Smartwatch

Samsung Galaxy Watch 4

I have atrial fibrillation (commonly called afib). My heart beat is irregular and sometimes very fast. That's what put me in the hospital 20 years ago. They gave me some drugs and my heart slowed down, but it's still irregular. I'm still taking the drugs. Seems like I am getting worn out more easily these days. It could just be because I am getting old, but rumor has it that some of these drugs might be slowing me down. I wanted to see if my heart was always being flaky, or whether it might sometimes revert to a normal rhythm, so I looked at heart monitors. I was looking for one that could record my heart beat for extended periods, but the more I looked, the less I found. Lots of Smartwatches offer heartrate monitoring, but most of them are for people with normal heart rhythms, you know, exercise fanatics. This Samsung watch will record a rudimentary electro-cardiogram which is step up from simply counting the number of beats. It was only $70, so I thought I would give it a shot.

Samsung 30 second ECG

The watch makes the recording, sends it as a PDF to my Samsung smartphone via Bluetooth, I 'share' it via email but don't send it. Now the mail is in my gmail drafts folder. Open this message on my desktop, download the file to my computer. Open the file, take a screenshot, edit it to remove the extraneous noise and then insert it in this blog post.

I have made a half a dozen recordings and they all show an irregular heartbeat.

Then I come across this cool video on YouTube:

Your Smartwatch is even more incredible than you think
Steve Mould

Time

This watch vibrates 1,296,000 times per hour
The Slow Mo Guys

This morning I'm watching the Slow Mo Guys and while they are entertaining I am wondering more about the cameras and how they synchronize them with the action. I mean, when you are trying to capture something that only takes a fraction of a second and your camera is recording a zillion frames a second, you want to be Johnny-on-the-spot when the bomb goes bang. High speed memory is expensive and you can only fit so much of that memory in the camera.

Trying to find 200 frames of explosion amongst 1.6 million black frames

The line on this image gives you idea of the problem. Anyway, I want to know more, so I go to YouTube page and I don't see anything about what I want, but I do find this cool video of an Accutron Watch (see above). 

Tik Tok

Gaku Okada's remarkable Tempo Rubato metronome 'watch'
Monochrome Watches

Very cool.

YouTube blurb:

The Tempo Rubato is young Japanese watchmaker Gaku Okada's graduation project. Finishing his watchmaking training in the Hiko Mizuno College of Jewelry in Tokyo, Japan, he created this mechanical metronome out of his love for jass music.

Via daily timewaster

 

Richard Mille Watch

Richard Mille Watch

Just came across a story about someone getting shot by a thief who wanted his half-million-dollar Richard Mille Watch and I'm thinking WTF? I've heard of other ridiculously expensive watches, but I've never heard of a Richard Mille Watch. Where did these guys come from, and more importantly, how many other ridiculously expensive watch companies are out there? I can see if you have a zillion dollars you might be inclined to go out occasionally and blow a million bucks on some play-pretty. But how many zillionaires are there? And how many of them are inclined to spend money on something like a watch? I just don't understand the economics of it. There are roughly 2800 billionaires in the world today. Let's say 1% of them have a hankering to blow a million bucks on fancy gee-gaw every year. That's 280 million dollars. If you figure 100 K per year for each watch maker and salesman, that's full time, first class employment for 2800 people. So, okay, I guess you could make an industry out of that.

Donut bag windfall story

Iaman sends me a story:

Bitcoin Donuts

Riding the crosstown, a stumblebum boards my bus, disheveled, wreaking of booze. The unfortunate is carrying a neat clean little bag of Little Debbie Mini Powdered Donuts, I may have noticed because they are a favorite of mine.  After a long twisting ride, the man gets up to disembark at the next stop. I notice he has left the Little Debbie bag on his seat. I hail him "Sir you left your donuts!"  He waves me off with a slurred profanity.  On his wrist I spy what appears to be a besmirched Cartier Rotonde de Cartier Astrotourbillon wristwatch, clearly out of place.
The bus jolts to a start, the abandoned Little Debbie bag falls to the floor, papers appear out of the top of the donut bag. Bored and curious I examine the paper......Bitcoin Private keys! On the pages there must be a hundred, this mornings news said Bitcoin was topping $15,000! So these coins represent $1,500,000!
Upon arriving home I google businesses that take bitcoin as payment,  the only one that interests me is OKCupid a web dating site,  the most they charge is $19.95.   What to do with the remaining $1,499,980.05? What to do?

