daverea.com

Sometime in 2006, some co-workers and I tried our hands at running. We’re not all that fast, and our endurance isn’t all that great, but we enjoy hitting the pavement together, and we’ve all reaped some big-time fitness benefits from the hundreds of miles of ground we’ve covered in our four years of ground-pounding. What we lack in performance, we make up for in dedication – we run right through the bitter Upstate-NY winters – but none of us has ever felt dedicated enough to drop several hundred clams on a dedicated GPS training device.

But then, at long last, the Droid came to Verizon, and I finally entered the world of Android users. Not long after me, one of my running buddies traded in his Blackberry Storm for a Droid as well. Since then, I’ve tried out a couple of apps for runners, and thought I’d share a few observations here…

CardioTrainer

The first app to join me on my runs was CardioTrainer, from Android app house Work Smart Labs. I tried the free app on a couple of trail runs during a visit to California, and it did a great job. Given the unfamiliar surroundings, it was nice to have a little insight into how far I’d gone. CardioTrainer measures distance, time, pace and calories burned in real time using your handset’s GPS receiver, and automatically – and anonymously – uploads completed workouts to the Work Smart servers. There, you can view additional details about your performance, as well as check out your route on a larger map.

After returning home, I tried CardioTrainer on several routes that I had previously mapped using online tools such as MapMyRun or the GMap Pedometer. The app’s distance measurement is very accurate, and receiving spoken pace and time information proved helpful in regulating my speed and achieving a more balanced effort. Still, it’s is not without its annoyances – despite the formidable processing power of the Droid, CardioTrainer takes noticeably longer to register screen taps than other apps, especially when it’s using the GPS. During some runs, while the overall distance and time numbers are correct, large portions of the track are mysteriously missing from the track display. I suspect this has something to do with the autopause feature.

Checking in on the CardioTrainer web site, users can view their training history and data logged for each workout. Oddly, each workout’s elevation graph is accessible on the web site but not via the handset interface, while a pace graph is available on the handset but not on the web site.

Pros

• Many configuration options
• Live map display – very helpful to check for dead-end roads when running in an unfamiliar place!
• Automatic track upload to CardioTrainer web site
• Can track several different activities – running, walking, biking, etc.
• Ability to manually add workouts (such as for indoor activities, swimming, etc.)
• Configurable auto-pause stops timer and pace calculations if you stop moving

Cons

• Pace graphs only show miles/hour, not minutes/mile (which would be preferable)
• Voice guidance configuration could be improved
• Autopause can disrupt track logging
• Can export KML and GPX files, but not import

Buddy Runner

After experiencing a few quirks with CardioTrainer, I took a look in the Android Market for other options. Buddy Runner seemed to have a strong rating and a friendly pricetag (it’s also free), so I gave it a shot during today’s run. While the interface is far more sparse than that of CardioTrainer, BuddyRunner does allow customization in one area that its competition does not: specifically what data is read aloud to you during voice guidance. Rather than CardioTrainer’s pre-defined content – which alternates depending on whether you’re at a milepost or mid-mile interval – users can choose exactly which data points they want to hear.

In use, Buddy Runner is simple – the main screen provides “Start / Pause” and “End” buttons, as well as tickers displaying time, distance and pace. A map view is also provided, though I’ve never looked to see if it’s updated in real-time. I particularly like the fact that Buddy Runner gives you an option to select how your voice-output pace is calculated – it will read out either the “live” pace from your last few seconds of running, the average pace for your last mile, or your overall average pace for the entire run. Based on my usage of CardioTrainer, I’ve surmised that the only pace it reads to you is the “live” pace, which is what I prefer to hear anyway.

Pros

• Better voice guidance configuration
• Simple interface, easy to use while running
• So far, no corrupted tracks
• Configurable pace calculation (last few seconds, last interval, entire run average)

Cons

• Only tracks running – no other activities
• Autopause is either “on” or “off” – the stop interval isn’t configurable
• Requires e-mail address to enable uploading of tracks to the web, but does upload automatically
• No visible feedback on button-presses, such as highlighting – a complaint common to many Android apps

Conclusion

With both CardioTrainer and Buddy Runner on my phone, I’m hard pressed to choose a winner – neither is head-and-shoulders above the other, at least when it comes to running. I’m inclined to look past CardioTrainer’s occasional quirks, given that it has the capacity to track other forms of exercise, as well as input indoor workouts manually – we all know I enjoy my time on two wheels. Which will I use going forward? For day-to-day runs, Buddy Runner wins, since I can choose what I want read aloud to me while running. If both apps were to slap on a $5 price tag tomorrow, however, my money would go to CardioTrainer – it simply delivers more functionality and a smoother user interface. They’re both great apps – and I would encourage any Android-toting runner to give each a try.

