hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr4013.txt

Episode: 4013
Title: HPR4013: Smart Watches gross
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4013/hpr4013.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 18:37:17

---

This is Hacker Public Radio episode 4,013 for Wednesday, the 20th of December 2023.
Today's show is entitled Smart Watch's Gross.
It is hosted by Operator and is about 30 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is, Operator talks about his setup and issues with smart watches.
You are listening to a show from the Reserve Q.
We are airing it now because we had free slots that were not filled.
This is a community project that needs listeners to contribute shows in order to survive.
Please consider recording a show for Hacker Public Radio.
First, the reason I wanted to try Smart Watch is because Google Assistant is awful.
I ended up having the screen to my pocket to get it to say, hey, or okay, the G-word.
So I opted to think of something that would give me some kind of external mic that I wouldn't have to have a mic on my ear all the time.
The only thing that's going to work is a wearable.
So my first requirement was all I need is a microphone that will send basically a Bluetooth microphone that I can wear around my wrist is what I really want.
There's probably an option out there or something to that effect just a small form factor microphone.
USB or Bluetooth microphone that I can just attach to my wrist or my lapel or whatever you want to call it and have that ability.
Even just if I had to turn it on and wait for it to sink and then say my thing could turn it off or just leave it on all the time.
I don't know what my options are but I definitely need something besides screaming to my pocket when I want to talk to my assistant.
The other background is I want to start working on GI automation making my AI voice.
There's a few ones out there 11 labs I think it's called.
They do a decent job but they won't let me have the model of course.
So you record like 20 seconds of audio and they do a pretty decent job of my voice.
Obviously people that know me know that that's not my voice and it sounds a bit staged.
But same thing for the video you can do the same kind of thing with video right now but it looks staged and it doesn't look like it makes a whole lot of sense.
So but I'm working towards that what I want is to create an AI agent that sounds like me.
I want to create and I want to have the model be maybe 20% me.
I want there's some rattling.
I want the model to be I want to be able to ask the model stuff.
I want just a second.
So I want the model to I want to train eventually train my local model which is not really going to be an option for me because I don't have like 30.
$30,000 to train model and like you know $5,000 worth of GPUs and RAM.
But I'm assuming we're going to get there pretty quickly.
You might have some kind of secure way in which to try to find your own models.
There might even be something out there but I'm trying to stay ahead of the curve.
What I want ultimately is a AI assistant that sounds like me that will manage my time for me right will help manage my time and will also help me with communication.
So mainly obviously personal communication only not work based stuff.
So I want it to to help me with time management and help me with stuff like you know communicating with people effectively.
So if I go to write a text message or whatever I send a message to someone it will be might it for me and then maybe say it back and say,
well this is how this is how I want this is how this is the message I'm sending blah blah blah you know it broke in relation.
So those are my two requirements for them or that agent and I can ask you things like you know tell me you know I'm going to a conference in Blue Ridge on Monday.
But I have to be also in Blue Ridge or I'm going to a conference in Augusta you know look at my calendar I'm going you know I'm going to a conference in Augusta and I also have to go to Blue Ridge.
What should I do to you know the shortest travel how should I sort that out and it could tell me you know some way to say hey you should go to Blue Ridge first where you should stay in home and then go directly to
you know Augusta and then have your wife drive drive herself back from Blue Ridge I don't know.
But there's a million things you can ask to do to agent to do and it will kind of essentially within the next year to do it.
Well that gets the size all that I've thought for five minutes about AI stuff but that just to give you some background that's why I'm going down this road.
I don't like wearables I in fact I'm kind of against them at their current state they're infectious and kind of gross.
You know they live off your data.
So I had a fit bit it was like three second-hand fit bit that I played around for a little bit but I'm not into any of that.
I didn't get a smart watch for the fit I got a smart watch for basically to work on create my only AI agent or something of the sorts.
So the first thing I ended up with is a what do they call it it's a little it's a little ESP32 on a little wrist ESP32.
