Do you have a treadmill at home that makes your heart rate monitor go nuts? I do. Two of them (wore out the old one). The newest is the worst.

I’ve used heart rate monitors for many years. My old one (very old - simple analog) had trouble getting along with my treadmill, so I asked in shops what I could do. I was told a coded analog (Polar type) would withstand the interference. So I bought one (expensive bugger). But when I tried it, it wasn’t any better than the old one. Sure, it had way better features, but it didn’t do the job I bought it for.

Over time I learned to live with the problem. I eventually found that I could use an elastic strap (ball bungee) to attach the watch to a specific place on the treadmill, where the interference was less pronounced. But every time I upped the speed on the treadmill quickly, it would go nuts for a while before settling down.

After I got the new treadmill, I renewed my quest to find a heart rate monitor that would withstand the heavy interference. I found this page dedicated to Digital Heart Rate Monitor. According to this page, a digital watch will manage to cut through the resistance. I started looking at a Timex, but A) it’s expensive, and B) users report that they can’t use technical fabrics - which is all I use when working out. So I put it on the backburner again.

Then I swung by a store during a sale, and saw an aging watch that was marked down. I checked it out and it had a digital mode (switchable - also has analog mode that works with fitness equipment). Not knowing anything about it, I bought it, thinking I could return it if it turned out to be terrible.  Oregon Scientific SE212 has a reputation for not being reliable, and there are as many pissed off users as there are satisfied ones. But I decided to put it to the test anyway:

I used the old treadmill, and attached it (via the handbar attachment that came with it - now THAT is a good idea) to the bar holding the pulse monitor handgrips - a place there’s normally a great deal of interference. It was rock solid at normal speed. I did four sprints - all at different top speeds. The first and third, it seemed to be showing the right pulse rate - I’ve used pulse monitors so long, I know what it should look like at higher speeds. The second sprint, it totally lost the plot. Went up quickly, about 10 beats per interval, and ended up at over 200 for a while before it again showed realistic numbers. The fourth sprint, it went up about 10 beats above what it should be for one interval, and then fell back down to realistic.

Another test:

I tested several monitors and belts. The oldest analog one went to zero if I touched the pulse monitor that was built into the old treadmill, and also when I attached it to the handbar attachment it went to zero. The same thing happened regardless of what belt I used with the old watch. The coded Polar one had no trouble from the pulse monitor interference - it’s the motor that gives that one trouble. I also noticed something else - the Oregon Scientific belt, set to digital, would cause the old Polar watch to indicate double beats - but no number appeared on the display. I wonder if the belt isn’t really digital, just digitally coded. Big difference, in my opinion.

Conclusion so far (still have to test the new treadmill) is that a digital heart rate monitor is better at sorting out interference than a uncoded analog one. But it could lose the plot now and then. I can’t find the quotation now, but think I remember that this watch/belt uses 5kw FM signal. Other brands use other frequencies. It’s about as good as the coded Polar at handling interference - not much better.

I’d like to know what experiences others have had with other brands? E-mail me if comments are off.

Probably the cheapest digital heart rate monitor is the Garmin FR60 (Forerunner 60). It’s about double what I paid for mine, and much newer and has accessories. Has anyone tried it with an impossible treadmill?

I just bought a Nokia N8 (yay!) phone, and for the first time, I needed to move my contacts from a Sony Ericsson c901 to a Nokia phone. All the suggestions I saw were clunky (sync via Outlook etc). I wanted the really elegant solution, where I could use the backup of the address book on the memory card. I found it at the bottom of this thread:

http://discussions.europe.nokia.com/t5/PC-and-Mac-Software/Cannot-import-contacts-via-CSV-or-VCF-file/td-p/446594/page/3

1) Transfer your VCF file to your PC in my case from now happily shelved SE
2) Connect to your Device and go to memory\Others\
2) create a folder called contacts and move your vcf file there
3) disconnect usb cable
4) goto contacts, options, copy from mass memory
5) done.

Notes: What I would do: Do a backup of your whole contact list/address book. Transfer to your computer via memory card and name it differently (add date to file name, for instance). Then edit the address book on the phone, to get rid of the contacts you no longer use. Then do a new backup to memory card. Transfer to computer, then use that to add to the new Nokia.

This review also covers the Denver CAU-420 car stereo, since they seem to be identical in function. The CAU-415 has a detachable front panel, and the CAU-420 does not.

