I’ve been thinking hard about getting fit. One can’t just rush into these things. I could just throw on some shoes and start running, but where would all the data go? Speed, distance, heart rate: all this information being pumped out with every step, going to waste.

I tried and failed with a few approaches. Manual exercise recording with fatsecret.com isn’t granular enough. I did have some success with Runkeeper on the iPhone, but battled with GPS sensitivity, and ironically (if you’ve been following me on Twitter), lack of multitasking – not to mention the inability to track heart rate information. Carrying some bulky GPS device in addition to my iPhone isn’t an option.

Not a giant wrist computer

Chris, quite the unreasonably fit geek, suggested a Garmin Forerunner. I remembered these as bulky wrist-computers that even the most unabashed geek would have trouble living down. Imagine my surprise when the Garmin Forerunner 405 arrived on my doorstep.

The 405 looks nothing like a GPS device. I’d be quite happy wearing it as a regular sports watch, if it weren’t for constant recharging required due to the 2-week standby time. Kick it into full GPS training mode, and the battery will be chewed up in 10 hours. It does seem quite power hungry, but I guess this is fine for all but the most advanced endurance athletes.

When you consider what Garmin have packed into the 405, you can understand why it needs so much power. At its heart the 405 is a 1000-lap stopwatch with a sensitive GPS receiver that will track your speed and distance. The watch supports the ANT+ protocol, so any compatible devices can be paired with the device to add their own data. It comes with a heart monitor as standard, and you can purchase add a cadence meter if you’re a cyclist.

Using the touch-sensitive bezel, you can pull up any information during training in the form of customisable screens. Pretty much any combination of speed, pace, distance and heart rate are available. There’s also a “virtual partner” mode that tells you if you are behind or ahead of a set pace or previous recording.

Online Magic

When you get back to your PC, the real magic happens. After pairing (yes, Bluetooth users will find the process familiar) with the ANT+ USB stick, the Garmin 405 will send its information up to the Garmin Connect service.

This is more like it. There’s all that data I was talking about, laid out in gorgeous infographics. You can see a track of your run, along with speed, elevation, and heart rate. You can even play back your training event and see how these measurements correlate.

Regardless of your measure, I am not an athlete. I have heard that these bizarre humans do in fact use this information to improve their ability to inflict pain on themselves. You may have felt like you were going to die running up that hill, but if the stats show you that you had 10 more bpm in your heart muscle, then you’d better go out there again and punish yourself.

Get one

You can get the Garmin Forerunner 405 for around NZ$450 from a number of different places, including here and here.

Popularity: 19% [?]

I love weighted moving averages. They provide an elegant representation of a regular measurement, while smoothing out the day-to-day changes. It’s an ideal way to track your weight, where the daily change can seem significant, but the long-term trend is what really matters.

The problem is, to track something over a period of time, you need to measure and record it religiously. For weight, this means hopping on the scales daily, and remembering to go and enter the numbers into your recording device each time. There are websites that will help with the tracking – I love fatsecret.com and livestrong.com – but they don’t magically suck the data out of your scales.

What we need here are some scales with, I dunno, WiFi or something. “Hrmm,” he says, scratching his enormous belly, “if only there was such a thing available.”

Hark! The WiFi Scales from Withings.com. Once you’ve set these up with a bit of your standard jiggery-pokery, you simply stand on them once a day, and everything else is taken care of. A few minutes after weighing yourself, you’ll find a new entry recorded at the Withings.com website, complete with a sexy graph. The data can be made public if you choose, and you can even use their iPhone app to show your friends how heavy you are.

Ed's note: this is not my weight

The scales also measure your body fat percentage – albeit using a somewhat inaccurate method. The important thing is that the measurement is consistent, which does give you a useful long-term trend.

The Withings Scales are incredibly easy to use. My current digital scales require me to tap them, then wait for a zero measurement, and only then can I weigh myself. With the Withings, I can jump straight on the scales and get an immediately depressing measurement. Brilliant!

The only things missing from Withings are an API for data access, and – ironically – a weighted moving average on their default graph. You can export your data in CSV, but I’d like to see an API so I can pump data into a more complete third-party health site like fatsecret.com.