It's pretty pretty big it's pretty bulky is probably not very sturdy but I got it as like a hacker smart watch.
So if I want to it has a microphone I think a speaker I want to save Bluetooth and wireless.
I can't remember the name of it but there's a million of them out there.
But if I remember up with the show but it's not super important in their time it doesn't.
But this one is ESP32 based and it's like the second to enter something.
And they had like firmware updates automatically and stuff but you know me just say it's a proof of concept device.
If you were going to where you know create some kind of wearable or have some kind of specific requirement for a wearable needed like a cool framework to start from that would actually be a great one to do.
But you got stuff like flip or zero that will kind of do a lot of that stuff.
But I got that one and then I got it used what is this Samsung S5 watch or something like that S3 or S5.
I got it used for I don't know how much it's like the pink rose gold one I don't even care.
I got a fair discount on it used and I got the pirate one first the kind of open source one first.
And it wasn't particularly impressive obviously because it doesn't have the backing of a $5 billion company.
But it did have potential and it could be you know a very simple record this audio you know send it over you know compress it or even just send it raw over to the server to be processed by the unit that's something I could simply build.
But by the time I figured that out I could probably just use the Google's you know API or somebody else's API.
But with the smartwatch I've been using it for a month or so now.
Number one you can't wear any other watch I have little cheap watches that I love.
You know that I love that you need personality and I like to wear different little cool watches.
And I get like to get compliments on my you know little cool watches I can't afford a $40,000 watch.
But I can have these cool little watches that are like you know throw away watches and I'll have to worry about breaking them or losing them.
But you can't worry that crap because you have to worry just stupid smartwatch.
Also this one doesn't come with any kind of real or protector.
I bought screen protectors for it and I've already gone through three of them.
So I'm not happy there I've already scraped it on the roof cracked it and scraped the top of it on the roof.
So there's some damn it already there I didn't get the site thingy so they you know it's dumb people get these you know expensive devices and they don't put protectors on them at all.
And then they get scratched up the hill.
So I can't blame anybody myself on that one.
So the first you know it's it's annoying because you're you have a watch that you had to wear all the time.
The second annoying factor of it is that I didn't like I don't really like these rubber things which I went back to it.
The rubber it's kind of sweaty and not breathable.
I'm actually taking it off right now just to give my arm some air.
But you can wear them at night. They're very comfortable at night. The little rubber things are very comfortable at night.
If you this S5 oh she's I forgot about that.
So I'll go buy the comfortably comfortability first and I'll talk about the other stuff.
So these rubber bands watch bands are great for sleeping.
If you have apnea or you snore you can wear this and turn on the snoring with the Samsung crap and have snore detection and all that good stuff.
If you want to start tracking some of that you know go go for it.
But I bought a cheap like a metal watch band for this watch specifically and it is very uncomfortable.
I don't know at one point what point time but I couldn't.
I just buy wrist like a wrist pad or even at the office I don't have a wrist pad and just a pressure of the crappy metal wrist band with the hard edges.
It makes a difference. So if you're going to buy another watch band make sure you buy a nice quality watch band that's got rounded edges and not sharp metal edges to it for the clashes and stuff.
So I think if I actually took the Dremel tool to the metal one it would be more whatever but your band arm band ones wrap around better and they are more consistent heart rate detection or protection which I don't care because that's not my use case.
But you know when I started getting into it it's kind of cool to be like oh you know I've had 10,000 steps today and oh wow we did 72,000 steps today.
So it's kind of nice. It helps you remind you that you're not being active enough.
I go up and down the stairs. I try to go up and down the stairs at the office or walk at least once a day and then do the trail every day but it ends up being the bike trail ends up being like every other day.
I will say that speed up here I got a nice speed boost on the speed limit sign went up 10 miles.
So I will say that that was kind of interesting the whole fitness thing is kind of interesting to be whatever but I don't appreciate or even want to know how they're using that information.
