Paul Grave’s blog

I previously mentioned how to setup Garmin Pay with any UK bank card using Curve.

I setup both a debit card and my credit card with Curve and about a week ago Curve started blocking all transactions. The other issue is that I can’t add Curve to anymore of my Apple Pay—supporting devices either.

Looking at the recents reviews in the App Store, I’m not the only one who has experienced this problem.

In addition to the card not functioning as a card, the support is non-existant.

I paid £6 for a week of using Curve. I’m kinda glad that’s the extent of my loss.

On the basis of the lack of support, I would recommend no one use Curve. Stay away.

UPDATED Don’t use Curve.

Garmin Pay, unlike Apple Pay, is not widely supported in the UK. Apple Pay in the UK is supported by over 150 financial institutions. Garmin Pay is supported by 12. Apple Pay is one of my favourite features on Apple Watch.

I wanted to make the switch to my new Garmin Epix Gen2 Pro as smooth as possible and I was worried that I was going to miss out on the ability to pay for goods with my watch.

There’s a way around Garmin Pay’s poor support. Curve. Curve is a service that acts as a proxy for your various credit and debit cards. You add your cards to Curve. Add Curve to your Garmin watch. Then pay for goods with your Garmin Watch. Curve then works out which card to use.

Setting up Curve was simple with their iOS app. You have an account set up in about 5mins and then all that’s left to do is to add Curve to Garmin Pay.

Paying with an Apple Watch is a case of double-clicking the side button. It’s a shame that Garmin’s default isn’t as slick. You have to hold the light button, enter the controls menu, and press up/down multiple times to find the wallet icon. Garmin lists 7 separate steps in the Epix manual. There is an easier way. I configured a Hot Key so that a long press on START opens Garmin Pay. That’s one step instead of 7.

Curve has a couple of interesting features that I want to explore further. The first one is Smart Rules. You can configure one or two rules (you have to pay for more) to determine which cards will be used for payment. The second is Anti-Embarrassment Mode, where you can use a backup card if your Monzo account is empty.

Over the past week I’ve been using Garmin Pay with the Garmin Epix and the experience has been on a par with Apple Pay, which is all I would have wanted.

Castletown Harbour near Dunnet Beach

One of my favourite places in the world. Remote and beautiful.

Whilst in El Chalten and Bariloche I knew we wanted to do hikes. Over the 4 days of hiking, I used a combination of apps to help us enjoy our hikes. I’ve listed the 3 below and described what I liked about each of them.

My requirements were:

• Trail discovery. I wanted to find the best trails and maximise our time.
• Downloadable maps. I wasn’t sure I’d have any network coverage
• Works on both iPadOS and iOS. I wasn’t going to take my laptop with me. Planning on the iPad is easier than on the phone.

My requirements didn’t include navigation or recording since my Garmin Instinct series 2 would cover this.

Gaia GPS

App Store link

Gaia has the prettiest maps out of the three apps I tried. I downloaded maps for El Chalten, El Calafate, and Bariloche. Whilst the UI for downloading was clunky, it worked. Gaia offered an iPadOS version and a web version for its maps.

I found Gaia easy to use and reliable during hikes. It was easy to figure out which turns to take, and how much of our hike was left.

I ended up paying £51.90 for 12 months of access to their mapping.

All Trails

App Store link

Whilst Gaia had beautiful maps, All Trails helped us decide where we wanted to go. They have lots of trail reviews and pictures.

Unfortunately, All Trails doesn’t offer an iPadOS version and for that reason chose Gaia GPS over All Trails for downloading maps.

All Trails is an App Store Award-winning app, winner of the iPhone App of the Year. I can see why, the app has a great UX.

Garmin Explore

App Store Link

I wish I had discovered this app before our vacation. The maps themselves don’t look as good as either All Trails or Gaia, but the necessary detail is there. And it’s free.

Its killer feature is the tight integration with my Garmin Instinct. During an active hike activity on the watch, I could open Garmin Explore, find a destination on a trail, Garmin Explore would create the course, sync it to the watch and start navigating. Seamlessly. Then I could see ETA, estimated time remaining, and ascent remaining on my watch without having to take my phone out of my pocket. It worked great.

Garmin Explore has an iOS and iPadOS version. It’s available on the web via explore.garmin.com The maps are downloadable by region, so it’s easy to download everything you need before hitting the trails.

Circuito Chico is a ~20km road that is ~20km from downtown Bariloche. It is one of the main attractions in the area and offers spectacular scenery and it’s from there that you can access Colonia Suiza. A picturesque Swiss-style village. Cycling the Circuito Chico is often suggested as the best way to experience it as opposed to driving. My wife and I recently visited Bariloche and completed the Circuito Chico on bikes but it ended up being a day of frustration rather than one of relaxing in a gorgeous location.

Don’t cycle from Bariloche to Circuito Chico! It’s a ~40km round trip from downtown Bariloche and is not worth the time and effort. You might think, like I did, what could ruin a 40km ride near the banks of the nearby lake?

