u/DPAmes1

I've noticed recently that none of the major grocery chain stores in Richmond seem to be offering BC-grown fruit this year - it's all from the USA, or occasionally from further away like New Zealand - and it's pretty expensive. I checked Superstore, Walmart, Freshco, and Save-On. No BC-grown fruit as I would normally expect to be plentiful this time of year, as it has been in previous years. At first I though it might be supply chain disruption from the fires, but in smaller local stores and farm markets here in Richmond there is plenty of BC-grown fruit, and its cheaper too. What's up with that?

I have previously checked my Fit3 step counting accuracy vs. a manual count on a normal walking route, and it does ok: maybe +/-2% on a normal walk with a fairly consistent stride, although of course it gets worse if there are other factors like changing terrain, frequent breaking stride, or a lot of auto-pause/resume.

There's no stride length setting for the Fit3 to estimate distance from steps when there's no phone GPS available. I have heard that it auto-calibrates default stride length when it is connected to GPS, so today I tried a test on a walk I take almost every day wearing the Fit3 with my phone in my pocket providing GPS. I instead put the Fit3 in airplane mode to disconnect from the phone and started a GPS tracking app on the phone. Result at destination: Fit3 says 3.38 km (est. from steps), phone says 3.36 km (from GPS tracking). Works out to 1284 steps/km. Confirmed that the Fit3 activity had no GPS data. I think that's about as good as could be expected, given that it's a familiar walking route with a consistent pace that the Fit3 would probably have included in its prior calibration.

I also compared the Fit3 to my GPS watch when running, a casual jog through the park trails. In this case the Fit3 distance reads about 9% higher than the GPS distance. Works out to 1140 steps/km - unclear whether selecting "Running" bumps up the default stride length, or it's somehow based on the pace. I don't think the step count is any less accurate when running, but if the step count is accurate then the Fit3 must be over-estimating stride length when running. Perhaps they're aiming for an average running stride length increase half-way between a fast-paced run and a slow jog. The GPS track distance can actually be 1-2% low due to rounding of corners at the position sampling rate, but that's only a small contribution.

Another data point: after a run with the phone and the Fit3 together to provide GPS data, the next run without a phone works out to an estimated 1140 steps/km. That would seem to indicate that the Fit3 is keeping separate step-length calibrations for Running and Walking.

I have several Apple AirTags and Atuvos AirTag clones placed on various things that I don't want to lose. I don't have an iPhone currently, so I connect to them and view Find My locations with my iPad Mini.

Problem: If I forget to connect for a month, Find My on the iPad Mini loses its Bluetooth connection to the tags. They are still shown at the last known location, usually at home, with dates of last detection only a few days ago. But Find My cannot detect them, can;'t beep them, no matter how close they are. Restarting Find My doesn't help.Turning Bluetooth off and on doesn't help. Turning the tags off and on doesn't help. Turning the iPad off and on doesn't help. Find My insists that the tags are out of contact.

The only thing that works is a full hardware reset on the tags, then Find My can suddenly see them as new tags to be added, and it adds them and updates their location successfully. It seems to recognize that the "new" tag is the same as the old tag because the "new" tag replaces the old tag rather than duplicating it.

Any idea what's behind this behavior?

I have 3 apps still connected on my legacy non-VIP Trakt account, which I presume will eventually be reduced to one as I am inevitably forced to renew the authorization or change apps. Updating the apps seems to be ok for the moment as long as they do not change their existing Trakt API keys.

But I have a second streaming device on a second TV running those same 3 apps, same versions, same Trakt API keys, and when I updated the apps on that device they reported Trakt authorization lost. Can't be renewed.

So does this mean that "one connected app" on non-VIP accounts also means "on one single device"?

For the benefit of people trying to figure out if there's a way to set the heart rate zones for the Fit3: no, there isn't.

The Fit3 itself has only default heat rate zones, and they can't be changed. This makes the heart rate zone display fairly useless for a lot of people unfortunately, as the default zone setting is quite low, and it will always show maximum zone in any kind of moderately vigorous workout.

In addition you will find that the Samsung Health app will not let you set custom heart rate zones if your only connected device is the Fit3. It appears to offer custom setting, and the documentation says that it does, but in fact this is wrong: you can change the setting, but it will not save. It silently reverts to the default with no explanation when you exit the Setting screen. I infer that this is because the Fit3 doesn't support custom zone setting.