And what they're gathering location data and you know my steps I've got where I've gone all that stuff.
Not super great so I can certainly go all great and we've got down to 10 miles an hour.
That's fun. I just went up for like two miles just long enough to get the speedy ticket in the speed trip.
We have 10 miles and then right back down. Oh, now we're down another 60 from 60 to 45 now.
Wow, so we win. That's that's layers. Anyways, where was I?
So I got and I put that rubber watch man back on. I've been sometimes sleeping with it at night to get an idea of how much sleep I get.
I come in and out of getting the pumpers.
But you start doing the math when you actually fall asleep at least for myself. It doesn't look particularly great.
You know I get six hours maybe seven. If I get anything past seven I start to wake up early and then fuck around like a fish.
I have RLS. I'm taking beer packs.
I actually tried sleeping pills. What's the sleeping pill everybody does.
I did half of five milligrams of that and I also tried on top of that. I tried.
What's the other big one? Jesus, I can't remember either one of them. Not so much.
But whatever sleeping pill is everybody uses that one. The other one I use is.
You have a pen. Jesus, you have a pen is one and the other sleeping pill is so not so much.
Anyways, I was taking those and I realized, you know, sometimes I would wake up and do silly stuff.
I used to drink a fair amount so I'd wake up in the middle of the night and like down a bottle, like a little mini bottle of wine and then go to sleep.
I would sometimes use my sleeping pills so bad I would sometimes use alcohol to try to go to sleep.
So I would be taking the sleeping pill and I have a pen and sometimes I would even be on the 10 milligrams.
I don't think I was sleeping any better on what this to be about me sleeping, but I don't think I was sleeping any better.
I just forgot that I was sleeping because I was knocked out.
But I actually talked to some neighbors and the husband is a pharmacist and the wife is a primary care physician.
So they came over and it was just like, I don't know if you all have any friends, their doctors or pharmacists, but Jesus, the amount of feedback you get from two people like that in a room at once is instantaneous.
I like extremely appreciate the input and stuff because they will just tell you how it is and what people are doing in both the averages and whatever and you'll get to know.
You can tell them, hey, you talk to your doctor and they're all like, they gotta be all careful about what they say and they gotta, you know, doctors are weird, they're not really solaceable.
You know, I've never had a doctor that can really be at my level and answer the questions that I'm actually asking.
So anyways, they suggested two things and I ended up with the mere practice and it's like the lowest delicious you can have possible.
So anyways, I was able to track my sleep and stuff.
I've gotten to where, if I exercise, go out to walk.
I can sleep and if I can just insist about my sleep and I don't drink, I don't really drink anymore.
I can sleep pretty quickly.
I actually had to take a five hour energy today, so hopefully I will not be wide eyed when I get home because I had to go like six hours a day.
I took it up until I'll have extra five hours.
So minus five hours is when I took it.
Alright, six hours is when I took it, so hopefully when I get along, I won't be completely dead.
Anyways, still talking about my sleep, sorry.
So the next thing I'll talk about is the tracking school, the app sort of kind of shaperware.
There's bloat on the same songs.
I know people say they want to clutch same song.
People say that Garmin stuff is good.
There's only a couple of frameworks.
Google has a framework.
It's called like, like, phono-ass or some shit.
They have some kind of framework.
So there's like maybe one or two other ones to like, talk to the device or like, you know, apps that can talk to it.
It's called like, phono-ass as Google's, and then I don't know what Garmin uses, but it's weird.
Like, there's some smart watches that support stuff and others don't.
And some of them are basically like, or if I fit bits and some of them aren't.
Like, I don't really understand the ecosystem.
Even though smart, which has been around forever at this point, it is not consistent.
It's just like the Android ecosystem, but it works.
Because you never really know what you're going to get and you never really know how awful that thing is until you buy it or you watch it.
And you do videos on how the actual interface works.
But I just kind of bought the cheapest that I could get away with and it did not be as slow as a piece of garbage.
