Wahoo colour codes

When my Wahoo is showing the route recorded, it uses a colour coding scheme to show how severe the climb is. I did some experiments today while cycling up and down Howth Hill and figured out what the colours mean.

• Downhill = Gray (no matter how steep the descent)
• Grade 0-4% = Green
• Grade 4-8% = Yellow
• Grade above 8% = Red 

For example, the picture on the right shows my screen after climbing the steep side of Howth hill. As you can see the climb is mostly yellow (4-8%) with only a bit of red (after passing the church) and a little bit of green (near the top of the climb it levels out).

Drone delivery comes to Dublin 15

 I was recently  notified that the Manna drone delivery service is coming to Dublin 15. This was a cause of great excitement. I know that drone delivery has been going on for some time in North Co. Dublin, but I personally never had the thrill of eating drone delivered food yet.

The first step is to install the phone app which I did last week. This automatically detected that I was in the greater Blanchardstown area and so they told me the service was coming soon.

This morning (about 9:10 am) the app notified me that I could apply for a free trial of the service. I love free stuff so I instantly click on the necessary buttons to say I wanted it dropped in the back garden (there are cars parked out front). They told me that expected delivery was 10:03am, so I felt free to run a quick errand before it arrived. This was a mistake because the delivery arrived early around 9:45am and I missed seeing it.

Nevertheless I did get to consume the free goodies. The delivery was in a sturdy paper bag as you can see in the picture. A long thin string was used to attach the bag to the drone and this was dropped in the garden too.

I tried to order a real meal from the service, but they are not taking orders yet. Therefore I can't comment on whether it is good value for money.

My new GlowOrb tells me when rain is imminent

I recently acquired a new gadget called a GlowOrb. This is an orb the size of a ping-pong ball which is MQTT enabled which means that it can be programmed to change colour to give an ambient indication of some metric you would like to be aware of. Previous owners have used their GlowOrbs for a wide variety of uses e.g. alerting on air quality changes. However, I am obsessed with rain (as are almost all Irish people) so I decided to configure my GlowOrb to alert me of the chances of rain in the immediate future.

I followed the colour scheme from official weather warnings. So if my GlowOrb is

• Green (as in the picture) it means that there is < 20% chance that it will rain in the next 4 hours and I can cycle to work with confidence that I won't be like a drowned rat when I get there.
• Yellow tells me that the chance of rain is between 20% and 40% so bringing a jacket might be a good precaution
• Orange indicates that the probability has grown to 40% - 60%
• Red implies that the chance of rain is over  60% so there is no point in putting out the washing.

The way it works is that each GlowOrb has a serial number (printed on the underside of the unit) and you send a MQTT message containing a colour code to a MQTT channel associate with the serial number to change the colour of your orb. Don't worry if you don't understand what this means, there is a web address like http://mqtt.org/GO/XXXX-YYYY/ printed on the base of the unit (where XXXX-YYYY is the serial number of your unit) and if you visit this web address you will be given detailed instructions on how to use the GlowOrb. It also gives you a piece of JSON that you can import into any NodeRed service to have a working control program for your GlowOrb.

All I had to do to customise my GlowOrb was to write a simple NodeRed flow which accesses the BlueMix weather service every 15 minutes to determine the likelihood of rain where I live and then change the colour of the GlowOrb to match.

If you can imagine a use for your own GlowOrb, I encourage you to get one and experiment. They are quite cheap, but there is no formal ordering or pricing process for GlowOrbs. However, if you send a twitter message to @AndySc, he will give you a price quote in bitcoin or pound sterling.

The life and death of the @llweather weather station

It seems that my personal weather station is going to be off line for several months (or maybe forever), so I thought I ought to write a short blog post to explain the history of the station and why I have to take it off line. It is a good example of how much work can be involved in keeping a service running despite the fact that the service is supposed to be completely automatic.

