A week with the Amazon Halo Band

UPDATE December 14th, 2020: I can no longer recommend this device. It’s December 14th, 2020 and after 87 days with the device I just can’t recommend it. A few weeks ago the device stopped charging, and after a a support request via the website where I was told to “try another charging cable, like from your phone” (it has a proprietary clamp-connector…) Amazon sent me a refurbished unit (correct, they sent me a refurbished unit on an invite-only device) several days later. The refurbished replacement was placed into a plastic zip bag and dropped into a plastic mailing envelope with zero protection whatsoever. I then had trouble trying to get it to pair with the app, my backups wouldn’t actually restore so I lost all of my previous data, and the refurb was regularly failing to detect large portions of my sleep claiming it must have come loose or I was sleeping on it. Don’t do it.

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Original review September 25th, 2020:

The Amazon Halo Band is a new fitness tracker Amazon has brought out. Basically it’s a movement tracker, has a heart rate monitor, and… a microphone to analyze your conversations…

I’ve had mine for a week now and overall I’m fairly satisfied with it. My previous experience with activity tracking is fairly limited, I had a Striiv that clipped to my waistband and then a Gen1 Apple Watch but I have no knowledge of other current-gen products. Here’s my Black + Onyx Amazon Halo Band (don’t worry, that’s a salt lamp out of focus):

My only real complaint is the band took a few days to get used to, the material… is a bit abrasive. The material exists in a world between industrial carpet and that carpet-like material used on automotive speaker enclosures that let you thump that 808 drum in your trunk at stoplights.

I’m getting about 30 hours of battery life until I drop to the 20% range, obviously over the course of a year this is probably going to start to drop off some but honestly the recharging is fast. I’ll take it off in the evening when I sit down to read for 45 minutes or so and it charges fully in less than that, you also get a notification on your phone letting you know that it is charged. As of writing this it has been 11 hours since a full charge and I’m at 85%, mind you nearly 7 of that I was sleeping.

Here are some examples of the activity tracking

What I found interesting is how many points the cycling registered, my guess here is because it is more of a steady-state/constant pedaling thing that my heart rate was consistently elevated in a moderate range whereas with my lifting as a strength athlete I've got a lot of heavy stuff in a brief window then my rest period where I'm making my heart rate go back down as quickly as possible through breathing and general lack of movement but then the elliptical (a Precor EFX 835) which is much more high intensity (just shy of all out, high resistance), thus a far higher heart rate, than the cycling barely registered any points in comparison.

Sleep tracking, the band itself isn’t annoying or abnormally noticeable in bed. As for the tracking, the results I’m receiving are wholly believable so I don’t doubt them. Here are my “best” and “worst” (this night I definitely tossed and turned a lot, oh the stress of attempting to buy a home) nights so far

As far as recording you throughout the day for the “tone” I personally have no use for it but I have enabled it and have it set to the most frequent setting. I could absolutely see where this could be a useful tool for various people that have issues with public speaking, dealing with a co-worker/manager/direct report, are fighting with a sibling/parent/spouse etc to help them become more aware of how they are personally participating in conversations but I mean… I really don’t as I’m working from home for almost 6 months now due to Covid and if i’m being honest my wife and I don’t have a whole lot of heated conversations so a lot of this is me just thinking out loud at work-related things, at a podcast I’m listening to with my earbuds, or muttering to myself as I read a Reddit thread. What is captured here in the example below is the frustration of this home buying process and the varying levels of incompetency we are experiencing with every single party involved. The notable moment captured in the screenshot here is actually me talking to myself, completely alone, about the general state of my Minecraft village on a survival server I play on, the 11:50 AM is again me completely alone talking out loud as I was having VPN password sync issues with work and was unable to do anything, the 5:10 pm was me telling my wife goodbye as she left to go back to work to work concessions at a middle school sportsball event and the 6:30 pm was, again, me talking to myself as a friend and I were messing around in a contest on the Minecraft server. Man, I talk to myself a lot.

