My upgrade to the Apple Watch Ultra

Posted on November 16, 2022 by Fresh

Greetings all, I hope this post finds you well.

Since July 2017, I’ve been tracking my fitness workouts with the Apple Watch. First starting with the Series 3, then continuing with the Series 4 (gifted to me). For all intents and purposes, the watch has proven to be a useful device for what I need, even with its many more features as an evolutionary medical device and companion to the iPhone’s features.

After doing two weeks of what I consider deep research online and talking the ear off of a recent Ultra owner, I lastly decided to determine what my best purchase approach would be. Applying for a brand new Apple Card vs Best Buy resulted in the former winning. This upgrade was also a milestone birthday gift to myself and I admit (although I’m not an ultra athlete by any stretch of the imagination), the tech that the Ultra offers, compared with its aesthetics and what Watch OS9, and beyond, will continue to offer for it, made it a compelling enough reason to upgrade. While my current Series 4 can make use of the WatchOS9 updates, and is still supported by Apple, I’m glad I made the jump. The whole experience thus far has been very nice.

While I won’t wax philosophically about its usual selling points (you can spend a short amount of time on YouTube to get your fill of a diverse set of opinions), I do enjoy the extended battery life between charges. While that is a good thing, I’m used to going to bed at with a minimum of 30% – 40% of battery life, so nightly charging has never been a issue, especially because I don’t track sleep metrics. What I do enjoy about it are along the lines of its aesthetics – particularly its 49mm size, sapphire flat glass bevel and titanium case. Outside of a new $750 MacBook Air I purchased for a family member, and M1 Mac Mini for my studio last year, this has been the most expensive Apple product purchased since 1991, the year I purchased my first ever Mac, a Mac Classic II.

As mentioned above, WatchOS 9 provides many of the software features across the Ultra, Apple Watch Series 8, and Apple Watch SE 2, however the Action Button is a handy feature that will become even more useful as developers create more apps that can take advantage of it. The Wayfinder watchface, in conjunction with the Compass app and backtrack features is also a nice edition. The Ultra, as many articles and YouTube posts talk about, is hardly a “Garmin killer”. I constantly state that if Apple and Garmin remain on their respective evolutionary paths, Garmin will remain king in the realm of fitness tracking watch devices, especially for the ultra athlete. The reason is simple – Garmin fitness watches are dedicated to fitness and ultra-athlete activities, while employing smartwatch features. The Ultra, while being a first real entry (level) introduction into outdoor extreme athletics, is still a smartwatch with upgraded fitness tracking/outdoor athletics features – it lacks many of the things that Garmin is superior for, especially battery life (there is no real comparison between the two).

That being said, I anticipate the Ultra serving my needs for years to come, and believe future WatchOS updates will make it shine even more.

Thanks for read.

Oceans of rhythm/peace and blessings.

Fresh

Posted in Apple, Apple Watch, Fitness/Training/Nutrition, Technology | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

Getting into the holiday spirit: too early/too commercial/too soon?

Posted on November 15, 2022 by Fresh

Greetings all.

Hope you are well. Here we are halfway through November 2022, and on the way to completing another year already. It seems like January 2022 was just upon us.

Earlier this week I was perusing a Facebook group about the Apple Watch Ultra. Someone had post a photo of a watch face with a closeup of Christmas lights against his real decorated Christmas tree. The question in the post was: “Does anyone have their Christmas tree up yet?” One comment in the thread responded by saying he put his yup last week. Early this week was November 7th, which means the commenter put up his tree at the end of October – a whole seven weeks before Christmas Day.

I’m fortunate enough to look back to a time where holiday celebrations, and the focus thereof, happened closer to the actual holiday. This is not to say that the commercialism of the holiday wasn’t evident then, but it’s always seemed that as the years went by, the commercialism of the holidays seem to take precedence over the meaning of the holiday itself – especially for Christmas time.

Thanksgiving has always been an interesting holiday, based on the reasoning behind why we choose to celebrate it (which I totally get, as it is the day in the US where we recognize, collectively, that we should give thanks for what we have), yet considering the history of interaction of Columbus and his crew with the Native Americans they encountered (and the results thereof), is VERY ironic.

As for Christmas, I literally focus on what the meaning of the actual word is and the “reason for the season” (which to some may be the purchasing of the best gifts ever). Christmas, for me, is the true inception of “thanksgiving”.

