One of my new year’s resolutions was to Be fitter and heather
Been consistently loosing weight at a slow pace but I do need to do more exercise. I’m hoping to find more of the things I like doing including volleyball in the next year. I’ve been consider a lot of what happens in the QS (quantified self) world and eying up the FitBit Ultra as it seems just open enough to do interesting things and work with my setup. My family got me enough Amazon credits to buy one which is great.
So I bought a Fitbit Ultra… Unfortunately its certainly a pain… More of a pain that I was prepared for originally.
First problem was the fact you need to get it started by using its own proprietary dock and software. I don’t have a spare Virtual Machine on my new laptop and I rather not go through the hassle of running a VM just to setup it up. So I went to my neighbor and he set it up instead.
Once that was done, I was able to see the stats on the website and the android apps which I installed. However I wasn’t getting updates…
In the end I saw they launched another Fitbit, titled Fitbit One which synced over Bluetooth 4.0 instead. So I swapped it and paid the difference on Amazon…
Although I still had to do the original setup using a mac or pc. The hope is I will be able to do the syncing from now on over the Bluetooth connection of my ubuntu laptop, or my phone/tablet with the fitbit app. Weirdly I can’t seem to find Ubuntu drivers for Bluetooth 4.0, altought Bluez says they have some support. Frustratingly this “feature” is still coming on Android although it works on iOS devices (as usual)
I’m holding out hope for the OpenYou project. But right now, it seems to be a process of waiting and waiting. During that time I’ll keep using it and hoping it keeps the data till its sorted…