As far as the body fat/composition feature… it is clunky at best. You have to prop your phone up nearly completely upright then walk back and forth under ideal lighting until it is happy and then make 1/4 turns at which point it generates an image that basically looks like someone ran you through an app filter with decade-old image processing. And, at least on me, it rounded off some of my muscle… it shaved maybe 1/3 off of my traps and deleted part of my right calf. Another curious thing, I have a quite long beard and it didn’t’ seem to know what to do with it and gave me a weird chin that looks more like an odd adam’s apple.

As far as the labs… they’re all crap, some of which is even based on questionable science like “Listen to Isochronic tones to reduce stress” and “Improve sleep with binaural beats”. Some other random ones:

• Block out negative noise at night for smoother sleep

• Reduce bedtime stress with a bedtime story

• Wake up refreshed with a 10-minute meditation

• 4 Weeks to a Leander, Stronger You

• 150-minute fix

• 30 Day Lengthen and Tone

• Intermediate Barre

• No Props, No Problem

• Meditate to bring more gratitude into your world

Uhhh… yeah, no thanks Labs tab.

Find the product page for the Amazon Halo Band here

My LEGO MOC of habitat modules for a Mars mission and how I'd set up the first colony

I originally intended to do any entire Mars mission out of LEGO, I have most of the elements I need for the rocketry, return vehicle, exploration vehicle, etc., but five months ago I did the habitats and stopped. I'll get around to finishing everything eventually. I had thought I posted this MOC on this blog, but it appears I haven't, so here it is!

I have about 18.5 m2 of PV panels displayed in the model which would provide about 1415w at high noon on Mars during the Martian winter (1851w in the summer), the tanks have been launched and landed ahead of time mostly empty containing ISRU units to generate/capture usable things from the atmosphere. Probably WAVAR for one of the ISRU units which upon landing could quickly be used for starting soil washing experiments and/or hydroponics, if near the northern polar region you could take your time harvesting water ice for melting, you could also have some of the water from the WAVAR going to a second ISRU purely to make oxygen and hydrogen, you could also have one making monopropellant hydrogen peroxide for the return mission and/or return samples. In the event of a dust storm, which can last months or more, the PV panels would be mostly worthless; however, the stored oxygen and hydrogen could be used with a fuel cell to provide energy for the habitat modules.

I didn't picture an RTG as I plan to have one of the vehicles using an RTG for processing water ice (the waste heat to melt the ice and warm the passenger cabin), this vehicle could be plugged into the habitat modules to provide heat and emergency energy in the event of a prolonged storm as leaving the habitat modules would be a bad idea due to severely reduced visibility.

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If I were to establish a Mars colony here are my initial thoughts on how I'd go about doing it.

Habitat

In the early days, I'd start with inflatables as I've shown above in LEGO elements. But Ryan, what about radiation shielding? 

It's not as big of an issue as you'd suspect. You aren't going to be living/temporarily living in clear nylon inflated bubbles. Yes, you'll pick up more rads if you are living in an unshielded habitat, but shielding it is going to be quite easy if you have even modest mechanical means of moving regolith.

Worst case for a non-permanent mission, the areas of the habitat you spend most of your time in have the water stored in the walls and ceiling.

Quick shielding for more permanent living, you take a strong, but light, material like Nylon 6 with you ultra-light metal poles. You place the poles around the habitat you then weave the material between them (think 'under over') and then spend your first few days using modestly powered Martian wheelbarrow to scoop and move regolith between the material and the habitat except for shielded doors. Again, have some of the water stored in the top of the modules for the hours the sun is overhead. OR make a simple machine that fills sandbags, the sandbags would require more material (fabric/plastic) but would likely be quicker than carting regolith around.

With my example in LEGO, I'd have the inflatable modules I have shown then come in with poles spaced out like fence posts, something like Nylon 6 sheeting woven between the poles and then fill the space with regolith. For a more long term shielding, your habitats are mostly underground, OR you use regolith as a component for making bricks and stack bricks around the hab modules.