What are you weighting for?

Currently the only way to get these scales in New Zealand is via the Australian reseller. They do support a 1 year warranty, but will add a shipping charge onto your purchase, which means the scales will cost you AU$295, or about $370 kiwi. Fairly steep, but what price convenience?

Popularity: 14% [?]

I’ve tried cheap telescopes and binoculars many times, and the results have been sufficient. That is: the items I viewed appeared larger than with the naked eye. But like any precision device, there is a leap in clarity and usability as you spend more.

Konusmotor 130 F.1000mm

First up, the chunky Konusmotor 130 reflector telescope [switch to english!] from Konus. A reflector scope like this one is ideal for night-sky viewing. It uses the same method as the gigantic domed telescopes you see on hilltops, (and the same as the Hubble telescope): a fat tube with a mirror at the bottom and a eyepiece in the side. The result is amazing light sensitivity and clarity. The photo at right is a very clunky image taken with my camera pointing into the viewfinder, using a 17mm eye piece. It really doesn’t do justice to the clarity and size of the moon as viewed in person. I sat for 30 minutes last night just staring at the moon, amazed at the visible detail in the craters and plains.

The scope is supplied with 17mm and 10mm eyepieces, which give 60x and 100x magnification. With a 1000mm focal length, the Konus can provide up to 250x magnification with a 4mm eyepiece. That would be more than enough to see Saturn as a small disc with rings (under the right sky conditions), but the field of view will require constant adjustment of the scope. Thankfully, this scope comes with a motorised mount with a speed adjustment to track objects as the Earth rotates.

You should be able to grab one for NZ$600 from any decent camera shop.

Leica Ultravid 10×42

If you want to view non-celestial objects, a pair of binoculars is often more appropriate than a telescope. These Leica Ultravid binoculars are the pure embodiment of “you get what you pay for”. It’s almost impossible to explain just how incredible these binoculars are, but perhaps “three thousand, three hundred New Zealand dollars” will go some way to doing so. That amount of money buys you some incredible Leica glass, a robust nitrogen-filled housing, precision focussing, and adjustable eye-relief cups; all precision-assembled by the undisputed leader in optics.

I’m not surprised at the anecdotes of hunters and spotters finding animals that simply aren’t visible to the naked eye using these binoculars. They appear to gather every photon emitted from your subject, resulting in incredible light sensitivity. Viewing at dusk or into shadow is no problem, and the clarity makes the subject look almost more 3D than reality, if that’s possible. I could put more words here that try to explain what looking through the Leica binoculars feels like, but I don’t have the vocabulary.

Popularity: 14% [?]

Surprisingly, there are limits to my geekosity: I simply cannot abide by holsters. You may believe there is little difference in the nerdiness of holsters versus a manbag, but me and my Crumpler 5 Million Dollar Home would beg to differ. My bag goes everywhere with me, faithfully carrying my camera, headphones, leatherman, and Moleskine.

Being an indentured servant to geek fashion comes at a cost. More than once I have felt the creeping dread brought about by the lack of reassuring weight on my shoulder. I stop and spin on the spot – often on a busy sidewalk – the camera spins with me, whirling faster and faster, creating a sense of disorientation. The music swells, and then stops, zooming in on my face. “Noooooooooo!” he screams, fist clenched.

Yes, I’ve left my bag behind before. So far, every time I’ve gone back to the spot and sheepishly found my bag under a chair. One day I might not be so lucky.

Bags of Security

Enter BlueWatchDog (imported locally by Mi5 Technologies), which is – perhaps ironically – neither blue, nor canine. It is however about the size of three credit cards stacked together. It has a button and some lights, and is designed to be paired to your phone and placed in your bag. If your phone and bag are separated by more than a few metres, the BlueWatchDog springs into action.

You’ll first get a warning on your phone, both vibrating and audible. If you fail to notice this, or you are unable to close the distance between phone and bag, the BlueWatchDog will emit a rather loud siren. It’s not quite ear-splitting, but it is surprisingly loud for the size of the device. Definitely louder than any cellphone ringtone I’ve ever heard. I can’t imagine ever losing my bag again with the BlueWatchDog in action.

