It’s official: Amazon is sunsetting the Halo fitness tracker. The news came as quite a surprise to loyal users like myself who have come to rely on the device as part of our daily fitness routines. The Halo tracker is set to stop working on August 1st, and I must admit, I’m feeling a bit disappointed without a clear alternative in sight. The market just doesn’t seem to offer a comparable fitness tracker right now.

Scrum is an Agile framework that aims to deliver high-value products with minimum waste. As a software engineer, I’ve always been interested in becoming more efficient at what I do. During my over decade-long career, I have worked with different teams using different processes. Currently, my favorite is the Shape Up methodology proposed by the people behind the 37signals company.

It’s been over a year since I started using the Amazon Halo fitness band. It’s a good time interval to reevaluate and comment on whether my assessment of the fitness tracker made a year ago still holds.

Hi. I will keep this post simple and stick to the last year’s format.

The following is my conversation with ChatGPT with no edits. — Hi, ChatGPT! 👋 — Hello there! I’m Assistant, a large language model trained by OpenAI. I’m here to help answer your questions to the best of my ability. Is there anything you’d like to talk about or ask me?

The book is an interesting read, is well-written, and shares facts and stories about Apple that I hadn’t heard before. I loved the many ideas presented in the book, but I also didn’t like a few. Among the many I loved are the following:

At the beginning of last year, my Oura fitness ring died on me for the second time within 26 months, just outside of the warranty period of twelve months, which meant that Oura wouldn’t replace it this time. Both times, it was the battery. I’ve been with Oura from the first version; I flew to Helsinki to get my first Oura ring. I love the design and the form factor, but the fact that it dies so fast makes me question whether it is worth it. $300 for a device that barely lasts a year is a bit too much. And recently, they started to charge a $6 monthly subscription on top of the price of the ring.

Back in the days, I used to read a lot. I would have a book in my hands every chance I had. Then came the period when I started reading much less for various reasons; this period lasting a while. A few years ago, I decided to fix this by explicitly setting aside some time to read and by listening to audiobooks in the gym. Then, COVID hit, meaning no gym, but possibly, more opportunities to read at home; I kind of naturally started to read a little bit more. And at the beginning of 2021, I set a goal on Goodreads to read five books in a year. It’s not much, but you have to start somewhere, and, IMO, it’s more motivating to hit a goal and over-achieve it than to under-achieve.

I have 72,769 photos stored on my NAS and organized into subfolders named according to the pattern “YEAR.MM.DD - Event description.” This organizational approach is software-agnostic and creates a structure that is easy to navigate. I have followed it for more than a dozen years. However, there are situations when I want to find a particular photo. Looking for it even within a specific subfolder can take a lot of time, especially if that subfolder is packed with many pictures. Another challenging scenario is finding a picture that will fit a particular theme without having a specific one in mind. In both of these scenarios, having content-based search available is helpful. I looked around and didn’t find a solution that satisfied me. What to do when you find yourself in a situation like this? Build your own solution!

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is, by far, the best fanfiction I have ever read. And it is also one of the best science fiction books I have ever read.