Water

Depending on where you land will matter here. If you wanted to land near the northern polar cap you'd find 821,000 cubic kilometers of water ice available for exploitation, elsewhere you'd have to find it in the regolith or get lucky and drill and hope to find an underground water source near a geologically active area that is pumping out geothermal energy (which you might want to do for heating and energy production anyway). 

For this post, I'm going to assume we are setting up camp near the northern polar cap, farther south than the cap gets during the winter. From here, you'd need a vehicle that was capable of a week or longer trips. You'd drive all day and park at night. Ideally, you could make it to ice in 3 days or less, you'd then determine concentrations of water ice, and cut/hammer/pick out as much as you can fit into a storage compartment and then drive back. You'd also want a second vehicle at the base so a rescue party could come and get you in the event the vehicle became stuck or otherwise disabled.

Now, you need to melt that ice. With power being a precious commodity on Mars, I've had thoughts on how to do this. 

The 'cheapest' method is going to be using the sun directly, basically put the ice in a sealed, transparent, greenhouse and use reflectors to concentrate more sunlight on a given space to raise the temperature. Place ice in, seal, pressurize, open the valve in a funneled floor, let the sun do its work. Use a solar tracking system to adjust enough reflectors while it melts, and the water collects in a tank. With the melting done, close drain valve and vent pressure. Since no one is in the box, you don't even have to use breathable air; simply pump the Martian atmosphere into the box in a high enough concentration to assist with the heating of the box.

The second option, so Mars averages 57% of the solar irradiance that earth gets. The average temperature on Mars is -55C. Doing some quick math in my head you'd likely need a little less than 0.5KWh to melt 1kg of ice and to get it slightly above freezing so you'll need about 6 square meters of PV panel to thaw 2kg an hour of ice, that's about 2 liters of water an hour assuming it's pure water ice and doesn't contain any dry ice or meteorites of appreciable size.

I'm going to use the potatoes everyone knows about from The Martian for this to give us an idea of how much water might be needed. Now, it takes about 34 gallons of water to grow a pound of potatoes, that's almost 129 liters. Keep in mind you'll be keeping the water you wash soil with and growing in a sealed greenhouse losing minimal amounts to air exchange in an airlock. The water content of the potato itself will almost entirely be recaptured, as well. So, you'd need 8-10 days to melt enough ice to grow a pound of potatoes if you go the PV route. If you went the solar reflector route, you'd be melting a hell of a lot quicker and need about the same weight of materials.

Making a colony make economic sense, funding the effort

Aha, now this is the real key to settling Mars, making money to fund sending more humans and cargo.

If a private company, or more likely consortium of companies from various industries, could cough up 500bn (for reference, Apple reported a NET income of 53.39bn in 2015 and has 200bn~ in cash, the fortune 500 top 10 earners reported 210bn in NET profits in 2014) ...

Let's be conservative and pretend a private company would need 20bn per 5 flights. Let's say 1 equipment launch per 4 manned launches. I believe Mars Direct called for 3 people for the early flights, but let's pretend 5 per flight.

You get 100 people and a hell of a lot of equipment and habitats to Mars for 500bn over 10-16 years and then BOOM. Declare yourself a nation.

You sell land claims, you license technologies, you tax import, but instead of a financial cut, you get paid in cargo space or human passage. Screw the various space treaties/agreements, the backing companies spend plenty of money on lobbyists the world around and could get a few countries minimum to exit those agreements and recognize the new government.

You take those human passage spaces taken as tax and use them to hire via employment contracts. You get passage to Mars as well as room, board for working for us for x years, and you also earn this many Marsbucks per month. Any mineral deposits, discoveries, inventions, etc. you make while under your initial contract, the Martian Free Government gets 10% royalties on gross profits and may use any technologies or processes for free.

