WibblePress

Partly out of my own curiosity and partly because a friend is planning to buy herself/be bought one as a birthday present, I’ve been playing around with the idea of an Apple laptop.

Along the way, I’ve noticed a few interesting things.

Macbook – bit old?

Firstly, the MacBook seems ridiculously underpowered low-spec compared to its 13″ Pro cousin and, at least with Higher Education discount, doesn’t seem to be as much cheaper as it is lower-specced. The differences:

There’s also a collection of other bits missing from the MacBook:

• Thunderbolt and Firewire 800 (no real loss in most cases, I’d suggest)
• SDXC slot (useful if you have a camera that uses SD cards)
• FaceTime HD camera (I’ve never used the webcam on any of my laptops, someone probably does).

Before someone goes all [citation-needed] on those claimed differences between the CPUs and GPUs, Geekbench source and forum post with NotebookCheck graphics benchmark.

Now fair enough, there’s a difference of £130-150 between the two and the weight and thickness differences are arguably minute, but you’re still getting a slower CPU, less memory and a smaller hard drive (you could argue that either CPU is more than powerful enough for most people but it’s been claimed OSX Lion wants at least 2GB, you don’t really want to be at the minimum; just about everyone seems to be able to fill disk space with video, music and crap).

Adding the missing 2GB of RAM and getting a bigger hard disk in a Macbook costs a total of £121 (£80 for the RAM alone¹) retail and £103.20 (£68.40/£34.80) in the HE store, bringing the Macbook price up to £808.40 or £988 retail. That’s still including the other differences I’ve already mentioned.

Given all of this, it’s probably no surprise that they’ve been listed as “Don’t Buy! – Updates Soon” for a while now.

HE Software – huh?

After that, the really strange thing:

At the non-discount prices, iWork is £72 whether you buy it separately or as a build option.

Similarly for MS Office Home and Student 2011,

• on the normal store: £89.95 build to order, £109.95 family pack separately
• HE store: £76.80 BTO, £109.94 family pack separately
• £58.40 from Amazon, £37.89 from “Software4Students”, even if the site looks a bit iffy though they say they’re a MS Partner.

How does that make any sense?

1. yes, you could get RAM cheaper elsewhere; that’s beside the point [↩]

The weekend before last I did the unthinkable and bought one of those fruity tablet things – for what it matters, the 16 GB WiFi model¹.

It bought it from the store in Glasgow and it has to be said that the “experience”² was remarkably good. I’d reserved one online to collect on a Saturday and it was obviously going to be pretty busy but despite being warned I might need to wait it took a few minutes at most to find someone who was free. The person I got was partcularly helpful and all told I spent around an hour in there.

The actual collection process was a faff about. She needed to find a free computer and go to some webpage³ to get one of their stockroom imps to bring it out before we go and wait for them at the location specified then finally it’s to be paid for⁴.

She went through setting up email, a quick demo of some of the features (things like the multitasking bar weren’t immediately obvious if I hadn’t RTFM) and a few suggestions (things like http://ipad.tvcatchup.com/ and saving a bookmark of the user guide to the home screen). All basic stuff, but it was nice to get that introduction rather than “here it is, give us your money, go away”. Vertical integration FTW, I suppose.

On to the device itself – in general I’m surprised to say I actually quite like it! Beforehand, I’d been researching the return policy and, at least subconsciously, expecting I’d hate it and want to get rid.

If I had to change one thing it would be the screen – a higher resolution would make text a lot nicer to read. On the other hand, no other device does any better (for example, the Motorola Xoom: near enough the same pixel density albeit at a different aspect ratio).
I still don’t get why you’d want to watch videos on it (besides the sort of casual YouTube browsing that works on a phone). The screen’s AR is just wrong and although it doesn’t eat up battery power quite like I expected it to, it just seems like a bad idea. I know some people do it, though.

One real surprise, having used (and written apps for) an Android phone, is the size of apps. The storage space appears to be contiguous (rather than internal/external but built in/SD like on Android) so it seems less of an issue for iOS apps to be much bigger. For example, I’ve got Angry Birds installed on both devices: on Android, the app is <20MB (dropping to ~2MB if the "move to SD" option is used) whereas the iOS version is ~50MB. There are video cookbook apps which are coming on for 1GB!

The title's partly inspired by the reaction I've had from some people -- someone described it as a "dirty little secret" , another seems to have gone running⁵ saying I'd "abandoned my principles" (?!).

One last thing – 670MB software update, for a point release (4.3.2), what the hell?