This car stereo has no CD-player. It has an RDS radio and three inputs - audio in for your iPod, a USB input and an SD slot.

I will describe the way the MP3 player works, which is what I was looking for before I bought the player and didn’t find:

If you have an SD-card in the slot, the player will start up when you start the car, otherwise it’ll wait until you press the on button. Even if you have a card, if you leave it depressed in the slot, the player won’t start automatically.

It accepts SD micro in an adapter.

So far I’ve tried multiple USB sticks and a few MP3 players. It’s played every one of them, except one Sansa Clip. The player in the store accepted it, but not the one in my car. I’m guessing the battery was shot, and that’s why it didn’t play. It just got stuck on USB play, and didn’t start playing.

Although this player reads the ID3 tags (I assume, or it might be ID2 for all I know), it doesn’t navigate by them. It indexes the songs on the player in a number system. There are two buttons that will advance by 5 or 10 songs, and forward and back buttons advancing or going back one song. That’s sum total of navigation possibilities, as far as I can tell.

So with this player, there’s no point creating well thought out systems that will play by genre. If you need to switch music depending on your mood, gather together old USB sticks, simple MP3 players and small or cheap SD cards, and upload different “moods” to them, and switch them according to your mood.

A 2 gigabyte or bigger stick or card might drive you crazy, unless all of the music is your favorite stuff. There’s no way to quickly get to what you want unless you take the time to press skip 10 songs repeatedly, or switch the media out.

But the player has a good reputation. Owners tend to like it for what it is: Low cost, no frills, dependable, OK but not good sound. My take on it so far, only using stock door speakers that came with the car - it sounds good enough for me if the sound quality on the file is good, but if the recording isn’t too good, it’s almost unbearably tinny.

Facebook suddenly got incredibly slow and buggy. I asked others nearby about it - no, they hadn’t noticed anything. So, possibly something was wrong with my computer. And other things got slow too.

So, time to trouble shoot. I started thinking back - what had changed? What I had noticed was that the fan was on a lot more, and a lot faster (this is a laptop). So, maybe it overheats a bit. Too much dust? Had it gotten too hot one day and damaged? I still didn’t know. So I started running my hand around the back. And right away, it clicked! I’d changed desks. I had a big LCD screen for the other computer that was right behind the laptop. The new desk had less space, and everything was closer together. The base of the screen had a slope on it. A lot of hot air got trapped in that space and not dissipating fast enough. So, how to solve that? I happened to have a genius half shelf meant for a kitchen cupboard that I’d gotten from Ikea:

I put the screen on the shelf, letting the exhaust air from the fan blow under the shelf. The screen is too high up to use as is, but I can always bring it down off the shelf when I’m using the other computer.

But still, after I’d done that, the computer was still slow. So, I hit ctrl-alt-del to bring up task manager and looked at resources. Turns out one of the processors was going at least 50 percent. It used a lot of memory too. Checking processes, it turned out to be Firefox. I had several tabs open plus a PDF file, and I’d had it open for a long time. Firefox can be a bit of a resource hog, and the longer it stays up, the more tabs you’ve had open, the worse it gets. It turned out that even when I closed the program, the process still kept going - even though task manager didn’t show the Firefox program running, so I had to close the process manually, then restart.

I’ll have to watch the resources if it starts to heat up, because both over heating, memory usage and continual processor load can affect speed and responsiveness of the computer.

I hope this helped someone?

This is a very simple charging station for cell phones, Ipods and other electronic gadgets. It’s simple because you don’t have to do anything complicated save for assembling a box made of carton. No cutting, hammering or other activities that require tools.

Grab a Kassett DVD-box from Ikea.

Get a non-slip dash mat and lay it on top of the lid. Those mats are meant to be put on the dash of your car so cell phones and other items don’t slide around. It’s possible an old fashioned mouse pad will do, or something made of neoprene. But the dash mat is fantastic, so if they have that locally (try a store that has car stuff), use that. You could possibly skip the mat, but be aware the gadgets could slide off.

Inside the box you could place two Glis boxes (Ikea), plus two smaller plastic baskets. There should be plenty of room for chargers in there. And that’s why I chose the DVD-box over the CD-box - I wanted compartmented storage, and the CD-boxes can’t fit more than one Glis box inside.

If you place a power strip next to the box (I don’t recommend putting it inside the box because the chargers tend to produce a fair amount of heat, and it could theoretically burst into flames), you could use adjustable velcro straps to tame the power cables. Take out the chargers you need at the moment, with the gadgets still on top of the box while charging.

