Changing Cars: Going Hybrid

It has to be said that driving a brand new car is an expensive indulgence, but I have to own up to rather liking it! It just so happens that every car I've owned, I've had from new. It's a guilty pleasure.

Anyway, the time has come to change my current car, a Mazda 5, for something new and shiny. Although I like driving new cars I find the process of buying one tedious and stressful. But this time I had a different plan in mind because I wanted to go a little greener and began looking at hybrids. The kind of car I like to drive hasn't been readily available as a hybrid, but with the arrival of the Prius+ a number of years ago, an alternative to the typical MPV became available.
It's not everyone's first choice but it's what we have chosen as our next new car.

Hopefully we'll adapt to the automatic gearbox quickly. It's a bit unnerving to start with when you don't quite know where to put your left foot or what to do with it! But once you get out one the road it's a nice, rather relaxed smooth drive. I actually collected the car just before Easter and immediately drove it to Bedford, Eastbourne and Saffron Walden over the weekend! I think I can safely say I've got used to it now!

The ever increasing complexity of the technology that goes into a modern car continues to dazzle. Even more so with the transition to a hybrid and all the data that is available about when you're running in EV mode, how the power is being generated and distributed, and all sorts of other things. I remember when most new cars came without a radio let alone a satellite navigation system and proximity sensors.

If you're a so-called petrol head then you'll probably find the Prius+ a boring, uninspiring drive. That's fine. I didn't buy it as a performance car, I bought it because it suits our needs, it's a hybrid, and it's comfortable. My first refuel suggested I got around 50mpg, and apparently that's likely to improve over time.

So there we have it. The money is spent, the car is bought and the next 4 or 5 years of driving are sorted out. The Prius is the first step in moving away from simple combustion engines towards something greener. The next change will be Anne's Kia, but quite when and what to, I'm not sure. Perhaps another Toyota in the form of a Yaris hybrid.

In 4 or 5 years time I will probably look at at a PHEV version of something. Technology will have moved on and there may be a much wider choice of such vehicles than there are currently. Maybe we will even go fully electric. I can imagine a day when you pull into a service station and simply swap out the batteries rather than recharge before going on your way. I'm guessing too that battery technology will change and maybe we'll have 1000 mile ranges available by the time ICE's go out of production completely.

In my ideal world we will have a house that has all electricity from renewable energy so that charging our electric vehicles is carbon neutral. Is that so far fetched?

Early Days with Nest

 We've had our new boiler and Nest thermostat for just over a week now and I thought I'd write about our early experience. For those who don't know, the Nest thermostat learns your patterns and adjusts your heating accordingly. You can set up a schedule or simply let it learn as you turn the stat up and down. It take about two weeks for it to settle down, but you can programme it as you would do with a standard clock controller. If you're used to an older clock-based system you'll know that at their most sophisticated you only really had the choice of weekday and weekend schedules. Some of the wireless systems that were introduced did have more daily controls, but they were sometimes fiddly to set up. Not so the Nest.


Using either the 'phone app or the web version you set up and alter a schedule very easily. Our current schedule is very simple. Monday to Friday mornings are routine, Weekends are different. Weekday evenings take account of usually coming home at different times rather than having a single set point for the heating to come on and heat an otherwise unoccupied house. The nice thing is that you can turn the heating on remotely, so for those times when we're coming home earlier than expected a quick tap brings on the heating.

You can also use geo-fencing, but given that I'm often driving past the house I suspect this wouldn't be a useful feature for me! The other thing that Nest does is turn the heating off when no one is home. So, if I have to go off to the gym to do an early lesson, Nest will turn itself down.

You can also see your energy usage. It's only been a week, so there's not much to see, but already there have been a couple of occasions when the thermostat has not brought the heating on because nobody was in the house at the time.

Under our old system we had the heating running for around 7 hours a day (5:30-09:00; 17:00-21:30). With the Nest this can drop to around 3.5 hours for some days. That could represent quite a saving over a heating season.

One thing that was hidden away in the features is the pre-heat time. The default setting allows the thermostat to bring the heating system on up to 5 hours before the set temperature. So, if your'e used to having your heating come on at 06:00 to reach your desired temperature by 06:30 you could find that your heating comes on at 01:30 under extreme conditions. Not very likely I know, but you can change this setting. Being a bit old school, I've set ours to a maximum of 1 hour.