You also work with other companies that want to send people to Mars. "You will be granted access to such and such, an xx year land lease for a nominal amount, in exchange you will give 5% of any profits that arise from your operations on Mars whether or not sold on Mars or not".

Inside of 50 years from the first landing of humans, you'd mostly have Mars locked down. If any wildcat colonies tried to land, it'd likely be far from your settlement, and they wouldn't be an issue for centuries. If armed forces attempted to come and be a problem if they were from a Terran government, that government would likely find themselves screwed politically as soon as the news made its way back to earth.

Recommended reading:

How to Live on Mars: A Trusty Guidebook to Surviving and Thriving on the Red Planet

The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must

I bought a Chromebook, and am dual booting linux!

For those of you not familiar with Chromebooks, check out Google's page on them. I encountered a Chromebook for the first time in the wild this past Saturday and was quite impressed with how snappy and functional for casual web browsing they were.  A little bit of research later that afternoon I discovered several (the Intel ones) are capable of running Linux with minimal effort. After doing a fairly quick Google search I found that the Acer Chromebook CB3-131-C3SZ 11.6-Inch Laptop would allow support for dual booting Chrome OS and Linux if I flashed the rom with a custom one. 

I decided to go with Gallium OS as my Linux distro as it is made, and optimized, for use on Chromebooks. Acer Chromebook CB3-131-C3SZ 11.6-Inch Laptop would allow support for dual booting Chrome OS and Linux if I flashed the ROM with a custom one. Flashing the ROM for this specific device was easy:

• At the Chrome OS screen I logged into my WiFi network but NOT the OS.

• Opened a crosh shell by pressing CTRL+ALT+F2(which is actually just a right arrow where the F2 key should be)

• Logged in as 'chronos' with no password

• Followed the instructions on https://johnlewis.ie/custom-chromebook-firmware/rom-download/ which download and install the firmware ROM for the chipset my model has. I went with 'RW_LEGACY' as it allows dual booting.

This flashed the rom and I then powered the machine off and turned it back on just to be safe before proceeding to the next step. I was now ready to install Gallium OS! This was equally as simple:

• At the Chrome OS screen I logged into my WiFi network but NOT the OS again

• Opened a crosh shell via Ctrl+ALT+F2 again

• Logged in as 'chronos' with no password again

• Then ran the chrx install script 'curl -Os https://chrx.org/go && sh go' which downloaded the install script and gave me a few options for the install, like setting the partition size (I gave 9 of the 12gb to it as recommended).

After about 15 minutes it had downloaded the distro and installed and bam there I was at the Gallium OS log in screen! It works great. Now when I turn on my Chromebook I have 30 seconds to select which OS I want by pressing either 'CTRL + D' for Chrome OS or by pressing 'CTRL + L' for Linux, if I do not select one within 30 seconds it automatically launches Chrome OS! I've read you can change the default as well as the time but it's not a big deal, within 1 second of pressing the power button you are at the screen then it's just a quick tap. Chrome OS takes about 9 seconds to load now from pressing 'CTRL+D' and Gallium OS takes roughly twice as long after pressing 'CTRL+L' to be at the log-in screen!

I have to say, this Acer Chromebook is a great little machine. Its housing is plastic but it makes a great little machine for browsing the web, chatting, using pushbullet to text etc while I sit on the couch watching TV or while sitting in a coffee shop people watching out the window! 

Is Pokémon Go funded by the CIA?

FYI Folks. Niantic Inc made Pokemon Go. Niantic Inc is a company that was formed by Keyhole Inc founder John Hanke. Keyhole Inc was a company that received investment capital from In-Q-Tel (that also invested in Facebook), which is THE VENTURE CAPITAL FIRM OF THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY. So, when you're playing your stupid Pokemon Go game, know you are helping the CIA domestically spy on American citizens. (Ok ok, calm down, Niantic has no overt ties to the CIA directly, however, John Hanke has received CIA - technically general US intelligence agency - funds for Keyhole Inc, a previous company and this is a 100% plausible use of the technology).

