I've had a Withings Steel HR (was briefly owned by Nokia) for 5 years and would recommend it to anyone. About £150 new, still achieves a month plus battery and in that time all I've done is change the band a few times.
Upsides: Month long battery (doesn't use a standard USB cable, but it reaches full charge in about an hour), basic activity tracking, smart alarm clock (which I absolutely adore[0], haven't used phone's alarm for years), no subscription needed for any of its features.
Downsides: glass is not scratch-resistant (mine's full of scratches), getting data out of via API is not trivial, and the screen itself is annoyingly small (it can fit like 10 characters).
For the past two or three years I did look into other options a couple of times, but they all either don't have any additional actually useful features, or if they do their battery barely lasts days. I don't see myself switching to anything else for the foreseeable future, unless Withings goes out of business of course.
[0] Instead of telling it "wake me up at 9am", you can tell it "I need to wake up at 9am, but 8:30am is fine if you detect my sleep is weak". It wakes you up by vibrating. Quick press of the only button on the watch turns the alarm off, longer press snoozes it for 10 minutes.
EDIT: I also discovered by accident that it still "works" even with 0% battery. I forgot to bring that special USB cable with me on some trip and I still used it to track time/steps for days until I returned home.
Is it hackable? I don't want to faff about with proprietary bloated apps, I just want to interface with it to read sensors/write data via whatever application I choose.
It might be worth trying the Insync client instead of the official OneDrive one as I've found that quite slow to sync large libraries. It's far more customisable and runs on Linux too.
> I would admit that it would take many years to make a dent, but there's no rush to it. Windows seems a sitting duck. Nobody, including Microsoft, seems to care about it.
Microsoft are too busy making money on Azure and M365 subscriptions for the hundreds of thousands of companies heavily invested in Microsoft apps. Windows is just one platform to get users to those apps. Microsoft are pushing Intune/MEM so organisations can push Microsoft apps to all devices including Apple ones. They don't care about the OS because it's not important.
But then you have to deal with conflicts in a sensible way that won't lose users files and make it simple enough for people to choose which files to synchronise.
> I know people that don't think raising the minimum wage basically just causes inflation. They're just wondering why apartments in undesirable areas became 3x more expensive when minimum wage went from $5 to $15.
That's a pretty poor example though as there are many factors that contribute to property prices and there isn't just a mechanical link between wages and house prices.
So you'd prefer to see millions in negative equity unable to sell while companies buy up the ones that are repossessed? I think that would actually be worse than the current situation.
If large businesses owned a huge number of rental properties, it would be politically easier to regulate them -- limiting rent increases, requiring insulation etc.
Conversely though, it would also be easier for them to lobby the government to deregulate the rental market. A company with £50bn of housing stock on its books would be very powerful.
Even ignoring that though, and assuming that companies could be regulated well, you'd still be looking at a situation where all young people would be transferring most of their wealth to the owners of these companies forever. There would be no way for people to use property investment to fund their retirement, people would never feel secure enough to have kids, and ultimately whether or not people would be able to live in an area would be at the whims of whether a business will rent them a home. It's a massively dangerous situation for a society.
People use the equity in their homes to do things like funding startups. Loads of successful business started out with founders mortgaging their properties. This is would bring about the end of that being an option.
That is probably true but part of the problem is that, as I recall from years of Intel Developer Forums, Bluetooth was originally focused on mobile headsets and there were a bunch of other wireless technologies floating around for other purposes.
However, for whatever historical reasons, Bluetooth through a number of iterations pretty much ended up gobbling up all the non-WiFi wireless use cases (other than cellular and NFC of course). And it arguably wasn't really suited for a lot of them.
85% of the prehistoric time earth was like that, its called greenhouse earth or acyrogenic climate. Dinosaurs lived when it was around 10 degrees hotter, and they did not die from that.
Right now we are living in a icehouse earth where polar caps are a thing, which is not the case in a greenhouse climate.
