What is the Ukraine crisis? [Vox.com]
I’ve been a fan of The Verge for a long time, actually, since This is my next and now I like what Vox Media is doing with Vox.com. As always, the design is beautiful and Cards interface is outstanding. You get a lot of information, but it’s structured and not overwhelming.
In my recent post I’ve wrote about choosing activity tracking app. After that there is even more important and difficult choice – what to listen to. Running without headphones is not an option. I get borred pretty fast and start thinking about how hard it is to run early on. Here are my thoughts about enterntaining yourself while running.
Running with music
About a year ago I completely ditched iTunes and started listening to music only on Spotify. I have Starred playlist with about 700-800 songs, which get cached on my laptop and smartphone. Being lazy person that I am, I didn’t go through this playlist looking for perfect songs for running. Instead I’ve found two playlists [1] and [2], that were a good fit for my tempo.
My first couple of runs were pretty quick. I’ve run a little more than 2km, so listening to music was enjoyable. Then, as my runs got longer, music started to get boring after about 4th song and it does a bad job blocking those “I can’t! I want to stop!” thoughts.
Podcasts
My second choice was – podcasts. I’ve tried many of them, some work, some don’t. They are just too slow and mess up your tempo, but you can find something that will fit you. Looking for a good one in your podcast listening app takes couple of minutes, and then there are ads. If you listen to podcasts, there is a good chance you’ve heard Squarespace ad hundreds of times. Chance are you skip ads and it’s not easy done while running. That means you have to look for a podcast, which doesn’t mess up your tempo, is long enough and doesn’t have ads, easier said than done.
My last choice – audiobooks
As with podcasts, you have to find the right one. Books, though, are much longer than a podcast, which means you can listen to one book for a week or two. This was the last thing I’ve tried and I stuck with it. If it’s an interesting book, you forget about the fact that you are running. Often I get surprised by the distance I’ve run without even noticing.
It looks like user base is all that matters right now. Facebook bought WhatsApp and Instragram mostly for their users, you won’t use a service (especially social one) if your friends aren’t there. It was the case with me. I’ve chosen WhatsApp, not Viber or Line, because more friends are using the first one. It wasn’t as fun using Foursquare before more of my friends joined.
Finally I’ve found one space, where it’s not true, for me at least.
I’ve been trying (successfully) to lose weight since the New Year’s. I’m currently on a diet (which desires a whole blog post by itself) and also I’ve started running. Although I have Fitbit, I’ve decided to use running app, for more detailed information.
My choice was between two apps – Endomondo and Runkeeper. I’ve used Endomondo couple of times before, when I had a Symbian phone and the website looks the same ever since. Runkeeper is cleaner and more modern looking service, so I’ve started with that one this time.
When I wanted to add friends, I’ve discovered that all the friends who track their activities, are using Endomondo. That made me to return to the Endomondo. After couple of runs I’ve came to conclusion, Runkeeper pushes me more than my friends.
I’m a novice runner, which means it doesn’t matter to me, that my friend ran 10k today. I can’t do that. My record right now is 4.37km. It’s more fun to compete against myself, so all those stats and encouragements from Runkeeper (like showing couple of times, that you beat your distance/time/etc. record) make me feel good and, what’s more important, encourage me to try harder next time.
In the end, I’m using Runkeeper despite not having any friends on that service.
When I first started following technology news, I added a lot of tech news sites to the RSS and was sorting through them using Google Reader. Then there came Flipboard for iPhone, I’ve connected my GR account to it and was sorting through feeds that way, looking for potentially interesting articles and saving them to Pocket.
But recently I’ve changed this workflow. Now I have mostly blogs in my RSS, it’s more interesting to read opinions then a lot of junk news. But then I would use Zite to quickly sort through news whenever I’ve had time, in my opinion it does that job much better than Flipboard. So it’s a shame they won’t update Zite anymore.
