Recently in Gadgets Category

In a sometimes noisy office, I'm always looking for ways to drown out the outside world. Usually this means an ipod or maybe streaming my music from home via Squeezecenter. But with either of those I always tend to listen to the same old music.  A bit of opera to make me look xclever, and then just the same old 80s,90s and 00s music I always listen to.

Recently though I've discovered Last.FM, a British based website that lets you stream unlimited music tracks that suits your tastes - for FREE!. It's fantastic to be able to type in the name of an artist and then be able to listen to a personalised 'Station'  of music from that artist and others like it. I think the system picks tracks based on other user's recommendations of similar artists and it works really well.  Whenever I put in a favourite artist, the station I get contains at least another 5 or 10 artists that I love just as much.

I especially like the exploratory feel, with new artists constantly being offered to you without you having to search them out. Because they will be based on similar artists to the ones you like, there's a good chance you'll want to listen.  If not, you can click 'skip' or even 'ban' tracks you don't want to hear again.  If you like a new artists you can 'love' a track or add it to your playlist, making it easier to hear again in future.  Genius.

You can also make use of 'Scrobbling' which is a way of letting your friends (and others) know what you're listening to.  Usually this is done transparently without you having to do a thing.  As you play your music, the last.fm website is updated with what you're listening to, giving others a chance to explore.

I also love the fact that it works across all types of devices.  You can use your browser to listen with a Flash player, my Squeezecenter has a plugin for last.fm, it integrates with most music players like Songbird, iTunes, Amarok and Rhythmbox.  There's also a standalone client for Windows, OSX and Unix which gives you quick and easy access to your own radio stations and the Love/Hate buttons.  You can even install it on your iphone or Series 60 mobile phone (using a plugin called Mobbler).  I know it's geeky, but being able to wander around listening to music on my Nokia N95 and know that other people can see what I'm listening to is just brilliant!

Anyway, I'm off to bed to listen to my last.fm 'sleep' station.  If you do happen to stop by last.fm, my username is cleanthes.  Feel free to say hello and listen in to some of my favourites.

I've just started working with a chap (Robin Akers) who is doing a research programme into explosive and/or resistance training and its effect on time trial performance.  He's going to be working with a number of amateur triathletes to see whether certain training regimes will improve their power capabilities and performance more than others.

The programme will last for six weeks, and I'm not sure yet what it will entail for me, because it depends which training group Robin puts me into.  I may even be in the control group where I don't need to do anything other than my normal training programme (here's hoping!)

To start with, he wanted to take a 'baseline' power measurement, so he can say how much (or little) I improve over the six weeks.  This was mainly what appealed to me, because I've heard a lot recently about how power-based training can be more effective than that based solely on heart-rate and HR zones.  Since I didn't have any idea what my power output was, I thought it would be good to find this out, and hopefully improve it.

He worked out my baseline power by measuring my output during a 10 mile indoor time trial, using a PowerTap hub which measures power, cadence and speed.   The PowerTap reported that I averaged 205 watts over the 28 minutes of the TT.  This compares very poorly with some of the other people he's measured so far (I will probably be the worst!), with the best so far coming in at sub-20 minutes and with an average power of over 300 watts.  But, at least now I have something to improve on!

I've previously read that a good starting point is:
    average power (watts) =~ 2.5-3 * body weight (kg)
So, at 76kg, that would give me an average power output of 190-228 watts.

Today I found another formula by Jim Martin of the University of Utah, which seems more precise.  You can see the details here, but basically it's:
    power (watts) = 60 * Body weight (lb.) /10k run time (minutes)

Again, for me, that would give

power (watts) = 60 *167.55 / 52 = 193.32

So at 205 watts average, I'm about on the money.  I've definitely got a lot to do, and as well as improving my power I also need to improve my technique (I'm very inconsistent with my cadence and gearing over the 10miles), but hopefully by doing this programme with Robin I will be able to focus a bit more on this aspect of my training and things will start to improve.

Oh, and if anyone wants to donate a PowerTap hub to my cause, you can buy me one here.

Our friend Joe, over at Joseph Bloggs has been challenged by his brother-in-law to run the Grim Challenge, an 8 mile "Cross-country" jaunty in December (where "Cross-country" means cold mud, cold water and cold muddy water).  This is where off-the-cuff bravado gets you, Joe - beware!