The city is inviting responses to a survey on the the future of the Britannia Shipyards historic site.

"Share your thoughts by:

1.Attending an open house: ◦Tue, Aug 11 from 2:30 to 4:50pm at Brighouse Library (7700 Minoru Gate)

◦Thu, Aug 13 from 3:30 to 5:30pm at Steveston Japanese Canadian Museum (3811 Moncton Street)

2.Taking the online survey by Sun, Aug 30 at LetsTalkRichmond.ca"

From the survey questions the changes being considered seem to be:

1. Block off the site with more barriers to prevent people passing through.
2. Charge an admission fee.
3. Use the site for more diverse general events.

I just don't get how the Fit3 is counting calories burned.

Specific example I wrote down yesterday:

On the Fit3 at a point where it had not connected with the Samsung Health app for a few hours:

- Daily activity targets screen shows: Calories 584 (incrementing slowly with no exercise activity in progress)

- When I tap on the daily activity targets screen, the details show: Activity cal 584, Total burned calories 1285

- But when I tap on the Steps screen, the details show a different number: Calories 558 (and I have noted previously that this field, along with Distance, frequently drops to near zero - totally unrelated to the current step count even though it is on the Steps detail screen)

After connecting to Samsung Health:

- In the details under the Steps screen: Calories 558 changes to 366

- Total burned calories 1285 changes to 1721

Samsung Health and the Fit3 then match on these changes, and Samsung Health also adds:

- Exercise calories 484 (appears to be approximately the total of the two exercise activities recorded by the Fit3 during the day)

There's no help in Samsung's Fit3 user manual. It is unclear on the actual definition of what is "activity"; is it a specific recorded exercise activity like running or walking, or is it something happening throughout the day? Samsung seems to switch back and forth on the meaning. The user manual adds no details explaining the diverse calorie counts. (BTW this is all calories burned, no food calories involved here.)

The "Exercise calories" offered by Samsung Health (but not on the Fit3) appears to be the sum of the calories burned from each of the individual recorded exercises during the day.

I can guess that the "Total calories burned" is meant to be an estimate of the total calories burned by your body throughout the day (it varies in Samsung Health if you adjust body mass). Apparently the figure estimated by the Fit3 is an inaccurate placeholder until Samsung Health crunches some numbers and updates it?

The other three numbers (558, 584, 366 calories) are apparently measuring something related to "activity", however Samsung defines that, and it's not clear why the numbers differ. Maybe the watch is estimating calories burned by "steps" activity (not necessarily in a recorded exercise), without adding background "just living" calories that get added later by the Samsung Health app? Maybe the small difference between 558 and 584 is due to some kind of update lag between two data fields in the Fit3? (I've noticed that the steps value tends to jump rather than incrementing, so there is some lag). But as I mentioned above, I frequently see the 558 calories field on the Steps detail screen drop to near zero and start over, along with the Distance value on the same screen. That's clearly a bug: it's obviously wrong to have a screen show "Steps 5000, Distance 0.01 km, Calories 3"

Has anyone found alternative documentation in this area?

Does anyone know how Samsung defines the different distance totals it shows in different places on the Fit3 screens?

For example, if I tap on the Steps tile to display more information and scroll down, right now I see "Distance 4.81 km". If I tap on the Daily Activity tile, it shows me "Today - Distance while active 4.87 km". Both show the same step count. But sometimes the discrepancy is much larger., e.g., the "Distance while active" will suddenly drop to 0.01 km for no apparent reason. (not syncing any data with the phone, as Samsung Health will corrupt both the steps and the distance.)

Obviously the Fit3 is computing these two Distance fields differently, but how? They haven't defined it. I could hazard a guess that maybe they defined "Distance while active" as a subset of the total daily distance which includes distance while not active (whatever that means). But in that case the "Distance while active" would be the smaller number of the two, and it's not always - in this particular case it's larger.

Another guess: Possibly the "Distance while active" has been added up from each activity using accurate GPS tracking on the phone which accompanied the Fit3 while walking, while the daily distance total is estimated by multiplying the total daily steps by the average step length. If the average step length is computed using some long-term averaging algorithm that's running a little bit short, then it might result in the the daily total appearing to be less than the GPS-tracked activity total. The firmware developers might not have considered that issue, or didn't think it was significant enough to bother correcting.