Here is the history:

• My story started during the cold winter of  2010 in Ireland. The weather was so severe that this cold snap has it's own wikipedia page. As a result, I became very interested in weather and I dropped a strong hint that I wanted a weather station kit from Maplin as my Christmas present.
• This kit included some software to upload my weather data to the internet. This seemed like a cool idea to me, but the software only worked on Windows and I didn't like the idea of leaving a windows PC running 24/7.
• I used Google to look if there was other software I could use and found several open source options. Eventually I picked a python library pywws and I staredt publishing to my personal weather underground site in March 2011 with a Tonido Plug  (an Ubuntu Linux based plug computer) doing the hard work.
• In April/May 2015 my plug computer died a natural death due to overheating. Instead of buying a new plug I replaced it with a Raspberry Pi because that had been released in the meantime and it was the new cool thing to use for hobby projects (it was also smaller and cheaper than a new Tonido plug).
• As part of setting up the Raspberry Pi, I downloaded a new version of pywws. I noticed that  it now had support for uploading to a number of new services including Twitter and so I established the @llweather account to store my tweets. 
• I though other geeks might be interested in what I did an so I spoke at 3Dcamp Limerick in May 2015  At this talk, an audience member warned me  that I was lucky to have a station still working because the normal lifespan is 2-3 years. This prediction was proven true when shortly afterwards the indoor weather hub smashed to pieces in an accident Apparently it is normally the outdoor equipment that dies due to the severity of the weather it is monitoring, but due to my own clumsiness my home office was a more severe environment than any Irish storm. It wasn't possible to buy a new hub unit so I bought a completely new kit. Luckily my old software configuration worked fine with the new hardware and service was quickly restored.
• The software was completely automatic, but I found that sometimes my site stopped sending updates and although it was normally easy to fix the problem, it took me some time to notice that there was an issue. Therefore I implemented a monitoring service based upon tweets or lack of same. Since my employer IBM had recently launched the Bluemix service I implemented this in NodeRed running on Bluemix.
• The monitoring software would send me a Twitter DM whenever it noticed that the weather station had stopped sending tweets or if it started sending blank tweets. There were several possible causes but I noticed that they were normally solved by tightening the USB cable and/or rebooting the Raspberry Pi. After a while I stopped investigating the cause and just tried simple solution. I only investigated the issue when this failed to solve the issue.
• In early 2017, the station started warning much more often often. Since these problems often solved themselves, I loosened the rules about when to issue a warning (e.g. 40 minutes without a tweet instead of 25 and ignore the first 2 blank tweets). However. the problem got even worse and I couldn't ignore it anymore. I suspected that the raspberry pi was at fault because it was getting old, but a new replacement was not significantly better. I eventually thought to replace the power supply and problem went away for 1 month.





Shortly afterwards I had a new problem which was a constant stream of blank tweets. It started happening while I was away on holidays so I wasn't able to investigate for a couple of weeks




19:31 GMT: Temperature: -, Wind: , Humidity: , Hourly Rain 0.0 mm, Pressure: 1025 hPa

— Laurel Lodge Weather (@LLWeather) October 30, 2017

• When I investigated. I noticed that the indoor hub was getting either no data or crazy data e.g. 51 degrees centigrade in Ireland. If this was Dubai it could mean hot weather, but in Dublin could only mean equipment malfunction. A quick Google said it was most likely a problem with dampness in transmitter unit. When I disassembled the unit there was indeed signs of water damage. Unfortunately, the recommended solution of leaving it in the hot press for a few days didn't solve the problem so I decided to buy a replacement transmitter.
• The only supplier of spares is Maplin (or amazon/ebay) but all said that they were sold out. I then went to local Maplin store and they said none anywhere in Ireland. 5 available in English Maplin stores but they couldn't tell which store and it might be a computer error. Their web store won't have any in stock until Feb 2018 and I couldn't place an order now even if I was willing to wait
• The Maplin guy said that it might be possible to buy a spare from another supplier, but he couldn't tell me which brands were compatible with Maplin N96GY. I found some websites selling sparese for the Nevada WH1080PC weather statio which is allegedly co,patible, but when I found one online their picture looked slightl different to mine so I was reluctant to buy

I eventually decided to retire the station for now and reconsider in Feb if I buy a spare when they become available. Overall I must admit I was surprised at how much work was involved in keeping a relatively simple service online.