At a slight tangent, when you set your temperature you really need to think about where the thermostat is sited and fiddle around with the temperature to get it right for the house. Balancing your heating system can help save money too because overheated rooms wastes energy. When I was working in R&D our design day temperatures were 16 in bedrooms, 22 in bathrooms, 21 in the lounge, and 18 in other living areas. Now without a lot of effort that's pretty difficult to achieve. But doing simple things like adjusting radiators and TRV's to get a more even distribution of heat helps. Our thermostat is in the hall and it's usually set to 19.5. It doesn't matter if it's actually 19.5 in the hall as long as the house is warm.

I suspect the Nest is far more accurate than the old bi-metallic strip thermostat we used to have. That used to be set to 17 because that gave an even distribution of heat. The nice thing about the Nest is that you can tweak the temperature up or down, knowing that in the next cycle it will revert to the previous settings instead of having to remember to reset the stat manually.

Overall I'm pleased we decided to have the Nest installed rather than a programmer and thermostat.

A C- Smart Home?

We've not quite plunged headlong into the world of the smart home, but we're experimenting. A need arose that we thought some smart lighting might be able to meet, so in order to test this out I bought some smart lights for home. We went with Philips Hue and invested in the starter pack and a couple of extra bulbs.

The starter kit comes with two E27 white bulbs and the bridge unit that connects your lights to your network. I've since added a remote switch in the lounge and an "ambience bulb" in the bedroom. I also got a couple of E27 to bayonet adaptors. If you look at the price of these things that comes to around £125, a not insignificant amount for 5 light bulbs!

I chose Hue because it's well known, and it's HomeKit compatible (Apple's Smart Home App). You don't need the Home App to use the lights, Hue has it's own App, so if you're not an Apple fan then there's no issue.

The bridge was very easy to install. We have a data network running throughout the house, so it was very easy to plug it into a port and get up and running.

Knowing which light was in which room was little more tricky. I could have made a note of serial numbers I guess, but a bit of trial and error sorted it out.

Setting up the remote switch was easy too. So far so good. Then I got to play with the apps.

The problem here is that the Philips app and Apple's Home work quite differently and can do different things. Hue, for example, seems to be able to set randomised patterns with start and end times. Home does not appear to be able to do that. Home can create scenes, i.e. lighting patterns, Hue doesn't. So which app do you use? At the moment the answer seems to be both.

There's another issue I've been having. For Home to work best you need a home hub. I could use my iPad, but it would need to be plugged in permanently and at home to do that job, which rather defeats it's functionality as a portable tablet computer that I can take anywhere! The only current alternative is to buy an Apple TV (more money). There are other home hubs available, but so far I haven't found one that says it will work with Homekit. Hopefully Apple's new Homepod will act as a hub, but that means waiting and it will probably be more expensive than buying an Apple TV box. Home should work without the need for a hub, but so far it's been less than reliable for things like turning the lights on when I come home. This seems to work better with Hue.

So my current experience is that Hue does some nice things, but Home offers more flexible automation, albeit limited in some ways that Hue is not. Hue, for example, allows you to set a routine with a start and end time. I haven't found that anywhere in Home. I do like being able to use voice control via Siri, but that's more a novelty than a necessity. Setting scenes is potentially quite useful. For example, I've set a scene called "Movie Night" that dims the lounge lights to 15%. I've also got one called "Bright" that brings those same lights on at full brightness. "Good morning" is another nice scene that brings the main bedroom light on using the light colour feature of the white ambience bulb, and I could have another scene that set a more subdued lighting pattern for the evening.

At some point I'm going to explore other sensors and options. There are plenty of them about, but integration is key. For example, it would be nice to have something that turns the heating on in my treatment room that is integrated with my diary so that the room is warm ready for a client arriving.

The other Smart arrival is an Amazon Echo. I got this to try it out as a possible gift for someone for whom I thought voice activation might be useful. It only arrive yesterday, so I haven't really explored all the possibilities. It looks very neat and when I eventually got it up and running it responded well to my voice commands.

But here's the gripe. Integration and compatibility. All these so-called smart gadgets do not play nicely or easily with each other. I'd like to be able to listen to my iTunes library though my Echo, but it's a painfully tortuous process involving uploading hours of music to another cloud based server and paying for the privilege when I can use my computer at home to distribute the music easily throughout the house. Either that or setting it up as a Bluetooth speaker for an iPod. It would be nice to be able to ask Alexa to put something in my diary, and I should be able to do that, but again there looks to be quite a process to go through to make that work and I don't as yet know whether it will work with only one diary or all my iCal diaries (home, work, personal). We shall see. It would also be nice if it acted as a home hub!

