It's all about mi, mi, mi!

So, one of the things that has kept me amused since I got back Thursday evening is that I had ordered a Xiaomi Mi band, one of those cheap fitness tracker things, and it had arrived by the time I got back. Luckily for me, the parcel was small enough for the postman to stuff it into my mailbox and they skimped on transport insurance … I've had cases where I needed to go to the main post office downtown to sign for, well, my color-changing toilet bowl light, for example.
Aaaaanyway. The installation process, in bullet points. The thing arrived uncharged, so it needed putting into its tiny USB cradle for a couple hours, fair enough. It even uses the three LEDs it has to give an approximation of charged it is.
I make sure the band fits around my wrist. I ascertain the band does not fit around my ankle by about an inch and a half. (I had heard about people's trouble with step counting by arm movement, and I didn't really buy it for the heart rate measurement, so I figured I might as well look like somebody out on parole, but maybe not, if the strap is too short. There's a third option (note: third option not available to all sexes), which will probably make the daily goal celebration vibration very interesting.)
Anyway, wrist it is. I have no idea how it wants to measure my heart rate on the top side of my wrist when the veins are more on the bottom, so let's put it on the bottom.
There's no clients for desktop systems, just Android, iOS, and unofficial clients for WinPho. OK, I have this Android-based media player thing hooked up to my TV, which is how I wanted to use it anyway. (No, this does not mean I'll only be jogging around my TV, tempting as that is, given that Homeland box set, the wristband can do some stuff on its own without having its hand held by its mother(ship)/phone, and you can sync it later. Frankly, as far as I'm concerned, the whole thing would be pointless otherwise because sufficiently smart phones have accelerometers, which measure how close you are to the next green stalk of the parsley family can be used to count steps.)
So, official app in the play store says "I'm not compatible with this device", no further explanantion. My tablet is too old to have the requisite low-calorie wireless required to talk to the wristband. (I found out my neighbour seems to have a bluetooth-enabled TV, though. Which seems to mean I can pop up a "your PIN to enter is XXXX" window on his TV at will? Oris that my TV only that's not unlocked?) My windows laptop sees it, though.
Go look at alternative software, and try to find one that doesn't scream "7eet haxx0r.ru, please enter your credit card n0mber h3r3!". Not available through app store. Download, copy to thumbdrive, put thumbdrive into media thingy, install, start. Searching for wristband… failed. Take a walk, just in case. Come back, try to manually pair wristband with media thingy first. (IT is full of pairing and mounting and male and female plugs. Make of that what you will.) Seems to have found... something. Start app again. Wave arm around, see if steps are recorded. Nope. Find a debug menu. (Did I mention that the media thingy, of course, is not touch, but only has cursor keys on a remote, with optional mouse emulation mode? More on that below.) OK, Debug mode can make the band vibrate. Debug mode has a live step mode, and if I now wave my arm, after a couple seconds, a curve goes up. Debug mode has a "measure heart rate now", and if I do that, I see the green light come on on the wristband, and after a few seconds it tells me I'm dead. Fair enough, it's not what I bought it for, maybe it collides with the toasty tan. A smarter device would probably automatically call an ambulance, aren't I lucky I'm cheap?
Somewhere in here, I un-paired the thing again, because I tought maybe it would help with accessing counts and all that, and then couldn't get it to re-pair. I looked around the web in panic and was almost resigned to putting it in the fridge for a week to try and kill the charge on it (this thing is supposed to last a month between rechargings in usual conditions), but the next morning, it worked better again.
Abort experiments (at this point, it's sometime Saturday evening-ish), but wear wristband during jogging on Sunday morning, just in case. Funnily enough, it seems to be counting steps OK, because at some point after about probably 8k or so, I get a buzz signal, which I take to mean it thinks I've done 10k steps today. (Beat that, AA!)
Return home, sync with software, no steps. Think more about installing official app (that appstore says is incompatible, but what can possibly go wrong?)
I think it is at this point I also try to run Android on VirtualBox, which technically works, but for me only got as far as "please choose your WiFi network" and seemed to do nothing after I said "no thanks" (the virtual machine should already see the host network, but I can forgive a mobile device operating system for not being good about "I already have a wired network connection")
Google around, find a downloadable copy on apkmirror. Download to thumbdrive, thumbdrive into media thingy, install, hooray. "Please create an account." OK, whatevs. I read that not all mail domains work for this, chinese firewall and all that, so I don't even try my usual spamfodder address (or maybe I do?), and then I try gmail, which people said should work, and it doesn't. Funnily enough, what did work was a spamgourmet address :D :D :D.
So now I have an account, and I can sign in in the app (which is a bitch if your username is now blabla.6.blablablabla@spamgourmet.com and you need to type it twice with an on-screen keyboard you navigate with cursor keys). And now I'm in the app, and I can pair the wristband again, I swear my wrist has never seen that much pairing action in a day, and I can try stuff out in the official app. Only not really, because they have a bunch of custom UI widgets, like "we now make the thing vibrate as part of setup. Tap the icon if it does vibrate", only that didn't work with the mouse emulation for the first three tries or so. And then it wants useful data like height and age, and the pickers don't work. (As it turned out later, the pickers only work through dragging, you can't tap anywhere to change the setting, and I physically can't keep the tap button pressed on the remote and use the cursor keys around it at the same time.)
I cave in and hook up a mouse and keyboard to the media player thingy, which makes everything much less of a drag (ba-dum-tish! Thank you, I'll be here all week unless the chemicals in the wristband kill me).
I set a demo alarm on the band, and it goes off. I think I'm ever out of bluetooth range at that point, so I'm fairly confident there's enough of a clock mechanism in the band to do that autonomously. For fun, I've turned on all the bells and whistles (like, improved measurements during my sleep? Warn me if my heart rate goes over 170? Warn me if my jogging pace goes below whatever was the default, though I guess that won't work without GPS? Whatevs, all I want is a rough estimate of how much jogging I do, to hopefully make me do more. I hear this is called gamification, which is somewhat appropriate given the smell of my jogging gear.)
And so, ladies and gentlemen, that's my getting a Mi Band 1S into a vaguely working state.