was Fitbit did not allow saving notes with the activity, so I would have to copy the notes from the Runkeeper tracked run to the Fitbit imported run on Runkeeper. Upon saving, often the miles would change, perhaps due to some algorithm Runkeeper has to smooth GPS jitter. Whether or not the miles changed, it seemed Runkeeper would then reimport the Fitbit activity since apparently the one resaved with the note was no longer connected to the original.

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fwupd trouble on XPS 9370

Posted at age 30.

I didn’t realize my fwupd installation was not working till I noticed my BIOS is still running 1.5.1 instead of the latest 1.6.3. Upon investigation, I realized I did not have the Linux Firmware Update boot entry above the Linux Boot Manager entry. When I fixed that, or tried to manually select after F12, it still was not working. It took some time to notice there was an extremely tiny message flashing for less than .1 seconds. I had to use my DSLR to zoom in and record a video of the corner of the screen to figure out what it says:

Found update fwupd-7ceaf7a8-0611-4480-9e30-64d8de420c7c-0 WARNING: No updates to process. Called in error?

I realized I could boot to the laptop’s native BIOS update utility with F12 and then navigate to the .pac file in \EFI\arch\fw\, so I did not need to solve this problem.

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Insync broken with GDAuthError

Posted at age 30.

The backup and sync saga never ends! Now on my desktop I have been unable to open the Insync UI or apparently get it to sync at all. I killed it and run it by console to see if there was any output, and it fails before it starts syncing anything with an error: GDAuthError: Access token refresher stopped. Only two search results appear for “GDAuthError Insync”. One from a year ago has no solution, but someone commented recently that it happened to them, so perhaps there was a regression.

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Switching to Dvorak, Part 3

Posted at age 30.

I’ve been using Dvorak full time on computer for 17 months, a number that shocked me just now when I initially wrote “5 months” and then realized I was off by a year. I have not deliberately practiced much in the last year, and am also not as fast as I hoped I would be by this point. Still, I have no regrets. I have also not had any typing related hand or finger pain, which was what led me to this originally.

I still use QWERTY on my phone, but I have been thinking about switching there, too. My brain does seem to treat them totally separately; I initially suck at typing QWERTY every time I try on computer but never think twice on the phone.

Since I want to do some more practice, I’ll continue to log some statistics to this entry just as I have in the past in Switching to Dvorak and Switching to Dvorak, Part 2.

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