Pebble

My cousin Henry is a musician and world traveller. At dim sum the other day he turned and asked me: so where are we headed tech guy? And I said: wearable tech. Of course, I don't have Google Glass or even a Fitbit, so I'm not sure why I said that except that I've been reading about this trend.

Then Henry leaned over and showed me his UP band. We discussed his recent bike trip down the coast, and how he used his UP to track his progress. He showed me pictures from his phone and shared some great stories. So I guess wearable tech is not where we're headed - we're already there. And I'm kinda behind the times.

I do, of course, carry my iPhone with me, and on the iPhone I have an app that basically does a lot of what a fitness tracking wrist band does - it's a GPS pedometer app called Moves. I particularly enjoy when Moves gives me credit for cycling when I'm driving around town. Is it cause I have a convertible? But, boy, look how much I exercise - well, not much.

So I decided to take the next step and get a Pebble smart watch, which I've now had for about a week. The Pebble is a watch-like Bluetooth LE device that adds a kind of bonus display to your phone, and will vibrate when you get a text, a call, or an email. You can then see a small summary of your communication on the watchface. When it's not being an iPhone display, it's acts like a watch, so it doesn't seem like something "else" to wear.

I've already grown to love it and it kinda reminds me of the old days when I first got a Newton Message Pad. There's something a bit rough and kit-like about it that invites customization. And there's a thriving community doing the customizing. I particularly like a web site where you can make your own watch face - Watchface Generator for Pebble by Paul Rode. Fairly easy to waste hours fussing around here. Build your face by uploading a background, adding analog or digital clocks, and other things - then use a QR scanner like Red Laser to download the .pbw file to your phone, and use the Pebble app to load it via Bluetooth.  It's fun and easy.

Here are a couple I made (click the link to download the watchface):

     

webble watchface  |  MAbble watchface

The "Think Question Create" tag line is from the school where I work, Marin Academy.

So how is it working out? The convenience is that I no longer have to take my phone out of my pocket to see who's calling, or get a text or email (just the sender and subject line). That doesn't sound like a big deal, but it turns out it is - at least for me, and I would imagine for lots of folks who do IT work.

Out of the box, the Pebble will just display time and remote your music app. In order to get the additional communications functionality, you do have to add some extras: I am using an app called SmartWatch+. This app includes a tool to read your calendar, your texts, your emails, and grab weather info vis-a-vis your GPS. You then have to add a watch face or watch app that will display that info - they have one bundled, but I prefer these from MyPebbleFaces.com:

     

Smartface/SmartStatus  |  Futura Weather 2 Dark

I find that while I'm running around campus, I usually have Smartface going. If the day is not too busy, I prefer the Futura display. At home I switch to a basic clock display like the ones above.

There's just a couple things. When I get a text, the watch vibrates and shows as much as it can in the display. When I get an email from one of two accounts that I have configured, the sender and subject line show up, but when I go to read more, it just says "Loading" and never loads (or I've never seen it finish loading - this happens on one of my Google accounts, but works fine on my iCloud account). And its odd that the watch will display the battery level of your phone, but so far, I have not figured out how to view the battery status of the watch itself.

I also find I don't have to dig out my phone to check if I messed something - my watch will know. The SmartWatch+ also includes some other apps which I have not yet explored: there is a weather forecast, a stock ticker, a more advanced music app, a complete calendar app. I have yet to load the camera app, the Bitcoin tracker (I'll never need that one, I hope), GPS screen, HTTP request screen, Find my Phone, and Reminders. Lots more to play with.

Unlike the fitness trackers, the Pebble does not collect much data, it just displays data you already have on your phone on your wrist. I stopped wearing a watch way back when I was an architect and I was still drawing on drafting tables with pencils (remember those?); when I was drawing I'd take off my watch then I'd forget it at the office. Later I was doing so much network stuff, I started wearing a beeper (remember those?) which had a time display, and I stopped wearing a watch completely. So we'll see how long this infatuation lasts.

UPDATE: Good read on WIRED on wearable tech.

UPDATE 2: Pebble releases new firmware v2.0 - here are the new watch faces for it:

     

webble 2 watchface  |  MAbble 2 watchface

Trip to Europe - Part 10: Don't Mess with the Travel Gods

We have our last dinner in Florence at Vini e Vecchi near the Palazzo Vecchio. The food is wonderful as it has been throughout the trip - I have a beef stew with peppercorns and beans. Our conversation is retrospective in nature; it's been an amazing trip. But then we stray into darker territory before we depart for home: travel horror stories. Blithely I say, bad things have never happened to me.

