Tech sucks

#14117 · May 15, 2022

I have a few tasks I currently do every day—some of them even multiple times a day—that are just cumbersome and seem completely superfluous to me.

Syncing my routes

I do most of my bike planning in the app of the German Alpenverein (DAV), they have a cooperation with outdooractive.com and as a Member of the DAV you get a discount on their apps. Even though the primary target is hiking, it’s great for biking (e.g., it lets you choose the type of surface, mountain bike, road bike, general bike, etc.) and it has an overlay map from the German Biking Association (ADFC). That overlay shows you more information than just the surface per route, for example the expected traffic. This is all great, it works on any of my machines and syncs well.

My bike computer is a Wahoo ELEMNT BOLT. To get the GPX track from the app to the BOLT, I need to do this:

  • Export the route as GPX from the DAV app
  • Tap "Share" and choose Telegram (because the ELEMNT app is missing from the list)
  • Open Telegram, click the shared GPX, select to open it in the ELEMNT app
  • Click Select Route in the Wahoo ELEMNT app and wait for it to sync

Since I don’t fully plan my days, I do this about 3 times every day.

Action cam footage

My action cam is an Insta360 GO2, it has a USB-C port, but it can’t USB-C. In fact, I don’t carry a cable that allows a data connection and transfer files from the Go2. All the manuals and threads I’ve found online mention that you have to use the original cable that came with the device. So what I do every night is:

  • Wirelessly connect the camera to my phone—it’s some hybrid Bluetooth/Wi-Fi connection that sucks enormous amounts of battery out of both devices
  • Sync all clips to the phone (the speed is 10-15 MB/s), most days at least a few clips fail to sync, and I have to tap retry over and over
  • After all clips are synced, connect my phone to my laptop and copy the files over
  • Clean up the files from phone and camera

Videos shot on my phone

Initially, I thought if my phone is connected to my laptop anyway, I could just sync the videos I’ve taken on the phone during the day as well. Unfortunately, my Pixel Phone saves all camera files—photos and videos—in one folder. I have tens of thousands of files in there. Which means the computer OS takes ages to display the list (macOS or Windows does not matter) and searching, filtering, navigation is practically impossible. To get the video files off my phone, I have to:

  • Connect a USB stick to my phone—use a third-party app to copy the files because Google Files lets you read but not write to an OTG device
  • Connect the USB stick to my laptop and copy the files over
  • Clean the temporary files from the USB stick

For some reason, I also can’t move the files synced from the GO2 to my phone to the USB stick via OTG because it fails for "large" files. I haven’t found out what the hard limit is and what imposes it.

I do all of this at least once every day. Every time I’m mad at the tech. Every time I think, there must be a better way, so far, I haven’t found one. Tech sucks!