Good and Geeky Wexting – Walking and Texting

A Good And Geeky start to the day

Every day, almost without fail I have to walk the dog before I can really do anything else. Usually I use this time for listening to podcasts or audiobooks and that’s a fun thing to do. The great thing about listening to stuff while you’re walking is that generally you will walk further because you’re quite happy with your walking and not thinking about how far you’ve gone. That’s a good thing for the fitness and as you know I track my fitness with my Apple Watch. What would be rather nice for my good and geeky start to the day, is if I could have a Wi-Fi enabled kettle. Better still would be a modern version of the Goblin Teasmade, one of those devices that you would get ready with water to be boiled and tea in a pot next to it. You can still buy a version of these devices Swan Vintage Teasmade with Alarm Clock, 600 ml. This would be your alarm clock in the morning and it would wake you up with the hot tea ready to pour. With all of the new Internet of things now coming online now, I’m surprised that somebody hasn’t had another go at creating such a device. Rather than having the thing next to my bed I prefer to leave it in the kitchen and for it to know by detecting my movement in the morning when I was getting out of bed. It would have everything ready by the time I was dressed and ready for dog walking session.

Writing in a journal or texting while walking

If you’re in the middle of a town and you are walking around texting while walking it is now called Wexting. This is according to the podcast I was listening to this morning Note to Self. It seems, a lot of people do this while pounding the pavements on their way to work or wherever. They bump into people, they walk into lampposts and it can be dangerous for themselves as well as for the people. So this morning I decided to do a journal entry in my Day One journal application on the iPhone while walking. I didn’t turn into a texting zombie while I was walking because I was able to write 300 words using Siri dictation. You can usually get about three sentences out before it stops and you have to start again with the next three sentences. You don’t need to be looking down the keyboard and tapping keys, so you’re less likely to be falling into a hole in the road. I did have to stop a couple of times to have a read and make a couple of corrections. Fortunately, while I’m walking there is not another person in the road and no cars, as I live in a very quiet neighbourhood. I don’t have any external noises of people in the street shouting or the noise of traffic to disturb my dictation. So maybe I look silly like I’m talking to myself, but there’s nobody there to see me. It’s good to make excellent use of my time by multitasking. Getting other things done while I’m keeping fit is part of my routine. I don’t think it would be quite so easy if I was running rather than just walking. Another thing I’ve done quite a few times is to record audio for a podcast while I’m walking. So long as I don’t do it while I’m walking up the hill and getting out of breath, it works very well indeed. So as well as writing a couple of postings for my Day One journal I did also send a couple of texts to my wife to ask her what time we should book the cinema tickets for, for the new Star Wars movie – The Force Awakens. All I have to do now is to work out whether I’m going to use the Wookie costume or whether I will get dressed up as Jar Jar Binks.

Recording fitness data with the iPhone.

I like to use my Apple Watch to initiate the start of a walking workout as I’m leaving the house. Quite often I do forget to turn it off when I get back into the house. I might have been sitting down for half an hour or even an hour before I remember. It messes up the calculations regards the average heart rate for that time period, but other than that, the data is still good in terms of the number of kilometres and calories burned. Another application I’ve used in the past is called Map My Walk. It does just that and it will give you a map to show the route that you’ve taken while you are walking. It’s a good application and it feeds the data into the health application on your iPhone just the same as the with the Activity application. I stopped using it for a little while because I found it was messing up my iPhone and I might give it another try to see if it gives me more fitness data than the standard activity application from Apple. I’m sure it will have been updated numerous times since I used it. I was recently asked to have a look at application called Bounts which gives you encouragement to use the application and to exercise. For some reason or other, it didn’t work too well with the applications you need to use to feed the data into it. I had great success by using the application MyFitnessPal to lose weight. With this application you don’t just record the exercise you take but you also record your food intake. It’s just a simple sum of making sure you use more calories than you put in your body. It’s quite easy to bring the whole activity of weight loss down to just four words. The Less, Move More.