Category Archives: Musings

Heart Rate Monitoring

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Feel a need to catch up on writing about what I’ve been doing with Heart Rate monitoring.

Started with an Arduino board and a simple ear clip heart rate monitor and gsr sensor from Seedstudio (Grove). Made a simple biofeedback program out of it.  Set up some Python programs to read the data and save to a MySQL database. Worked with that for a while though the limitation of being tied by cables to the machine was a restriction that limited the amount of times that I would actually sit down and take measurements. Also an ear clip monitor is not the most accurate way to measure heart beats, though it was doing the job.

Last winter decided to move up to a bluetooth chest strap to measure heart rate. Decided on a Polar H10 chest strap. Polar is well rated for their accuracy as consumer devices and I thought because they are somewhat popular that it probably would be something I could access with Linux.

Found a blog post specifically about getting the H10 to connect.
https://nob.ro/post/polar_h10_ubuntu/

If it wasn’t for that blog I might have not gotten my device working under Linux but with those instructions was able to get a connection with gattool and start measuring heart beats. I was not able to get Python to connect with pygatt or pybluez but by using the one liner for gattool I could run it as a system command and capture back the data in Python.

So, I don’t have the gsr readings that I was getting with my Arduino solution but it is a more accurate heart rate monitor and I am not tied to my machine while recording. I have Python routines that activate the device, collect the data and save it to database. I have an interactive, biofeedback type, of program that shows not only my heart rate but a number of heart rate variability values. HRV can give you various ways to do biofeedback to achieve certain states that improve the values or can simply be an indication of over all heart health.

Besides being able to do live sessions displaying HRV values as I am recording heart rate I have some routines that give me statistics and create graphs of existing sessions that have been saved in the database.

It has been a nice project and there are plenty of tweaks to make it even more useful. One feature of the Polar H10 is that it can save a session of data in memory and then transfer the data back to your machine. However, I can find no information on the codes necessary to make it do that. There is an Android application Polar Beat, andofficial app for the Polar heart rate monitors, which will tell the strap to save a session in memory but still no documentation on how to do it yourself.

I’m hoping that by capturing bluetooth packets I might be able to figure out the codes myself. That is the current project. This is a high level overview of what I’ve done with heart rate over the past year.  I will intend to try and write up some more details of the projects I have accomplished with the Polar HRM to get to where I am currently and follow those to where I’m trying to go.

Category: Becoming a Cyborg, Musings

Android RSS Feed Reader Reviews

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I’ve been searching through lists of best RSS feed readers and the problem is that everyone has different tastes on what they are looking for in a reader. I do not want one that syncs to online accounts or has a lot of fancy images and graphics all over the screen. I want my feeds sorted into categories (news, science, tech, etc) and the ability to read all the feeds for each category at once instead of each feed individually. I just want a simple list of headlines but having one or two lines of text for each headline is preferred.

I had been using RSS Demon version 3.1.19 for quite a while now and it did all of the above. I reinstalled my system and now I’m finding that the search screen of RSS Demon 3 does not work and I don’t really want to add all the feeds by hand with URLs. The program does have OPML import. Wish I had the foresight to have saved my feeds in OPML before reinstalling but I did not. I could use another application to save my feeds and then import it into RSS Demon.

Read 1.4
Does have a working search for feeds
Does not sort feeds into categories, you have to read them one at a time
Does not have OPML import/export
Articles are listed with headline and a couple lines of text.

RSS News Reader
Does not seem to have any search for news feeds, add by URL only
Does have OPML import/export
Lets you categorize feeds, however you need to still read each feed individually – cannot read posts by category.
There is a tab feature where you can read All feeds at once or Favorites but you not by finer catetories.
Articles are listed with headline only.

Flym
Search does work
Does not have categories
Does not have OPML import/export
Articles are headline only with pictures.

Aggregator
No search
Does have categories
Does have OPML import/export
No ads
Article list seems to be headlines only

spaRSS
Does have categories
Search does not work
Does have OPML import/export
Article list is title, round picture, and author name

RSS Reader
Search does work
Does have categories
Does have OPML
Article list is headlines only
Ad or paid versions

gReader
Has search but sources seem more limited
Does have categories
Headlines and some text in article list
OPML export/import
Free and paid versions

RSS Demon 4.0.2
Does have search
Does not seem to have categories
Displays with headline, some text and pictures
Cannot find OPML functions
Ad and paid versions

For my purposes it looks like either sticking with RSS Demon 3.1.19 and creating an OPML list to import or using gReader are the best options. If I want completely free and no ads Aggregator or spaRSS would be a good option if I didn’t mind the headline only article lists.