So keep that in mind when you are out walking the dog, hitting up a park, setting out lures, etc. in your attempts to catch make-believe creatures in your augmented reality app. Congrats, you are now a free contractor for the CIA, helping them to violate the part of their 1947 charter that prevents them from spying domestically on American citizens. 

Now, you ask, "Why does this even matter?" which is a valid question. Let's take a look

• Within a week, they have millions of users, carrying their phones around with GPS on and data being sent back to the servers.

• The app uses augmented reality, deploying virtual pokemon at locations your phone's camera is actively viewing

• In my neighborhood, all of the 'gyms' and 'stops' are the town's town hall, churches, and veterans groups like the VFW.

Here we see a loyal Pokemon Go CIA drone hard at work.

So you have a company with direct ties to the CIA having millions of users walking around with GPS and cameras that are frequenting government, religious, and veteran buildings pointing their camera at said locations. Say they have satellite coverage of an area and are surveilling someone of interest, but they need to see what is going on better. What do they do? "We have x users in the area, deploy a new gym or stop or deploy a lure from a fictitious account now people should start congregating in the area giving us multiple vantage points without us needed to put assets on the ground. Once people start showing up deploy our assets on the ground, no one will think a thing about them pointing their phone at them as they are used to all of the Pokemon Go players in the area doing the same".

You say:

“But Ryan I would notice the data increase, I mean like omg wowz netflixes uses tons and tons of the megabytes so I know they aren’t watching me!”

Well, one, they aren't watching you, they wouldn't watch you, they'd watch what your phone is pointed at or listen to what the microphone can pick up.

Just because a camera isn't displaying on the screen, doesn't mean it isn't on. It would be trivial to have it view the camera's feed. Access to the camera also includes access to the microphones. Satellites don't have microphones, planting a 'bug' requires physical access and wiretaps are only suitable for rooms that contain a phone (microphones can be turned on to listen to a place without the phone actively making a call).

It, again, would be trivial for the app developer to turn on a transmit feature at will and turn on the camera(s) and microphone(s) if the app is running. Not saying that they are, or intend to, but literally, a line or two of code would allow for it. Then it merely transmits back to the server when active and the vast majority of users never experience a data spike.

Another line of code and oh hey send at a low resolution with the app compressing it on the fly with the ability to increase the resolution if they indeed have a feed of something of interest.

The microphone(s) could transmit audio with minimal bandwidth to overhear conversations or even environmental noise. For sound, depending on quality, you are talking 6-50kbps. At 50kbps, you are talking 160 seconds of audio per megabyte of data.

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“IQT identifies, adapts, and delivers innovative technology solutions to support the missions of the Central Intelligence Agency and broader U.S. Intelligence Community.”

https://www.iqt.org/

“On 29 September 1999, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was treated to something different. In many of the nation’s leading newspapers and television news programs a story line had appeared that complimented the Agency for its creativity and openness. The media was drawn to a small corporation in Washington, DC that had just unveiled its existence and the hiring of its first CEO, Gilman Louie. Mr. Louie described the Corporation, called In-Q-It, as having been formed “...to ensure that the CIA remains at the cutting edge of information technology advances and capabilities.” 1 With that statement the Agency launched a new era in how it obtains cutting edge technologies. In early January 2000, the name of the corporation was changed to In-Q-Tel.”

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/intelligence-history/in-q-tel

Now folks, keep in mind this post is mostly tongue in cheek. However, don't dismiss it as a work of fiction; the company and investment connections are real. The technology could legitimately be used in the fashion I outlined above. Is it? Probably not. Is the CIA thinking "damn, he ruined that future idea for us!", haha, maybe? Did the specific app Pokemon Go receive CIA funding, who knows! Just be mindful of what you install on your phone and where you are pointing that phone when the camera is on. Respect the privacy of others. And stop trespassing to catch your silly imaginary cartoon characters.

Haha have fun guys! :)