Personal Blog

10 Improvements I’ve Made As A Result Of Being Immersed In The Quantified Self Movement

Reading Time: 10 minutes Overview For me, tracking data related to my overall health & fitness has been a long and amazing journey; starting off almost a decade ago in 2009 with my Total Recall post (http://eric-blue.com/2009/10/18/total-recall/), my idea on fitness tracking after waking up from a dream (http://eric-blue.com/2010/08/14/fitness-tracking-platform-personal-informatics-for-fitness/) and ultimately building a health & fitness data aggregation company…
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ChatGPT-Twilio-Java : Enabling communication with ChatGPT over SMS

Reading Time: < 1 minute It’s been quite a while since I’ve blogged, or published an open source project! With ChatGPT taking the world by storm, and finding myself using it daily, I decided to do something I’ve done before – opening up an SMS interface using Twilio. When you’re on the go and just need a quick interaction, nothing…
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Artwork Focus: Tonalism

Reading Time: 2 minutes For the past month, I’ve been researching more on the Tonalism style of art. This was a very popular style of art in the early-mid 1800s to early 1900s before Impressionism became the rage. I really like the mood / atmosphere, and darker color themes and stories you can tell with light. I particularly like…
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Blogging in 2019? Looking Forward and a 15-Year Retrospective

Reading Time: 2 minutes Let me start by saying, where in the world does time fly?! Getting a new personal website refresh done and porting over hundreds of blog posts from the last 15 years was long overdue – 5 years by my count. So, better late than never! Blogging seems to be a thing of the past for…
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Announcing ActiveOS

Reading Time: < 1 minute It’s been quite a while since I’ve regularly written a blog post.  I’m hoping to change that after the New Year and start writing regularly again as I have a lot to share, and much has been happening since the blog has been active.  With that in mind, my health & fitness tech startup – ActiveOS…
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Home Automation with Belkin Wemo, Twilio, and Siri

Reading Time: 3 minutes Ultimate Hack Mashup – Belkin Wemo + Twilio + Siri A quick note: For another home automation trick and those interested in finding out about the earlier Twillio callbox+TV popup/notification hack check out STEM (https://github.com/ericblue/STEM).  Certain models of Samsung TVs allow popups for incoming phone calls for Samsung phones, but this can be extended to…
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Quantified Self Meets Virtual Reality

Reading Time: 6 minutes This week I’ve had a few of my interests intersect – the Quantified Self, virtual reality, biofeedback / neurofeedback, and consciousness.  Earlier this year I came across the Oculus Rift , a next gen virtual reality headset, that looks to be a game changer (no pun intended).  Like many people fascinated and growing up with technology…
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The Creative Breakthrough: Lessers Give Up, Masters are Stronger

Reading Time: 6 minutes I’m currently working my way through the excellent book Mastery by Robert Greene.  Actually, I’m listening to it as an audio book through Audible.com.  I’ve never been a fan of audio books, but I’ve found that it’s great to listen every day for about 30 minutes or so on my morning walk.  It may take a while…
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Life Beyond Zeo

Reading Time: 3 minutes We knew the inevitable was coming, but as of last week it appears Zeo has finally shut down.  When I posted the FreeMyZeo site the other week I was hoping their API servers would stay up long enough to allow others to salvage their sleep data.  Although Zeo’s main website is down, there’s still hope…
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Quantified Strength

Reading Time: 6 minutes Background For the past 6 months I’ve been obsessed with the idea of strength.  Actually, obsessed is probably  a strong word but let’s just say *very* focused on being functionally strong and balanced. This is a far cry from where I was 3-4 years ago after chronic lower back issues originating during lifting (squatting specifically).…
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