So that's why I'd give my Smart Home a C- at the moment. I have high hopes that in the future things will be better integrated, cheaper and reliable, but that looks some way off.

Years ago, before the advent of the "Smartphone" people would often remark that paper diaries were better than electronic ones because the batteries never ran out! Then along came the iPhone and seamless integration of diaries and reminders between 'phone and laptop and desktop. My cherished Filofax was consigned to the bookshelf and although it still sits in the corner of the study, it hasn't seen a day's use for more than 5 years. Perhaps eventually integration will mean that smart devices will simply work and trying to figure out how to get them to do what you want them to do will be a simple as asking them.

A quick comparison of Runkeeper and Polar A360 data

I've recently done a bit of interval training/walking again, and I've remembered to set Runkeeper going to record my efforts. I also have my trusty Polar A360 activity monitor strapped to my wrist. Perhaps I should have stuck my old pedometer in my pocket too, just for completeness!

Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to compare the data from both the A360 and Runkeeper. Here's the raw data:

The top screenshot is from Runkeeper, the lower one from the A360. There's clearly a discrepancy between the two, but there's also an obvious explanation. Runkeeper uses the GPS facility in my iPhone to map the route, the A360 does not have GPS capability. Consequently it has to use some form of algorithm to calculate distance which in turn impacts the calorie estimate and pace data too.

The point is simple. If you're going to buy an activity monitor then make sure you get something that suits the main type of exercise you do. If you're a runner or walker, then you really ought to consider something that has GPS if accurate distance is important. If like me, most of your activity takes place in a confined space like a tennis court, then GPS is irrelevant. I don't do enough running/walking to warrant a GPS enabled watch. It's all possible that if I activated the app on my phone form Polar (Polar Beat) it might se the GPS and compensate for the difference. I don't know, but it might be worth investigating. 

Activity monitors are simply that-monitors of activity. Some allow you to set the type of activity, the A360 has various sport/training modes that you can set, but generally speaking it's all about trends and making sure you get up and active on a daily basis. My Polar Flow did that and the A360 just gives me a bit more flexibility and a little more data (heart rate mostly).

Anyway, I just thought it was interesting to see the difference and be reminded that nothing is perfect and the data out is only every going to be as good as the data in.

IFTTT

No, it's not a typing error it's a new application I've recently come across on the internet. IFTTT is a simple way to make connections, perform actions, post notes, control lights, sense messages and a whole host of other things you never knew you wanted to be able to do!

You create recipes of logical IF's to perform a task (If This Then That). For example, I've created a Twitter account for South Ockendon Sports (@socksports) and I've created a recipe that posts a daily weather update at 7:00am to Twitter. I've also created a recipe that puts a status update on my LinkedIn account when I create a new blog post about therapy related stuff on my other blog In2Motion.

Each If starts with a trigger form a channel. You can choose from a wide range of channels but not everything you might want to do is available. Once you've got a trigger you simply work through the steps as you are prompted and build your recipe. I'd really like to be able to include more than one blog in the recipe, but I can't see a way to do that at the moment, and I'd like to be able to link my Polar Loop daily activity data to Twitter or Facebook. You can do some editing of the logic, but I can't see a way of doing either of these things yet.

What looks good about IFTTT is the way it reduces the number of websites you need to visit in order to update something. It might just be a toy for some, but for others it could be a really useful tool to streamline social media. Of course, if you have some of the more interesting tech around the home you can even control the heating and the lights. For example, you could use location data from your 'phone to turn on the heating when you're within 30 minutes of home, or to turn on the lights at dusk.

Bit of an update on the iPod Touch and GPS

I posted a piece about using Runkeeper on my iPod Touch and the inaccuracy of the tracking I experienced with it. Given how well Runkeeper works on the iPhone, it can't be the app that's got the problem, it has to be something to do with how the device itself accesses its location.

Now there have been one or two occasions in the past when my old 3GS iPhone would produce a sudden leap off my know route leaving me both confused and with a PB unlikely ever to be beaten! That aside, I think I may have a handle on the issue with the iPod.