And muggins here has agreed to do it with him... I figure I'll be done with the triathlon season by October and will have time to train up for some off-roading. And anyway, the ERR crew keep telling me how wonderful cross-country is.  Let's see where off-the-cuff bravado gets me.

Joe plays a lot of football (quite well too - or so he tells me), so is fit enough, but he doesn't do much "running" (as opposed to sprinting back and forth and falling over, which I think is the key skill in football).  So he wants to know how fast and how far he can run. This is presumably so that when he puts a nice little wager down on himself he can do it with some accuracy. 

We went out for a first run together this morning.  I very rarely run "with" someone else (as opposed to "against" them), but as I've said before it can be very motivating and gives two great benefits:

• it allows me to run at a different pace from my normal plod (we started off more slowly because Joe only has little legs, but then sprinted like a bugger when we started discussing Fartlek sessions)
• the time seems to go more quickly when you have someone to chat with

Joe measured out a route for us of abovut 2 miles on the GMap Pedometer. If you haven't seen this site, it's a fantastic tool for runner or cyclists, and allows you to easily plan or review a route you want to use.  It can even estimate the number of calories you'll burn (on a run) if you're that way inclined.

I also made more use of my Nike+ and ipod, just to track our pace and distance.  It really is a fantastic tool, and despite what I say about about real-life-people being motivating, I get a bigger buzz from Lance Armstrong saying "Well done" to me at the end of a long workout!  I'll do a review at some point, but for now, and at last, here is the point of this article: the Nike+ website lets you graph your runs, so here, Joe, is our run.  The 1st and 6th km are my runs from my house to the 'so called mid-point' between our houses. But the rest is pure Joe.

(This article was called 'Jungle disk and iPod problems on Windows', but as Dave from JungleDisk points out below, it's not really a JungleDisk problem, and I like their service so much I didn't want it to sound too critical.  I also appreciate Dave doubling my readership.  Hopefully the article will be useful for others though)

I recently bought an iPod nano (finally!). More on that, and the nike+ kit I bought with it anon, but in the meantime I had a problem today which I thought was worth sharing with others.

JungleDisk is an online storage service that works with Amazon's S3 storage service. I've been using it for a few months now to backup our photos. For about 30GB of data, it costs me about $4 per month, which is very cheap.  It's very easy to use, and I highly recommend it. There are clients for Windows, Mac and Linux.  But today it (edit: sort of) broke my iPod.

Compression technology has been popular amongst serious athletes for quite a while, and has now started to become more popular amongst less serious athletes like myself.  A lot of athletic clothing claims to be designed by boffins with the sole aim of improving your training and racing performance, but I think most people just buy fancy "technical" clothing because it looks good or has a swish on it (I know I do).  The fact that compression clothing  does appear to be backed up by 'science' really appealed to me - I can look good and get an easier life when exercising!

Nike are just one of many companies that produce compression clothing.  I chose this Nike Pro Vent Tight top when I was I was in the Nike outlet store in Manchester's Lowry shopping centre.  The tops were on offer at around £15 rather than £25 so I decided to give one a go.  As you might know, I am much more motivated when I have something specific to work towards, so the fact that the tops were tight was also a great incentive for me to lose a few more pounds.

I've made a "Natural Language" BMI calculator which understands Imperial and Metric values for height and weight.  Go and try it out.  Edit: The styling doesn't work well in IE6 or IE7 - sorry, as a Linux user I find it harder to test in these but I will try to make it work better soon because I know most people use Windows. Now works in IE6 and 7 too!

Or rather OMG ipod Touch! How exciting is this gadget? (very).  And how much do I want one? (very)

As you may know, I've wanted an ipod nano and Nike+ training kit for a little while now, assuming that the extremely small and clever gadget will make me go faster (isn't it obvious?!).  But now I'm torn.... I doubt the ipod touch is going to work with the Nike+ in it's current form, so should I go for the nano and Nike+ combo, or go for the super-super-cool ipod touch instead?

And whichever one I go for, how do I avoid losing it, scratching it or just accidentally taking it apart and not knowing how to put it together again?

Maybe best to wait until we've got our new kitchen, then decide.

Update 11/11/2007: I now know that the iPod touch has Wifi built in, which is fantastic. I also know it definitely won't work with the Nike+ transmitter, and anyway because it's got a standard hard disk inside it (unlike the solid-state disk in the nano), it's probably best not to run with it...  Yoiks - maybe I need one of each? ;-D