In 1947, the Heathkit company – a formerly-bankrupt aircraft manufacturer – introduced its first electronic kit. The $39.50 oscilloscope became a best seller, a dozen years after the company’s new owners bought Heath for a whopping $300. Back then, hobbyists built ham radios, black-and-white TVs and hi-fi sets from vacuum tubes, soldering fiberglass circuit boards together with glowing guns from Radio Shack, hunched over basement workbenches, surrounded by a haze of blue-gray flux smoke. It was long before the days of microscopic surface-mount components, squirted from machines at tens of thousands of parts per hour.

Not long ago, I wrote here about the atrophy of amateur radio, and inquired (unsurprisingly, unsuccessfully) if there was any hope for that pastime. Most things ham trigger a lot of nostalgia in me – recollections of dad-chauffeured car trips to the city for radio classes with Jason; of my “Elmer”, Ed, N2EH (now a silent key); of good times spent with the other hams at the RIT Radio Club, who were among the best of my college friends; and of countless growing-up hours spent tinkering, building things, and un-building things. For a long time, I thought this spirit of geek tinkering was similarly waning, but recently I’ve had a few reasons to change my tune…

First off, the pieces and parts. In the golden age, resistors, capacitors, coils, tubes and transistors were the parts du jour – and you could do some pretty cool things with them. The 70s and 80s brought integrated circuits – and my generation of tinkerers dove head-first into logic gates, op-amps, newly-commodified microprocessors and LED displays. But as the demands of the tech-buying public called for more miniaturization and richer feature sets, things got more difficult. Ball grid array packages – unsolderable by all but the most-dedicated and well-funded (or craziest?) hobbyists – ushered in an age of inaccessible parts. But now, thanks to projects like Arduino, and companies like Bug Labs and Gumstix, pluggable modules and microcontrollers are becoming basic building blocks in themselves.

But more than just the evolution of what’s available to build with, there has been a renaissance in the builders, too. People like Diana Eng and Jeri Ellsworth, and groups like the recently-formed Interlok Rochester – or, hell, the entire readership of Make Magazine – remind me that the spirit of tinkering is alive and well. Maybe hobbyists aren’t exactly making the next iPhone – though they’re certainly trying and in some cases, succeeding! When you’re faced with the immense complexity that’s possible via today’s gadgets, it’s easy to get discouraged about the potential for electronics as a hobby. But it’s also easy to be hopeful and inspired when you look at what these folks are doing. To the tinkerers: keep up the good work! And to those who’ll bring us the next generation of electronic building blocks, I can’t wait to see what you’ve got in store…

Laundry time! (image source: sxc.hu)

Not too long ago, I saw a television commercial that touted the energy (and, hence, money) saving abilities of some-brand-or-another’s high efficiency washers and dryers. I wondered… Could dropping upwards of a grand and a half on high-efficiency washers and dryers really save enough coin to make up for the cost?

I toyed with the idea of calculating the cost of running a load through our good ‘ol Kenmore washer and dryer, but never really ran with the idea until this week, when my shiny new Kill-a-Watt energy meter arrived. With Kelly at work for the day, I shut off the furnace, emptied my bladder and set up my newly-unboxed gizmo to measure how much electricity the washer was pulling out of the wall. I figured I’d run a worst-case test – a bleach load, warm wash, with towels, and a double rinse. The results?

• Electricity – Washer: 0.32KWh ($0.018)
• Electricity – Dryer: 0.49KWh ($0.056)
• Gas – Total: About 0.3ccf, or 0.30555 Therms ($0.30)
• Water – Total: 60.3 gallons ($0.15)
• Detergent – 3.2 ounces ($0.32)
• Bleach – 4.2 ounces ($0.115)
• 1 Dryer Sheet ($0.05)

The grand total? 73.94¢. Worst case. A smaller load, with colored clothes (hence no bleach), and no towels? I’m guessing less.

So even if that magical high-efficiency washer and dryer could clean our clothes with no energy or water at all, it would still take almost 1,900 loads of laundry to pay for them. If we assume that they cut our usage in half (still, a pretty tall order) then doing about 4 loads of laundry a week (which we do), it would still take over 18 years for them to pay for themselves.

Those old ceramic-white Kenmores are looking better and better…

Just testing…

As of about 90 seconds ago, Wordpress.org and Automattic have announced their official Wordpress app for Android!! Yay!!!

Check it out over at http://android.wordpress.org/ … and watch here for more info soon.

One of the less-publicised but more-interesting product announcements to come out of this year’s CES conference is the Airnergy Wi-Fi energy harvester, brought to us by (surprisingly) the folks at RCA. Priced at $40 and planned for sale this summer, the little gizmo supposedly plucks wi-fi radio signals out of the air, then uses the energy to charge an internal battery which can then charge your mobile phone / MP3 player / etc.

Image source: ohgizmo.com

While the gadget enthusiast in me wants to say “sign me up!” the electrical engineer in me says, “hold the phone…”

In the US, the maximum legal power transmitted from most wi-fi devices is 0.1 Watts. If you plug that into this RF power calculator and assume a distance of 5 meters with no line-losses and 3dB of gain in each antenna, the maximum harvestable power at the Airnergy will be about 0.00000157 Watts. This is plenty of energy to sling bytes of data through the air, but even if the charging circuit were (quite impossibly) 100% efficient, this input power is an order of magnitude less than even the self-discharge rate of most Lithium Ion batteries.