The next morning as we finish breakfast, we get the first hammer blow. Our flight to Paris is cancelled. We hightail it to the airport to deal directly with those who can fix things - we find no such people. We try to get onto another flight to Paris that might save our connection to San Francisco, but that flight fills up, so we get a later flight, hoping to reschedule our connection.

We make it onto a six-fifty flight, and at about five o'clock we make our way through security to wait in the departure lounge. All seems somewhat salvaged until that flight is also cancelled. From there things unfold like this:

• A small asian-looking gate attendant tells us to board a bus so we can get our luggage; the bus takes us around the airport to the arrivals gate, where our bags are dispensed and collected.

• She then arranges for a bus to Pisa, and we are all herded into the parking lots with our bags, where we load and board a tourist bus for the hour-long ride.

• We are brought to the Pisa arrivals counter and blast the entire passenger group through baggage check-in and boarding in amazing record time.

• We board another bus which then whisks us out to an awaiting plane; we leave Pisa just before nine o'clock.

• We arrive at Charles De Gaulle Airport in Paris at about eleven; the terminal is basically shutdown, and the remaining Air France staff books us into hotels for the night.

•  Then a couple of the Air France agents actually drive us to the hotels in little vans (the hotel shuttles have stopped running).

• The kitchen is also shut down by now, so we coax a sandwich and some pomme frites from room service.

• The next morning, we catch our flight to San Francisco.

Thus ends the lesson and the trip.

[ <<< Back to Part 9 ]

Trip to Europe - Part 9: Monteriggioni and San Gimignano

Driving back to Florence from Siena, we take a more westerly route so we can visit the town of San Gimignano. But our first stop is the tiny fortress town of Monteriggioni. We park in a lower lot and make our way up; I am expecting a kind of empty ruin of a place, but it's full of inhabitants. People still live here. The shops are full of wonderful home made foods and treats, and the town is beautifully kept - but it is a bit of a tourist trap when it costs extra money to climb the stairs to look over the walls.

We continue on, marveling at the countryside as we go. Small spires and castles break the horizon, and the landscape is dotted with lovely farms and country estates.

We soon arrive at the well-visited town of San Gimignano. I'm expecting a slightly smaller version of Siena, but some of the Monteriggioni fortress-ness is there, too. It's actually much bigger than I thought, and very easy to lose yourself. We wander inside the walls for some number of hours before settling down for a nice lunch at Il Pino.

The drive back to Florence is rather uneventful; just more gorgeous Tuscan countryside. We need to make a dinner reservation and deal with getting checked into our new rooms near Santa Maria Novella. It starts to feel like the beginning of the end, and we are all quiet.

[ <<< Back to Part 8 ] [ On to Part 10 >>> ]

Trip to Europe - Part 8: Siena! Go-o-o-al!

A beautiful Sunday in Siena starts with a carillon chorus from all surrounding churches. At seven in the morning; wake up sinners! A charge of crashing bottles from last night's bacchanalia follows. Does the recycling bin happen to be right outside our windows? And then more bells at the half hour.

Siena is loud. In every way imaginable.

After breakfast, we walk the two short blocks from our rooms to the "back door" of the cathedral of Santa Maria della Scala - Siena's Duomo. The facade is adorned with faces, edges, creatures, stripes, twisty things. pointy things - everything. This is the plain side. It is not possible to stand back far enough to really take it in.

We go around the door to the Baptistry, and then up a couple flights of steeps stairs, and through a gothic portal to reach the Piazza.

We can finally see the Campinile and the Duomo itself. The piazza is open and airy; they are doing some big reconstruction of the surrounding high walls. But the cathedral: more stripes, more pointy things, and just more.

Still, this does not prepare us for the inside and the implosion of stuff. There is not a surface, edge, structural or non-structural element, floor area, or ceiling that hasn't been lovingly dressed with every imaginable color, face, or critter. No one out-does Siena.

The chapels that seemed over-the-top in Florence, are sedate here, and become (relatively) quiet spaces of contemplation. Except that every ten minutes an Italo-English voice barks over the address system: no flash photography.

Downstairs, in the Baptistry, the space takes on a dark and sedate quality, as well as a smaller scale; really wonderful art pieces and frescoes help your visual cortex recover.

After the Duomo, we head over to Il Campo, the public square. It's just down the narrow street, through a narrow ramp, and down to the sloped square itself. By contrast to the streets, of course, Il Campo is open and wide - and remarkably steep once we get to the bottom. We do notice that all the sides of all the cars parked nearby are scuffed and dented.

On the other side of the Palazzo Publica, and down some more ramps, is the market area, where we have a tasty and very filling lunch at Antica Trattoria Papei. Their ribollita is a revelation.