Reading an article about how to use your wifi only iPad or iPod to navigate around a city, it appears that these devices use a map of local hotspots to track your location. According to the article you can use your map to navigate simply by setting a route between to points while you are using say a local hotel's free wifi. Once you've done this, your device loads a database of all local hotspots.

So, if it's using hotspots rather than GPS (which might be a feature only available via the cellular data network I'm thinking), that would explain why it jumps around so much because it's not actually tracking your true position but rather the location of these hotspots. And if that is true, then the iPod will never be useful as a route tracking device which is a shame, but at least it gives me a wider range music to which I can listen while I run or walk.

The moral of the story is: If you want to listen to music, buy an iPod Touch, if you want to track your route, buy a GPS device!

Runkeeper on the iPod touch

I decided it was time I replaced my iPod touch that was stolen a year or so ago. I opted for the 16Gb version and called in at the Apple store while I was in Lakeside waiting for a call from the garage about the car (another story for another day). One of the reasons I decided to buy a new touch was that it will run apps like Runkeeper that use GPS to track movement. I rather assumed that the technology in the touch would be similar to the tech in the iPhone, but I got quite a surprise when I took out this evening for a short test run. I seemed to be covering the distance at quite a fair pace, and it wasn't long before I realised something was wrong. I know I walk fast, but I don't even run at less than 6min/Km!

It seems that the touch has much more difficulty with the GPS than the iPhone does. Here's what the touch reported:

Expanding the map showed that the GPS was jumping all over the place adding almost 2Km to the actual distance walked. Cleaning up the map took a while, but the difference is clear:

This is disappointing because I bought the touch so that I didn't have to use my phone, running down its battery and having the potential for access to more music on the iPod rather than the phone. It would also mean that if I didn't want to take my phone with me for some reason (I can't think of one except maybe because I was planning to run through a river and didn't want to ruin a phone!), I wouldn't have to. Shame really, the new touch is slim and light and lovely like it should be.

There may be a reason, even a fix, but at the moment, while I love the new iPod, I remain disappointed with the GPS performance.

All my music on demand!

A few months ago I finally got around to getting all our music into our iTunes library. I say all, there were a few CD's that I decided to omit from the digital storeroom because quite frankly I'm not sure I want them popping up in a random playlist and send me lunging across the floor for the nearest available way to skip the track! I remember meeting someone at the gym who was rehabbing a broken ankle sustained getting off an exercise bike to answer his mobile 'phone. Don't want, "Trying to skip that annoying version of a song I'd forgotten we had on a CD" on a list of weird accidents reported at A&E!

Anyway, it's nice to have completed this part of our digital library. Whether I'll get around to doing the same with our DVD and Bluray collection who can say. But having done the CD's it's rather nice to use the Remote facility of my iPhone to set a playlist in motion. We have our sound system in the lounge connected to the network and I invested in a sound bar for the extension so we can have a nice jazz mix playing quietly in the background during dinner. Had you there for a minute!

At the moment I've got an interesting playlist running: Bob Dylan, Crowded House, Eva Cassidy, The Zutons, Simon and Garfunkel. It's certainly an interesting mix. I'm not sure how many CD's we have, but I"m guessing we listen to far more music using digital playlists than we would if we had to go to the CD's and stand there staring at them to decide what to choose.

Perhaps this is indicative of the way we listen to music these days. Rarely do we sit down and listen to a whole CD anymore. I guess the digital library is our own private radio station without annoying adverts or DJ's. The only problem is that sometimes you get the opening of a live concert but nothing more because that's where the engineer decided to put a track break. Ah well, it makes for interesting juxta-positioning of musical styles!

TED Talks

there are many helpful and interesting TED talks. The other day I posted a link to a conversation with Edward Snowden on Facebook, and after I watched that broadcast I followed a link to a talk about bionics. Now if you grew up in the 70's you will remember The Six Million Dollar Man and the spin-off The Bionic Woman. I believe there was also a bionic dog somewhere in the storyline too, but maybe I'm just dreaming!

Whilst the programming became more and more ridiculous, the early concept, loosely based on the novel Cyborg, was intriguing and seemingly far-fetched and futuristic at the time. But here we are 40 years on and we now actually do have some amazing technology that has incredible potential for prosthetics.

Interestingly, in the Ted talk, alongside the amazing bionic legs described is a very challenging idea. Put simply, it's that technology is what is broken not the individuals with challenges. We are, or so it seems, edging ever closer to the reality of those famous opening lines form 1973, "We have the technology, we can rebuild him..."