I have my box at the back of my desk, but it could also be placed on top of a shelf or cupboard. The power strip is hidden behind my LCD screen. You could also fasten it under the desk or in other fancy ways. You’d use velcro with two hard sides, and cable ties. That’s how we fasten routers, so it works!

I made a Norwegian version as well

I liked Friendfeed, and wanted to add it to a blog (not this one). They have widgets you can use.

Problem is, the widgets don’t produce code that can be seen by spiders in your page source, unless those spiders are a bit more intelligent than I thought. Which also means the spiders won’t see the page as updated.

I wanted ONE page on a blog to have the feed from Friendfeed, I didn’t want it in my sidebar.

The only thing I’ve seen that works, easily, is Lifeline.

AND, it adds the welcome feature of stripping out Nofollow from the links you’ve added to your feed!

It’s not as pretty as the widget - no Youtube thumbnails, for instance, and the caption you add to the links aren’t included. So I think it’s a good idea to add a smaller widget below (without the feed) in addition to the spider fodder.

Solved: The site now ranks in Google. Don’t know why it behaved so weirdly, but I’m told it happens.

I found that Google sometimes doesn’t return text search results beyond the first few words on the page. Here’s my method and results:

I’m currently testing for the (removed) domain.

It’s a new domain registered in the beginning of October.

The first few days it was in the top of the Google results for the two keywords in the domain - found by freshbot following a link.

Then it disappeared. The only way to even get it to come up was to search for the entire domain.

After I put the actual design in place with some more pages (including pages with basically nothing on them), Google indexed most of the pages. The only page to have a cache was the index page, but all pages had a blurb.

Now I started to do text searches for phrases on the pages. Nothing came up.

I started doing the same thing, only with site:nameofsite.com in the search. And I found something curious. If I searched for phrases near the top of the page, I couldn’t get very far before it returned no results. The title of the page is 47 characters, and then there are the keywords. The Meta description was shown, and I could search phrases as long as the last word wasn’t further into the page than character 43 of the Meta description.

But I could search for single words further down the page, or even several words - it returned results easily.

But if I use those exact same search words without specifying site:nameofsite.com, the page is not in the results.

However, a blog I’ve had for a few years got a different treatment. I wrote a blog post yesterday, and it’s not only in Google today, I can search for phrases at the bottom of the post, and it comes up, no problem.

Update: Guess what, THIS post got indexed by Google within an hour of me writing it, and I can search for phrases far down the page, no problem. However, both the blog index and the blog post are returned by Google without a cache.

Update November 4:

I still sometimes see the old content in Google’s index, meaning there are datacenters that still have the old index. But even so, it appears the additional pages on the site are dropped from the index. On other other hand, I can now find the site by searching for the domain name, without specifying site: first. And if I search for site:www.domain.com and phrases, I can find them even far down the page, while site:domain.com still has the same behavior. I still don’t get any results from the site, though, even if I search for namerofsite. It’s pretty normal to get the domains first in the results if you search like that.

Update November 7:

The site is now searchable and ranking well in Google!

I had a harddrive fail yesterday. It wasn’t entirely unexpected, I’d seen the signs for a day or so.

But I know from experience that non-techies tend to be completely unrealistic when harddrives fail, so I’ll describe what happened, so maybe others will be able to save their data before it’s too late.

This was a laptop. An old one, with an old harddrive.

The first thing that happened was that I was a bit less careful when moving the laptop than I usually am. I thought, hmm, that might not have been smart. In general, you should not shock a harddrive. An average harddrive will survive some shocks just fine, while another - much less severe - will kill it. It depends on the angle of impact, what direction it’s moving, whether or not it’s on, whether or not it’s accessing or writing data as you move it. The worst time to drop a harddrive, is when it’s writing to disk.

And keep in mind that laptops are moved about a LOT more than desktop computers. The more you schlep your laptop around, the shorter lifespan your harddrive will have. Expect to replace your laptop harddrive at least once in the life of the computer. And make sure all your data is backed up. As the harddrive nears the end of it’s life, some data may become inaccessible, but you may not realize. So checking the data is something that was done a lot in the past.

Get into the habit of listening to the harddrive, as it boots up and as you work on the computer. If it starts sounding different, it could be going bad, and you’ll need to do backup IMMEDIATELY.