After lunch, we have to take care of some business errands, exchanging cash and so forth, which takes us across town.  We walk towards San Domenico, trying to avoid the valley along Fontebranda. Reaching the other side gives us some great views back, but there is a big soccer match today, and the police, in riot gear (shields and everything), line the Viale Dei Mille, which we must traverse to reach the bank. Siena scores a goal and the crowd just erupts with cheers and roars. We look at each other, eyebrows raised.

A light dinner of pizza at Il Campo, and some gelato from Grom finishes our day. Our walk home is interrupted by some ambulances, pressing the crowds to the sides of the streets as they go rushing by, sirens echoing through the narrow, twisty corridors.

Stand back far enough, and Siena seems like a quiet, quaint hill town. But no, Siena is loud.

[ <<< Back to Part 7 ] [ On to Part 9 >>> ]

Trip to Europe - Part 7: Driving to Siena

"Turn around when possible."

It is the insistent plea of our GPS unit, with her British voice; I dub her Mary Poppins. We program the GPS to take us to Siena, but we want to go a different way, down the lovely Route 222. Our vehicle is not helping, a diesel Nissan mini-van with itty bitty tires - climbing the hills and switch-backs. The roads are just as we imagined: narrow, slightly crowded, terracotta and stone buildings at the edge. It's drizzly and a bit foggy in patches. We stop for lunch at Montagliari, a scenic vineyard that also makes balsamic vinegar. It's tidy and well kept by folks who know and care about their craft. They are talkative and engaging. Lunch is simple and wonderful: spinach ravioli in a cream sauce with walnuts, apple tart with ice cream and balsamic to finish.

We pass through Greve in Chianti and the surrounding country side in drizzle and clouds. The landscape rewards us at every turn.

Finally we arrive at Siena's city walls. "Turn around when possible." Poppins seems to think it's okay to drive through gates - it is not. There is a hefty fine those who violate the ZTL - you must have a permit to enter. Calls to our innkeeper direct us, in broken English, around the city in the opposite direction from Poppins' initial plan. Things that look like major thoroughfares on the maps are in fact more narrow streets. Squares that should be intersections are mazes of directional arrows.

We finally find the parking structure and pop out the top of it. We realize the problem is not just the confusion in the horizontal plane, but the vertical. The city is way up there. Poppins did not mention that.

A walk part-way up the hill through the Roman walls, luggage in tow, and a series of escalators takes us into the old city. We finish the day at Antica Osteria da Divo, for an anniversary dinner featuring truffles: risotto with pecorino and white truffle shavings, stuffed pork with truffle sauce. Amazing.

[ <<< Back to Part 6 ] [ On to Part 8 >>> ]

Trip to Europe - Part 6: Michelangelo and Vasari

The Laurentian Library is open today, though from its web schedule, it seems to open only once or twice a month. This is Michelangelo's late masterpiece: the flowing stair with elliptical treads, over-sized brackets holdings the columns above, inverted pilasters in the windows, and all sorts of other inventions. The entry vestibule is bigger than I thought, and the Library itself is much bigger than I thought.

Fascinating details abound in the ceiling and floors, as well as the clerestory panels, but the whole thing taken together is harmonious and solid. For an old architecture student, for anyone, it's a real treat.

Next, we head over to the Palazzo Vecchio for a different kind of tour. The interiors decorated, in large part, by Michelangelo's friend and biographer Vasari; but our tour starts with a climb up the tower (about half as many steps as the cupola of the Duomo, but the same type of winding stairs are used.

The view at the top is fabulous, if also because you can see the cathedral and Brunelleschi's dome, as opposed to being on top of it. And this is turning out to be the best day weather-wise we've seen so far: deep blue skies and puffy white clouds.

We look down on the peasants and laugh like Medici's, the old Palazzo is full of odd nooks, big iron doors going into teensy rooms, and unexpected lookouts everywhere.

From our descent, we enter the Palazzo tour from the wrong end, but this turns out to be a blessing. The  Second Floor rooms are tall and generous, with amazingly ornate ceilings. We especially enjoy the Hall of Geographical Maps, with it's old, person-sized globe in the center. The maps are large, rendered and illustrated.

We stop off on the Mezzanine, where the rooms are smaller and more plain, but still decored by Donatello and Botticelli. Down on the First Floor each room seems bigger and more ornate. We end our tour where most folks start, in the Salone dei Cinquecento. What a finale. Longer than half a football field, every inch seems decorated with something. They are setting upfor some event, so it's hard to get good light in an iPhone "Pano".