Category: Musings

Mind Mapping

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Had listened to a recent episode of the Linux Action Show and there was a quick review of Freemind, Mind Mapping software. The host mentioned that he was using it all the time now for notes. Better for keeping organized notes than a text editor and better for putting up related text than a graphics program as the canavas automically resizes.

Nice review and I decided to look into it. I had learned basic mind mapping techniques on paper years ago but never really got into the style. On paper you can’t move things around once you’ve placed them there and it is too easy to hit the edge of the paper while you are writing down your ideas. Software mind mapping resolves those issue.

So playing around with the program to see how it works for keeping notes and trying to organize thoughts and ideas. It is fairly easy to use and does have a nice style to it. Looking around at the site I also found a fork of Freemind called Freeplane. Even though if you look at any top x lists for mind mapping software you will see references to Freemind but not Freeplane and download activity of Freemind is much bigger, Freeplane seems to have the most active and most user responsive development which means a somewhat more complete feature set.

Freemind gives you 73 icons that you can put in your nodes for graphical representation of your ideas (which is supposed to be an important component of mind mapping.) That may sound like a lot but is fairly limited in what you can express with it. You can manually also enter your own images if you have what you want and have them organized. But most images, and even most clip art, are too big for the documents.

Freeplane on the other hand allows user created icons, comes with more icons out of the box, and there are a couple of readily available add ons that give you a lot more icons (over 700). For some people the extra icons is an important feature, for others maybe not so much in their text/idea documents.

Another feature I liked of Freeplane is the ability to place free standing nodes on the screen that aren’t attached to the main node tree. You can then later decide to move them back into the regular node tree or you can have stand alone nodes on your screen. A standard mind map is supposed to be a single theme and all ideas branch off of that but it is nice for making documents that you have the flexibility of placing things where ever you want them on the screen.

Anyway, both programs are very handy utilities for brainstorming, taking notes for educational purposes, just making general notes or to do lists for yourself, for outlines and maybe even for creating organized full fledged informational documents. I have been using notepad for years to make to do lists at work and trying out Freeplane this week for my to do lists and so far I’m finding the format to be very nice for keeping ideas organized and being able to prioritize what I’m working on as well as readily capture any momentary ideas that need to be added to the list.

I’d certainly recommend trying mind mapping programs out. There are other titles out there as well both desktop applications and web based mind mapping sites but these two are fully cross platform and completely free so are a very good place to start.

Category: Musings | Tags: ,

Music

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I’m not an accomplished musician in any sense of the term.  I learned how to play flutophone in 4th grade.  Took Clarinet in band in 5th and 6th grades.  In my late teens /early twenties I learned to play guitar a little bit but never really learned to play with others in a group.  In October 95 I started playing the recorder and played that almost every day for about ten years and started to taper off.

Recently when at the parent’s house I was seeing an old guitar and thought about the idea of getting back into music.  Guitar is nice but you have to deal with picks or calloused fingers.  The recorder was fun but too much saliva and also the pain of having to get new corks on the wooden ones.  I thought about maybe a portable keyboard which was an idea but not quite hitting home.

Thought about a xylophone.  I was thinking of metal bars for sound but turns out a xylophone technically is wooden bars, the toys that have metals bars and are called xylophones are mis-labeled.  (The word xylophone means wooden tone)  Metal bar instruments are glockenspiels.

Anyway got a somewhat cheap 27 key glockenspiel.  In all the instruments in the past I learned in a similar pattern.  Start with simple songs, like merrily we roll along, and work your way up to learn the instrument.  Using sheet music the whole way and using the written music most of the time.  This time I wanted to do something different.  The glockenspiel is harder than other instruments I’ve used before with sheet music because I have to look at the keys to play and can’t be looking at sheet music at the same time.  I can hunt and peck with sheet music but I also want to just play it more free form.  Work on just banging on the keys and learning the sounds and developing patterns.  Also I’ve never learned to get a full ear for picking out music just for listening too it.  It’s always been a bit tedious and having sheet music is easier (for me at least).  So I want to just play along with other music more often.

I’ll still play from the sheets but want to make it as often just playing around rather than just reading new songs and only playing by rote from them.  Different for me.  I’ll never be a great musician but it is still fun to dink around with.  I’m enjoying just drumming on the keys enough that I did also decide to order a 15 key wooden xylophone.  That should be fun as well.

Category: Musings | Tags:

Not ready for prime time yet

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Just got a new WordPress site up so still under constructions.  I don’t want to spend a lot of time configuring WordPress currently and would prefer to just get into writing so the page will probably look primitive for  a long time before I add anything fancy.

Category: Musings