What happened with this one, was that I was watching video on it, with the video file on the harddrive. And it would stop playing now and then. If I waited, it would start playing again, but I had to rewind a bit to get what I’d missed in the meantime. I didn’t know why in the beginning, this was a Linux machine, so I wondered if it was OS related, or if it was going warm. But then I noticed that the harddrive light (the light that shows you’re accessing the harddrive) was staying solidly lit while the video was stopped.

That’s when I knew the harddrive might fail.

The second day, again watching a video, after having jiggled the harddrive connection (in case it was caused by a loose connection), it happened again, and this time the video didn’t come on. I moved the mouse, and suddenly I’m met by a black screen with white error messages. I was in the middle of a video, and hoped I could get it to work again, so I tried to reboot, but got the message there was no boot disk.

Harddrive history.

Don’t feel bad for me, I had nothing on that machine I didn’t have a copy of, as far as I can remember.

I just wanted to share how that happened, and to be careful if it happens to you.

I’ve just uploaded a new design to the blog, and also to the front page of the website.  Feel free to give me feedback on it!

I’ve used Artisteer, a program for making Wordpress templates. The only item I prepared myself was the image of myself. I tried to cut out all the background and make it invisible. Not easy to do when you’ve got hair as fluffy as I do, and the background is White! I saved it as PNG, which preserves the invisible background, and then imported it into Artisteer as a photo that was floating on the header background. That way any embellishments on the header won’t be over the photo of me.

The rest is done in the program. All the color choices were made one by one - there’s no way to set a custom color palette. I would have liked that, because it’s a chore to change all those colors to my palette. But apart from that it’s really easy to do, if you choose a pre-existing palette, and don’t fiddle as much with the photo as I did - there are built in photos of generic people in the program, along with landscapes and cityscapes for the header background - it could take you ten minutes flat to build a template.

When I was done with the Wordpress template, I made a few structural changes, and saved the same project as HTML. I did a nondestructive edit, and copied the project file to a different name, just in case I wanted changes to the blog template without affecting the HTML version.

The HTML output needs a lot of work once you’re done with it. You need to change the menu choices - in HTML, and you should change headers here and there and content. But once you’re done with all that, you’ve got a file you can use as a template for other pages on your website. Just remember that if your site has a folder structure, you should use absolute links in the menu, or the links could easily break deep down in your site.

I also opted to move the css and js files to a subdirectory, as well as change the name of the folder of the images to layoutimages, to avoid any conflict with existing files in my site.

The really painful job is of course the cleanup of all the outdated stuff my website has accumulated in the course of the 10 years it’s been online (total, including before I bought the domain name), and also convert all the pages to the new design. I fully expect to make several versions of the design and do some fancy copy and paste of code to make it all work. That’s the beauty of it, you could have two columns on some pages, and three on others - the overall design would still be the same.

I’ve never used sub items to menu links before, and especially liked that. I had a lightbulb moment when I wondered what to put under the CONTACT menu item that was created automatically. Should I keep it? I realized I could put Facebook, Myspace and Flickr links in the sub items, and just point the main item to the front page. Brilliant.

Frankly, I wasn’t that concerned with getting a video camera on my cell phone. The still camera was very important to me, but not the video camera. I’ve since realized how useful it is. I’ll tell you why:

My DVD-player was starting to act up, and finally the time came when it refused to read a DVD for the first time. It was time to take it back to the store under warranty. So, what to do. I figured I’d save the store some work, and document it myself. It would sometimes read a DVD, and sometimes not. I simply filmed the whole process from putting in the DVD, until it threw up a “no disc” message. The first time I did it, the player actually recognized the DVD, but some other things were funky. So I deleted the take and tried again, this time starting with the funky bits, then ejecting and re-inserting the DVD. And this time it didn’t recognize the same DVD.

When I got to the store, I showed the video (not very sharp, but sharp enough to see what was going on) to the clerk, and he asked me some pesky questions to see if it was user errors or not. My answers convinced him, and he sent it for repair or replacement.

But the point is, because I documented the error, he didn’t have to hook it up and turn it on, then try to mount a DVD. It saved him a lot of work, while giving me the assurance that he saw what I saw - who knows, if the player cooperated in the store and he was really annoying, he might say there’s nothing wrong with it? I’m guessing some documentation might help people with more timid personalities, because there’s no room for enterpretation if it’s an on again off again fault with a product?

I’ve used the still camera to document other malfunctions before with good results. But for this particular problem, a video camera was the only thing that would really prove it.