My Personal Weather Station comes back on line

Back in March 2011I set up a personal weather station reporting to Weather Underground. Thus continued to report until September 2014 when the hardware I was using died. I recently acquired  replacement hardware and I now have my site on Weather Underground up and working with data being updated every 10 minutes. I am now using a Raspberry Pi rather than a Tonido plug which I was using last time. But, this useful guide on how to get working on a Raspberry Pi helped make it very easy.

I am still using the pywws library, but I am glad to report that it has become even better since the last time.  Using the new functionality, the site is also twittering regularly and also send updates to the UK Met Office and OpenWeatherMap. The software also supports a number of more obscure web sites so it is really easy to widely share the data being collected.

When I first set up the weather station, there were around 4 or 5 stations reporting from Dublin. However, when I checked recently I see that the number of stations reporting from Dublin has grown to over 50 (possibly helped by the fact that Maplin are selling the hardware in kit form quite cheaply).

Previously I could claim to be the only wunderground weather station in Castleknock, but now there are 4 quite close to me. One is about 750 meters south west of me. Another is 1km east of me, while a fourth station is about 1km further east. When I have sufficient data collected I might do a little analysis about how close are the data point reported by the 4 stations in almost the same place.

Last time I mounted the sensors on the boundary wall. Unfortunately this meant that the wind sensors were blocked by overgrown vegetation in neighbouring gardens. This time I decided the put the hardware on the side of shed where I hope it is less likely to become entagngled.

My new Headphone Hat

While I appreciate all of the Christmas presents I got this year, I was particularly taken by the usefulness of a present of a Bluetooth Headphone Hat.This is a regular knitted hat which has two small speakers hidden in the seam which allow it to act as a Bluetooth Headset.

.My initial impression was that this was a fun gimmick - an impression reinforced by the fact that the brand name is Techfun. However, I now realise it is a really useful and practical gadget.

I normally wear a Bluetooth Headset while running so that I can listen to podcasts. However, the action of running tends to shake many headsets off my head - which means that I need to choose a headset that wraps around my ears and can be quite uncomfortable to wear for extended periods. The headphone hat is quite comfortable to wear and while the sound quality is not great, it is certainly good enough for my needs. In addition I would need to wear a hat like this anyway while running at this time of year, this means that I can reduce my number of pieces of equipment by combining a set of headphones with a hat.

Fitbit steps for running, walking and cycling

I recently got a FitBit activity tracker and have been having great fun competing with family members who live abroad to see which of us can take the most steps. It is a fun way for me  feel connected to them by looking at their activity logs even if time zone differences make it impractical to actually speak to them.

As part of a discussion about one of our step challenges I was asked if the FitBit was giving me credit for taking steps while I cycled. (I think I might have been subtly accused of cheating in the challenge).

The honest answer was that I didn't know how/if the FitBit was giving me step credit for cycling. So, in order to test this out, I checked what steps I was given credit for when involved in various different activities.

This is my results:

• Running - I checked my FitBit before and after a few runs and found that it gives me credit for almost exactly 1,000 steps per km. This seems consistent with the fact that I probably have a stride length of roughly 1 metre while jogging.
  
• Walking - when I go for a walk with the dog, I get credit for 8-10% more steps than if I ran the same distance. This probably means that my stride is shorter while walking than it is when running. The fact that it is slightly more variable is probably because I wander around a little while walking the dog, but rigidly put one foot in front of the other when running.
  
• Cycling - Twice daily I cycle the route between home and work so I have lots of chances to measure how many steps I get credit for when doing this journey. My FitBit seems to give me credit for somewhere between 700 and 1,800 steps for this 8 km journey. This is a strange reading from a few points of view:
  
• I do tend to take a few real steps at the start and end of the journey as I wheel the bike in and out of the shed, but this would probably be 10s of steps not 100s.
  