Making notes while browsing the web

There are lots of ways to make notes, capture information and collate stuff while you are browsing the internet. I've used iClip, when it existed, Circus Ponies Notebook, Textedit, Pages and Scrivener to name a few. It's never usually a problem having two applications open at the same time, I've often got more than that, and tabbing between them or having them side-by-side doesn't pose any real problems.

But what if you could do it all in your web browser? Well apparently you can! There's a simply command line that you can type into the address bar of your browser which will allow to you type notes directly into a blank web page.

You can save or print or email the contents of the page.

I discovered this through the Lifehack Blog, but if you don't want to go there to get the command, then this is what you need to type:

data:text/html,%20%3Chtml%20contenteditable%3E

I guess you could even save it as a bookmark, or set your browser to open a notes page every time you start it up. Just in case you find html hard to memorise!

Goodbye Googlewave

So I found out today that Google is to wave goodbye to its innovative online collaboration tool. Googlewave is to be no more. Apparently the lack of user uptake is the issue.

I thought Googlewave had tremendous potential for planning and developing ideas, but as I found out, not everyone is keen to explore new technology. Having a continuous conversation that is easy to review rather than an inbox full of emails was really exciting. I mourn its demise.

So, I will have to look elsewhere and I've already begun to have a look at what might fill the gap.

Wridea looks promising, but I've only seem the overview. Again the issue is less about finding something to use and more about getting others to try it too.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Update on the printer

The new printer duly arrived, and after a while it's all installed and seems to be running okay. The installation was a bit long, a whole bucketful of drivers and software added to my computer, but I guess that's to be expected with a multi-function machine.

I've set it up as a wireless printer on the network, which was in fact really easy. Although it did require me to go through the installation process twice, once for each computer. I'm hoping that I can set up the Windows laptop to use it via the network, but I can't face a third long installation process today. I don't have the time for one thing.

At the moment it's busy scanning a 15 page document and putting the data into a text file on my iMac. All done wirelessly. How very neat!

Actually this was one of the reasons I decided to buy this printer. The document feeder takes up to 35 pages and the results so far have been good. When I tried the copier I got an image file which I then had to use Adobe Acrobat to convert to text. Okay, but straight to text is better and a document feeder means I can be doing something else while the scan progresses on its own.

Which reminds me I ought to get back to what I was doing before I decided to do this!

Well I never!

There are times when technology even surprises me. It usually involves being able to do something far more easily than I imagined. Let me set the scene.

We're starting a new Sunday series from John's Gospel in September and I found some old study notes I prepared on various characters and themes. They look useful but they need modifying if we're going to use them in the Autumn. Unfortunately I can only find the printed copies, the computer files lost in the processes of changing from one computer to another and another. I certainly backed them up before changing, but that was probably on 3.5 floppies which have long since headed for the great obsolete technology pile in the sky.

So I was looking at either retyping the notes, scanning them page by page on my flatbed scanner or investing in a scanner with document feed capabilities. I even looked at cheapish multi-function printers.

So it was that I wandered down to the church to see if the photocopier would play nice and act as a scanner. I was thrilled to discover that it can work with removable media, only the one I tried sent it into a tail spin of flashing error lights and I had to restart it.

Reading the manual I discovered that it had a "send" function that could email documents. Hmmm, I thought, I wonder...

So I loaded the paper feeder, chose send, entered my email address and pressed start. All the pages went through the scanner and that was it. No messages to say it had worked or not. I wandered back down the church to my office/study and checked my email. And there it was. A pdf version of the document I'd just scanned. Brilliant.

So credit where credit's due, well done to the copier. I now have my documents in electronic form. The only problem is that they are images rather than text, but I have some ocr software at home which solve that problem, we shall have to wait and see.

It's finally coming

Ah the Apple iPad. Very soon to be available in the UK and anticipated with some excitement in the Pool household by at least two of us. Three if it dispenses cat biscuits!

I have pre-ordered mine and I'm looking forward to finding out if it's as good and useful as I hope it will be. I know some people can't get their heads around what Apple have done with the iPad. some people think it's just a big iPod Touch or iPhone.

I understand it to be far more than this. It won't, I suspect, replace my MacBook. Too many things i like to use on the MacBook won't be available on the iPad. But I don't think it will be long before some pretty impressive software starts to appear for it.

So roll on the 28th May and don't expect me to be anything but excited for the next week!