I wonder what the trolls at Apple think of the data they’re getting from my Apple watch.
You know they’re harvesting us like the crops we are. In the name of making cooler better-targeted crap for us to buy, I’m sure that’s all they use it for. But I’ll save privacy rants for another day. Today I was in the shop working on these sawhorses. Not the lame knock together kind that takes up too much space and isn’t really steady. Nice heavy duty ones with mortise and tenon joints (duh) connecting the legs and a through wedge to lock the beam in place when assembled. Vaguely following an article by Will Myers in a 2018 issue (I forget which one) of Popular Woodworking. He’s a hand tool guy with an awesome NC accent. Not that you can tell in the article, but I’ve heard him speak. The whole thing is made from a couple of 2x10s, making it cheap. Of course, in NC, he gets Southern Yellow Pine from Home Depot. I get this SPF crap (Spruce-Pine-Fir) here in Maryland. It takes some dedicated picking through the stacks to get a couple of boards I’d buy, but I now have a pile in the basement for these sawhorses and a project for Marcus.
The beams are 2 chunks 3′ long face jointed and glued together. That was a project for last weekend, something to certify Breezy as a fully operational battle station, er, dust collector. But the face jointing didn’t go well. Even hand-picked, sort of quartersawn boards started moving after ripping them even more once I showed them to the jointer. After half an hour, I had 4 rhombus-shaped boards, still not really flat and now too thin to make the beam. Pissy, I was.
I got another board, used the planer this time to just skim these things, and managed to make two beams roughly 3-1/2″ square by 3′ long that are pretty flat. So, I had these jacked-up boards. What to do? The only parts I could get out of them were the 20″ long spreaders for the legs. I needed 4 of them 20″ long and 7/8″ x 2″. That’s going to make a lot of scraps, but at least I can salvage something out of that debacle.
Now, these boards were still twisted somewhat (we call that wind in the craft). By eyeballing them, I managed to find a pretty flat 20″ stretch in each board. Yay me. That was all chop saw and table saw roughing them out. But they still had a little wind; knowing I’d end up there, I had roughed them 1/8″ over thick and maybe a little more than that over wide.
Fixing wind with planers and jointers is a PITA. But, a pretty simple operation with a plane. I wasn’t in the mood to trust that damn jointer anyways, so I broke out the planes.
What does all this have to do with my Apple watch? I’m, getting to that. You don’t have anything important to do right now anyway, or you wouldn’t be on Facebook, much less letting me waste your time with another story.
Planing up a bunch of stock can be very relaxing. On went the Bluetooth earmuffs, even though planing is quiet because I want to rock out. Planing is best done to Heavy Metal. On 11. Plus, it drowns out the dogs and the neighbor’s kid upstairs. Like I said, relaxing.
Make one face flat. Start by checking a face on the table saw table, mark the high spots, knock them off, rinse and repeat until you get one flat face. Tidy it up with the smoothing plane. This is now the reference surface, the thing to which all the rest will be square. Make one long edge perpendicular to that face. Make the other long edge also perpendicular to that face. Now you have just one face to fix. And it’s probably weird-looking, varying in thickness all over the place. This is where that extra comes in. Set the marking gauge to your final thickness (7/8″ in this case) and strike a line on all the edge faces. That’s your target. Bringing that last face down to the line makes it parallel to the other face and perpendicular to the edges. Break out the cambered jack plane, whack off the extra material, and tidy it up with the smoother. Boom, a flat and square board despite the best efforts of the crappy construction grade lumber.
So, the watch.
I have it, but I am not one of those power users. It’s basically a way to pause and resume the music, audiobook, or podcast I am listening to on the headphones from my phone. And since some shop time is to be had between meetings, a way to get prompted by Microsoft Teams if one of my teams starts melting down, forcing me back upstairs to the computer. Oh, and it tells time. I am told it does a bunch of other things, but I have computers for that or the phone.
But it’s the alternating scolding and cheering I’m talking about here.
“Yo fatso, stand up. Perhaps blink once or twice while you’re away from the computer too. It’s good for you.”
“Yay, you stood up! You might live to see another sunrise.”
Crap like that. And it keeps track of your standing up, your move goal, and your exercise goal. I really don’t watch that stuff. If it happens, it happens. The standing thing can be useful during the workday, but other than that…
So I am planing away, and the watch buzzes and does its thing to let me know I hit my move goal. And I think to myself, “dude, my two feet have not moved in over an hour. WTH?” These boards are short enough that I don’t need to step to keep planing. At least that 90 min or so pushing iron around counted as FOUR MINUTES of exercise, LOL.
That’s what got me thinking. They aggregate all this watch data. And probably use it to build models of activity. Since they know who you are, they know all sorts of other things like age, gender, etc., and probably can correlate race and weight as well. This shop activity must totally blow up their movement model of what to expect from old fat white guys.
Or not. But I sure as hell didn’t walk 1.5 miles tonight. So stop hassling me about bedtime. I sure as hell won’t be getting 8 hours of sleep either. Deal with it.