1. The vast majority of bikes available for hire are mountain bikes. The bikes are heavy, the tires are slow MTB tires. A gravel bike would have been ideal. An e-gravel bike would have been better. I didn’t spot either of those along the way.
2. You can’t see much of the lake along the way, so the ride isn’t very interesting.
3. Worse. The road is busy. The good news is that the cars give you space. The bad news is that the buses don’t, they expect you to ride in the dirt. One bus passed me so close that I could touch the side of the bus.

It took us almost 2hrs to cycle 20km to Circuito Chic and by then we felt like we’d had enough. The stiff headwind didn’t help either

My advice would be to drive or grab a public bus to Circuit Chico. Then hire an e-bike at the start point. Circuito Chico is not flat! It has numerous short climbs with some tough gradients. Yes, we had a tailwind on the way back but by then we were too spent to enjoy it.

Check my ride on Strava

TLDR: Bring dollars!

I knew the Argentina would present some unique problem when visiting due to the country’s financial problems. Inflation was over 200% and the peso was artificially pegged the dollar. Ahead the trip we bought $1000, a bit more than what we needed. I figured any currency leftover can be used for future trips to countries were the dollar is in demand.

On arrival we found using ATMs to be problematic in Argentina. The maximum withdrawl amount was capped at $15000 ARS and the charge to withdraw was over $8000 ARS. At the time $15000 was the equivalent of around 15 GBP. Not great.

Almost everywhere accepted contactless payment. I either used Apple Pay or Monzo card to pay for things. For everything else we used ARS, and dollars when we were short of ARS. Tipping is expected in the restaurants when service isn’t items on the bill/check/cuenta. The $1000 notes came in handy there.

In Buenos Aires there were plenty of people offering ”cambio”, but as a foreigner this didn’t feel like the safest option. The additional risk didn’t feel like it was worth the offer of a better exchange rate. Instead we used official cambios that offered us a "turista” rate that was marginally better than what the local were offered.

In hindsight I think we got things right. I’d recommend bringing dollars, and find a cambio to buy pesos when you have the opportunity.

@1password Is it possible to install/run 1Password in ~/Applications instead of /Applications ?
I tried moving 1Password to ~/Applications and it complains.

No matter what I do, Head Tracked Spatial Audio eventually re-enables itself on my 3rd gen. AirPods. Is there any way to turn it off permanently?

@stux Does mstdn.social intend to defederate with Meta/Facebook when that capability eventually arrives?

@1password What’s going on with 1Password’s memory usage. The main window isn’t even open.

@gruber I appreciated the The Talk Show Live intro. I waiting to hear ”Now, remember, you're All a big part of the show, So the better you are, the better John is.”

Training Peaks integration 😱 #wwdc

Holy crap! Apple Watch estimating FTP!? And connectivity to power meters! Still not sure why I’d ditch my Garmin bike computer. #wwdc

Season 2 of TLOU has been green lit. That’s going to drag a bunch of people through the wringer. #tlou https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/27/23574443/the-last-of-us-season-2-hbo-renewed

Using @ivory has made such a difference to my consumption of Mastodon. As a long time Tweetbot/Twitterific user, the migration to Mastodon has been frequently jarring. Now I feel at home. #ivory #mastodon

I’ve been on this planet for 47yrs and yesterday I discovered what that additional hole is used for on trainers. Heel lock. I tried it on this morning’s run and it’s a revelation! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1tPGJ3-mxbY #running

That was great first episode. I’m already bought into Bella Ramsey as Ellie. #TLOU

Strava’s UK price increase seems like a reasonable one. I’ve been a user for many years and I still think it’s good value. Especially when considering how other social platforms are run.

A tip for those individuals running K3s on RaspberryPi devices. Be wary of using MySQL as a datastore. MySQL performance can suck which in turn affects the stability of your K3s cluster.

I’ve installed etcd on a RaspberryPi zero, and it’s working great. etcd is smaller, faster, and more simple to run.

France was dead, dead, dead. #worldcup #allezlesbleus #allezkylian

Has anyone tried sending iOS crash logs via Open Telemetry trace? I’m trying to figure out how to best symbolicate the crash data. #opentelemetry #observability #distributedtracing

@jpkroehling Do you happen to know if there’s a nice way to view Open Telemetry RUM data?
I don’t want to have to use the Elastic RUM Agent but the way in which the UX data is displayed in Kibana is really nice.

Apparently there is no possibility to check a decision with VAR after the whistle has been blown to restart the match, and after the final whistle has been blow.

Except that’s exactly what the ref did during the France - Tunisia match.
Fortunately this screw up had no influence on the outcome of the group.
#fifa #worldcup

Ran a good 5k last night. 7 secs from a PB. Saucony Endorphins Pro instead of my Flyknits. They worked well. I think next time I’ll use pace alerts to make sure I don’t back off. #running