So I ended up with like, that's five, I think.
The budget used rose gold, that's five.
As far as other applications I like being able to suppress the alarm, or the main is alarm, so I don't have to take the phone out of my pocket and snooze the alarm.
So like if I'm doing something or cooking mainly, I refuse to get like a Google whatever or Amazon spawn or Echo or any other crap.
One, because a lot of times I'm outside when I want to make an I notes or on it work.
And I don't want to have to put one everywhere I am.
That's just ridiculous.
And I don't want to do that.
I also don't want something other than my phone is already recording me twenty percent to be to be to be like around all the time when people that don't really have consent and privacy in mind, whatever.
So I do like the ability to be able to like, use it for suppressing alerts.
As far as apps go, it's just dumb.
I have a small form factor.
I think of forty, forty inch or forty one millimeter or whatever.
It's pretty much the smallest one they have.
And I want a very small form factor because the apps on it are dumb anyway.
So I don't really care. I just want a microphone or an interface for my AI individually, which I'll probably never get to now.
The other thing I like about it alarms the Google Assistant, I guess it's still shitty.
It's not the phone. It's not the watch this problem. It's the phone.
What else do I have a leg about it?
Smartwatches, nothing really.
I'll go into kind of the last part is the interface or the watch faces, whatever they call it.
At least within my ecosystem, the .face format or whatever Samsung's format is, is a closed ecosystem as far as I can tell.
There is nothing out there. There's people selling. There's stupid watch faces.
There's people talking about how awesome their watch faces are.
There's video reviews of people making watch faces, but to my knowledge.
I even looked on Reddit and I spent a fair amount of time kind of looking around.
I found some old templates for the old style watch faces that aren't really supported anywhere.
Like DMG or D something, it's not the new Samsung format or even whatever the open format for Google has one that's called.
It's supposed to be like a language that you write in instead of whatever.
Google has one and Samsung has one that's apparently compatible with the watch.
But if you all know anywhere where I can do watch faces that like have templates, my requirements are one calendar, right?
Google Calendar, I want the weather and I guess I want my steps battery life and I don't even know what else is even on here.
Steps the day of the week. Oh, the next meeting that's coming up.
Which is extremely important for me because I can look at it and say, ooh five o'clock, it's my next meeting. Great.
I got plenty of time to figure out whatever. I live my life by calendar.
Steps is in there. Obviously the time. So I figured, hey, all I need to do is take this default watch face and just modify it a little bit.
I don't really like the color scheme. I don't like, you know, I don't really care about those steps.
I just rather have that via value and maybe put something else in these, whatever they call these consignments or containers or whatever.
They have an interface for anyways. All I want to do is take the default Samsung, one of the default Samsung watch faces, modify it slightly and then move on.
There might be a way I can do that with like debug debugging the, you need to get on debug and copying it over manually maybe.
I just don't know, but just the pure, like on a, like the closed loop that is watch faces, I could not find any templates.
Even the Samsung thing has like nothing on it. There's no, there's no like nothing. There's like variables that you can set for certain things, but nothing, there's no weather.
There's no weather built into it. And one of the other ones is I think the calendar is not built into it. So it's like, okay.
So how are you guys doing? And from what it feels like, it's like some kind of like proprietary watch face agent thing that runs on.
As far as I can tell, like I tried to do a fair amount of research and I'm like, this is just some kind of like, you know, voice club to the lack of a better term of like, you know, how to, you know, how to sell your stupid watch face.
I couldn't find anything but just tons and tons of spam of people's watch faces. Like I get it. You want to sell your like, you want to sell your crappy, you know, $3 watch face.
That you spent, you know, eight hours doing, but it's basically the same to everybody else's, but you move some objects around and maybe you have created some content.
I mean, I'll give these guys some credit. They went and, you know, created, you know, different pictures for different logos. So you might end up writing.
Making like, you know, 15 different logos for the battery life indicator, right?
