Bayerworld

FitBit Update

 

How does the sleep tracking work and what will I learn?

It's important that you get a good night's sleep. Recent studies have shown that sleep quality is linked to overall wellness. Have you ever wondered why you still feel tired even though you think you've gotten a full 8 hours of sleep? The Fitbit Tracker will allow to "see" what your body is actually doing at night.

When you get into bed, you slide the Fitbit Tracker onto a wristband that is provided with the Tracker. As you fall in and out of sleep, the Fitbit tracks the movements that your body makes and can tell you how long it took you to fall asleep, how many times you woke up throughout the night and the actual time you were asleep vs the time you were in bed.

Does the Fitbit accurately track calories from cycling/biking?

The Fitbit is optimized for walking, running and general household/lifestyle activities and gives you a good general 24 hour picture of your day. It's not going to be that accurate for things like biking, but the website will allow you to manually log activities, so that an estimated calorie burn for your biking can be included in your daily totals. If you are only doing the biking for an hour or so a day, the Fitbit will give you a good overview of your activities for the other 23 hours. The Fitbit is really for people to get a general sense of their day and get motivation from improvements in their general day to day trends.

http://www.fitbit.com/faq#sleep

Jodix Free Ipod Converter

I have a lot of files in the avi format that I want to watch on my iphone and ipod touch.  Most of these are DVDs that I ripped to my computer.  I need to convert them to an ipod format like mp4.  I had purchased a Xilisoft product to do this but it had expired and was not that great.  Before buying the newest version,  I downloaded Jodix Free Ipod Converter.  Its perfect.  It keeps the audio and video together and takes up few system resources.  It is also free.

My Problem with Apple

I am apprehensive about writing this because in my experience, anyone who has anything negative to say about Apple seemed to get attacked by the cult of mac.  These two posts: one and two, are great examples.   I decided not to be terrorized  and write about my experience with the Ipod.  For the record I have a 30GB Black 5th Generation Ipod. 

 One Sunday, while watching the Saints prove that maybe one good thing came out of Katrina, I decided to upgrade to Itunes 7.  Itunes 7 also makes you upgrade the firmware on your ipod. The firmware upgrade did not work and my ipod crashed. I reformatted and tried again.  It seemed to have worked. I started adding songs and the ipod began making a weird click noise. A short time later, a sad ipod smiley face showed up. I reset and the sad smiley face went away. The next day the the thing locked up. I went to apple's website and followed the directions on returning an Ipod that was under warranty. I was a little dismayed that I had to send my Ipod in without getting a replacement, unlike my dell juke box mp3 player experience.  The DHL guy called me 2 days latter and told me he had a package from Apple, but it was shipped to the wrong address. I had accidenly reversed a digit in my address when giving it to Apple.  He left the package on my porch and I mailed it the next day.   The following Monday I had just watched U2 and Greenday play at the Saint's home opener and left my stadium seat to grab a beer. While waiting in line I checked my email and saw that Apple had received my Ipod and they would notify me when sending it back.  For the next two weeks I waited in eager anticipation.  I never got a response so I decided to log into Apple's website.  It told me that there was no problem found and that they had sent my Ipod back. Apple did not correct the address and so DHL had deemed it undeliverable and returned it to apple. I called Tech Support and a nice lady told me she would send me my Ipod. 

I heard nothing for a week and called tech support again. I explained my situation to another nice lady and she told me that she would send my ipod to be looked at again and then send it back to me. 

I heard nothing for another week and called Apple.  A nice man explained that they had looked at my ipod and that it was physically damaged. It was dented in. I did not take pictures of my ipod before I sent it in but did not remember any dent. I talked to his supervisor. She told me that they would not fix it but I could buy a referbuished one and get a one year warranty.  She also told me I could take my ipod to an Apple Store and the Techs there might replace it. The nearest store is

Houston

, 4 hours away. She also explained that they had pictures of the damage which she would send to me. Both the manager and the tech explained they could see the damage from the pictures.

2 days latter I got my Ipod back with no pictures. There was no visible damage at all to it. You can see the pictures yourself.  Check out my Flickr account.  If you rub your finger along the back at one small point you might be able to feel a dent. I am really not sure, but again you can't see anything. Apple was even nice enough to include an arrow to "this dent".  Without the arrow, I would never have found it.  I think it is pretty crappy that Apple will not repair products that are under warranty.  I could have purchased my Ipod with the damage already to it and would never have known.  There is no way that the Tech Support could have seen the damage from the pictures.

My next course of action is to send the Ipod to Atlanta where my freind Juan will take it to an Apple Store.  I having a feeling that they will replace it.  Even so, I am done with Apple.

 

The real kicker was that in December I was going to buy the 80gb Ipod. Looks like the Creative Zen or Zune is the way I will go. To the Buzz Out Loud crew, you were right and I was wrong. To all those that have not drunken the apple cool aid, be aware that Apple does not seem to honor their one year warranty. Jon Lech Johansen, looks like I will be purchasing your product. If the Government wants to come after me for violating the DMC, I have a couple of Internet Tubes in my backyard for a quick escape.

 

iTunes is pissing me off

I love iTunes.  The minute I got an IPOD, I started using it.  It is extremely easy to use and I quickly gave up winamp.  Now, I am pissed.  I recently wiped my laptop.  I do this at least 4 times a year(probably more like 10).  I put a lot of experimental software on it and it gets bogged down.  This is pretty common(for me).  A couple years a go I got smart and partitioned my hard drive and put my documents folder with all my other user created  data on the partition.  So I reinstalled everything including iTunes and pointed everything to the My Documents folder.  When I reinstalled iTunes it wrote over my old iTunes library database with a brand new one.  I spend a lot of time setting up that library .  I backed up my data nightly, swhich saved me, but when you reinstall iTunes, it should search your hard drive for an iTunes library and ask you if you want to use that instead of overwriting it.  I have no ideal why this would be of interest to anyone but me.