Fitbit Ultra — For those New Year Resolutions to Get in Shape!

Feb 21

Chrisfitness, generally cool stuff, sports , No Comments

I never thought that I’d be telling anyone about a pedometer. But, I have been blown away by how cool and nifty Fitbit Ultra is!

First, I guess the thought of using a pedometer to help exercise or get fit is kind of silly. I mean, it is exercising that helps with getting fit, right? Well – when you have something as cool as fitbit, and admittedly a little on the pricey side, you are going to want to use it and see what it can do.

And what can it do?! It is a pedometer – so it measures how many steps you take. It uses the same gyroscope technology that is seen in the Wii motion controller. That means it can also measure how many stories tall you’ve climbed over the day. Cool now?

Well how about when you go to bed at night? The fitbit doubles as a sleep monitor! There is an included strap that lets you wear the fitbit on your arm overnight. The gyroscope measures how much you move your arms – times when you are moving your arms are times when you aren’t in a sound sleep and you can see on the graphs the next day just how well you slept. How many true hours of sleep did you get.

All this information is shown to you on a tiny little OLED screen (cool in itself, right?!). So the main problem remains, with any pedometer you have to reset it and write down your progress, right? A pain. Not so with this! You’ll plug an USB power adapter base into your PC’s USB port and snap the fitbit on. It’ll charge (leave it on the charger over one night once a week and that’s all you have to remember to do!). The base wirelessly talks to the fitbit and transfers your data to it. And once there the data is loaded onto their website for you to view the results on demand. Or share with your friends. So as I sit here at my PC typing this, every 15 minutes it will update how far I’ve gone. The resulting time graphs are really cool.

But, this is something that makes you wonder what else it can do for you? Well, if you fully fill out your information on the site it will know how tall you are and how much you weigh. If you tell it your average stride lenght while walking and/or running it will accurately tell you how far you’ve walked. Weight allows the fitbit to calculate how many calories you’ve burned over the course of the day. And the website allows you to enter food eaten (calories consumed) so you can see how you are doing. Some of this may be a bit much, but pairing the fitbit with the Withings Wifi Body Scale, will allow your weight and body mass to be kept for your without having to do much more than stand on the scale!

That’s the whole beauty of this. Without having to change your habits much at all you’ll have something that is monitoring your activity level. Seeing these graphs and data is impressive and subconsciously encourages you to do more walking or stair climbing the next days. You’ll be awarded badges and awards and you learn nifty things like that you climbed as tall as the Hollywood Sign!

If you think that you’ll forget to wear or check-in with fitbit, then install a little painless app – it is a batterminder app. From their website under Products you’ll find the “App Gallery” Look for Joshua Stein’s Low Battery Notifier. This little program will monitor how frequently your fitbit checks in and keep track of its battery level. When your battery gets low it’ll remind you to charge it. But the best thing is to set the check-in time to 24 hours. If you haven’t been by a base station and let it log your data within 24 hours you’ll get an email or a text message reminding you. Set this up and you’ll have a perfect little forget-me-not!

Hightly recommend that if you are concerned about fitness at all or turning over a new leaf to get more active, please look into the fitbit! Great stuff! And so tiny! (Since it is so tiny, please check out getting one of these straps).

Fitbit is also availabe in a purple!

MLB 11: The Show

Mar 17

Chrisbaseball, playstation 3, sports, video game , , , , No Comments

This video game, MLB 11: The Show, came out for Sony’s PlayStation 3 (and 2 and PSP) system just last week – and already it’s sucked up so much playtime it is getting embarrassing!

I had other stuff to do.. yet just one more game!

If you aren’t familiar with this franchise, you’ll find that it is a great baseball sim. If you want to play the Yankees vs. the Red Sox – you can. But, one really great way to play this game is the Road to the Show feature!

Road to the Show

What you do is you create a baseball player. And enter the draft. Some team will pick you up (or you could pick the club you want to play for) and you’ll end up getting sent to the minor leagues. What position do you play? Pitcher? Closer? Catcher? 1st base? Well, that’s where you’ll play the game. And you play in the plays that take place at your position. Pitchers pitch each pitch until they are pulled from the game. As a 3rd baseman you’ll see the plays you are involved in, etc. Then you bat!

Basically how well you do allows you to move up, and finally to AAA ball, and then the Big League! It’s lots of fun for anyone who likes baseball, or sports, or just wants a diversion from all the killing in other video games.

Online play is cool too. You can manage a league online and play games against your other league-mates. You can just play random people too if you want. Fun and satisfying!

There are a couple minor little drawbacks. The loadtime, ugh, I guess its an “expected” thing with PlayStation 3. There is about 15 seconds waiting telling you about how to properly set-up the Move peripherals. For a game where the only use of Move is the Home Run Derby? Then loading a saved game, well, takes a while! I waited about 20 seconds after it said it was 100% loaded. But once you are into the game – it is immersive and worth the little bit of a wait.

Try it today!