"Re: Perhaps more alarming, many felt under pressure to reach their daily targets (79%) and that their daily routines were controlled by Fitbit (59%).

Uhm, a research study on the (positive) impact of such devices on (bad) habits one wishes to discard would be ideal at this point in time -- thoughts?

Indeed, sometimes a bit of extrinsic motivation can help to get us over humps. If you weigh 200 kilos then the good of reducing that probably outweighs the harm of extrinsic motivation, as there is immediate and pressing danger to self, and extrinsic motivation can often achieve immediate results. But it is still not a good method. Long term, it is positively harmful to cultivating lifelong habits that persist, unless you keep piling it on indefinitely. Short term, at best, it is far less effective than cultivating intrinsic or internally regulated motivation, albeit that it may achieve its effects more rapidly at first. Typically, it kills intrinsic motivation stone dead.

Theory distinguishes two distinct forms of extrinsic motivation: external regulation and internal regulation. External regulation is nearly always bad, unless non-compliance would cause immediate harm (e.g. we might externally regulate our kids if they are doing something dangerous or unkind). Internal regulation can be very good. It comes in several flavours - introjected, identified, or integrated  - where we do things not because they give us joy, but because (for instance) we feel we should (it fits our beliefs, or what we believe others think we should do), or because it aligns with our image of ourselves, or because it is needed to achieve some further goal that matters to us. Such internally regulated extrinsic motivation is both necessary and useful, especially when it contributes to a sense of self-worth and value, and it can contribute to achieving a sufficient level of performance to become intrinsically motivated (e.g. when we practice scales to become more capable musicians). This is why I greatly prefer tools like my Pebble watch that simply inform us, thereby supporting us in reaching our own goals and cultivating the habits we want to cultivate. This is why good (human) trainers help trainees to find the motivation within themselves, to reflect on what they want to achieve and how they want to achieve it, who praise effective behaviours rather than the individual, who listen to what trainees want to achieve, who explain the value of doing things a certain way, illustrate the problems with bad habits, show that they care, lead by example, and so on. Good teachers help students find reasons that matter to them for doing things they don't naturally enjoy doing, and support them in overcoming humps along the way.

Dumb devices that achieve those ends by telling you to get up and jog, and berate you for not meeting goals you did not set yourself (whether by implication or directly) might achieve immediate effects but they are either deliberately or inadvertently creating an addiction. Short term, it works, but it has the opposite effect when you take it away. There have been literally thousands of studies and experiments that have shown this quite conclusively, across all walks of life. Knowing this, for all the short-term good it may achieve, I think it is positively immoral to continue making such things.

re: "Good teachers help students find reasons that matter to them for doing things they don't naturally enjoy doing, and support them in overcoming humps along the way."

and "...good (human) trainers help trainees to find the motivation within themselves..."

Point taken. Thank you for the informative paragraph on motivation. 

I need to learn more about what is available in wearables, including the Pebble watch you mentioned. 

I find your posts both informative and interesting- thanks! 

password strength: https://xkcd.com/936/

Thanks Jon for this informative review.

Just for sharing: I found

Mendeley https://www.mendeley.com/

is very helpful to me to organize and store phf files

oscar

@Richard - app decay is a major problem. I've had apps that I've paid plenty for that are no longer available and, of course, free ones that I rely upon come and go all the time (more fool me for relying on free apps). Same is true of things that are built-in. I hate the new Apple Notes which, of course, ties you to iCloud: the one and only reason the old version was worth having was that it could use any IMAP account for storage. As I mentioned, we don't own our devices any more. The same is even true of cars. When they rely on a complex ecosystem of operating systems, other apps and cloud services, the control is in the hands of the seller (or whoever buys the seller), not the purchaser, and we only ever have a licence to use them. Even Linux boxes suffer a bit from app decay, though to a much lesser extent, especially as they are far more likely to use standards that do not change anything like as fast, and that usually remain backwardly compatible. For the record, I still use an iPad 2 from time to time, and it is so far fine. The iPad 1 gathers dust, the iPhone 3 lost its screen, and the iPhone 4 is without a SIM right now but was OK last time I checked, a few months ago. The hardware is still fine but, indeed, the range of apps that run on them is diminishing all the time.

@Viorel - I too had a first generation Intel MacBook Pro (circa 2006 I think) that died early this year and is only dead now thanks to cats: it hadn't got operating system updates for a while, but it was trundling along nicely with nothing more than a new battery and upgraded hard drive in all its nearly 10 years of operation till cats poured water on it. I still have a working Asus laptop from around 2003: its batteries (in days when batteries were replaceable I always used to buy 2) are both down to 5 minutes, and it would die if subjected to Windoze, but it runs Lubuntu very happily, if a little sluggishly with its 768MB of RAM and first generation Celeron.

@Oscar - yes, it's a good app, though it's another cloud-based system that could be yanked or changed at any time, and the DPT-S1 doesn't support it. I'll have another try at the iOS app - I found it OK a few years ago but I don't trust Mendeley with my data, especially now it is owned by Elsevier. I think Zotero is a safer, if rather less slick, option.

Jon,

First the history. :-) I have a Radio Shack TRS-80 4P that I upgraded the drives to double-side panasonics the day after I bought it. It still runs and all the software still works. :-)

I have a Toshiba laptop - my first Toshiba laptop. Still has Win95 and I long ago turned off updates. I keep it because it has a REAL RS-232 port on the back that I use to talk to  my galss furnace and annealer via RS485. It's currently on my side desk as a serial test device as I cannot get my son's Zaurus to communicate with my Raspberry Pi 3 via serial. The PiDP8 (PDP8 copy that uses the RPi as it's engine) is  running Multos  right now and I need a serial terminal to connect a second user. The Zaurus is reliable and portable (and I have the serial cable for it). It was last used to do the initial configuration of a Sun Sparcstation V440 in 2005 which only allowed serial console.

As for devices, you are correct. My phone does work as a phone and a texting device - something my old Nokia would not do well (text, that is). It's the apps that annoy. All the map applications quit last year and now the Navionics only works via wifi. Hard to use at the dive site.

As for Linux, I'm not so sure. I just did a big installation using VirtualBox on my PC in order to build a reservoir simulator from source. It worked on Ubuntu 14 but not 16. Turns out someone (expletive's omitted) allowed a broken beta package of a critical library to make it into the release version of 16!

I'm also running with updates turned off as the latest set of Ubuntu 16 updates destroys the unity desktop. Real fun doing an update only to end up with nothing but a blank window. It's been a known problem since U12. As much as I love open source, sometimes letting these folks loose on so-called stable builds is not the best action plan.

Even the latest VirtualBox update from the grand master of the buy-up, Oracle, has had problems. It's hard to embrace open source when it can't keep itself running for more than two weeks!

Of course I long ago turned off all Microsoft updates on my Win 7 box. Far to dangerous to let Mickeysoft tamper with things once it's obvious they no longer care, and only want to force Win10 on the world.

My 2005 Macbook Pro is still running, but without a battery. The installed one died, so I bought a replacement from Asia. It lasted two years then suddenly expanded. I noticed when the mouse/trackpad cursor developed a mind of it's own. Took out the (then) removable battery and all was well. It's been running that way for the past 3 or more  years. Of course it cannot be upgraded past Snow Leopard but that's not really all that bad.

My 2012 Macbook Pro is still running and 'updateable'.

One could argue that it's the way with all things computer, but I know many people that are still getting adequate server life out of Linux or BSD running on old 386, 486 and Pentium boxes.