Even though RCA of-late seems to be more interested in selling their branding to marginal, no-name OEMs, the appearance of their logo on this gizmo is just about the only thing that gives me any hope that it might not be smoke and mirrors. The physics doesn’t add up, but who knows – 15 years ago, most folks probably wouldn’t have believed that 0.1 Watts at 2.4GHz was enough power to carry data at 100MB/s – yet you can happily do so at your local coffee shop. From your cell phone. Along with a half-dozen others.

Fifty-two weeks for the year, and fifty-two posts to go along with them – that’s the plan for DaveRea.com at least, and with a little luck, a few reminders and at least a handful of marginally-meaningful 11th-hour postings, I’m pretty confident I’ll be able to handle it. With the goal set, then, I’m just left wondering what to write about…

For ideas, I figured I’d take a look at what’s popular in DaveRea.com’s 497 existing posts. To start, that meant reviewing the site’s stats via the stellar Wordpress.com Stats Plugin. By a pretty large margin (read: by a factor of 10-to-1) content like reviews and how-tos wins the page-view popularity contest. My review of the Lumiquest 80/20 takes the crown, with over 1,400 page views since I started collecting data in January 2009. Shortly behind, my info page for running Linux on my HP 6710b notebook tips the scales at 1,300 visits. You have to inch down to the #7 position before reaching an opinion piece – my commentary on the idiocy of Rochester’s gun “buyback” programs, which weighs in with 130 viewers.

So apparently y’all like information. But page views isn’t the only metric of what’s popular – in fact, I suspect it’s a better indicator of which content sits at the confluence of popular search terms and the portions of the site that are easily-indexed. Comments, I suspected, might give a better view of which DaveRea.com postings are most interesting – or at least which ones motivated you to saddle up to the keyboard and talk back. As it turns out, I must not motivate you all that much!

There are a shade over 300 comments spread across the posts and pages here, and it seems the majority of those comments are nearly-evenly split between informational pages (the 6710B post wins here, 10 comments), opinion pieces (such as my rant on Apple’s iPod access restrictions, 14 comments) and posts about life events (such as when I went to work for GM, with 10 comments).

So in the end, the message I take away is that info-posts, reviews and how-tos are good, and make for a good fit with the search engines. As hesitant as I am to post opinions on controversial things, those posts seem to earn some popularity too. And since there are at least a few readers here who care about what’s going on in my little corner of the world, throwing in some life updates for good measure doesn’t go unappreciated. That said, what do you want to see here? If you have a preference, hit me up in the comments (tchyeah, that worked real well last time, huh?) and let me know.

There was a time when you could query nearly any Linux user and learn about all sorts of things that couldn’t be done under Linux. Whether it was the latest digital camera, a quirky scanner driver, a proprietary video card or a problematic printer, it seemed using Linux-based operating systems was an uphill battle and nothing “just worked”.

These days – at least if my experience this past week is any indication – the times seem to be a-changin’. My family and I had the good fortune and blessing to spend the recent Thanksgiving holiday with my Aunt and Cousin in Southern California, and a patently wonderful time was had by all. We Northerners all got to have some grand new experiences – sailing a 35-foot Hunter Legend around San Diego Bay, enjoying wine and appetizers on an 80° Thanksgiving afternoon, and seeing a Tesla Roadster up-close-and-personal were just a few. But as a Linux user, I got to have an unusual new experience that my Windows- and Mac-OS-piloting kin couldn’t share: I finally got to enjoy being the only one who could enjoy a completely-obvious and should-just-work feature of my computer that everyone else couldn’t.

Between my family and myself, we have all the major OSs covered. Present at the Thanksgiving feast this year were two Windows XP laptops, three Mac OS-X notebooks, and my trusty HP 6710b running Ubuntu Linux 9.04. In the next room, there was an HP DeskJet LaserJet 1020, which – it turns out – became an unwitting participant in our Thanksgiving week adventures. The 1020, you see, isn’t supported by HP under Mac OS X. No drivers, no instructions, no work-arounds … nada. But under Linux? Three clicks – two of them on “Next” buttons – and my Ubuntu test page was sliding out of the heretofore-recalcitrant printer. Not even the Windows users present could claim that sort of ease – they still had to download and install drivers from HP’s website.

Maybe it’s just me – and I’m admittedly biased – but I thought Macs were supposed to be easy to use, and just work! And I thought Linux was “supposed” to be for power-users only, difficult and cryptic, and fraught with ventures into the scary world of the command-line! I didn’t win any Linux converts during our week on the West coast, but I did get to enjoy a new and unusual experience, one that I’m sure will be replicated many times over as Linux shines as a truly ready-for-mainstream operating system.