What I mean really is it's not that difficult to create a watch face given the resources and a default template.
But I just could not find anything but just spam. So that was a big turn off for me.
What I did find was a faceer that I know there's a bunch of other like, three other main ones. They're part of the same song itself has their own watch face.
Stupid store.
Facer has a bunch of watch faces that are decent, but it's just a spam nightmare. You know, I mean, I probably, even if I got the premium, I would still be bombarded with like, you're a newbie tape.
I mean, like, I don't want that. I want a watch face and I don't want to have to have like basically the faceer interface pops up every time you like switch watch faces or like turn on your watch or whatever.
You see their logo pop up and then you have to wait for like the watch face to like be decoded or whatever and push to like your phone locally or whatever.
But I just don't like the spamming of the whole thing.
But you can use they, you know, they give you free, you know, there's free tier watch faces.
And I actually found a $40,000 watch face that's kind of cool.
But pretend that I had my $40,000 watch, but on a digital watch face design, which is kind of interesting.
And I also found a way to like rip any watch face. You just replace the resource URL, but like whichever one you want.
And then you save that as your custom watch face.
So you load your custom watch face. You just replace the URL and it will basically pull in all the encrypted or encoded.
It's not only encrypted, it's encoded watch face stuff.
And it'll pull it in and then you just say, yep, this is my watch face and you click save.
And I'll save all, you know, overwrite your custom watch face with whichever resource you set, which I'm sure they already know about.
But it's kind of interesting.
So I actually uninstalled the face or app because I just don't like the way it works and the way the watch faces work and the way you customize it is all proprietary.
Like I just told them to my knowledge, the only way to create a watch face is through their stupid web UI and I don't want that.
I want to be able to locally create a template, make my own watch face, you know, modify it slightly and then, you know, save it locally, back it up at my own thing.
This guy's being dumb.
So that's a big turn off. The whole pay to play watch face thing is stupid.
I feel like it shouldn't be a thing by now, but apparently it still is.
Maybe I'm missing something, maybe I need to dig deeper, but it's just I just didn't get passed all the paywall spam stuff.
So that's essentially where I'm at.
I haven't gotten anywhere with my AI stuff because I know we're not there yet.
It would be nice to kind of start working on it and connect it to an agent and it would speak back to my voice.
And I would have like the voice be processed on my server in home, but that would take.
It would take like, well, probably five seconds to upload it, you know, another, you know, five seconds to process what speech to text it, convert it.
And then like another probably five seconds to come up with a response and then like a much longer time.
Probably five seconds to like create the way the audio file that is the playback of the response to my request.
And then, you know, upload it to the phone and play it and be like another.
Oh, and all of a sudden, I probably take like 20 seconds just to like getting a response back from my AI at this time.
I feel like my coding skills.
So it's not really there yet.
And even it doesn't really sound a lot like me.
The fine tuning is something out of my day grade.
And literally by day grade because I make enough money to have my own, you know, massive large model.
I mean, if I want to do it, I want to do it.
I want to do it right and get a decent respectable size model in there.
And I'm just not ready for like a $10,000 commitment to creating your own local large language model.
Like fine tuning, all that stuff.
But we'll get there and it'll get smaller and cheaper and faster.
I think these big ones just like the image stuff will be whatever.
So anyways, I've rated and gone on for 30 minutes now.
I apologize if you're still listening.
You know, if you understand watch faces, you want to help me figure out templates for watch faces.
My requirements are, you know, seeking Google Calendar.
Show me the weather for the next couple of days.
Oh, that's it.
That's really only one.
And like a background rotating background.
And it's for something.
Anyways.
Oh, that's it.
And take it easy.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at HackerPublicRadio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HBR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast,
then click on our contribute link to find out how easy it really is.
Hosting for HBR has been kindly provided by an onstoast.com,
the internet archive and our sings.net.
Onstoast.com, today's show is released under Creative Commons,
Attribution 4.0 International License.