• On the other hand, it could be argued that each time I push the pedals up and down this is effectively the same motion as a step. But, if was what the FitBit counts as steps, then it is seriously underestimating the number of pedal turns that I would do.
  
• The other thing that is strange is that there is so much variation in step count - some journeys were more than twice as many steps as others despite the fact that I was going on exactly the same route.
  
  I think (but can't prove) that the key factor is how often I wobble. If I was cycling nice and steady on a flat road, my wrist would be staying still on the handlebars and the FitBit would count that as resting. However if I was wobbling from side to side, the up and down motion of my left wrist would probably move up and down in a similar way to if I was walking. The amount of wobbling I do would probably vary from day to day depending upon traffic and other factors.
  
• Working - I work as a software engineer so my work involves virtually no physical movement (which is why it is a very unhealthy occupation). The FitBit should not give me credit for any steps while I work. I tested this one day by looking at my step count when I came into work and then checking it 1 hour later.
  
  The FitBit said I took 7 steps in that hour - initially I thought it was giving me false credit, but then I remembered that during the hour I had left my seat once to look at a colleague's screen to help solve a problem he was having (his desk is beside mine so 7 steps sounds right for there and back). Therefore I think that it correctly gives me no credit for activity while working.
  
• Sleeping - I know that I tend to toss and turn a lot during my sleep. In fact my FitBit sleep data tends to show frequent periods of red in the middle of the deep blue sleep time (the red periods are times when the FitBit thinks I am awake/restless - I am not sure how it decides that). I thought that the FitBit might give me credit for steps when I was really just tossing about restlessly during the night. However, it seems that it doesn't.
  
  The FitBit resets its step counter at midnight and I would normally be asleep by then (or at least lying in bed trying to sleep). So I decided to check my FitBit on a few mornings straight away after I got up out of bed. It would normally give me credit for a small number of steps, but never more than about 10-15 steps per night.

Overall I think that the FitBit gives a reasonably accurate measurement of activity level even if it is off significantly when measuring cycling.

I have read on-line about a legal case over how inaccurate the FitBit heart rate monitoring function can be. I don't doubt that the readings are often wrong, but I think the real problem is why were people expecting that a simple wrist-watch with two LEDs built into it could really provide accurate readings? (Medical professionals use complex and expensive devices to take the same reading.)

My Weather Station comes back on-line

My old weather station equipment suffered damage and so no data has been reported for the last few months. Luckily I got a birthday present of a new weather station and so my weather site is back online again. Unfortunately the twitter feed is not being updated, but I will fix that soon.

As I was setting up the new station I realised that the clock on my Tonido plug was seriously wrong. For some reason the date skipped forward from 2nd of December 2013 to 16th of April  2030. This means that the forecast data I have been collecting was incorrectly dated. When I get a chance I will write a script to fix up all of the data.

A really interesting new robot

In recent decades, the field of robotics has advanced  from science fiction to practical industrial use. Nobody is surprised when they visit a modern factory and they see a robot doing much of the repetitive and specialised work. However, it is only relatively recently that robots are becoming mainstream in homes. The Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner is popular-but often more for its novelty value among geeky owners than for its really practical usefulness.

I was very impressed to see a recent proposal from a small company names Matia Robotics for a robot which effectively replaces a wheelchair. I think this is a very practical use that many people would be willing to spend money on.

The following video explains the details of the device. I don't really know any more about it other than what is contained in the video, but apparently it looks like a major improvement over a conventional wheelchair for people suffering from spinal cord injuries.

They have a FAQ page on their site which answers many questions that people might have. They are not shipping units yet, but they are taking advance bookings which are expected to ship before the end of 2013 and will cost about US$15,000.

I know that this is quite a hefty price, especially when compared with manual chair (prices counted in the low numbers of hundreds of dollars) - but it is probably fairer to compare this with a motorized wheelchair whose price would already be counted in the low thousands. Hopefully the price will comedown considerably once the large volume manufacturing starts.

