I've built Caloree an iOS/Mac app that allows you to track your daily calorie intake, go on a calorie deficit diet and track your weight which has worked wonders for me. It's freemium, but most features are available for free. It can be found at https://caloree.app.
The company Stefan founded is just 5km (around 3 miles) away from where I live. I have friends who either worked or still work there. I also met a bunch of the folks at InnoQ over the years and they are a great team.
Whenever people or his employees talked about Stefan it was always in a positive way. He must have been a great guy. RIP Stefan and my condolences to the family!
I was just about to comment about my dear of bumping into a grizzly bear while hiking there, but apparently “only” black bears live on Vancouver Island. That would still keep me away and I always wonder if I’m just way too cautious or if the likelihood of running into a bear is so low that it’s worth it?
They're pretty docile. Think of them as very big raccoons, not small grizzlies. The primary thing that brings the bravest black bears into close contact with humans is their love of untended food, but they're skittish and will scamper the moment someone hollers at them.
Personally, I worry more about cougars and wolves.
Cougars and wolves will generally leave people alone, but will be very interested in your pets. Wolves may try to lure dogs out of the yard, but kill them as competition, while cougars may take an unleashed dog on a bush walk.
We have both where I live, but I don't usually worry too much about off-leash trail walks during the day. Night time though, I just do leashed up road walks.
Yes, the risk is very, very low. Probably in the same ballpark as being struck by lightning. (Though I do know someone who was stalked by a cougar while they were hiking alone. So there's at least something to feel nervous about.)
FYI, Vancouver Island has the highest population density of cougars in the world. This includes mountain lions, pumas, panthers, etc, all the same big cat by other names. They are so elusive though. I lived on the Island for nearly six years, during which time I mountaineered and hiked all over the place, and never saw one. Saw lots of black bears though.
Black bears have killed 67 people in North America since 1900, so I think statistically the risk is very low [1].
I have come across black bears on several occasions while hiking in Yosemite and Sequoia national park. They have never expressed the slightest bit of interest in me. Give them plenty of space, make plenty of noise, and eventually they will wander away.
I have hiked a popular ridgeline hike in the Jasper National Park area every year for the last 3 years, and I am 3/3 for grizzly sightings while on trail. The first was the scariest, we came around a bend and startled a cub with momma bear a ways off behind. Thankfully cub scurried off, so mom followed. Had we been more diligent with making noise, I’m sure the encounter wouldn’t have even happened.
The other 2 times, the bears were feeding on berries in fields near the trail. We made lots of noise, had spray on hand, but the bear just looked at us then kept eating; we made a wide arc around and carried on.
Definitely hair-raising, but not so terrifying that I’m scared away from hiking the area. They’re less skittish than black bears but don’t like people any less.
There must be tens of thousands of black bear encounters (where human and bear are mutually aware of each other) in the U.S. every year, and I think less than one attack per year on average. It's not uncommon to see videos of bears wandering around in suburban back yards.
I run into black bears a couple of times a year mountain biking in the PNW, I usually just see their back as they run away. I think it is extremely unlikely to be attacked by one. Grizzlies are a bit different certainly.
Yeah, I've only come face to face with a grizzly once, black bear a few times a year over decades in the bush. Grizzly with cubs or on its kill is a serious thing, bear spray is a must.
Completely off-topic, but I was an avid IH user before I somehow lost my password.
For some strange reason resetting the password doesn‘t work for me. It tells me it‘s going to sene a mail with instructions in a few minutes and then nothing ever arrives…
Hi quickthrower2, thanks for the feedback. Glad you like it and apologies for the late reply. I somehow totally missed that there were comments in this thread. I got a lot of feedback on producthunt and apparently that was enough to distract me.
It should have definitely asked for height and sex, I just tried it and it "works on my iPhone". Perhaps you had to scroll down and that wasn't obvious? Good feedback though, I'll see what I can do there!
As for the calculation: the child comment is right (see below), it's a BMR calculation. However, I think I should change it to a TDEE based as that takes daily movement into account. That should make it more realistic. Any thoughts?
It depends what the purpose is. I've been on a calorie-in-calorie-out weight loss journey since last August and for most of that time used BMR, as it subtracted a few hundred extra calories each day as a bonus.
For weight loss, eating at BMR is about right generally. And I'd imagine most use cases for calorie tracking apps are about weight loss.
To make it most accurate, I'd personally just add a basic multiplier for what sort of lifestyle people have (sedentary, small exercise like walking the dog, moderate exercise and hard exercise in the multipliers of 1.2x, 1.4x, 1.6x, 1.8x).
I exercise a lot and that typically adds 1000-1500 calories onto my daily BMR of 1500 or so, so the multipliers a lot of BMR / TDEE calculator websites use seem to make sense.
I'm more curious where the food database is sourced from. I tried something similar by getting data from British supermarkets (Sainsbury's, Tescos etc.) and none of them seemed to have APIs, so web scraping was the only possibility.
Makes sense, happy to report that this will make it into the next version amongst some other things that didn't make it into the MVP. Thanks a lot for your feedback!
As for the food db: I use Open Food Facts which is great, but can be messy and sometimes wrong as it's mostly crowdsourced. I combine that data with data from US Food Data Central, which is an awesome resource.
You will see open food facts data as unverified in the app whilst food data central will appear as verified. Hope that makes sense.
I am in the process of adding major US restaurant chains as I recently found another great dataset with more than 30000 entries. So McDonalds, Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts, etc also coming.
This is definitely not one of these balloons. Check out the discontinued Google Loon project to see a closer representation of what the world was looking at.
I have used weather balloons like the one you linked and I can assure you that these will burst after only a few hours in the air.
I recently got interested in installing a TTN gateway in my home and adding some temperature sensors.
Having played with LoRa years ago my thought was that there should now be readily available and cheap sensors. But to my disappointment everything seems to be a bit pricey which really surprised me. I can get a Zigbee temp sensor for around 15 euros, but Lora sensors cost around double that. I am wondering as to why that is?
This is pure speculation - I have no prove.
I believe is also due to the target buyer: afaik the biggest adopters are municipalities and not general consumers.
I have a genuine question which I have been wondering about for sole time:
Is there anything positive to this “one nation can veto everything” rule? It feels like this is really blocking a lot of progress in the EU where some of the right-spectrum nations can simply block anything or bargain from.
Why do we have this rule and is it hard to get rid of it?
Yes, there is. The rule means that nothing can be forced onto any nation.
Many people, and nations, would be hesitant to join a union where you can be coerced to tolerate neighbors you otherwise wouldn't. Hence the idea of consensus.
Because we don't have a real European public and open discourse. It is just some losers online that happen to speak English as a common language. But even then you wouldn't know anything about domestic politics in Bulgaria (assuming your aren't from there).
You cannot really get to anything you can call democratic voting, it would be so random and indirect that it would basically become meaningless. So states still need a hard veto for themselves and the direction the EU will develop in.
In practice the EU has already got rid of this rule in almost every area, for that exact reason. However, it means that the arguments for leaving the EU get stronger. It used to be that a good answer to opposition to the EU was "but they can't force us to do anything because there's a veto". Now it's very far from that.
It's that exact trend that led to Brexit in the first place - your comment shows why it's problematic perfectly. EU supporters see it as a way to force left wing politics onto populations that otherwise would reject it.