Back to commercialism, I don’t knock it, that’s not what this post is about. Holiday commercialism has been, and will always be, an inherent part of the holiday season – not just for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day, but for all the others that precede them. It is the foundation and engine that drives business, after all, who DOESN’T like to take advantage of a good sale when one can? I just try to focus on the meaning behind the holiday and to not get stressed by the barrage of/expectations that come along with the commercialism of such.

What are your thoughts? Either way, I hope your holiday season is a happy and safe one.

Oceans of rhythm…

Fresh!

Posted in Daily Musings | 11 Comments

30 Day Blog Challenge: 14 Nov – 14 Dec 2022

Posted on November 14, 2022 by Fresh

Greetings all.

I hope this post finds you well. Recently, via Twitter, a discussion ensued between me, Soulcruzer, and Darrenkeith, about our long love for blogging. The discussion started after DarrenKeith posted a recent blog and mentioned how much he enjoys blogging occasionally. The three of us have been blogging for quite some time, in various capacities.

My blogging started prior to me joining the microblogging platform we know very well as Twitter. I first began posting daily entries regarding my used of the Apple Newton MessagePad PDA back in 2001, on a website I hard-coded in HTML that was hosted on Geocities (talk about a throwback). Thanks to the good folks in the Newton MessagePad community it is now archived at the United Network of Newton Archives. My site, Newtonium-62: The Newton Messagepad Nanospace v1.1, can be found here, with a link to the blog, here.

After that pretty much folded, I started “officially” blogging back in 2007 when I purchased my first and most active domain, Vibes & Scribes (named after the prolific album by Incognito, Tribes, Vibes, and Scribes). The intent of this blog was twofold – daily postings of my musings and song/album reviews, the latter of which never really took off because of the work involved. Later on, the site also became home to my podcast, The Sunday Soundtrack.

As Darrenkeith and I often speak of, blogging is something that was never really commercialized for a very long time, it was more of your own space, your own digitally walled garden to do with what you please, without being subject to the rules and regulations of a social media site you signed up to. Once again, monetizing blogging was never a thing when we started back in the mid-to-late 2000s but, as we know, it has shifted to that and then some. This is obviously the same path podcasting has taken, which is a discussion for another blogpost.

As Darrenkeith says, I still enjoy self-publishing without rules and constraints…it’s liberating and I can change the facade of what I bring at whim, so it’s nice. Of course, everyone would like an audience but to obtain a regular one, it takes work, work meaning pushing your blogpost to larger platform mediums, using word of mouth, etc. It’s really no different than any social media content creation today. Therein lies the whole story in 2022.

I have tons of posts dating back to 2008 here, I hope that you take the time to enjoy them at your leisure and, as always, feel free to leave a comment.

Oceans of rhythm…

Fresh

Posted in Daily Musings | Tagged | 5 Comments

Early morning musings: Twitter

Posted on October 8, 2022 by Fresh

It’s Saturday morning. My alarm woke me up to a sunny day and I remembered that have zero tasks or events on my plate for today.

I purposely laid in bed for an hour checking for my usual tech tidbits in my Twitter feed. Being a user for 16 years (an early adapter to, and adopter of, the platform), I’ve amassed over 65,000 tweets. Though I’ve watched Twitter evolve to what many call a cesspool, I find it invaluable as a source of information for things I’d like to learn about regarding certain aspects of our evolving techsphere.

With that, and all the impending doom many predict after Elon purchases it, I’m adopting a “wait-and-see” attitude. I’ve taken actions to make my feed enjoyable to read and will only exodus Twitter if those actions become OBE beyond my control.

Have a good one.

Fresh!

Posted in Daily Musings, Technology | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Digital Minimalism (The Newport Way): 30 Day Results

Posted on October 1, 2022 by Fresh

Greetings,

From 27 August through 30 September, I set out to do a modified version of what Cal Newport discusses in his best-selling book “Digital Minimalism”. Essentially, the detox calls to get rid of using, not just social media sites, but all other types of tech that appears to have a grip on oneself (i.e. gaming, etc). The end result is to use technology to enhance the value of your everyday life, as opposed to technology using you. for it’s gain, in the midst of the digital and social media economy.