We end our day with some shopping, first at the Mercato Centrale, which wraps around San Lorenzo - that's the dome for Michelangelo's Sacristy down the aisle there.

We walk down to the Mercato Nuovo, with it's classical loggia. At night the hawkers clear the stalls, and the loggia is left completely empty, right down to the floor. Another spectacular day.

[ <<< Back to Part 5 ] [ On to Part 7 >>> ]

Trip to Europe - Part 5: The Uffizi Is Really Big

More rain in Florence today, so we spend the day indoors wandering around the Uffizi. No pictures allowed. We walk up to the second level (that's the third level for us Americans - Europeans don't count the ground level),  and even that's a chore. The scale of this place is nuts.

We arrive in a long, wide corridor lined with sculptures, the ceilings all decorated with fancy little paintings. Turn into the first gallery room and you are immediately greeted by Giotto's Madonna and Child, and that is also way bigger that expected. Next to that is a smaller, five-panel piece known as the Polittico. There are other pieces, but the two by Giotto really stand out (below is a linked third party picture).

Then begins the wander: gallery after gallery of Early and High Renaissance alter pieces, portraits, and other panels. We wander, separate, rejoin and continue on. The Botticelli Room is certainly a highlight, as it is by far the largest gallery room except the sculpture corridor: the Venus dominates one wall, and the Primavera another (again, a found picture).

The wandering continues for about three and a half hours before we all tire and make a dash through the last few galleries (sorry Caravaggio fans). In all, we walk just less than three miles.

We end the day back at San Lorenzo, and Brunelleschi. It is a gorgeous cathedral, with a flat coffered ceiling and a wonderful gold dome at the center of the cross plan. We especially enjoy the Old Sacristy (yet another borrowed image below) with the simple, banded main dome - and the unusual dome with constellations above the adjoining alcove. It's a wonderful comparison to the New Sacristy by Michelangelo, and a wonderful way to end our sightseeing.

[ <<< Back to Part 4 ] [ On to Part 6 >>> ]

Trip to Europe - Part 4: The Oltrarno

On the southern bank of the Arno is the Oltrarno, though really it feels like all the same city to me. We start the day with a brisk walk to Santa Maria del Carmine. The Oltrarno, we are told, is home to many artisans and craftspeople. We happen into the shop of one such person, a metal smith specializing in brass and the inheritor of a multi-generation family practice. His shop is clean and kept, as is the man himself. His tools have the gravitas of an authentic patina of work; they are as interesting as his handiwork. A small frame costs about $400. We are truly appreciative, but we move on.

We soon arrive at he Brancacci Chapel, a wonderful alcove in one corner of the cathedral that holds a cycle of frescoes primarily by Masaccio. Access to the chapel is thru a convent designed by Brunelleschi, one of many we've seen already. Remarkable for their simplicity and clarity, the frescoes have colorful warmth and amazing life. Our art history books are coming alive.

Then, we catch a city bus to San Miniato al Monte, a gorgeous little thing on the top of the hill overlooking the river and the city beyond. Fantastic. But the real treat here, it turns out, is the church: carefully decorated wood trusses, and column bays arranged in triads. It is full of amazing rhythms and patterns. At the far end from the entry, there is a mezzanine for the priest and choir, and a crypt below for "former" parishioners. In fact the whole church seems to be surrounded by a cemetery, laid within the walls and battlements of an old Roman fort.

We descend from the sacred to the profane - they have jammed a copy of David into a parking lot, surrounded it with food trucks and call it Piazzale Michelangelo. A wonderful view of the city, and you can buy it on a plate.

Another short bus ride to the Porta Romana, we hit the art school crowd - literally, as hordes of art students from the nearby art academy jam their way on as we depart. We walk down the Via Romana, which appears on the map to be a major roadway, but is actually a thin strip where tourist buses go wizzing by narrow side walks. We try to walk quicky (though a pizza shop delays our progress).

We soon reach the Palazzo Pitti and the Boboli Gardens; we want to see the gardens. Not sure why, but I am picturing fun sculptures and flower beds, manicured greens and lively structures. Arriving in a large, grassy amphitheater surrounded by sculptures, my hopes rise. But beyond the formal area behind the palazzo, we get a (very) big, (very) hilly forrest with a few big boulevards cut through. The place is just enormous. And hilly. There are a few fun sculptures and a few fountains, but not really much more to see, and the distance is just tiring.

We finish the day at dinner, at a trattoria near the Brancacci Chapel. I have one a truly memorable meals: artichoke salad, Florentine streak, chocolate mouse at Pandemonio. Over ten miles of walking, but we leave the Oltrarno smiling.

[ <<< Back to Part 3 ] [ On to Part 5 >>> ]