Day: 22 November 2022

Don’t miss out: Mozilla Festival 2023’s call for proposals ends 16 Dec

Ian Quote text “I appreciate that Mozilla runs the festival in the open. It’s transparency to the tenth degree. I really appreciate that they’re trying this stuff, seeing where it goes, and kind of always in this constant cycle of, “Let’s try this, see how it goes. Let’s build on it or decide if it’s not for us.” Feedback is quick and used well”Its a tricky one to remember because of the changes over the last few years but the Mozilla Festival will be back in March 2023 as a virtual festival complete with a number of in person events during the same year.

Because of the March virtual festival, the call for proposals is live and waiting.

I’m thinking about 2 or 3 proposals right now.

  1. The public service internet
  2. Design a client to take full advantage of the fediverse
  3. Rethinking how we match people for the benefit of all

Sure more will come along but the community spotlight around transparency has me thinking even more, how these can benefit from transparency.

Wearable watch woes

Amazafit-GTR4 smartwatch

A little while ago posted how I have finally stopped using the Pebble smartwatch (I still own one and hold on to it). Funny enough a few people sent me posts about how about a quarter of a million people still use the pebble smartwatch. Of course I was one them for a long time.

I moved to a TicWatch3 which is a Android wear OS smartwatch. It was good and the Android wear system was quite good but the Android overhead is a massive resource hog. It was on a recent trip to London while using using the sleep tracking, I woke up to find the watch dead after 36hrs. I decided enough and swapped it for the Amazfit GTR4.

Its a good smartwatch with lots of options and great battery life (generally about 6-8 days on a charge). I was aware of the complexity of options but the interface and ecosystem makes things more tricky.

For example, I currently have two apps installed on my phone. Zepp and Notify. Main reason for Notify is because of sleep as android. There has been a few times when the watch has disconnected from the phone during night leaving zero feedback about my sleep stages, heart-rate, etc. The disconnection happens more than I’d like and the only way to get it back is to restart the watch or mess with my phones bluetooth.

Other annoying things include not being able to voice reply to messages, this was built into Pebble’s since the Pebble Time & Pebble 2. Its strange because it has everything needed to do it like the voice assistant (which is annoyingly the Alexa voice assistant, wish I could change that)

Right now I’m looking through the FAQ, forums like XDA and even Reddit.

Generally its a great smartwatch and I’m generally happy but really need to  spend time understanding how to do simple things like control my remote music. Ideally it needs a well thought out UI with a paradigm like the Pebble has.