It's a story, that is, fiction. Besides, private keys likely give you access to wallets (if you have the wallet id), but having access to wallets doesn't necessarily mean there is anything in there. Fractions of a bitcoin are very popular. Most people don't have 15 grand to wager on a risky gamble. 100 accounts with .005 bitcoins each would only be worth $7,500, not 1.5 million. But it's all imaginary anyway, dreaming about imaginary riches.

Rotonde de Cartier Astrotourbillon wristwatch $140,000
Just in case you were wondering.

Shiny

Ladies Wristwatch

I took my wife's wristwatch in to get the battery replaced today. The counterman notes that it is a good looking watch. Well, yes, it's gold and it's shiny, so yeah, sort of. But it's costume jewelry, it's not solid gold, it probably cost about a hundred dollars. But I've never seen this watch before (okay, I've probably seen it, but hadn't noticed it). How could I tell at a glance that it was gold plated and not solid gold? (Disregard the fact that solid gold watches are not in our budget.)

I don't know, but I have a theory. Most metals are harder than gold, so whatever it is made of can be polished to a much higher degree, to the point that it is really shiny. When they plate it, the gold simply carries on that really shiny surface. Working with solid gold, you can't polish it that fine, you'll just wear away the gold, so you can't make it as shiny.

Programming

How a watch works ; Mechanical movement
Programming is so weird. You write thousands of characters and they all have to be just so or your program won't work. For instance, I ran into a problem that I could not solve, so I excerpted the offending section and posted it on the Go Language Help Forum:

I thought I had a simple expression in an if statement:if c2c >= (r2 + r2) {but I couldn't make it work until I replaced (r1 + r2) with a single variable.
https://play.golang.org/p/juhYJaoq5p6Am I missing something?

The sharp eyed among you will notice that inside the parentheses, inside the box I refer to the variable r2 twice, whereas in the following text I use two different variables. Doh! Kind of a crucial error. (the > is supposed to be an a 'greater than' sign. It may look like one by the time you see this.) I couldn't fix this problem because I literally didn't see it.

There are some errors that the compiler will catch, like if you misspell a variable name. For instance, if I had typed 'r3' instead of 'r2', the compiler would have complained, but only if I had not created variable r3. And in some cases you can transpose expressions, or lines of code and even whole sections, and the program will run just fine. I liken it to virtual watch making. The only parts that matter are the working bits, and those have to be absolutely right.

Quora has a good post about this.

Update April 2018 replaced missing video with something similar.

Watch Me

We start with this ad full of red cloaked demons and a couple of insidiously cute girls:


Pit Stop - Breitling TV commercial
which leads to this video of a guy taking apart a very fancy watch and repairing it


Service and repair of a rusty valjoux 7750 based Breitling watch
Which gets me to wondering about the market for used and / or broken Breitling watches, which takes me to Ebay where I find there are thousands of Breitlings are available (5,954 at the moment). Looking for broken ones turns up 27 listings, and most of those are just for spare parts. Well, how about watches in general? How about a million and a half? The first one on that list:


How can you sell a watch for $2.86? I suppose if they fell off the back of a truck you could do that. I just don't understand. This gets me wondering about watch factories, which leads to Wikipedia's list of Watch movement manufacturers which contains only 15 names. But look! One of them is Russian (two actually). How bizarre.


