Seven minutes to get you fit

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Seems like every day we get a new bit of research saying that high-intensity interval training (HIIT) is the best way to increase and maintain a good level of fitness. Often these exercises take the form of stationary cycling or track running with 20-seconds on maximum effort, 10 seconds rest. (When I’ve not been running for a few weeks, I normally do a few 4 x 1000m interval sessions and that gets me right back where I left off.)

The New York Times reports on a straight forward routine that only requires a chair and a wall (and your own bodyweight) to do. It’s a circuit of 12 different exercises performed back-to-back in seven minutes.

The exercises should be performed in rapid succession, allowing 30 seconds for each, while, throughout, the intensity hovers at about an 8 on a discomfort scale of 1 to 10, Mr. Jordan says. Those seven minutes should be, in a word, unpleasant. The upside is, after seven minutes, you’re done.

While I’m really not thinking about giving up running, I don’t do enough strength training. This looks like a good routine to try out.

Hashtags and conferences

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I largely agree with Daniel Victor on that hashtag-free tweets are more aesthetically pleasing and that we should avoid using them. Or at least put more thought into when we use them.

I’d like to add a little idea I’ve had on using hashtags in conferences. Hashtags are handy in connecting small groups of people but I think there’s an alternative.

Twitter should treat hashtags at the start of a tweet the same way as it does @replies, hide from your main feed unless you follow that specific person or hashtag in this case.

#LearningFest Just arrived, who else is here?

This way you could freely be a little more vocal at these events but and at the same time not piss off those followers who don’t care about premier education events. I know people are self conscious about this; I’ve seen some start separate conference accounts to allow machine gun tweeting without the ill side effects.

Problem is that Twitter will never make that change. Large part of their valuation is based on how ubiquitous the hashtag has become. “Oh, by the way Simon Cowell, fewer people will now see #xfactor as we’re cleaning up the system to make it more user friendly”. No. Never gonna happen.

But fear not, solution is already here.

I suggest that next time you’re at a conference you do this instead:

@LearningFest Just arrived, who else is here?

This way only those who give a damn will see it. Chances are that if you’re at that conference, you’ll have followed the account. You can always mention before hand that “I’ll be at @LearningFest, follow to hear the latest” so your other followers can keep up if they care enough.

Other obvious benefit is that now it’s easy to find out what the event is you’re talking about. So often you see a hashtag but struggle to find out what the context or event is.

I guess hastags are the new punchline.tumbler.com—or punchline.com as it used to be at the turn of the century. You know, back when we use to say things like “you’re a dumbass dot com”? I’m not saying I’ll never use one but as Victor suggest, I’ll be more considerate when using them.

How piracy destroyed Battle Dungeon

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While the internet tubes get lubed and ready for what will probably be the biggest piracy event to date, here’s the story on how piracy made one game shut its servers.

However, when you release a multiplayer game that requires account creation to play you suddenly get a much clearer picture. The answer? Around 90% of our signups were coming from pirated copies of our game.

Battle Dungeon: Risen is the reworking of the original title as a single player game and it’s available in the App Store.

Via MacRumors.com

iPad Air will most likely sell for £249 ($299)

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I’ve been sitting on this screenshot for a while. Since the iPhone 5 announcement event, in fact.

It’s from the first few minutes of Apple Store UK coming back online after the event. Look at the iPad section and ‘from’ price. At the time, and still today, iPad pricing starts at £329 for the iPad 2. I think the screenshot shows the price that Apple at least at the time was thinking for the yet-to-be-announced iPad Air. £249.

(For the record, you can download the screenshot that was taken on my iPad, here. That’s the untouched, RAW file downloaded using Image Capture.)

Couple of things. First, how could Apple accidentally update the iPad ‘from’ price to a wrong one? It’s probably because they at some point might have planned on announcing the iPad Air in September and this price got stuck on one the website content templates that were consequently activated on the 12th September. Easy mistake to make.

But £249? Isn’t that more than what Google is selling the Nexus 7 for and what Kindle Fire costs? Yes it is and it doesn’t matter.

When has Apple ever intentionally competed on price? Never. After the original iPad came out, other tablet makers were unable to either match Apple’s spec or the price. The iPad was, and still is, unbeatably cheaper but I don’t think this is what they are going for; the price is a side product of an immaculate design and perhaps more importantly, the amazing scale they’re made at.

iPad Air isn’t trying to get into the sub-£200 game but it will establish what consumers are to expect from a sub-8 inch tablet.

Why Apple should buy Vimeo

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With iOS 6, Apple is getting rid of yet another link with Google; the Maps app which has always been made by Apple but uses data from Google Maps will start using Apples own proprietary map tiles and directions.

Still, one well known Google property remains on the first home screen: YouTube.