1. I didn’t see much point paying the extra for 3G; I have a phone that will work as a wifi hotspot and a tablet’s not something I can see me taking out of the house *that* often anyway [↩]
2. Not the best term; I’m exchanging money for a product not getting married [↩]
3. I hope it was internal, not that I can recall the address either way [↩]
4. What happened to the combined iPhone/card reader devices? This was a standard PIN pad [↩]
5. To her mother of all people...long story! [↩]

Every other year, Duncan Smeed holds “Gunk Dunc” — having water, wet sponges and the titular “gunk” chucked at him — to raise money for Comic Relief.

Some photos were taken¹:

Although after tipping this²:

some payback was had:

…and £770 was raised. All very good fun!

1. 500, circa 6GB’s worth! [↩]
2. gelatine, Irn Bru, custard powder, Bovril, food colouring, cornflour, golden syrup [↩]

I upgraded to an OS WMR100: about as close to a proper weather station as it gets. As well as measuring temperature and humidity like the RMS300, it also has wireless wind and rain gauges, the option for a UV sensor and sufficiently improved range that putting the sensors outdoors is feasible.

Finding a suitable place to put the outdoor parts¹ was awkward but generally it all works.
There are a few issues: the signal from the wind gauge can be quite flaky² and the cover on the temperature sensor is plastic so quite poor at stopping the sun getting through.
Ideally, the two would be in separate places so that one could be in clear space and the other shaded.

Like before, I use the WMR100 USB client to get data from the console and dump it in a text file then parse it but store data in PostgreSQL and use matplotlib to draw graphs rather than rrdtool for both.

The combination has some advantages³. It’s a huge dataset to deal with⁴ so a lot of work had to be done to get processing fast enough to be usable.
Lots of time was spent with the Python profiler and PG query analyzer, adding table indexes and looking for slow code.

Data also goes to Weather Underground – they do a load of analysis and graph drawing that I haven’t get around to.

1. the temperature sensor and wind gauge are designed to be mounted on a (included) pole; the rain gauge is meant to sit close to ground level with screws to make sure it’s level; both should be in open space [↩]
2. the console is well inside range though there are walls which will affect that [↩]
3. rrdtool doesn’t really work for rain data; mpl is a lot more customizable although the documentation sucks [↩]
4. a month’s worth of wind speed/direction data is 192k data points if every measurement is received, there are roughly 4 million lines in data.log right now and it grows at a rate of 19 thousand lines a day [↩]

I meant to post this long before now but other stuff and general procrastination got in the way.

So last year it seemed like a good idea to take some kind of look at the year that had just gone, through the lens of the stats I gather on Daytum. This is the same again for the year that’s about to end.
I suppose these are like a much duller version of Nicholas Felton’s annual reports. Getting to the point, a comparison between this year and last:

So the tl;dr version: twice as much tea (six cups a day!?) and water, lots less orange juice.

The other stuff I mentioned last year:

• 442 car journeys (about twice every 2 days)
• 132 shaves (about twice every 5 days)
• 250 bus journeys (i.e. 2 every 3 days)

Last time I said I’d like an S60-native interface; since then I’ve done away with my Nokia N96 for an HTC Desire (running Android). An iPhone app recently entered some sort of beta and apparently the API is “built out enough for the iphone app” that they could give access to it but there’s no sign of that so far.

I also said I’d struggle to justify the price of a “pro” account – eventually I wanted more “displays” (views into the data to which some criteria can be applied, e.g. a pie chart of drinks in the last year) so I upgraded.
The privacy options were a nice addition but I’m not sure that privacy is something you should have to pay for.

It feels as if progress on the whole site has slowed to a crawl — I’m not sure whether the issue is time, finance or something completely different.

In part two I said I hadn’t done humidity yet. Now I have – it was fairly easy to do and I was short of something better to do in the wee hours of the morning.

Twelve hours:

One day:

I was asked in #bitfolk whether the station did anything other than temperature and I remembered that WSDL gave the dew point so thought I might as well add that too.

The maths required to calculate dew point and the background information is given in the Wikipedia article but for want of an excuse to use the LaTeX plugin for WordPress, the dew point is given by:

Where is given by

The bottom pair of lines in the temperature graphs in the last post show the dew point.

So nearly a week ago I got a weather station. Since then, I’ve hacked up some Python to deal with the temperature data and spew it into graphs. I haven’t got to doing the same with the humidity data, that can be Part Trois…

Anyway, graphs (update every 15 minutes). The last 24 hours:

The last week:

If anyone’s particularly interested I could post the Python that does this. It’s not the most exciting (or, I don’t doubt, the most well-written) code in the entire world but there’s probably someone weird enough to want to see how dire a job I can do of chopping a string up.
I added some optimisation to only parse lines which haven’t been seen before using a temp file so after the initial run the longest part is now uploading the images.