Initial Design for my SmartHome project

I have prepared an initial design for my Smart Home. The first version of the system will simply be able to detect the temperature in the house and turn the heating on or off.

I chose this design on the basis that I should concentrate on a single use case at first. I also wanted to make maximum use of the equipment I already have installed (all the items in green are already installed and only the items in white remain to be ordered). I also have a number of redundant communication paths because this is advised in the Insteon whitepaper.

As always, I would welcome feedback from people with more experience in this area.

Equipment for my SmartHome project arrives

This week I took delivery of an Indeon SmartHub and a Raspberry Pi model B. Both of these will play a key role in transforming my home into a SmartHome.I don't have a detailed system design yet, but I think that the SmartHub will be the central controller and main web interface while the Rasberry Pi will probably become a media centre.

I already have most of the other bits and pieces (e.g. Arduino boards), but I am sure I will also probably need to make a few purchases - especially cases which will be required to make the system neat and tidy.  However, my initial observation was how differently these two different devices were packed for shipment. Although the devices are roughly similar in size when unpacked - the Raspberry Pi was simply packed in a jiffy bag and the postman was easily able to slide it through my letter box, but the Indeon device was packed into a box along with bubble wrap and this box was in turn packed into an even larger box so that I struggled to attach the large box to my bike carrier when I collected it from the post office.

If anyone with experience ins Smart Home projects has advice to share with me, I would be delighted to hear from you so I don't have to learn all of the lessons the hard way.

Draft slides for @3dcamp

Here is the first draft of the slides for my proposed talk at 3D camp in Limerick the weekend after next. Feedback and comments are welcome.

Tweeting about local weather conditions

I am quite proud of my personal weather station and the fact that it automatically makes reports available through a dedicated page on the Weather Underground site. However, until recently I was embarrassed to admit that the weather station didn't have its own twitter feed. Yesterday, I rectified this situation and I can now boast to my fellow geeks that the station is Tweeting hourly weather reports as @LLweather which is a new Twitter account I created for the weather station. In fact it is one of a large network of private weather stations in Ireland tweeting weather reports with the #iwn hashtag - this should not be surprising because most Irish people are obsessed by weather.

Initially I tried to write a short python script to do the updates, but then I discovered that this feature was already supported by the PYWWS package that I was using to upload the data to Weather underground. There were even clear instructions available on how to configure the software on their web site (I had to upgrade to v12.10 to get it to work).

After I set it up I was surprised to notice that the weather station was apparently giving weather reports about 20-25 minutes into the future. When I investigated I found that the clock on my Tonido plug was running alarmingly fast. I tried to set up the NTP deamon to keep the clock synchronised, but this proved complicated because the plug is running a very old version of Ubuntu. I corrected the time manually and will keep an eye on it until I get around to configuring NTP properly.

How much do you need to pay for a bike computer

I like cycling and I like gadgets so I suppose it is not surprising that I consider that it is essential to have some form of bike computer to keep track of my speed and distance. Currently I am using simple bike computers on each of my bikes which I bought for €5.99 in Aldi.

Some of my cycling friends recommend that I should consider splashing out on a Garmin 500 series model. This would give me certain neat features not present on my current model:

• It has built in GPS so as well as tracking my speed it can also record exactly where I was cycling.
• It allows uploading of data directly to the internet so I can analyse my performance with neat visualization tools.
• It connects with additional sensors to track things like my hear rate and cadence so I can judge how effective my training is.

However, these features come at a price. The Garmin model costs about €250 as compared to only €6 for the Adli model. Therefore I think I will stick with my Aldi computer for the moment. In any case I can use some neat free apps for my phone to track my training in addition to the bike computer.