Signs were there early on in February when Mountain Lion was first previewed to a few journalists. OS X is taking good part of iOS and one of those elements is the share button. In ML you’ll be able to share content to different services much like you can on an iPhone or an iPad. But videos, you can only share to Vimeo, not YouTube. This might obviously change by the time 10.8 is released but I think it send a pretty stern message: there is nothing Apple needs from Google.

After becoming a father just over a year ago I’ve shot a lot of little videos of our son. Email isn’t great for sharing files like that so I most often just upload them to YouTube as an unlisted video and send the link to my family. System supported service for uploading videos to is essential, even more so than for photos.

What’s stopping them? I don’t think Vimeo ‘is not for sale’. Any venture capital funded company that doesn’t have a clear path to turning large enough profits to bring a good return for its investors, is for sale. At the right price.

Biggest problem there is is the sheer scale of iOS; 365 million users* would definitely put an unpresented strain on the service. What better way then than to test how well it scales by incorporating it in a smaller product like OS X Mountain Lion?

UPDATE: After reading this again, I realised I didn’t clearly answer the question. Reasons are that 1) Vimeo on its own won’t be able to scale fast enough and 2) Apple is all about integrated services that it has full control over.

*Devices sold as of June 2012

Why did Apple wait until now before including USB 3.0?

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I sometimes get into–let’s call them debates–with someone* about Apple. His comment was this:

Oh, Apple is caving in and adding USB3. Guess Thunderbolt was the failure it was made to be. Well, I’m happy: Less peripheral connection standards, the better of everyone is.

(He did compliment Apple for now including a USB port on both sides of the new 15-inch MacBook Pro.)

Let’s start in order, one by one.

Why did they wait until now with USB 3.0? Were they never going to include it or was this their plan all along? My guess is that they kind of knew they’d end up including it eventually but wanted to give Thunderbolt a head start. Let’s call it a strategic delay. As a standard, Thunderbolt is superior (more on that later) but to get peripheral manufacturers to adopt it they wanted to have on the market a good number of computers that only supported TB, Not USB 3.0.

If you look at the PC industry in general, you’ll notice that it’s pretty conservative when it comes to killing off legacy technologies. Don’t believe me? Sony, Dell and Toshiba have just launched new laptops and all three include a VGA port (via John Gruber). VGA ports? Yes, VGA ports. VGA was probably revolutionary when it was invented but that was literally 25 years ago. It’s time to move on.

I feel embarrassed using this analogy but heyho.. “If Henry Ford listened to his customers, he would have made a faster horse“. In other words; Don’t sell your customers what they want, sell them what they need.

Is Thunderbolt a failed standard? It can fail in two ways. 1) it’s a useless, badly thought our standard that doesn’t do what it’s meant to and/or 2) it doesn’t achieve wide enough adoption to be considered an industry wide standard. Number 2 remains to be seen, but at the moment things don’t look that bad; at least Western Digital, LaCie and G-Tech have external hard drives that support it. While Apple seems to be the only one having a Thunderbolt port on a display, you can use a Thunderbolt to DVI adapter and have the screen as the last node of linked devices.

This neatly brings us to why as a technology Thunderbolt is so great. To simplify this, it is basically like connecting something straight to the motherboard via a PCI Express. It delivers speeds up to 10Gbps which is so fast that you can’t find a single hard drives fast enough to take advantage of this (You can make a RAID array of SSD drives to do this). Unlike USB 3.0, it supports daisy chaining devices. You can have three hard drives, a Blu-Ray drive and a display hooked to the same port and use all of them at the same time. What’s not to like?

Finally, with this in mind, if you want less connection standards Thunderbolt is the one to have. I don’t mean the industry should completely abandon USB, there’s still lots of good uses for that, not least because it is so widely accepted.

*As the conversation happened on Facebook and the original status wasn’t public, it’s not my place to say who this person is.

Facebook, Social Games and Real Achievements

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“I just spent $1 on a box for a turd that looks like a duck. I think it was worth it.”

-John House, a casual gamer on Mark Zuckerberg: Inside Facebook (BBC 1, 4 Dec 2011)

At first, this sounds preposterous. Spending actual real world money that you have to earn in a real world job on a digital box to keep a digital shit in? Makes little sense. But on the other hand, it’s just part of the over all cost of entertainment. Regular PS3 or Xbox game costs upwards of £40, most games on Facebook are free but to enhance the experience you spend money on extras or to get further, faster.

No, above isn’t the problem, the problem was exemplified by Michelle Maruyama who has played Restaurant City for two years:

It’s definitely a chore and it definitely cuts into your spare time. Like I know that I used to read the New Yorker pretty much cover to cover every single week and I know that I absolutely do not do that anymore.

