Submersible watches

When you read ads for watches you see specifications such as ”water resist 10m” and you wonder what that actually means and how it compares to ”water proof 30 ft.” or similar.

First of all watches and water do not mix very well. Unless your watch is actually a scuba watch, do not go scuba diving with it. Even if it says that it is ”water resistant 50 m” it does not mean that you can take it down 20 m below when you go wreck-diving. In fact this watch should not be taken to a swim at all and the 50 m can be quite misleading.

Water resistant means the water have some resistance to water but it does not mean it is intended for you to go swimming with it. In fact you should never submerge a watch marked only ”resistant” and if you are out in rainy weather where there is enough rain to soak your sleve or rain directly on your watch do not press any buttons or wind it before it has dried up properly. Doing so may allow water to get inside the watch and cause all sorts of future problems (foggy glass being one indication that this has happened).

In the beginning watches were classified as either ”water resist” or ”water proof” sometimes the latter followed by a number, 10m 50m 100m being the most common.

Water resistant

A water resistant watch is never intented for swimming or to be sumerged. If the water resist mark is followed by a number you can interpret this as the maximum number of minutes the watch should in any circumstance be exposed directly to light rain!

A water resistant watch can be washed gently with water if it needs to be, but avoid running tapwater and avoid detergents at any cost! Detergents such as washing-up liquid or similar causes the natural water tension to break down and allows the water to penetrate through buttons, windup axis or similar, even through a rubber seal!

Instead use a soft moist cloth and rub until shiny again. Alcohol solvents can sometimes be used, but the watch band might not like it and it can dry out the rubber seals in the watch.

Water proof

The way the seal on the watch is tested is that it is submerged in a chamber partly filled with water. Then the air pressure is slowly increased until such time that the pressure corresponds to a certain depth, usually measured in meters (1 meter about 3 ft.) and as long as there are no bubbles the test is deemed successful.

There are a number of reasons why this test is misleading, when you are swimming you are forcefully moving your watch through the water creating turbulence and various pressure, the test described above is for a watch at perfect rest in still water. For the same reason you should avoid washing your watch under a running faucet since this will also increase the risk for water to get into the watch.

That bubbles are not coming out of the watch does not for certain show that water did not go into the watch! Air compresses under pressure and therefore it is possible for water sometimes to penetrate the watch seals without there being any air bubbles.

To make things more confusing, new watch makers sometimes themselves confuses the water resist and water proof marks making it quite hard for the consumer to know what is right. Therefore I have here a table based on personal experience with wrist watches and people I have talked with in the business of repairing said clocks:

Table of watch water resistance

[table=7]

Avoid showers

Showering with a watch is a terrible idea, even if the watch is water proof enough to withstand the sprays from the shower, the soap and other things used to wash yourself will have some effect on the water tension allowing it to transgress even good rubber seals and get in to the watch. It may also leave residues on the watch itself or affect the wristband. Never wash a leather strap with water, use ”saddle soap” or similar products intended to gently clean leather.

Always dry the watch gently after it has gotten wet and let it sit for a while to dry out. Place it somewhere where the temperature is slightly above room temperature but not to any extremes and leave it there for a few days.

Swimming with a watch

When you are swimming with a watch that is okay for this but not considered a scuba watch never press any buttons or use the wind-screw or operate the watch in any way unless it specifically says in the manual it isd intended to work that way and you are covered by warranty should the watch break.

Many outdoor watches sometimes have a ”snorkling mode” where the air pressure barometer inside used to calculate the altitude can be used to show how far under water you are. Avoid this function, it may look fun but if the water is not classed to be a swimming watch do not take it swimming. As simple as that.

A training watch with heart rate monitor can sometimes be used swimming, but the same thing goes, set the watch up before you go into the pool and then avoid pressing its buttons while in the water! Most heart rate monitor bands that you strap across your chest and communicates with the watch will not work while in water anyway (and they might not be water proofed either). Suunto has a collection of such watches with a ”memory” inside the chest strap that remembers your heart beat that will be transferred to the watch when you get out of the water again. Check the manual and ask the sales rep what is okay.

Sweat

Sweat generally do not affect watches that bad. Sweat is salty and moist and that should be a lethal combination for most electronics but it usually does not penetrate into the watch. However, after exercising with a watch there might be a good idea to give it a nice wipe-down or if the watch can take it, rinse in water. When you rinse a watch never run it under the fauced. Instead make a small ”bath” for the watch, lower it into the water for a few seconds then take it up again and dry with a soft cloth. Leave to dry over night before you use it.

If the accident happens

If you happen to get water into the watch you need to consider if it is a fully mechanical operation (wind-up or auto-winding watch) or if it is an electro-mechanical or fully electronic watch. With the later two it is important to immediately open the watch and remove the battery to avoid damaging the electronic circuits. If you have moisture inside the watch and the battery stays connected it will causes various salts and other pollutions in the water to deposit and eat away at the delicate circuitry. If your watch is a fully mechanical one take it to a repair shop and ask them to oil it up and check the water proof seal to replace if necessary.

Auto logon in firefox

When you browse the company intranet with Internet Explorer it automatically sends the credentials you used to authenticate to the windows domain. Other browsers do not do this by default and therefore you get a sign on box now and then asking you to fill in username and password again in order to browse the site.

There is a remedy for this.