And the Calories count is even worse. The Fit3 shows 3 different Total Calories figures in different places: two different Activity Calories values which increment slowly even when there is no explicit activity (undefined), plus a daily total calories that is higher but not related to Activity calories. With no documentation it's impossible to tell what they are referring to. They also change when the Samsung Health app runs on the phone, and Samsung Health shows a 4th different Calories number called "Exercise calories" which appears to be the approximate total of calories from all of the recorded exercise sessions (like walking, running). This is a total mess! Why has Samsung never organized this?

I haven't encountered these problems on any other smart watch or fitness tracker. It seems to a Samsung "feature".

My Samsung Galaxy Fit3 watch seems to count steps accurately during activities, but the moment it connects to the Samsung Health app it starts reporting wildly erratic step counts and distance totals for the day. Thousands of phantom steps will appear in an instant, adding kilometers of distance - or thousands of true steps recorded on the Fit3 may suddenly drop back to a few hundred with a corresponding reduction in distance. Clearly the Health app is corrupting the data on the Fit3, but why?

The Health app is only on one phone, connected to one device (the Fit3), and does not sync data with my Samsung account.

Sources say the Health app may accidentally double data from your phone and the watch in daily totals, and you can select an option in settings to ignore the phone steps. But I have no such option in the Health app, probably because the Fit3 is shown as the only connected device.

Is there any explanation for the erratic behavior of the Health app, or a way to stop it from corrupting the step count?

Update: Unfortunately it looks like this is a 2-year-old known bug that Samsung has not fixed:

https://www.reddit.com/r/GalaxyFit/comments/1bbhv5a/galaxy_fit_3_inaccurate_data_being_synced/

For shame, Samsung!

I really like the way my Fit3 mirrors notifications on my phone and lets me read them and dismiss them for both devices. But proper delivery of notifications is only about 80%. About 1 in 10 notifications from the same apps that work most of the time get missed entirely, and a similar fraction are delivered but the watch fails to vibrate or turn on the screen.

I've verified that the notification settings are correct - obviously, since it works most of the time. I switched the setting for "only when the phone screen is off" to "always". Didn't help. Doesn't seem to matter whether the phone was used in the last few seconds or has been dormant with the screen off and locked for an hour. I've looked unsuccessfully for some pattern to the fault, especially in cases when the phone was right beside me and I could see/hear a notification delivered on the phone but the watch stayed silent. In that case about half the time when I turn on the watch screen the notification indicator is there, but it didn't alert me. The Samsung Fit3 plugin and SAS apps are allowed to run in the background on the phone, and are running when I check services.

Any ideas?

Supposedly the Fit3 watch is supported in the Samsung Find service according to online sources. I added my new Fit3 to my Samsung account, where it shows up correctly as a registered device in my online account.

But it doesn't appear in Samsung Find with my other Samsung devices.

I have enabled all the permissions I can find in the Gear app and the Fit3 plugin.

I asked Samsung Support in Chat - they don't know, their instructions say "Start Samsung Find, locate your Fit3 in the Devices list, ..."

Any ideas?

A few weeks ago, for no apparent reason, Wyze stopped issuing push notifications for Motion/Person/alarm to my Samsung tablet. I did not update the Wyze app. I did not update the Samsung system - the tablet is a few years old and stuck at Android 12. My phone (Pixel 7 on Android 16) continues to get all the Wyze push notifications just fine.

I found while testing that the tablet does get the Wyze notifications for a few hours after I run it, so somehow it has started sleeping the notifications? I checked that battery usage optimization is Off for the Wyze app, and it is. No system settings changed.

On my phone I do not need to have the Wyze app running in the background to receive push notifications, nor do I need to turn on the "Run in background" app setting in the Wyze app. Other apps that get push notifications on the tablet continue to receive them just fine even though the apps are not running in the background. It seems to be only the Wyze app that is losing notifications. I tried both of the options to run the app in the background on the Samsung tablet, and it does make a difference: I do get Wyze push notifications for several days. And then they go to sleep again until I close and restart the Wyze app, even though I can see the Wyze app was still running in the background.

Although I'm certain that the Wyze app was not updated, I went back to a version from a few months ago (APKMirror) to test. No difference as far as I can tell, although it takes several days to test.

