The Garmin forums were the only place I could find to suggest fixing this problem, so I posted there. It's worth a try.
forums.garmin.com/apps-softwar...

I'll bet it does. Or at least all the recent data that I care about 99% of the time. Sigh...

Heh. That's not a confounding factor that I'd thought about but I'll bet that is annoying.

I downloaded all (I think) of my Garmin data. It totals 110 MB. This is less than 0.05% of the storage on my phone. There is no reason to require an internet connection. If they want to clear locally cached data when they use "too much" storage then great, but offline viewing should be the norm.

If my phone has been offline all day - meaning that all my heartrate and steps data is cached locally on the watch or phone - then the Garmin app on my phone still refuses to display the data until it has uploaded it to garmin.com and then downloaded it again. It's impressively silly.

I'm not even going to get started on all the websites that are mostly useless because they can't handle the latencies and low bandwidth that are sometimes encountered. For now I'm just focused on apps on my phone that needlessly require connection. It's not always there. Remember that please.

Aside: when trying to download the data I found that www.garmin.com/account/data... redirects to their Vietnamese site because I'm in Vietnam. Without Google Translate (or replacing vn-VN with en-US) I would not have been able to export my data. Fail!

Garmin's heart-rate history when there is no internet connection. On this page it doesn't even show my current heart rate, and certainly nothing from earlier today

I suspect that all of the Garmin data from the 5.5 years I've owned this watch would be less than 1 GB (I'm currently exporting it to test this theory) so it is ridiculous that every operation requires an internet connection. In addition to be limiting it is also slow and wasteful. The trifecta!

The worst, however, is Garmin. My watch records tons of data and then transfers this to my phone. My phone then saves this to the cloud and without internet access it is unavailable to display most of this data. It can't even display my heart-rate history from today without internet access!

If Google Photos was less aggressive about discarding files then the odds of my finding what I want would be greater or 100%. Phone storage keeps getting bigger - please use it! Right now I have 56 GB free - room for all the discarded photos - but no way to request keeping more of them.

Google Photos is quite aggressive about discarding full-res photos from my phone so when I go to show someone a photo there are excellent odds that it's not available without a good internet connection. My phone has 256 GB of storage and I have 99.5 GB of Google Photos. It could fit easily!

Also, even with downloaded maps Google Maps can only do driving directions when offline. About 80% of the time when I don't have internet access I am walking rather than driving so I don't like this choice. Please support offline walking directions!

I carefully downloaded Google Maps for an area where I knew I would have no coverage. While out and about I dropped a pin so that I would know where to return to. Apparently that pin cannot be viewed until it has been synced to the cloud, meaning it was not useful until I no longer needed it.

Traveling around Asia with sporadic internet access makes me realize how terrible some Android apps are at handling offline scenarios. Some examples I've noticed:

It's OK to compare floating-points for equality

New blog post! I really hope I'll get a decent amount of people mad with this one 😈😈😈

#programming #computing #floatingpoint #geometry

lisyarus.github.io/blog/posts/i...

Windows dialog showing that Intel Graphics Software Background Processor hit an unknown software exception - it crashed

And then, just to make my day complete, when I went to restart my computer the Intel Graphics Software Background Processor crashed during logoff. Amazing

I just want Insta360 Studio to run smoothly on my six-month-old laptop. That's not too much to ask is it?

Intel Graphics Software screenshot claiming that the driver version is stuck at 32.0.101.5542, since Jun 8, 2024.

Meanwhile the Intel Graphics Software says that the version is 32.0.101.5542 from Jun 8, 2024 which does not match the install logs - unless the install failures caused it to go way back. Either way - it's a mess.

Intel driver install history showing that the last two attempts failed

Oh Intel, never change. Intel kept telling me that a new ARC GPU driver was available, but that's not true. What actually happened is that the install kept failing. That's actually different, and I was not told this until I searched the update history.

I tried to reason like that but then I got 02/02 from 03/29, which Google Payments has correctly stored, so then I stopped trying to figure out what was going on under the hood

I guess this is a LOCA bug but I lack the mental model or debugging skills to figure out what might be going on. Very strange.

I encountered a weird glitch when trying to add a credit card to the LOCA app (basically Uber in Laos). I used the Google Payments autofill, like usual, but none of my cards were accepted. It took me a while to realize that the expiry date always filled in as 02/02!

Mexico—a nation with 1/17th GDP of USA—is rolling out universal healthcare to its 130M citizens.

Starting April 13, Mexicans 85+ will have access to universal healthcare. By Jan 2027, Mexico will expand universal healthcare to all people, with full coverage of drugs, lab tests, etc by 2030.

1/2

Interesting claim. I don't remember hitting this before and I can't believe I've just been lucky. Maybe it depends what websites we use.

If you hit this, complain. We shouldn't accept such madness

Yeah, although sometimes even that is not enough. I've seen forms that refuse to allow spaces within credit-card numbers (even though that's how they are printed) or hyphens within Canadian phone numbers (ditto). Allowing normal separators also seems like a good idea

A trailing space? That is enough to make you silently fail, as if I had pasted nothing?

Congratulations CIBC (a Canadian bank) for making two-factor authentication just a little more painful. I got the authentication text, double-clicked it, copied, went to the CIBC page, and pasted it. No reaction.

It took several tries to realize that "401291" was okay but "401291 " was not. Sigh...

Mortifying how in 1 week USA & Israel killed 300+ civilians by illegally invading Lebanon, destroyed Rafi Nai Synagogue in Iran, & threatened Pope Leo in the Vatican, yet Democratic leadership is still reluctant to impeach Trump. All MAGAs are complicit. Congressional cowardice is off the charts.

A WHOLE CIVILIZATION WILL DIE TONIGHT My son needs lunch, and I have to put his backpack together, but a whole civilization will die tonight, so I'm wondering if they've closed their schools. Like, a snow day, maybe, except instead of snow it's "keep your children home so if you die, you die together" — instead of "well open back up once the plows have cleared" it's "we don't know if we'll be here tomorrow, hold your babies tight." It's just "talk" I'm told, which I've been told before. "It's how the president makes his deals." But I've never heard anyone talk about other human beings this way, and I'm not certain I can look my son in the eyes if we all agree to stomach it one more time. A civilization will die tonight, but as I zip up his backpack and kiss him off to school I think: if this is what we call leadership then I'm not entirely sure ours isn't already dead. @michaelfdubois Mukad A QuBoy @michacifdubois

Brutal.

BREAKING: Trump uses Pakistan as his get out of jail free card to claim victory with ceasefire

Mark It: In 2 weeks Trump will repeat this same ugly stunt

Enough! Impeach him. Prosecute him. Convict him. Remove him. Charge him. Arrest him. Sentence him. End his dictatorship once and for all. Period