Improving the accuracy of the GPS in Your phone

The GPS device in your phone is normally very accurate. However. like all computer devices when it messes up it can often do so in a spectacular way (e.g., I once went running around Galway at a moderate pace and then found out that my phone thought I had been swimming around the Irish Sea at a world record speed)

The Global Positioning System (GPS) is an amazingly complex piece of technology, so I suppose it should not be surprising that it occasionally fails. However, there are a few things that you can do to to increase the accuracy of your GPS readings:

1. The software that interprets the GPS and other signals required to determine your location is very complex. The technology involved is constantly being updated. Therefore, if you are experiencing poor performance it is a good idea to update the operating system software and/or buy a new phone.
2. The preferences on your phone should include "Use Wireless Networks" and "Use Sensor Aiding" - you should be sure to enable both of these options. On Android devices this will be under the "Settings\Location and Security" menu item, I am not sure where the equivalent setting is on an iPhone, but I assume it is named something similar. If you enable these it means that your phone can use several other clues to help decide where it is located even if there are not enough GPS satellites clearly visible in the sky.
3. Don't start running until you have a good GPS signal. It might take a minute or two for your phone to lock onto the GPS satellites properly, if you are moving around while this process is happening you make it more difficult for the phone to guess its position. The RunKeeper app even has a useful feature whereby it will warn you if you try to start tracking a run without having already locked onto the GPS system. If your favourite app doesn't have this feature then it is probably worth installing a specialised application such as GPS status to check.
4. Change your privacy settings to allow Google/Apple collect data from your phone. This is a clear case where you need to trade off privacy versus a benefit for yourself. The way that the "Use Wireless Networks" feature works is that hopefully Google or Apple has a record of the locations of the WiFi points that are currently visible to your phone and since the range of a WiFi network is not very large, it can quickly narrow down the possible locations where you might be. However, if nobody has shared this information for the area where you are running, the feature won't work. I personally don't think this information is very private because anyone walking past your front door can collect the same information, but I know many people feel differently. In any case, it is in your own interests to help map the location of  WiFi points in your neighbourhood especially if you are going to be regularly exercising in the same place. If you are really worried about privacy, then enable it for a few runs along your normal route before turning it off again.

I hope this information helps. If not, remember Google is your friend and a quick search of some of the forums related to your brand of phone will probably provide you with plenty of other useful tips.

Incidentally, I previously posted that I was switching back to using MyTracks instead of RunKeeper. However, I sometimes find that it is interesting to have both applications tracking my progress. Both applications have a tendency to occasionally crash for no reason, so having both applications recording your activity means you are fairly certain that you won't loose any data.

At the moment I have RunKeeper configured to announce periodic summary statistics in a female voice while MyTracks uses a male voice. The way I have them configured the two application normally announce at different times and because of the voice difference I know instantly which application I am hearing statistics from. Occasionally the two applications decide to announce statistics at exactly the same time which ends up sounding hilariously like a married couple arguing about whether or not the speed limit is being breached.

Update: 21-Aug
In the tips above I forgot to mention the obvious tip - try rebooting your phone. I sometimes find that my phone won't lock onto a GPS signal even if I can see the screen clearly and everything seems to be set up correctly. In these cases, turning the phone off and then back on again will often solve the problem.

RunKeeper compared to MyTracks

I am both a fan of exercise and of technology. Therefore, whenever I run or cycle, I like to use an application that leverages the GPS functionality of my phone to keep a track of exactly where I have been going and how fast I have been running/cycling etc. I have been a long time happy user of the  MyTracks  application from Google. Recently I converted to using RunKeeper because after watching a presentation on the benefits of sociability in training apps, I wanted to use an app which was more sociable. Ironically I am now switching back again because RunKeeper is too social.


In terms of core functionality, the tow applications are similar. MyTracks  application is a typical Google product which tends to appeal to most geeks like myself. It doesn't have lots of features, but it does one thing and it does it very well. The one thing it does is use the sensors in the phone to track exactly where you went.

• It does not even assume that you are using it for tracking fitness related activities - for example I first started using MyTracks, I was walking around neighbourhoods and tracking the location of roads so that I could update OpenStreetMap.
• If you are using MyTracks for tracking your training you can simply select the menu item "send to Google" each time you complete an activity and Google will automatically create a Google Docs spreadsheet with all the details of your training statistics without any effort on your behalf.
• The level of detail in the data is more than would be collected by a professional athlete, but there are no fancy graphs or charts. However, it is easy to use that application of your choice to create any chart you want.
• Likewise they don't attempt to implement any sociability features, but they make it easy to export your data to any other application if this is what you want to do. For example, I occasionally  use the excellent Tracks2Miles application written by Ben Hardill to send my training data to the DailyMile site so that I can share information with friends.