  1. Navigage in firefox to the following page about:config if you get a warning message that is okay.
  2. Locate the following keys:
    network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris
    network.negotiate-auth.delegation-uris
    network.negotiate-auth.trusted-uris
  3. Add to these keys the server root path that you wish automatic credentials be sent to. For example if your intranet page is launched from the URI http://intranet/ then you should add ”intranet” to these three keys.

Now you should be automatically logged in with your windows credentials next time you navigate to these pages.

OBSERVE! Only add domains you fully trust!

Training Wk 52

Monday: 3 km run

I then had muscle pains for a couple of days and then the christmas party time set in full fledged! I had no less than three christmas parties to attend to this year, from work, with friends and again this weekend with more friends. It has been fantastic in every way and then finally the snow came as well. It now does look like christmas but it has not done me well in the exercise scheme, the roads are perilous to run now but since it is close to christmas I will see if I may sneak down into the exercise gym at work and find a cross trainer or something similar to work out on.

I mean it, I need to get more exercise and the weather and road conditions are just not really that fit for running right now. Fortunately snow rarely lasts that long here in Stockholm, it will be fine for running in no time.

Course in portrait photography

Again together with fotonen.se we arranged a nice portrait photo course and as usual we had two days of incredible fun in the studio ending with a model shoot at the Sunday afternoon.

Återigen hade vi tillsammans med fotonen.se ordnat en porträttfotokurs och som vanligt hade vi två dagar av mycket roliga stunder, teori och praktik varvat och avslutade med att fotografera en modell.

Eyes
Model look
Jewellery
Model shoot

Fractal Time

This article is a very interesting read for everyone that works in a project. It deals with the perils of time estimation of a project and the underlying thesis is that the further you break things down to estimate the time of each piece of work to do, no matter if you are doing agile stories or some other way of organising your work, the longer the project estimate will be. This is beacause the more fine-grained you break things down the more factors like rounding errors, lead times to start each task and some general fear factors will be multiplied in and create a longer over all project time. As the granularity approaches zero the time to complete the project approaches infinity – we have in short a fractal time.

Everyone who has worked in the form of a project knows that most business organisations are top-down organisations that focus on mainly three things, money, time and quality. You are given a budget for a project based on an estimate that seems sound to the investors but when the statistics says that only 1/3 of what was originally described is ever delivered, another 1/3 is delivered but with severe changes and the last 1/3 is obsoleted, replaced and never delivered as orginally stated, then what bearing on the actual work has any ever so good project estimation?

Is this a sound structure for running projects?

Using your Android for network monitoring

Using a small software called RF Signal Tracker it is possible to create a log file detailing the coverage parameters your phone has at every point a long a route. This is something that other software like TEMS charge you thousands of € in order to facilitate and now you can do it for free using nothing but a bit of computer skills and an Android phone.

The RF Signal Tracker is a little buggy so in order to use it properly you should turn of auto-rotation of your screen and avoid running too many other applications at the time. When the phone is in idle mode you will get less accurate readings but usually good enough in order to make well reasoned assumptions about the network.

Starting the RF Signal Tracker software you have an option to record your data. It will use the built-in GPS receiver in the phone to find out where you are and then log together with the signal strength (in dBm) and other parameters such as the base station Cell ID, the LAC and many other important parameters as well as the base station position (if it is known).

This can then be exported to the Micro SD-card in the phone as a CSV file which is the easiest format to use. Once you have it as a CSV file you may tether the phone to your computer and transfer this file to your working directory.

If you are running some flavour of Linux, BSD or other Unix you are set but if you are running Windows you need to install a package called Cygwin. Standard settings should do, you need a command line that works and a tool called ”awk” which is awesome. Tutorial for AWK can be found here.

Open a shell, navigate to your working directory and find the CSV file. Then issue a command like this:

awk <export_091130170020.csv ’BEGIN {FS=”,”}; {print $3/1000000 “,” $2/1000000 “,” 130+$4}’ >coord.txt

This should export a file called ”coord.txt” in your working directory with coordinates in WGS84 decimal format (ddd.ddddd, dd.ddddd) with the easting/westing and the northing/southing in that order.

The next step is to take the following KML file and open it in a text editor, just copy it straight to the editor of your choice.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<kml xmlns="http://www.opengis.net/kml/2.2">
  <Document>
    <name>Paths</name>
    <description>Examples of paths. Note that the tessellate tag is by default
      set to 0. If you want to create tessellated lines, they must be authored
      (or edited) directly in KML.</description>
    <Style id="yellowLineGreenPoly">
      <LineStyle>
        <color>7f00ffff</color>
        <width>4</width>
      </LineStyle>
      <PolyStyle>
        <color>7f00ff00</color>
      </PolyStyle>
    </Style>
    <Placemark>
      <name>Signal Strength Test Run</name>
      <description>Some description here</description>
      <styleUrl>#yellowLineGreenPoly</styleUrl>
      <LineString>
        <extrude>1</extrude>
        <tessellate>1</tessellate>
        <altitudeMode>relativeToGround</altitudeMode>
        <coordinates>
<!-- YOUR COORDINATES GOES HERE -->
        </coordinates>
      </LineString>
    </Placemark>
  </Document>
</kml>

Find the section that says<coordinates> </coordinates>  in the above and then cut and paste the coordinates from the coordinates.txt file in between the two tags.

If you have google earth you can now double-click on the KML file you created and view the result. The height over ground is the signal strength calculated such as that a strength of -130 dBm is flat on the ground and for every dBm above the measurement point is placed 1 m/dBm above ground. This means that a signal strength of -90 dBm will place the point at 130-90 = 40 m above ground.

Happy hacking!