I’ve just discovered this French website which is full of really well done and observant cartoons about the lives of web developers and tech enthusiasts.
It’s called CommitStrip.com
Here are a few of my favourites from their archive that goes right back to February 2012.
I’ve been following the Swimmo project for a while now – ever since I backed their Kickstarter project last year.
I already swim with a Swimovate PoolMateHR which counts my laps and lets me download the data to my PC. It has a heart rate strap but I’ve never been able to use it as it instantly falls off while swimming, so it’s only usable under a wetsuit. The watch however doesn’t work in open water (it relies on a push-off-the-wall action to determine distance), so I’d have to wear a wetsuit in a pool to use the HR monitor. It’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg failure.
The Swimmo is different though. It detects your heart-rate through your wrist using LEDs. I’m really interested to see this in action.
The Swimmo also has a beautiful curved OLED display which really makes it stand out from the crowd. I do hope it doesn’t drain the battery too much and that it can still be used as a watch throughout the day like my PoolMateHR can.
The Swimmo also has no buttons at all. It works by detecting sharp rotating motions of the wrist (turning your hand so it’s palm up and back again) and taps to the watch body. I’m not sure how intuitive this will be in the real world.
One of the other features I’m looking forward to using is the integration with the Apple Health feature on my iPhone 6.
My other swim watches have a dedicated USB dock which is used to download the data to a computer. The Swimmo uses Bluetooth so this process should be much smoother.
The software I currently used to analyse my swims is pretty clunky and full of annoyances. I’m hoping the Swimmo software and Health app integration is an improvement.
The quote and images in this article are the property of Swimmo Inc. and were taken from their website Swimmo.com. If you want to get involved in the Swimmo Kickstarter campaign or pre-order a Swimmo, go to the Swimmo Shop
I’m working my way through these at the moment
Find out more by clicking on each book
I’m a keen swimmer and try to swim at least a mile every day.
I’m usually found at Pancras Square Leisure where they have a nice 25m pool.
I used to use a Swimovate Poolmate Pro HR watch tracked my strokes and laps and allowed me to upload all that to a computer to check my progress (or not).
I tried a Swimmo, but found it too bulky and clunky to use – and the lack of any buttons was a pain and made the whole UX horrible.
I now use an Apple Watch 2 which is much better and more comfortable that both the Poolmate Pro and the Swimmo.
I’m a PADI Master SCUBA Diver Trainer and PADI/DSAT Tec Instructor and teach the following courses:
I teach Tec courses using back-mounted twins from the start. I hope to extend these courses to cover sidemount later this year.
Although I’m an independent instructor, I usually run my training through Fin Divers in Stevenage, Hertfordshire.
I’ve just finished reading Red Country by Joe Abercrombie
It’s part of a series of books set in the First Law world
They follow on from the First Law Trilogy which features some memorable characters including Logen Ninefingers (The Bloody-Nine)
I shoot with a Canon 6D with a variety of Canon lenses.
My current walkabout lens is my Canon 24-70mm f2.4 IS II USM
I started diving in 2007 and became a BS-AC Open Water Scuba Instructor in 2009 and in 2014, I qualified as a PADI Open Water and Speciality Instructor.
I’m now a PADI Master Scuba Diver Trainer and PADI/DSAT TecRec Instructor. This has opened the door to PADI IDC Staff Instructor which I hope to achieve this year (2018).
I’m an experienced overhead-environment and mixed-gas decompression diver. I love fresh and salt-water diving and dive lakes, quarries, caves and mines in and around the UK and abroad including Spain, Greece, Portugal, Malta, Cyprus, Egypt and Mexico.
After years of using the JPEG & PNG Stripper to remove the metadata from my images before publishing on the web, I’ve recently discovered an even better tool.
It’s called PNG Gauntlet and performs LOSSLESS compression on JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIFF and BMP files.
It analyses an image file, strips any redundant information and metadata then applies multiple compression methods until the best result is found.
In my experience, it can even reduce the file size of images that the JPEG & PNG Stripper has previously processed.