Never heard of a Russian watch. But if you think about it, it kind of makes sense. They cut themselves off from the rest of world, and they had this attitude that anything the capitalist running dogs can do, we can do better, so of course they are going to make their own watches. Ebay has 13,000 odd listings. Many are mechanical (i.e. not quartz), many are old, some are Russian in name only.

Then we find this:

Raketa has made a giant clock for a children's toy store in the Lubyanka

What?!? The KGB's Moscow prison is now a toy store? Tell me it ain't so, Boris. Actually it's in a department store on Lubyanka square in Moscow, which just so happens to be where the infamous Lubyanka is located.

Update January 2019 replaced missing video.

Teaching the Art of Swiss Watchmaking

Final assembly of a 4x scale model.

Lititz Watch Technicum:

In 2001, Rolex established LWT as their contribution towards addressing the major challenge that concerns the entire watch industry – the shortage of watchmakers who are qualified to service the high-end brands.
The shortage originated in the 1980’s when the quartz watch debut threatened the future of the mechanical watch and the demand for highly-qualified watchmakers. The result was a dramatic drop in the number of watchmaking schools in the U.S. (from 40 twenty-five years ago to less than 10 today).
However, in the 1990’s, sales of high-grade mechanical watches began to rebound and continue to grow. Since mechanical watches require routine servicing to clean, lubricate and calibrate, the industry is faced with a large and growing number of high-grade watches that will require skilled maintenance.
Over the years our curriculum evolved in many ways to meet the current need for full-fledged watchmakers in the United States. The encouraging results of this evolution did not go unnoticed in the industry; resulting in the creation of a new certification body – SAWTA…Swiss American Watchmakers Training Alliance.

Via Posthip Scott.

Watch Me

Breitling Chronograph @ Costco $7600

My watch has gotten sluggish. Time to get a new one. I was at Costco yesterday and I thought I'd take a look. They had a fair assortment of watches for $100 to $200 and then I get to the end of the display case and saw this. Somebody could have all kinds of fun with it. I mean it's got buttons and dials galore for you to play with, and it's flashy, so you could wave it around under everyone's nose at the cocktail hour.

sWatch

Swatch Aluminum Cased Chronometer

I think I need a new watch. It was losing time, so I bought it a new battery and it's still losing time. In the past I've had a couple of old watches cleaned in hopes of resurrecting them, but it hasn't paid off. That might work for something like a Rolex, but it doesn't seem to work for your run-of-the-mill watches. So I need a new watch. I mentioned this at lunch the other day and my gang pointed out that nobody else wears a watch anymore, they all get the time from their cell phones. I don't have a cell phone, well, actually, I do, but I don't carry it around with me. I probably don't really need a watch, but I have gotten used to wearing this one and I kind of think that if you are going to wear one it should be able to tell you the correct time. Mine has lost almost 40 minutes since I replace the battery a month ago. Of course now that we have gone off of daylight savings time it's only 20 minutes fast, so in a couple of weeks it ought to be right on time. For a day.
    I had a little trouble finding this watch. I went to Fred Meyer's (the local mega mart) to pick up a Timex from the rack of a hundred. I couldn't find one that was big enough to fit around my wrist. I am not the most muscular guy, so I was a bit surprised by this. Used to be clasp-type metal wrist bands would have a dozen or so holes punched in the clasp so the size could be adjusted to fit. These watches had only three holes and they would not enlarge enough to fit. So I went to the jewelry department and picked out a Seiko, but it was too shiny, so I took it back. I must have gotten desperate because my next stop was the watch shop at Washington Square, our local mega mall. I just wanted a plain silver watch and I found one. It's a chronometer with a couple of extra buttons and a couple of extra dials, but it's analog, it's silver, it has a large face and it fits my wrist. Sold.
    Looking at in the store it appears to have a set of tick marks around the outer edge. I wonder what they are for? Turns out they aren't for anything, it's just the manufacturers name (Swatch) printed in little tiny letters. There is also a little square so there are seven distinct characters, the pattern repeats four times, so the edge is divided into 28 sectors, which must be good for something. I have no idea what.
    This watch is made out of aluminum, which makes it light weight and kind of cool. Not as cool as titanium, but why the eF would you need a watch made out of titanium? That just seems like a foolish amount of overkill, and extra expense to boot.
    My watch was especially cool back before the TSA turned up the sensitivity on their metal detectors. I could walk through the metal detector wearing my watch and no alarm would sound. Neener, neener, neener, TSA.
    Now I need a new watch, but I don't want a new watch. I like the watch I have. I just want it to run. Seems like you ought to be able to replace the guts in something like this, but somehow I doubt whether the economics are there. I looked at the Swatch web page yesterday and it was funny how none of their watches appealed to me. Is my watch that cool, or am I just getting old?

