Shallow Thoughts : : Sep

Monitoring Heart Rate with a PineTime Smartwatch

I've been wanting a heart rate monitor I can check while exercising.

I've tried carrying a pulse oximeter, but while they work fine for resting pulse sitting at home, they seem utterly incapable of measuring a raised pulse outdoors on the trail. (Too bad, since it would be nice to have the oxygen reading when hiking up a mountain at 10,000 feet.) I wonder if they have that problem for everybody; it may have to do with my very small fingers.

There's the chest band option, from brands like Polar. But I tried a Polar HRM years ago and found it exceedingly uncomfortable. I don't deal well with a tight band under my breasts, especially while exercising.

I've wondered about smart watches. Some people say they work fine for monitoring pulse rate, others say they're not so good. But Dave tried a couple of smart watches a year or two back, and I saw what he went through trying to get it working. It's probably all painless if you don't mind being part of the Apple or Samsung ecosystem, using devices and software exclusively from one company and having all your data uploaded to that company's cloud (there to be shared or leaked or whatever). But that's not really my thing.

Then I read about the PineTime watch.

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Tags: health, android, open source
[ 13:42 Sep 28, 2026    More tech | permalink to this entry | ]

Debian's American Sorting

I was writing a little example of a GTK treeview for my scripts repository when I noticed something rather funny about Debian's dictionaries.

My example uses /usr/share/dict/words as a handy source of data, just A through C since it turns out the TreeStore is rather slow in adding data. I expected top-level items of A, B, and C. What I got instead was: A, B, C, É, C, É, C, É, C.

What I got when I expanded the categories was even weirder: a bunch of éclairs mixed in with all my C words.

Was there something weird about my script? It didn't seem likely: I wasn't doing any sorting, just reading lines one by one from the file.

Sure enough, looking at /usr/share/dict/words confirmed what I was seeing:

laims
Clair
éclair
Claire
Claire's
Clairol
Clairol's
Clair's
éclair's
éclairs
clairvoyance
clairvoyance's
clairvoyant

and several similar sections later on.

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Tags: linux, debian
[ 11:44 Sep 13, 2026    More linux | permalink to this entry | ]