I’ve stumbled upon a very good write-up about the accuracy of Oura sleep tracking measurements and why it is a problem, with links to proper research including the one that Oura team themselves are using as reference: https://nutritionalrevolution.org/2019/07/20/why-the-oura-ring-sucks-for-tracking-sleep-and-might-be-harming-your-health/ (cached).

Apparently, they have done a well designed scientific study on how well Oura tracking was compared to other professional lab methods of sleep tracking.

“From EBE analysis, ŌURA ring had a 96% sensitivity to detect sleep, and agreement of 65%, 51%, and 61%, in detecting “light sleep” (N1), “deep sleep” (N2 + N3), and REM sleep, respectively. Specificity in detecting wake was 48%.”

Specificity in detecting wake was 48%! If this was a medical test, it would never be approved by FDA.

A specificity of 48% means that there is a 48% chance that someone is awake when the device says they are asleep.

That is horrible.

This is very surprising and alarming. As the author later goes on to describe, this has real implications and possible negative effects, this is not just a benign error here and there. Users are apparently supposed to use the Oura data to change or at least adjust and improve their sleep habits, and of course if they will do it based on faulty information, the adjustments themselves are going to be faulty and it can lead to worse or sub-optimal sleep!

Apparently you can still use Oura to track heart rate and HRV, but their own proprietary markers like “readiness” are probably based on all of their data including sleep, so they are not going be that accurate either.

Combining two great concepts in programming world – color themes and the StackOverflow engine, http://studiostyl.es gives you a one-stop place for all the nice Visual Studio color themes. No more searching “the ogl” for themes and typing them in manually into the settings window.

All the themes can be downloaded for all the latest versions of VS, however it is still not particularly user friendly to install them, at least not in VS2008. I hope their coders are at least a little bit ashamed, but hey, it’s not like this is the primary point of VS.

In VS2008, you just download the file, and in Options > Environment > Import And Export Settings point the “team settings file” to the file you’ve downloaded. If you already had a team setting file, I can’t really help you, but the settings are just an XML so you could easily migrate them into your personal settings file using your favorite text editor.

(Update: found it, it is much simpler to install those using Tools > Import And Export Settings.)

(Yet Another Update: here is where I took my theme needs before the studiostyl.es came along: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/VisualStudioProgrammerThemesGallery.aspx)

Aah, good old MS api class for representing the “system enclosure”, ie, what type of computer you have. Except:

1
Other
2
Unknown
3
Desktop
4
Low Profile Desktop
5
Pizza Box
6
Mini Tower
7
Tower
8
Portable
9
Laptop
10
Notebook
11
Hand Held
12
Docking Station
13
All in One
14
Sub Notebook
15
Space-Saving
16
Lunch Box
17
Main System Chassis
18
Expansion Chassis
19
SubChassis …

Pizza Box!? Lunch box!?

“Missing good old 80es when you ran dos on a pizza box…

(as seen on http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/Aa394474 and http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2837152/how-can-i-tell-if-a-user-is-using-a-laptop