Zombies, Run! – Race Missions Run-Through (Android)

Here’s a few details about the race missions part of the latest ZR2 update if you haven’t read the blog entry references in this post.

The race missions as the name suggests are different to the normal Season 1 and Season 2 missions in that they are not time-based. They are distance based so you must travel a certain distance to trigger the next audio clip.

Race missions are in an entire section of their own, and fill in gaps between Season 1 and Season 2.

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There are different race lengths – 5K, 10K, 20K (near half marathon distance)

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There are two main types of tracking in this mode — GPS and Accelerometer. Gyro will also be an option if your device supports (newer devices). Accelerometer is for people running on treadmills.

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If you have GPS enabled, then the app will use that to track your distance. If you don’t (e.g. you’re on a treadmill), then you will have to tell the app how to guesstimate the distance you have travelled, and it uses pace time for that. For example, for me, a walk is 10 min/km, a light jog is 7 min/km, moderate jog is 6 min/km a light run is 5 min/km and fast run 4:30-5:00 min/km.

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I haven’t tried the race missions yet, but I’ll be giving them a go when I’ve finished all Season 2 missions. I’ve caught up on the main story missions, and have just started on the side missions.

Running

It was quite amusing to see the reaction on my colleagues’ faces at work when I told them I’d done 17.22 km over the weekend. It’s so satisfying to be able to say “I did something you haven’t done yet”

Next step is to take it up a notch to a full HM distance.

Blocklist Downloader

A small script to help speed up regular updates for P2P block lists that you might be using for filtering for apps like routers, mail servers, or BitTorrent.

I’ve taken my block lists from iblocklist.com, but you can add your URLs to the list and have it download and concatenate as well. Some apps will need to be restarted to use the new filter list. Others might not.

Continue reading →

Tip: .tar.bz2

Ever get a file off the internet with a .tar.bz2 extension? Well, you can extract it in one step like this:

curl http://cf1.vuze.com/files/VuzeInstaller.tar.bz2 | tar xjv

Rather than extracting the tar first, then extracting the tar, then removing the archives. Running curl and piping it to tar in this way means you don’t need to write anything to the disk other than the extracted files, and it extracts as it goes.

ZR, miCoach, Endomondo

My body is aching, my legs are hurting, but I feel GREAT! 17.22 km (10.70 miles), 2 hours. Another few km and I’ll hit Half Marathon distance. And I broke several records on today’s run:

  • Calories burned in one session (1338 calories) – ironically, my calorie target is 1500 calories per day, so this run almost burned my entire calorie allowance.
  • Time spent in one session (2:06:35)
  • Distance travelled in one session (17.22 km)

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