It is not entirely without fault. The most glaring issue is software compatibility. The device relies on software installed on one’s phone. At the time of writing, there is no such software available for my iPhone, but I’m told this will be available very early in 2010.

Most other phones are supported via a mobile Java application, but you wouldn’t think so based on the SMS compatibility test. This ignorant automaton repeatedly told me that my wife’s Sony Ericsson c510 was incompatible. Being a belligerent geek, I forcibly downloaded the jar file from the manufacturer’s website and installed it on the phone. Once I’d performed the correct rituals, the application started and worked perfectly.

When running, the application provides the ability to both monitor and locate your bag. The “locate” option causes the BlueWatchDog’s alarm to sound briefly, allowing you to home in on its location. The “alert” function will optionally vibrate and bleep your phone to warn you that the bag is about to be out of range.

Verdict

An interesting product that is well executed from a hardware perspective, if slightly let down by installation and compatibility. If you’re a geek that lives in his bag, or perhaps a camera user with thousands of dollars of gear in a bag, then investing $129 in a BlueWatchDog might be worthwhile. I would however check compatibility by installing the application on your phone before purchasing.

You can buy a BlueWatchDog online from Mi5 Technologies.

Popularity: 16% [?]

I often measure gadgetry in terms of ambivalence. It’s a depressing reminder of how far I have come since the days of buying everything I wanted to review. Every package was carefully researched, and would be shredded within moments of arriving on my doorstep. There were tears of frustration when it didn’t measure up to the promise, followed by Trademe trepidation to see how much the “rental” would cost me. These days I get so many offers of devices to review – and packages that turn up unbidden – that sometimes I can barely muster the interest to open the box.

Based on this psychological framework, understand this: I have physical anxiety at the thought of having to return the 42″ LG SL90 I’m reviewing. It’s gorgeous. At a little less than 30mm deep, it’s easily the thinnest LCD TV I’ve ever used. When powered off, I’m reminded of a Clarke-esque monolith. While not truly “borderless” like the literature claims, the seamless glass front panel hides the bezel, and the huge 3,000,000:1 contrast ratio means you barely see the bezel against a black background. I’d be quite happy to have the 42SL90QD sitting as an inert sculpture in my lounge.

And then I turned it on.

I’m not a colour guru or gamut mentalist: I just call it as I see it. And I saw deep blacks and awesome contrast. My gut-feel test is whether I can see good skin tone on humans while still having good contrast. On my workaday Sony V-series, I either get washed-out backgrounds or too-dark faces. The SL90 was brilliant in this respect: natural skin tones in evening and night scenes without having to de-contrast. Given that the SL90 is edge-lit (apparently not as good as local-dimming back-lit sets), the contrast and deep blacks are excellent.

After dealing with some abominable TV user interfaces, I thought Sony’s TV menu structure was about as good as it got. LG is better. The menu text is large and readable, and iconography helps to guide you to the right location. The set has a built-in Freeview tuner, and the electronic program guide was up to the regular Freeview standard, including in-line viewing of the current program while you browse the guide. I’m still waiting for this feature from SkyTV.

There’s more:

The SL90 has an inviting USB port, just waiting for a stickfull of media. I wasn’t hugely excited about this because I’ve seen some shocking implementations of USB photo and video in some TV sets recently. Thankfully, LG appear to have got it right: I put some photos and a DivX video (home video of course, it’s against the law in New Zealand to convert a DVD to DivX), on a spare 4GB USB stick and stuck it in the slot. After a moment, the TV prompted me to browse pictures or videos. A few clicks on the remote later and I was watching a DivX video. Very nice.

The set also has Bluetooth, but I’m at a loss to understand what it is for. I presume you could use a Bluetooth headset or headphones if you had one available. Having never watched a TV with headphones on, I’m not one to judge this feature. Perhaps it’s fantastic for people who have gigantic TVs in their bedroom and Bluetooth headphones?

Conclusion

It’s not cheap at NZ$4399, but seems like good value for an excellent TV that doubles as an objet d’art. Get one from your local electronics emporium.

Popularity: 74% [?]