As said above, I took a modified approach. As suggested in the book, I removed the remaining apps from my phone: Twitter, Beta, Instagram, and Reddit. In doing so, I found that Instagram is (outside of posting photos and videos) essentially useless, the user experience leaves much to be desired. This is definitely understandable, so much to the point of me having little desire to check my IG account, let along engaging there on any regular basis. This result was discussed in the book – the inconvenience of logging into social media sites via the web vs the designed convenience of doing so with a mobile app. I didn’t think I would miss using Instagram, especially being an early adapter to the platform.

With removing mobile apps and causing the inconvenience of logging in via the web, the other part of the process was to avoid just that – logging into the sites via the web. Being a huge fan of Twitter, this is where I fell short. My modified plan was to just check Twitter for ten minutes every morning, primarily via the Twitter lists I have built in the beginning of the detox. The same was to take place for Instagram and Facebook as I could log into post content for music production. That process started well for the first week or so, but waned quickly after that.

There is this context of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). I spoke about this topic on a recent episode of my podcast, Tech Times. FOMO takes on many forms – for some it has to do with keeping up with friends and family posts, for others it’s breaking news, etc. For me, Twitter has always provided me with topic knowledge in the areas of technology developments, coding culture, and space news. It’s been an invaluable resource for those areas for the past 16 years, so going cold turkey on it has been difficult, even via the use of lists, and not having my feed littered with unwanted topic matter. Accessing it via mobile is barely different (unlike IG) then access via the web, so that didn’t help matters, but in the past month, one thing became very clear: the issue is not really the access per se, it’s ……………

…keeping the phone out of my hands.

I won’t wax phisophically on that issue, however, it’s the one and only thing that will cause me to use my time wiser and eventually get to the result that Cal ultimately states in his book. Last week, my screen time averaged 5 hours a day, which is way too much for the activities that caused that. That said, today is October 1, the first day of the last quarter of 2022. Yesterday, in my podcast episode “What’s The Password”, I mentioned that I plan to take actionable steps to finish 2022 on a high note. What I discuss, in terms of reducing my “digital footprint” (as a long time friend said to me years ago) is the primary strive I’ll be strengthening. With that strengthening, I hope to do more things to also strengthen the true and valuable things of my daily life for this point forward – things that don’t require the use of being online.

Thanks for the read.

Doug

Posted in Daily Musings, Social Networking, Technology, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Jazz Funk Soul – Blues Alley, Washington DC – 18 Aug 22

Posted on August 28, 2022 by Fresh

On Thursday, 18 Aug 22, I had the distinct pleasure of catching the opening show of Jazz Funk Soul at Blues Alley in Washington, DC. Earlier in the month, I caught Instagram updates from Jeff Lorber, and Paul Jackson, Jr, the keyboardist and guitarist for supergroup Jazz Funk Soul, saying they’d be at Blues Alley on that date through Sunday, 21 Aug. I immediately purchased two 8pm show tickets for myself and my wife and shortly after, my music production/business partner purchased two for he and his wife. We were set for a show that was undoubtedly going to be good.

Jazz Funk Soul is composed of:

Jeff Lorber – Keyboards, Paul Jackson, Jr – guitar, and Everette Harp – Sax. Joining them that night were DC’s own bass guitar phenom, David Dyson, and on drums, Lionel Cordew

Here’s a shot from Jeff’s IG feed showing the one and only soundcheck they did on the afternoon of August 18th.

We arrived about 20 mins before the show started and the club was pretty much full. We ordered dinner and shortly afterwards, the band entered the stage. Jeff, in his cordial way, talked about the history of the band, including the debut album members, Everette Harp, guitarist Chuck Loeb, and himself. They ha ve three previous releases, and their current one, “Forecast”, was recently released. More information about the first three projects can be found at Discogs.

The setlist for the show was:

Speed Of Light (from the self-titled debut release, “Jazz Funk Soul )

Monserrat (from the Jeff Lorber Fusion release, “Galaxy”) 

Life and Times (from the third release, “Life and Times”)

Hustle (from the current release, “Forecast”)

Serious Business (from the self-titled debut release, “Jazz Funk Soul” )

Going Thru Changes (from Everette Harp’s release “First Love”, written with G. Duke)

Forecast (title track from “Forecast”)

Tune 88 (from Jeff Lorber Fusion’s release “Water Sign”)

Every track on the setlist was performed flawlessly. The sound system in Blues Alley, for the size of the club, is really nice so from every seat in the house, you get premium sound.

