Thanks for doing that. I was typing the original comment from my phone, in a hurry.

I know this is not one size fits all, but I switched to a Seiko watch like a year ago and I’ve been so much happier. I can weigh myself on my scale, take my blood pressure with a $40 Braun device from the pharmacy, and everything else I can intuit: I know for a fact when I’m not walking enough, when I feel bloated and over-salted, when I haven’t slept long enough, when I get winded going up stairs, etc.; I don’t need to quantify and graph it out to know I need to do better and what it will require of me.

Again I’m not saying health stats aren’t or shouldn’t be important for you, but I do think the Web 2.0 / smart-everything era got us all so hooked on the constant feed of data points from all aspects of our lives that we came to feel things were required that really aren’t.

If you’re diabetic, or have a heart condition, or the in and only way you will ever exercise is if you can gamify it or whatever, then of course, try to find a health tracking solution that minimizes the sale of your data to brokers or whatever (if that is even possible). But for many average people who’ve just gotten used to health tracking, I gotta say, take a walk on the wild side and try going without.

I can’t put a price or a good enough description on how much happier I am to have one less thing sending me notifications and pulling my poor, abused attention all throughout the day…one less entire category of stats to keep up with, micro-manage, get anxious over. I’ve still got my Apple Watch if I ever absolutely need it but so far I haven’t needed it at all. I do not miss health data.

Google the FUTO Guide to a Self Managed Life. Louis Rossman far overstates how simple it is (“if it was too complicated for my grandma I rewrote it until it was something she could handle” is giving himself too much credit) but it is still a super super comprehensive guide anyone should be able to follow for getting an exceptional amount of home infrastructure self hosted. It includes owning and managing your own router, setting up a VPN to get your services away from home, setting up replacements for all the cloud services 99% of us rely on, and goes as far as self hosting security cameras and PBX phone systems and stuff. If you get that far into the guide, even if you don’t wanna run those things, you’ll have learned enough to host anything else you want.

Man! I think I even noticed that when I installed by my thought was, “this software is so modest and inconsequential, I bet the AI integration is inconsequential too and will stay out of my way.” So far that is the case. I think there’s a ‘ribbon’ tab at the top for AI? Haven’t clicked it. It’s probably just bullshit that will overwrite my authorial voice like the inside of a vacuum cleaner quick start guide.

I couldn’t effect the same workflow on LO as I was in PowerPoint but I pivoted to ONLYOFFICE and it is excellent. Let’s say 90% of the ease of use of PP (haven’t tried its other modules yet), for free (or did I pay a small fee? Either way, better than a lifelong renter status), and with no AI. My presentation is kinda micro-slide-y so there’s a high volume of non-dense slides; once I got into the 200s I noticed OO would bog down on me but restarting the software would clear that up instantly. The only real gripe (and it’s the same with LO) is that it doesn’t support ‘sections’ so I can’t group and collapse my slides for ease of navigation. No big deal.

I work in schools. We have them in every hallway and classroom. But the kids do not know how to read them, and they don’t even seem interested to learn even though it would take all of two minutes to wrap their head around. Seen it in the middle and high schools.