I said that MyTracks makes no direct attempt at being sociable with your training data, but the  makers of RunKeeper seem to assume that the only reason you are collecting data is so that you can share it on their site. If these applications were real people, I would compare MyTracks with a work colleague who believes that there is no need for social chit chat at work. In contrast RunKeeper is more like one of those annoying cheerleader types who keeps offering encouragement (whether you want it or not). Initially this encouragement is great, but after a while it begins to get on my nerves.

• The only place that the RunKeeper application will store data is on their site. Of course it is possible to later export the data to share it elsewhere, but not many people will go to this trouble. I suppose this is a natural choice for them, but I personally prefer the Google approach of making it easy to share data directly from their application to wherever you want.
• The charts on the RunKeeper site are much more visually appealing than the plan text spreadsheet created by MyTracks, but Google actually makes the raw data easier to get at.
• The default settings on RunKeeper is to share every piece of data with everyone. Of course it is possible to change these settings, but it would be easy for a shy person to be embarrassed by accidentally over sharing.
• The RunKeeper site will constantly send you congratulatory emails and/or post to your Facebook profile when you achieve significant training milestones. I suppose this is probably viewed as a good feature by some people, but personally I found it to be patronizing when I first started using RunKeeper and went on a fairly short slow run to try it out. They were gushing about how it was my longest run ever and a personal best (of course it was my longest ever run from their point of view).

Choosing an application, is somewhat like picking whom to be friendly with - there is no one choice which is right for everyone. Both of these applications are very good, but I think it is important to pick an application that its a good match for your personality. This is why I am sticking with MyTracks (for now).

Updating my exercise technology

I am a big fan of technology and I also love spending time outdoors exercising. Some people think this is an unusual combination, because the stereotype of a geek is someone who spends time indoors staring at their computer. However, technology and exercise go very well together as this presentation by Ted Vickey explains in detail how technology can help with your exercise regime.



I normally use MyTracks from Google to track my running and cycling. Although I am quite happy with the way it works, watching Ted's talk convinced me that I should be more adventurous and try something new. Hence I signed up for an acocount on RunKeeper and installing the associated applications on my phone.

My initial impressions of RunKeeper are quite good. It seems to be very easy to use and it has a very active eco-system of gadgets and applications that can enable you to get an even better experience. It seems to really emphasise the social encouragement aspects, for example after I first used it to record details of a cycle it sent me a congratulatory email for achieving a personal best.

The first difference that I noticed between the MyTracks and RunKeeper is the way they handle the periodic announcement of statistics. The MyTracks software announces the statistics in a normal sounding voice, but sometimes towards the end of a run I am tired and my concentration fades so the statistical announcements don't register properly. In contrast RunKeeper reads announcements very clearly and slowly (as if speaking to someone who does not have a good grasp of English) and this is much easier for a tired runner to grasp. However, while MyTracks pauses any podcast or music that is playing when it has an announcement to make, RunKeeper doesn't and hence it tries to speak over the background noise. Perhaps there is a setting that I will need to tweak.

I will write a more comprehensive review when I have more experience.

Let there be light

Many years ago relative of mine used to complain that he suffered from Seasonally Affective Disorder (SAD) due to lack of access to natural sunlight during the dark short days that are a feature of the Irish summer. As a result he had a special light box which supplied him with a light spectrum that mimicked the frequency spectrum of natural light. I think we all  appreciate having plenty of access to natural light and so I briefly considered purchasing a similar device myself - but at the time the cost of the device was prohibitive and they consumed a huge amount of electricity.