Lionel Cordew and David Dyson were really good in holding down the bass and drums for the group, providing that phenomenal groove foundation for the entire setlist. The highlight of seeing the band was finally seeing the incomparable Paul Jackson, Jr on guitar. His immense session work as a guitarist across multiple genres, and as a solo artist, has caused him to be a major influence on me as a guitarist. Here’s a point in the show where he cuts loose.

Everette Harp, groovin’ the melody to Jeff Lorber Fusion’s classic track, “Tune 88”

A few photos from the set

This was a fantastic opening show of eight total. If you ever get a chance to see Jazz Funk Soul, seize the opportunity!

Jazz Funk Soul’s latest release, “Forecast” can be found at Amazon and similar outlets, as well as on all major streaming platforms.

Thanks for the read,

Fresh!

Posted in Live Music | Tagged , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Back to the future: Hello iPod

Posted on May 15, 2022 by Fresh

Greetings all. As many have seen and heard, Apple has discontinued production of the iPod, a device that was undoubtedly pivotal to Apple’s trajectory of success. The iPod was produced in various formats since its debut in 2001. I was fortunate enough to own the original iPod, the little brick with a click wheel, Firewire connection, and capability of holding up to 5000 songs on its 5GB drive, if memory serves me correctly.

I, like many of you reading this, have owned at least one iPod. I’ve owned several – the mini, 2nd gen Nano, 4th Gen Nano, 6th Gen Nano (that I wore as a watch for fitness tracking (see below)), 1st Gen iPod Touch, and still have a few of them. The iPod, specifically those prior to the iPod Touch, did one thing, well two things, simply well – sync and play your music (via the use of iTunes). Those two things are the biggest attraction to me for the iPod and makes the pre-iPod Touch versions much more attractive. The obvious reason for me, which I’ve read others talk about and I’ve discussed with my brother-in-tech, DarrenKeith, is the fact that there were no internet apps on those earlier versions to distract the listener from the music listening experience the iPod provided.

The largest capacity iPod I owned (and had two of at one point) was the 160 GB iPod Classic, in black. Talk about a workhorse. To date I don’t remember what happened to one (it may have crapped out on me), but the other is now owned by my sister (which I forgot I gave her and wish I didn’t – LOL). I have fond memories of listening to my over 7000 song iTunes library through the years. It provided just the right listening experience for so many events from just cruising around town to chillin’ at home, to flying across country and then half way around the world. It was 2005 or so when I discovered and then regularly using the Minidisc platform, first for band rehearsal recordings to then making my own MDs for a similar listening experience the iPod provided.

Fast forward to the introduction of Spotify and other streaming platforms. It made listening to music extremely convenient and even though iTunes (now Apple Music) became available on mobile devices, the combination of having all your phone/internet apps along with your music was highly convenient, but the distraction (to me) made listening to music less focused, or as I’ve heard put, made music “disposable”.

I have Spotify and the Soma FM app on my phone – my only two streaming platform apps, and yes I listen to streaming music (I’m actually listening to Soma FM as I type this post). I’ve never downloaded music to my phone (or Apple Watch) primarily because I didn’t want space taken up, let alone the fact that why do that when I can stream music. Call me sort of a neo-luddite, but I’ve always preferred NOT having to solely rely on the internet to listen to music (as common as that is today).

When the announcement was made that the iPod was being discontinued, as expected, all versions of the iPod Touch sold out within a day afterwards. I predicted the price gouging to appear on eBay and as expected, I saw a 160 GB iPod Classic with a starting bid price of… $1500 USD (smh).

I confiscated a 16GB iPod Touch from my son some years back that was sitting around doing nothing and decided I would make that into my dedicated music player. I have a 1GB Shuffle but the battery is not the greatest. I attempted to sync the Touch to one of my MacBooks that has Apple Music (vs iTunes) on it. I was able to sync most of my purchases from iCloud, but the vast majority of my collection comes from CD. I had one or two CD imports to this library but couldn’t get them synced. Maybe I’m not as familiar with Apple Music as a successor to iTunes but it was way too cumbersome. I then remembered my mid-2011 Mac mini in my recording studio, the predecessor to my current M1 Mac mini. I had moved my entire iTunes library from that drive to an external drive. I connected that drive back to that Mac, set it up as the main iTunes library and synced as much as I could to this little 16GB iPod Touch. It brought back a lot of found memories, including the auditioning of many tracks I featured on my podcast, The Sunday Soundtrack. What else did I really love about the early iPods? The early ones came with the Nike+ Training app (known as the Nike+ iPod system) that first worked with a Nike running shoe sensor and a transmitter that connected to the 30-pin port of the iPod. Later the Nike+ app was created for the iPhone and iPod Touch. I blogged about that whole ecosphere (and my love for it) many times on this blog site.

