Heart Rate Monitor Watches

As those of you who know me already know, I’m really into cycling and now I’m working on hitting my target heart rate zone during workouts.

That being said, my heart rate monitor watch is primitive when you compare if to some of these interesting smart watches.

Check out this story over at techhive.com on the evolution of the smartwatch.

I’ll share more about my progress with my Reebok Fitness Dual Heart Rate Monitor in coming weeks. FYI, it’s available at Amazon: Reebok Fitness Dual Heart Rate Monitor, Black

If you check your local Target, you might find the watch on clearance for about $10 less.

Good luck!

USB - What the Heck?

It really is stupid how the USB connectors were designed. Look how simple the Apple Lightning connectors and magnetic power connectors are? There’s no “wrong way” to connect those - either way, up or down, you get a good connection with no problems.

This is a great blog about the subject (and many more) -> It’s called Vintage Computing and Gaming and here’s the USB post.

                Words cannot express how hard it is to use USB plugs properly.

Image above courtesy the fine blog Vintage Computing and Gaming. Trust me, go there and you’ll spend quite a bit of time marveling at the great posts.

Fanhattan? The cool iOS app is a website too!

If you love movies, you’ll love Fanhattan. You can search the iOS app by movie title, actors, and other key attributes of entertainment to find lists of sites and services where you can watch streaming right away! Sometimes when a movie isn’t available streaming anywhere, you’ll just get links to buy the DVD/Blu-Ray instead. Here’s a first-hand look at the website in private beta, coming soon to everybody. For now, you can use the iOS app and get many of these awesome features from your iPhone or iPad.

Using search is simple, just type in letters and watch results appear:

One you choose a program, you are presented with watch now and watch list choices.

You can select the option you want to view a streaming choice. If you have Amazon Prime or Netflix, you can often watch your choices free. If the title you want isn’t available for free streaming, add it to your watch list and you’ll be notified when it is available.

The point of this post: I have a few invites left available. Post a comment or send me a message and I’ll hand them out as long as I’ve got them. To be fair, I’ll be accepting requests through tomorrow and choosing randomly from the requests.

Once you get an account for the web version (at http://fanhattan.com) you’ll also be able to invite people after a short delay.

Enjoy!

Google Maps - New and Improved

Wow, Google’s done it again. They’ve upped the ante on web-based mapping and no doubt this will be even better once it is in the iOS app.

Here’s a quick tour.

Using the next step: search for Sushi, Boston, we get

When you click on any of the place pins on the map, you get an info card with options to give directions, save the location to your contacts, jump to Street View, access reviews and even read the menu!

I searched for Apple Store, Dallas, and I got two locations near downtown, with additional features showing on the info card. After clicking the place pin for the Knox Street location, I got an info card that shows the hours today and has a few links to related items. For example: Computer Repair Service gives a list of places that do computer repairs. Genius Bar wasn’t so helpful, as it just highlighted bars all over the Dallas map.

Clicking iPad 2 shows a list of stores, including an ad from Best Buy. No idea why iPad 2 is the choice and not just iPad since the iPad is a couple of versions beyond the iPad 2, unless based on Google’s algorithm, iPad 2 > iPad (which no longer has a number to say it’s iPad 3 or 4).

The Photos link gives you a cool view like this:

… the animation getting to the photo is really fun! :-)

Cool Stuff

• Clicking back (in Chrome) takes you back to the previous map state, not the previous browser page as with some map sites
• Animation is sweet
• Lots of content in the maps, especially the place pins
• Beautiful maps
• Did I mention the animation?

Bummers

• Related links are still weak implementations, if this is going to require human intervention tasking, they have a lot of work to do and if they can get the algorithms ironed out, they have a masterpiece
• Limited to invitation-only Gmail/Google accounts, I couldn’t even request for my hosted by Google/Gmail domains.

More to come, this looks headed for a bright future!

 

Tek Highlights

Welcome to Tek Highlights, where technology stories are covered from a first-person perspective.

On this blog you’ll see personal experiences using technology including new websites, devices, operating systems, applications and consumer electronics. Learn how one guy explores the new Google Maps (the next blog post) or writes his first programs using LiveCode’s new community edition (to be posted).

Indeed, if you want to read the perspective of a regular person using technology, Tek Highlights will be a great blog for you.

Thanks for reading - come back soon!