NuLight beside an Old blub

Recently a friend of mine told me about a UK based company called Nulight which sells a modern energy efficient version of the same thing that they call the Daylight Bulb. It is essentially a replacement for a normal light bulb and it fits into a normal light fixture. I bought the 65 watt version which cost me just over £10stg (plus P&P). Although it is called a 65 watt bulb, my current cost meter tells me that it only consumes about 56 watts of power.

My home office has a north facing windows and although it is not really dark, it is noticeably less bright than the south facing rooms in the house. When I installed the new light in it I could immediately notice the difference even in the middle of the day. I would estimate that the amount of light coming from this new bulb is even stronger than a floodlight which I have installed out the back of the house - however the floodlight consumes about 250 watts of power.

Sleeping and still consumping electricity

I know that many people are worried about the amount of power being consumed by electronic devices which are in stand-by mode and not actually doing anything useful. For example this article from the Economist magazine suggests that devices on stand-by could be consuming either 5% or 10% of total domestic electric demand (depending upon what part of the article you believe). I recently found out about the One Watt initiative which aims to ensure that in future all devices will be legally obliged to consume a maximum of 1 watt each while on stand-by.

The current cost meter that I have installed in my home provides me with an indication of the lowest power consumption rate each day. This figure is normally around 140-150 watts. Presumably this rate is reached when all of the household is asleep and not actively using any of the many devices we have in the house. My total power consumption varies from day to day, but on a normal day this background usage level would account for roughly 20% of my total consumption.

Not all of the devices consuming power  could or should be switched off at night e.g. it would not be a good idea to unplug the fridge/freezer before going to bed each night. However, I am sure that we should be able to reduce this figure significantly.

In order to identify which devices are consuming power at night, I would need to take measurements of the consumption of the various devices left on at night. The amount of power that each device consumes would probably be quite small and so the current cost meter (which only measures to the nearest watt) is probably not accurate enough. So I bought a plug in energy monitor from Maplins. which was capable of monitoring to an accuracy of 0.1 watts.

My first impressions are that this is a great device and wonderful value for money. However, the device has two main drawbacks which make it difficult for me to use:

1. The display has no back light and so it cannot be read unless I have a bright light shining on it. However, I can understand this since they don't want the device itself consuming too much power. And in any case, the use of a flash-light can overcome this problem.
2. The digits on the display are so small that they are barely legible. The unit has a number of different modes. In each mode one measurement is displayed in large digits, a secondary measurement is displayed in smaller digits an unfortunately I can only guess what value us being displayed. It also uses an even smaller symbol to indicate what mode it is in an this sysmbol is so small that I have no hope of even guessing what it us. However, I have developed a little trick to work around this problem - the voltage reading will always be close to 240 and  it would be very bad luck if any other measurement gave a similar reading. If I cycle through the modes until I see a reading close to 240, then I can use the manual to see how many more times I have to switch through modes to get to the mode I want. It is a pity that a great device should be ruined by such a simple defect.

When I complete my measurements with this new device I hope to be able to report back here on which devices I was able to switch off and how much electricity I saved.

Does leaving chargers plugged in really waste electricty?

I have often heard people say that you can save significant amounts of electricity by unplugging your phone and laptop chargers when they are not in active use. However, I have also heard people say that this is rubbish because modern well designed chargers will consume virtually no electricity when not actively charging a device. I was not sure which advice to trust and so I decided to run some tests with my new current cost meter in order to check it out.

In order to test out how much electricity is used charging my phone, I made sure to make heavy use of it today and I completely drained its battery (not an unusual thing for me to do). Then I plugged it in to my phone charger and observed the electricity usage using my Current Cost monitor. Despite the fact that my charger was plugged in all day, it consumed no measurable amount of electricity until I plugged in my phone. As soon as I plugged in my phone the consumption jumped up to 4 watts for 2 hours before the phone was fully charged and the usage went down to zero again.

Based upon this measurement, I calculated that if I was paying 14 cent per KiloWattHour, I would spend roughly 50 cent on electricity to charge my phone for a whole year. Leaving the phone charger plugged in while not in use would make absolutely no difference to my bill.