Apparently weather stations are a “conversation killer, if there ever was one!!!”. Who would have thought it?

I’ve wanted to set up/build a weather station for a while; lazyness and apathy were mostly what stopped me. Last week, I bit the bullet and bought an Oregon Scientific RMS300 (change from 35 quid from OS themselves).
It comes in two parts: a base station with a screen and built in temperature/humidity sensor and an included wireless sensor (by default labelled “outside” as a serving suggestion).

The supplied (via download) software, “OS Weather”, is…pretty shit. It doesn’t work on Windows 7 (“trial version” available “end of June”, apparently) and I couldn’t be bothered setting up a virtual machine to screw about with it.

Next up was Weather Station Data Logger. It’s good, but I have more than enough machines running 24/7 without adding a Windows one (and again don’t particularly want a Windows VM). I have machines which do run near-enough-24/7 but run Debian GNU/Linux so the ideal solution would run under that and ideally headless.

Enter the WMR100 module which will do all the work of getting the data out of the base station and its wireless sensors and present them in a fairly easy to manipulate format:

DATA[20100622001211]:type=TEMP,sensor=0,smile=0,trend=,temp=24.7,humidity=42,
dewpoint=0.0

Next magic trick will be to get the data I collected with WSDL and the data that’s being collected with WMR100, stick it all together in some way, and start getting it into graphs of some description. rrdtool‘s the obvious candidate.

Almost a year ago, I signed up for daytum.com.

The premise of the site derives from Nicholas Felton‘s “annual reports” (linked in the previous post) – keep track of something you do (trips to the gym, drinks, distance walked, whatever; at one point I noticed someone was tracking their trips to the toilet and what they did while they were there…) and the site presents it with some pretty graphs in the same sort of visual style as he uses and also with some basic analysis (time since the last entry etc.). To be honest, I didn’t expect to keep it up (fnar) for anywhere near a year, but for some reason I’ve found it strangely compelling.

To the numbers…

After a year, I suppose now is as good a time as any to have a look at some of the numbers. From New Year’s Day 2009 to midnight on the 28th December, I’ve had:

1. 958 cups of tea
2. 719 glasses of water (with or without diluting juice)
3. 620 glasses of orange juice
4. 474 glasses of Irn Bru

after that, the quantities get a lot smaller (best of the rest: 192 cups of coffee; keeping up the rear: 4 bottles of M&S Christmas Orange/Grape/Cranberry stuff).

That still means, though, that in an average day I get through about 3 cups of tea, 2 glasses of water, 2 glasses of orange juice and a glass of Irn Bru (amongst other things).

Some other stuff I tracked:

1. circa. 485 car journeys (1.34 a day)
2. 230 bus journeys (almost twice every 3 days)
3. 141 shaves (i.e. twice in five days, or once every 2 weekdays if you assume every time was on one)

New things I’d like to see

On the last part, one feature that I think might be useful, analytically, would be separating weekends and weekdays or perhaps taking account of the academic year (i.e. separate terms or term-time and otherwise) Daytum do let you download the data in CSV format, so it’s possible to deal with those issues; I just can’t really be bothered doing it myself.
One other feature I’d use would be a more native interface for my current mobile OS, Symbian S60. Not having to use the phone’s web browser and the iPhone interface (which works relatively well, in fairness) would be nice. Daytum are apparently working on an API though, so it should be possible to build some sort of application to do it.

The last thing is the future – what Cool New Thing™ should I start tracking this year?
I think I’d be interested in the total distance I travel, or better still a breakdown of time and/or distance in a car/on a train/walking. I’ve toyed with using Nokia Sports Tracker on my phone (Nokia N96 all-black) but it flattens the battery in no time at all because it insists on using the phone’s GPS and data connection – a whole day would take a miniature fusion reactor to keep it going. Which kinda sucks.

Something I think Daytum could do better at is showcasing the novel things people use the service for.
There’s a premium version, which gets you more features (separate your stuff into pages, some privacy settings) as well as more categories and items to store data with. I use the free version, mostly because I’d struggle to justify the cost (four US Dollars per month). If I bumped against some of the limits of the free account (here’s the opportunity to promote novel, or otherwise, uses and make some money out of it), I’d consider upgrading.

A week past on Saturday I went to Glasgow’s Zombie Walk to take photos of the brain-munching undead…it was fun, and here’s hoping next year’s even better!

Some of the photos I took that have made it to Flickr so far…