Now I’m a happy iPod camper again – 1265 songs in my pocket (thought I’m a bit anal in that a fair amount of tracks don’t have artwork – a must for me since this is an iPod Touch…haha…I have to fix that issue). The iPod has a regular headphone jack and I prefer listening with over the ear headphones, so I’m good. I can hook it into my car audio system via USB as well and it’s small enough that I don’t mind carrying both it and the iPhone with me.

I really thought about getting another iPod Classic, but will learn to live with this one (unless I can somehow convince my sister to fork over the one I gave her…LOL!).

Thanks for the read…have a good week.

Fresh

Posted in Apple, Daily Musings, Technology | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Oversharing – Is there such a thing in social media?

Posted on May 9, 2022 by Fresh

Greetings all…

This particular post is twofold, maybe threefold, in that it piggybacks on my previous post about the Twitter doomsday posts/articles regarding Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. What I mean by threefold is the genesis of this post comes from the aforementioned, something I heard on a recent podcast called “Off The Hook” by the well known hacking culture organization, 2600 and, lastly, what I consider to be a very well written blog post by my friend Darrenkeith Wyatt. The post, I’ll let you read at your leisure, you can find it here: Social Media + Holidays = Superficial.

What I found interesting in this podcast is commentary that aligned with me for years. The commentary begs the question that is the subject of this post – does the advent and ease of using and engaging in social media cause users to share too much? What is “sharing too much”? Of course, the definition will always be open to interpretation, but is there really a definition answer to what oversharing is?

Being not born a digital native but watching the internet be born and then social media to follow, I remember the strides one had to go through to share their lives. For the everyday person, it generally involved things like the following:

  • Wriing letters and sending physical photographs
  • Pulling out a wallet with an accordion-type plastic photo holder to show photos of family to another
  • Sending email and attaching digital photos
  • Phone calls
  • Livestreaming video (FaceTime, etc)

These examples, and similar, took more effort and extended time in comparison to the shooting of photos and video that can be instantly uploaded to your social media site of choice.

I’ve come across people I follow and don’t follow on social media that appear to share at a very high frequency. The content is varied from user to user, some post content constrained to a certain topic, others anything and everything, but again, does that constitute oversharing?

I think everyone shares whatever they do for a specific reason or reasons. The use of social media is so varied these days that I won’t get into the many reasons why. I will say that some of Darrenkeith’s blog post centers around one of the many discussions we’ve had on the topic of social media evolution, especially in terms of sharing content and consuming of such versus creating.

I remember driving home some years ago listening to a podcast (I think it was via NPR but I can’t recall the name right now) that broadcasted an episode centered around the term “oversharenting” – how parents continually “share” pictures of their children (sometimes from birth) into their teen years and how in those early years, the child doesn’t have any say about whether they want to be all over social media, day in and day out. The episode went on to cite a few teens who ended up disliking the fact that so many photos of them sequencing their growth, have been put on public display without their agreement.

In any event, give Darrenkeith’s blog post a read, I found it to be very interested and agreeable to a few thoughts I’ve had for quite some time.

Thanks for the read…

Best,

Fresh

Posted in Daily Musings, Social Networking, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

The Doomsday being presented as Elon Musk’s Twitter

Posted on May 7, 2022 by Fresh

I joined Twitter in November 2006, upon being told about it by a friend I knew from the days of AOL Instant Messenger, iMusic, Yahoo Instant Messenger, and Blackplanet, Lis. Shortly afterwards, I began to connect with other early adapters like Ray, Kenya, Brian, EJ, Will, Terri, and Todd aka The Big La. “In the early 2010s, when Twitter, which launched in 2006, was still relatively fresh, the site had a dramatically different atmosphere. People were more likely to tweet about fairly mundane things: school gossip, lunch, Shonda Rhimes’ hit TV series “Scandal.” Twitter was a place where ordinary people could talk about ordinary things”1 For me, it was just that, posting about the what DID appear to be mundane things – what you had for breakfast, lunch, dinner, running late for work, how you’re feeling, etc. I posted about all those things and, in addition, mainly about tech and music production (to include podcasting), along with other hobbies of mine. It was a relaxed, friendly, and fun place that forced you to be confined to the microblog’s limit of 140 characters. It was about or year or two later when my friend DarrenKeith aka DK joined. He and a number of us, including EJ, Fave (RIH), BSOTS, and many others were hosting podcasts on a regular basis, some weekly like DarrenKeith’s My Love For Music, Fave’s Friday Favecast, EJ’s Wayback Wednesday, and my podcast, theSunday Soundtrack. We are all pretty much regularly blogging back then. I know DK and I still do.

