Time to check those teeth.

Rosalie has been driving a Checker since 1964. Her dad owned the 1964 model but at some point traded it in for the 1978 model. She inherited it from him and still drives it to this day.

I was walking by with my camera, noticed the car and took a few photos. She noticed me doing so and came out to talk to me about it. It was great to hear her story and to get a glimpse into her love for the car and their story together.

Reservoirs at Mt. Tabor. Portland, Oregon.

Film: Kentmere PAN 400
Camera: Voigtländer Bessa R2a

It was as if the AI had cast 21st century Americans to put on different costumes and play the various cultures of the world. Which, of course, it had.

🔗 AI and the American Smile. How AI misrepresents culture through a facial expression. | by jenka | Mar, 2023 | Medium

Love articles like this that show how much bias lies within these generative algorithms. Biases that run so deep that they are not even talked about in social conversations.

Jenni and I got engaged a few days ago 🥰

Always enjoy seeing this mural at Assembly Brewing. Also love their food, beer and service. Great spot in our neighborhood 👍

On a scale of 1 to 10, the entropy of my home office and the desk therein hovers between 4 and 8. Currently both are at about 8. Each time I organize, I try to get it below 4 but it never happens.

I use an Apple Watch to track my activities, whether that be workouts or recreational. For outdoor activities, the watch records location data throughout the activity. This is later shown on a map in the Fitness app on the iPhone. While that map is interactive, exporting it only exports a low resolution image, and not the actual route.

When I share an activity on a blog post I like to show the map but I don’t like the idea of just sharing an image of the map. I would like to get the actual data out so that it can be overlaid on an interactive map using various mapping tools.

I found an app on the App Store that can export the data, among many other features, but I wasn’t keen on paying a subscription for this one small occasional use case. As an app developer, I know that access to this data is controlled by the Health related privacy settings on the iPhone and is accessible using the HealthKit framework. So I decided make a small app to get this data out while also gaining familiarity with that part of the iOS SDK. A few weeks ago I got started on it. I worked on it in small chunks of time, as I usually do with such side projects. The UI came together pretty quickly as a SwiftUI app. It is nothing special but looks presentable and gets the job done.

It took just a little bit longer to get the data out from HealthKit. Converting it to GPX files was straightforward. Once I had created a file I could use the share sheet to get it into other apps or to simply save it. From there it can be imported into tools that put it on a map.

For example, here’s a GPX file of a walk at Mount Tabor Park. It can be utilized to create an embedded map as shown below.

See full screen

Or even into Google Maps. In fact once imported there, you can view the track with elevation by selecting the option for Google Earth and enabling the 3D view. I love this option as it adds another dimension (literally 😂) to the activity.

Both these presentation styles are far more interesting to me than just a low resolution image out of the Fitness app.

Film: Kentmere PAN 400
Camera: Voigtländer Bessa R2a

I was thinking about getting more of those AcuRite sensors for expanding my home climate monitoring when I realized that I already have a couple of devices recording this and other data.

These include my Ecobee Thermostat and Remote Sensor and my IQAir AirVisual Pro. Both of these have means of getting the data off of them using an API. This blog post by Den Delimarsky really helped with the IQAir API. Ecobee API was straightforward. And after some coding and testing, I had a couple of scripts running that could pull metrics from them and send them to influxdb. So now I have a few more data points for existing metrics, and have added air quality to it.

In the previous blog post , I wrote:

I’m going to take a break from any further optimizing/tweaking for now.

Well, that didn’t happen! But maybe now 🤔

P.S. The screenshot above illustrates a few other things:

• How I got the scripts going in starts and stops as I figured out the issues in having them always running.
• A macOS update that I started before heading out for a few hours, which led to a large gap because I still have all of this on my desktop Mac.
• The dots show how some data was reduced in granularity overnight because of device settings that put it to sleep. So I changed those settings the next day.