The real cost of social games isn’t the money that is spent, it is the time that these games take away from other meaningful things we could be doing.

I guess that applies to all ‘pure’ entertainment that doesn’t offer knowledge as a side product. How can I argue if an hour spent on MafiaVille is somehow less well spent than an hour for spent on ‘watching TV’? But I can argue that fragmenting ones attention and concentration multiple times a day by having to make sure your crop doesn’t spoil can’t be good.

Watching TV or reading a good article is a satisfying experience that when you get to the end leaves you with fulfilment. These social games are more like smoking. They fill you with anxiety. As soon as you finish one session, you’re waiting for the next opportunity to [insert social game verb here].

Where’s the attraction then? I think it’s in our primal need for feeling of achievement, success and pleasure. These games offer a quick fix for that. You can make real FarmVille profit in just a few hours. It is the buzz one gets from making something, no matter how virtual or imaginary it is, out of nothing. In the real world, only few people actually sell anything apart from their time to their employers. (And with that I don’t mean you can’t get pleasure out of a job, of course you can, but it’s not a coincidence that the maker movement is gaining momentum.)

And the kind of achievement social games offer is different to other video games, too. In a normal video game going forward requires time, yes, but also trial and error and learning from your mistakes. In many social games, going forward only requires time and repetition. The is very little learning involved.

I’m not trying to argue benefits of ‘real’ video games but I’ll share two facts. In Finland, boys often have stronger English skills due to playing video games. Another is that studies have found that surgeons who play video games perform better than their non-gamer colleagues.

I think people should be wary of the time spent on tasks that offer very little in return. That goes for anything but especially FarmVille and most other social games; after all, it’s not just time actively spent playing them that is consuming.

That’s So Finnish

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Nokia used to be a Finnish icon. Torchbearer of innovation, engineering and design.

Then, in 2007, Apple released the iPhone and denied Nokia the opportunities to be innovative, continue to create iconic designs or even engineer decent phones. If there’s anyone to blame for Nokia’s misfortune, slide in profits and marketshare, in the recent years, it has got to be the iPhone, Apple and their creator, Steve Jobs. Right? If only Nokia had invented the iPhone, all would be well.

Too many newspaper and magazine articles in Finland about Apple are blaming them for single handedly reducing Nokia from being one of the largest companies in the world to one which future as an independent company is no longer certain. (Microsoft could have bought them twice over with their cash holdings.)

Here’s David J. Cord for Helsinki Times: “[Steve] Jobs has probably been directly responsible for thousands of Finns losing their careers at Nokia or its subcontractors”.

Here’s another quote from Kauppalehti (to call them Financial Times of Finland is giving them too much credit but for the sake of familiarity, that’s the role they play there): “It is widely assumed that the [24th October] release date of Steve Jobs’ biography is timed to take press coverage away from Nokia World [which was on 26th Oct in London]“

Both quotes, I believe, represents the populist views that the press in Finland are eager to imbue. It’s easy to blame Nokias misfortunes to an outside force rather than be critical of the Finnish icon.

What’s worst in this is that this misguided view is mostly only held by the press and some of the public. Nokia management knew the ship was going to run ground unless the course was changed. They tried to change it but were not able to.

One personality trait that Finns have is a fear of failure. When you’re biggest fear is to fail it becomes near impossible to talk about it and accept it when you have failed. Nokia has been much more than just another company to Finns.

But that was in 2007. Now, in 2011, it’s high time for the press in Finland to grow up and 1) report on lessons that can be found in what went wrong with Nokia and 2) give a fair treatment to innovation that comes from outside the borders.

Challenge: Once a Day

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Almost three years ago, I challenged myself and three friends to the 300 km challenge. Aim was to run at least 300 km between 23.8.-24.12. All of us made it. And at least for Ville and I, it rekindled our passion for running. Since then, we’ve both ran marathons and half marathons.

Running is, of course, still a big part of my weekly routine but currently with a small baby, it’s difficult to find time for it more than a couple of times a week. I’ve been trying to start doing more press ups and stomach crunches to build a bit of strength and see if it could also help my running. Trying and failing.

And because of that, it is time for another challenge. It’s called Once a Day. The aim is to just do something physically active everyday for the rest of the year. Something that doesn’t necessarily take that much time and is easy to do where-ever you happen to be.

Few rules:

Walking doesn’t count unless it’s purposeful, raises your pulse and is at least about 40 continues minutes. In other words, 5 minute stroll to the shops doesn’t count.
Sick days are off days (harsh, I know).
If you’re to do ‘fitness circle’ moves like stomach crunches, there has to be at least two other moves to accompany them.

Counting starts on 1.8. and ends on 31.12. That’s 152 days. Are you with me?