Author: Damian Allis

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QZ Fitness Quick Fix For Apple Watch – Just Reinstall (And Skip The Bowflex HRM)

Above: DeepAI's attempt at an exercise bike on a road with that road on the screen of the exercise bike. Fifth try. Meh. https://deepai.org/machine-learning-model/text2img

UPDATE 26 Jan – turns out the lack-of-sync'ing issue began again a few days after the reinstall. After a quick back-and-forth with Roberto about possible conflicting bluetooth devices, I didn't sync the BowFlex Heart Rate Armband that came with the bike (and that I'd been using all along). QZ Fitness on the Apple Watch read the watch's heart rate info, fed it back to the iPhone for that record (full fit file), and all the heart rate, distance, and calorie data wrote to Apple Health in 2 seconds after hitting the "Stop" button on the watch. Now have a slightly different device doing the heart rate monitoring (one would hope the data would be comparable), but also all the devices (including the Bowflex C6) talking. Happy camper.

Maybe this post saves Roberto Viola (qzfitness.com), who I have found to be both a highly competent and exceptionally responsive developer, from another five-part email exchange. His QZ Fitness app for iPad and Android (well, a Kindle Fire) was the foundation of my data junkie fitness routine in 2024 and I've only now decided to link it into my Apple Health tracking through my Apple Watch (there's a load of product placement for you) to collect even more data I'll never get around to properly processing.

The issue arose when I would (as is the required order):

  1. Start the QZ app on the iPhone
  2. Start the QZ app on the Apple Watch (selecting "Bike")
  3. Ride
  4. Hit "Stop" on the Apple Watch
  5. Hit "Stop" on the iPhone

The intention was to have the QZ Fitness data from the Apple Watch (therefore, from the iPhone through its connection to my bike) written into Apple Health, but only the Heart Rate data was being written. For the length of the workout, I expended zero calories (because it was overwriting the Apple Health calorie tracker with the zeros that the QZ app was producing from not writing that info out) and Apple Health showed I had not moved a muscle.

Left – the only proof I did any exercise (Total Time). Right – the lack of anything I did from 18:05 to 18:49 (the cycling time).

Rapid-fire email exchange – the issue, which Roberto has seen before, was likely due to a caching issue on the watch that was best solved by uninstalling and reinstalling the QZ Fitness app on the Apple Watch.

Uninstall, reinstall, do a quick bike ride and voila (no pun intended), calories began ticking upward for the ride. That said, the final write-out of this data is not instantaneous (for the calories, anyway). Heart Rate and Time (now also fixed) will, however, update the watch rings quickly.

And 5 stars/100% review for the entire QZ line. I use it semi-religiously with a Bowflex C6 and couldn't be happier.

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Free Astronomy Magazine – January-February 2025 Issue Available For Reading And Download

IC 2163 and NGC 2207

Above: IC 2163 and NGC 2207 from combined Hubble and Webb data, processed by Joseph DePasquale (STScI). From the website: These images are a composite of separate exposures acquired by the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes using Hubble's WFPC2 and Webb's MIRI instruments. See webbtelescope.org for more info.

The most recent issue of Free Astronomy Magazine (January-February 2025) is available for your reading and downloading pleasure in English, Italian, Spanish, French, and Arabic at www.astropublishing.com (and facebook).

The January-February 2025 cover. Click to go to the issue.

I mentioned to our fearless leader Michele that issues with new content and issues with curated content remind me of a comment by the great jazz/fusion guitarist Steve Khan. Issues with new content are like albums with new music, where you're trying to expand repertoire and introduce new themes. Issues made of content from other sources are like albums of standards, where you're specifically trying to develop your improvisational skills In this case, it's all about curation, framing, and presentation, which is excellent in this issue (I have no doubt that the exobiological/technosignature bent of articles over the past few years will not end, perhaps with a focus on the nonsensical New Jersey drone reports from this month).

I'm also very happy to see the recent increase in the number of international conferences and symposia being included in issues (not at all unfamiliar to readers of The Reflector or Amateur Astronomy Magazine).

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GaussSum 3.0 apt-get Install simpledialog Fix In Ubuntu 24.04 (Others)

Above: Just needed an output from GaussSum for show-and-tell. This image from the article "Computational Study of Benzothiazole Derivatives for Conformational, Thermodynamic and Spectroscopic Features and Their Potential to Act as Antibacterials," available at https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4352/12/7/912.

Continuing on the Ubuntu 24.04(.1) migration theme and in the thick of needing a program to simply prepare partial Density-of-States (that link, but in this case for molecular systems) analyses, users might find themselves working through the python3, numpy, gnuplot, cclib, python3-tk installation process on the old GaussSum Installing on Linux page without knowing that gausssum 3.0 has been available as a stand-alone apt-get for several recent Ubuntu versions.

apt-get GaussSum (3.0) after 502 MB of installs and one line change to preferencesbox.py

That, minus the amount of dependencies that get installed to make the program happen, is the good news.

First attempting to run gausssum from a terminal after this apt-get install produces the following:

user@machine:~$ gausssum 
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/gausssum", line 23, in <module>
    import gausssum.gausssumgui
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/gausssum/gausssumgui.py", line 27, in <module>
    from gausssum.preferencesbox import PreferencesPopupBox
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/gausssum/preferencesbox.py", line 21, in <module>
    class PreferencesPopupBox(simpledialog.Dialog):
                              ^^^^^^^^^^^^
NameError: name 'simpledialog' is not defined

As much as https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25905540/importerror-no-module-named-tkinter looks like an answer to the problem, the solution is a simple change at the very top of preferencesbox.py that can be found in https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9570550/pythons-tkinter-simpledialog-askstring-not-working-from-command-prompt (I didn't bother to ask ChatGPT just to help keep the SO traffic up). Use your editor of choice:

sudo nano /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/gausssum/preferencesbox.py

and make the following change to line 17:

import tkinter.simpledialog as simpledialog

After that, type gausssum, click on Help > About, and you should see the above, minus the previous NE-1 install in the background from the last post.