P.S. Looking at the picture I noticed that this watch has a calendar function. I never used it. You have to adjust it once every month that doesn't have 31 days, and that's half of them. Plus, you have to remember. The extra buttons are for the stop watch function. I used to play with it on a regular basis until it went wonky. I think I would rather have a regular second hand, which this one doesn't. The big second hand is for the stop watch function. The regular tick, tick, tick second hand is on the small dial at the center bottom of the face. The small upper dials are also for the stop watch function. The one on the right shows tenths of a second, and the one on the left counts minutes, though they don't show anything until you press the stop button.

MARC BY MARC JACOBS

The battery in my wife's watch died, so I took it to the Interstate Battery Store over by the Costco in Hillsboro to get a new one. Last time I needed a new watch battery I ended up replacing it myself because the nice lady at the jewelry store obviously wasn't interested in doing it. It wasn't especially difficult, just a little tedious. I usually go to a jewelry store for watch batteries because 1) I hate having to look all over the local mega-mart to find the coin cell display, 2) I hate having to look through all nine hundred batteries they have on display to see if they have the one I need, which means I need to open the watch and find my glasses so I can read the leetle teeny numbers stamped on the battery, and 3) they usually don't have it anyway. So I go, or rather went, to the jeweler. After this last go round, and with the wonderful luck I have been having with battery stores, I thought I would give this one a shot. No problemo, back of the watch pops off with a snap, I locate a couple of likely looking batteries and here the nice lady behind the counter offers to put it in for me. Well, how cool is that? Except it takes her a long time, so I walk over to check on her, and it's a stupid watch. You can't just pop the old battery out and pop in the new one, you have to loosen a couple of screws so you can move the teeny weeny retaining straps so you can get the battery out, and then after you get the new battery in you need to reposition the straps and tighten the screws. What. A. Pain. After endless agonizing minutes she accomplishes this task and now all we have to do is pop the back back on. Right, just line it up and give it a little squeeze. Hmmph. No go. No matter, nice lady has special, fancy schmancy press designed for just this task. Still no go. She hands it to me. I squeeze hard, but I am not feeling any motion. It's like the watch has turned into a rock, and the back is still sitting loose. Well this sucks. I take the watch home and put the back cover in the freezer overnight. Maybe that will help.

Today I tackled the watch again. Freezing the back did not help. Measuring the back and the hole I get a difference of about eight thousandths, which is a bit much for a press fit, but we aren't dealing with solid steel, so maybe all we need is a little force. So I get out my C-Clamp and a couple of sockets, line everything up, give the handle a couple of turns and stop. No pop. I was expecting a pop when the cover finally seated, but I got no sound at all. Is it in? Loosen the handle and check. Success! The lid is firmly in place. Now all we have to do is take it back to the store and complain that it died because even with the new battery it's still not working.
    MARC BY MARC JACOBS is the logo inscribed on the watch, not to be confused with Marc Jacobs the fashion designer who is the head designer for Marc Jacobs the fashion company. MARC BY MARC JACOBS is also designed by Marc Jacobs, but it is a "diffusion line", whatever that is.

Update January 14, 2012. Nordstrom replaced the watch, no questions asked.