This is important to me because Wyze notifications on the tablet are linked to my home automation system, including Person detection and Smoke/CO alarm sounds.

What could have changed to cause this? It was working fine the way it was for a couple of years.

Nice spring cycling weather, but oh! Those roadworks!

Obviously there's a lot of roadworks going on with the arrival of spring and summer, and they are always very careful to set things up for drivers to get through or get redirected. Sometimes they even have a thought for pedestrians, maybe just to put up a sign like "Sidewalk closed" or "Cross to other side". But there never seems to be any thought for cyclists, even when they are set up in the middle of a marked cycling lane. I've often found myself approaching a sudden appearance of roadworks in my cycling lane where I'm abruptly forced out into a single narrow car traffic lane that's pretty risky to enter, with no alternative.

A few days ago while cycling south down Garden City in the cycling lane I ran into an abandoned set of roadworks where they had left iron sign frames lying flat across the cycling lane and the only way to avoid them when spotted at the last minute was to divert into a car traffic lane or a gravel pit. I chose the gravel pit.

It would be nice if city workeres setting up road works across cycling routes had just a bit more thought for cyclists. Maybe have somebody actually visualize cycling through the works and then set up a solution for them. Even if it's just "Bicycle lane closed ahead, divert here" (although we know that there's seldom a nearby alternate route for cyclists).

My 8.5 year old Nest Protect seems to have developed a faulty smoke alarm sensor (at 2am of course!). I wanted to try a factory reset on it as a last resort to see if it recalibrates itself or something like that, but it seems to be impossible. I can initiate a factory reset, but the faulty smoke alarm always kicks in during the countdown and aborts the reset. Any ideas?

Google Photos on my Pixel phone has always shown me the default list view with photos grouped by date and listed under a date header for each day, newest to oldest.

Today the date headers disappeared, and all the photos are shown in one big grid, still ordered from newest to oldest. I didn't change anything to my knowledge, and I can't figure out how to get the old date headers back.

Any help?

Lately our Firestick 4k Max will frequently fail to load the home menu properly on startup - maybe 50% of the time? Normally it would start up, load the content ads and immediately shows the home menu apps below the content ads while cycling through the ads. But now about half the time it loads the content ads and starts cycling through them - but no app menu. Pressing the Home button on the remote does nothing. I have to press the Menu button on the remote and step down to Appstore to display the app menu. Amazon broke something, but what?

First time experiment paying for anything with crypto. Painstakingly worked my way through setting up an account with Coinbase, verifying account, transferring money, buying bitcoin, setting up Torbox one-time payment, and then...

Torbox gives me a QR code and an option to select wallet (why? what does that mean in this context?). Coinbase isn't one of the options. Coinbase can scan the QR code, but that produces - a blank transaction entry screen.

Selected manual payment on Coinbase, copied the "address" Torbox gave for their default wallet (hope it's right, who knows?) and the exact BTC amount from the Torbox screen. Timed out once, had to start again. Then Send!

Result: Transaction delayed, Coinbase wants me to take an anti-scam survery first. Aaargh. Fine, done.

Next: Coinbase tells me my transaction is on auto-hold until next week to make sure I am not being scammed or money-laundering my measly $12!

I have no idea what Torbox will do when the delayed transaction arrives. Does anyone know? Should I just try to cancel the transaction at Coinbase and eat the fees and try again sometime?

This one has me stumped:

The Wyze Android app for the Wyze cams posts notifications like this "Motion Detected Wyze1 at 5:43 PM". That's exact;y what I see in the Tasker run log when I use Action Edit %evtprm3 to see what the notification text looks like.

But if I attempt to use %evtprm3 in a subsequent action like HTTP Request, or if I attempt to set another variable to %evtprm3, I only get the first 18 characters.

For example Variable Set %naction = %evtprm3 produces %naction="Motion Detected Wy".

An HTTP Request sending %evtprm3 by GET or POST produces the same 18 characters.

Apparently there are no unusual characters in the string - a Search/Replace [^a-zA-Z0-9] on %evtprm3 replacing any non-text character with "x" produces "MotionxDetectedxWy".

Strangely I can use Variable Section to get the cam number at character position 21 of %evtprm3.

What's going on here? Why can I only see the first 18 characters of this notification string when the whole string is initially present in %evtprm3?