I check my step count a few times a day on my phone. It's habit. My brain is a big fan of number-slowly-goes-up. It's why I enjoy cricket and journaling, and why I don't like the stock market.

Last week I was distracted during one of my step-checking moments and when I saw a prompt from Samsung Health I assumed it was the app once again requesting permissions for my health data. It was not, it was another update that ended up squeezing AI generated crap along with more marketing into an app that I just use to tell me how many steps I've done.

Now, due to some giant "tip" that appears on the main screen I couldn't even see my daily steps without scrolling down.

This was the catalyst I needed to delve into Android development. Something I attempted once back in 2013. Thirteen years later the tools were evolved enough I figured that I could replace Samsung Health in a couple of days. And so I set upon my own AI Generated crap side project that I ran via AI while I waited for the AI on my main side project to run.

It did take a few more hours than I expected to develop my Samsung Health alternative. Two reasons for this:

First, I had to undertake some foundational development setup tasks like installing Android Studio to run an emulator and provide the SDK, and configure some OAuth tokens in Google Cloud.

Once that was done, and I got reading the step sensor working right, the majority of effort was describing the requirements. What I actually should have done second was just provide screenshots of what I needed from Samsung Health and let the AI do the rest.

So it took about eight hours of my time over a week, and now I have my simple step and app tracker.

Roll Over for the alternative option.

It even has a few nice features, like auto detecting sleep based on my longest overnight period without steps. It compresses the non-stepping periods on the intervals chart to make the key information bigger. And my favourite feature is that if you hit the step target, you can upload a photo to commemorate your walking. And if you scroll back through your step history, the background for those days is the photo for that day. This will be fun for revisiting holiday step charts in future.

Overall, once I understood the architecture of session management, local storage, UI and sensor access, adding features to the app became super easy. With skills the AI can even build the app, deploy it to the emulator, seed it with test data and validate the logs.

It was a lot easier than it was in 2013.

QuizzaMe tonight confirmed my memory of it skewing slightly older than other pub quizes.

Alex and I brought along a nearly 69 year old to help, and we did manage to finish 14th out of about 30 tables, so that was a win.

At one point, the question was name this song, and some 50s guitar ballad played for five seconds, followed by 5 answers to choose from. I'd never heard of any of the artists.

The answer was revealed. They play the rest of the song.
Sounds like the whole room is now singing along.

I really like plants. Not as much as birds, but they're definitely better than fish.

I wonder if I saw this chandelier back in 2019?

Three weeks of winter have passed so far and it hasn't been that cold yet. Either that or I need to dust my computer monitor. This morning was the first really chilly morning, with fog hanging above the surface of the grass as we walked Nash to the bakery for her weekly treat.

The cold morning was brought by completely clear skies, and even though it was the shortest day of the year there was no shortage of sunshine. I took another walk with my camera to check on the birds and find out what they thought about the solstice.

These silver gulls on the sand were loving the water, and not at all concerned about the data centres it might be able to cool.

Then I saw this cormorant diving for dinner, showing no signs it had bothered calculating how many days of stockpiled oil reserves are remaining.

On the island I saw this galah soaking up the late afternoon sun. If it knew about screwworm flies it would consider them a snack, and not a potential future in which beef shortages lead to Australia exporting galahs as meat to the USA.

This dusky moorhen in a shady pond has not considered the loss of French culture as amateur musicians in France lean more and more towards English lyrics during the annual Fête de la Musique.

This rainbow lorikeet was extremely stressed out about the state of everything.

I've lived within driving distance of Monarto Safari Park for most of my life, but I never visited until today.

Vanessa and I walked progressively up the hill past a whole bunch of amazing animals, and then caught the bus back the other way for a more casual viewing of other animals.

Just posted this one to make you scroll down a giraffe.