Fast forward to 2022, Twitter has changed tremendously as Internet technology advanced. Twitter was once known as a social network (like Facebook), but that term died and has been replaced with “social media”. Twitter has adopted a slew of new features, just like many other social media sites, but with the growth of technology, the advent and ease of first person news reporting, the use of advertising, algorithms, mobile device social media apps, and the like, Twitter has grown to possess the good and the bad (the latter I like to refer to as being akin to a cesspool).

Recently, the news has been full of the fact that Elon Musk has purchased Twitter. Most of that news (I’d say close to 100%) is that Twitter, based on who Elon Musk is, will suffer greatly at the hands of this millionaire and what he proposes to turn the site into, with respect to free speech and non-anonymity. From what I read, it’s a forthcoming doomsday for sure. Frankly, even with all Elon has been in the news for, the good and the bad, it’s speculation, which I treat as just that. Many say they’ll be part of the exodus already, despite the fact that he hasn’t fully taken over and no changes will be seen for at least six months from now.

Being a user of Twitter for as long as I have been, I’ve seen its evolution and know pretty much exactly how it works. I choose to follow who I do and use its privacy settings available to make my Twitter experience as pleasing as it can be for me. I can’t stand its algorithms in the least bit, BUT, algorithms are innate to social media technology so it’s something we all must live with.

As of today, I have no desire to leave Twitter and don’t plan to UNLESS (under the guise of ‘”free speech”) the environment becomes unavoidably more riddled with hate speech and the like. If that becomes a reality, I’ll take my 65000+ tweets and hit the road – meaning I will not participate/engage as a user any longer. No, I am not going to create a Mastodon (or similar) account and start all over. There is one site similar to Twitter, pnut.io, 100% user run, that I will continue to remain on (since joining in 2017). What I will also do is something DK and I have discussed ad infinitum – crosspost my blog posts from my blog (or walled garden as DK and I refer to it), along with future episodes of my latest podcast Tech Times, and give Twitter users the opportunity to visit. Might as well leverage social networking tech, yes? I’ve lived without Twitter prior to it’s existence, and if I feel the need to do so in the near future, I will. I enjoy Twitter for what it offers me and have connected with many great and resourceful users over the years that have expanded my personality, as well knowledge in a handful of personal interests, for the better. For what it’s worth, I never saw Twitter as a “race thing”, but a community of global users. Yes, racial issues continue to plague us today, but nonetheless…

Time will tell with regards to my exodus or not.

If you decide to leave Twitter, for whatever reason, what will you do, where will you go?

Thanks or the read.

Fresh.

1: Elon Musk’s possible takeover of Twitter is unsettling for many Black users

Posted in Daily Musings, Social Networking, Technology | Tagged | 12 Comments

Attachment to Tech

Posted on April 10, 2022 by Fresh

When’s the last time you noticed you were attached to a tech device? Whether it’s of the latest and greatest to hit the market or something used for years, I think we’ve all experienced it to some degree at some point. For me, it’s been the Pebble Watch.

The Pebble Time Steel

The Pebble watch shot to massive stardom m back in the 2012 time frame, boasting an always on e-ink display and long battery life on one charge (many times in excess of seven days). While I won’t get into the history of its rise and fall, there are may things, outside of the two above, that I like about it. It’s ecosystem is very much still alive by dedicated fans and developers via rebble.io. One of the most enjoyable aspects is the hundreds of watchfaces capable of being downloaded or sideloaded to the watch. I use an iPhone and the Pebble app still works quite well on iOS 15.4.1

The watch in the photo above is my dedicated dress watch showing one of my favorite watchfaces, FEELTTMM, designed by Albert Salamon. While my Apple Watch does a lot of the heavy lifting far better than any Pebble watch today, I sometimes prefer everything that the Pebble ecosystem presents to me. It’s different and offers and experience that is still quite enjoyable to me.

Long live Pebble.

Thanks for the read.

Posted in Technology | Tagged , | 1 Comment