Smartwatches - what's the point?

 A long time ago I bought myself a cheap no name fitness tracker, which worked quite well, allowing me to track my bike rides and to beep when I had a new email or text message - a feature that turned out to be quite useful, especially when I was wearing nitrile gloves and documenting an artefact - I could glance at the tracker and decide if the message was worth degloving for.

In time I replaced it with a brand name device, an Inspire HR, which actually did a little less, but came with nicer management software.

However, it did everything I cared about, was light and comfortable to wear, and didn't need to be charged too often.

Then, three or four months ago, Telstra, our phone and internet provider, emailed me to say I had a pile of loyalty points that were about to expire.

Unfortunately, the points were not enough to make a serious difference to the cost of a new phone, but they did have the Ryze wave smartwatch available, and I had enough expiring points to cover it, making it effectively free.

Now, I've always been curious about smart watches, so this seemed to be an ideal way of finding out if there was a use for one in may life.

Out of the box it did everything that was expected of it, had a nice legible display, and was a perfectly competent device - a bit bulky on my wrist but comfortable enough.

But...

I realised after a couple of months that I was only using the same functionality that I was from the Inspire HR, or indeed the cheap fitness tracker,

Basically, it really wasn't adding anything to my life.

So I stopped wearing it and went back to my battered and scratched Inspire HR.

Now, it's entirely possible that if I had brought another brand of smart watch, it might have had some attribute that really helped make life easier or better, but reading through the specs for those made by Google, Garmin and Apple, I don't really see anything stand out as regards to capability.

So, are they just expensive doodahs, or am I missing the point?

Linux on an old imac

 I appear to have accidentally done something useful.

J's old 2017 iMac had been sitting in a corner in the study, waiting to be wiped and taken to the recycler.

Too old, too slow.

So, today I decided to wipe it.

Rather than do something straightforward I thought I'd try installing the latest version of Ubuntu out of curiosity - I'd heard good things about the current version of Ubuntu and older intel based imacs, so it seemed worth a go.

Certainly, when I tried installing Ubuntu on an older imac five or so years ago I found it really didn't work that well, so it seemed like a fun idea to try installing a newer version of Ubuntu on more recent hardware,

Obviously, bluetooth mice and keyboards don't work until you've installed the new operating system so you need to use an old wired keyboard and mouse. The other thing I found was that you needed to plug the install USB into the back of the mac and not into a USB socket on the keyboard, otherwise I just used a standard installation USB I'd made a few months ago using Rufus and writing the volume as a dd image.

Well, surprise surprise, it recognised the image and booted cleanly

I chose a minimal install because I wasn't totally convinced it would work that well, but it got to the end of the installation process cleanly and rebooted nicely

and once logged in did the usual welcome thing

as I'd gone for a minimal install, I had to install Libre Office and Kate, not to mention Notable by hand and all seemed to work.

To check the webcam, I installed Cheese

giving you a picture of Yours Truly taking a picture of a picture.

Now so far, apart from being mildly surprised at things just working, I hadn't really found a killer use for the device, but I had been wondering on and off whether to buy a larger monitor or an old all-in-one machine to work with scanned hand written documents - working on a laptop can be a bit trying at times - so I downloaded a copy of a Madeleine Smith's marriage certificate

and that convinced me I might accidentally have made a useful machine out of the old imac.

It's not quite perfect - power management doesn't seem to work quite how you'd expect, with suspend and power off not doing exactly what you'd expect, but I can live with that. 

Otherwise I'm pleased with the result and reckon I've saved myself the cost of a decent monitor ...