On Pickleball and Video Recording

For those who may not know, I own a completely private and non-commercial building with 3 pickleball courts in it. I love pickleball and love to play and decided I wanted to have a great place to play at home, so I built it. And along the way I decided I wanted to be able to get video from my courts easily. So I started working on ways to do that, starting with an iPhone mount on the wall, then a GoPro, but ultimately I needed better.

First, a description of the video system. I started by simply adding a camera from my Unifi Protect security NVR setup to a pickleball court. Using that, I could go back and get games. But I quickly realized I didn’t really want games, what I wanted was to be able to mark a timestamp easily to find interesting points…Nasty Nelsons, body bags, or just long fun points or amazing shots. You can go back and see some clips on Instagram by hitting up the @picklebarnes account.

I cooked up an idea in conjunction with my son, Kevin. We figured out how to make the “Action Button” on my Apple Watch drop a timestamp in a Notes file on my iPhone. Worked pretty well for a time, but then two things happened: first, Apple broke it. Like as in some OS update literally broke the ability to make the timestamp appear in a Notes file. But on top of that, I also added a camera to *each* of my three pickleball courts, which was another problem altogether because now I had three places I would have needed to search for my clip since my Timestamp didn’t have a way to know which court.

I could have probably done some Siri magic to do something like “Hey Siri, add the current time and Court number 2 to my Notes file for pickleball clips” and maybe most of the time it would have happened. But I didn’t want to be stopping play to do that. And I hate talking to Siri anyway.

So I came up with a new system. I bought six Flic buttons and the Flic Hub. These are pretty small buttons that each have their own coin battery that should last a couple years and can stick to a surface. I then laser cut and engraved a nice little sign to stick them on that basically says you can push this button if something just happened that you would like a video clip of. And I put one of these on each end of each court. But what actually happens when you press the button?

Nothing as cool as you might expect. All the button press does is drop a court number and a date and timestamp in a Google Sheet. Which is a lot better than nothing! Sadly, at first setup there was no way to also get the seconds in the timestamp, just the current hour:minute.

So how to get the video from that? Well, first I’d take a screenshot of the Google Sheet and crop it to JUST the event as a whole (so anywhere from a couple presses to maybe 30 if it was a big group playing) and save that to my Photos. That serves two purposes…one, it’s an obvious marker in my Photos between events, because I am often grabbing the clips from several different days of events at the same time, and since these are video exports, they go into my Photos as new events, NOT as events that happened when they really happened. That is to say if I go get several days in a row, they all just show up the day I get them as one long stream. So the screen shot between each event makes an obvious break in my Photos roll. The other purpose is an easy to follow list. You see, getting the clips from my NVR is easiest using the iPad app. And to ease my workflow, what I’ll usually do is use my iPhone to view the list and my iPad to grab each clip.

So with my iPhone list in hand, I fire up the Protect app on my iPad, then I have to select the court camera I want to grab clips from. Then I have to select the date to go back in time to the right day. Then I have to scroll to the minute BEFORE my timestamp, because often that’s when the point started that I was after. I usually scrub to about 20s before the minute of my stamp and start watching. Sometimes it’s obvious I’m already in the middle of the point I want, so I go back and start further back. Otherwise I keep watching and mentally noting the start time of each point that happens until I DEFINITELY get to the spot I want (it’s usually obvious from the point itself, but if not then you can also see the person on video go for the button, in which case it’s the point just before that). Then I hit the button to “video archive” and then I have to scrub the start marker to the time I mentally noted, then the end marker to the end of the point. Then click “Download.” Wait for that to finish, then hit the back button to move back to the main timeline, then move to the next time slot on the list and repeat. For each camera in the list (there will usually only be one camera for a foursome, because we almost always pick a court and stay on it…but for groups, there could be presses intermixed on all courts).

So as you can imagine, that’s a lot of clicking in and out to get each clip. A typical foursome probably averages six or seven clips and I’d say that takes me about 15 minutes just to get the clips.

Then I made a conscious choice that it would be fun to share them via Instagram instead of just sending them to everyone involved. That created an entirely new workflow. I’ll be less precise here, but just say this: it was about 2.5 times the amount of time just grabbing the clips took to make the posts *good*. And by “good” I mean the algorithm liked them enough to push to random people. Getting the edit cuts just right plus adding some text that made at least light fun of a person or what was going on got the most exposure always. And at the peak I was getting 1.3M hits per month. Yes, MILLION.

But ultimately that just attracted assholes in the comments and didn’t generate any actual value other than, yes, people could see their clips and their friends could also see them. But at a tremendous time cost to me. As it grew it seemed worth it, but at a certain point it finally wasn’t worth it and I just stopped posting.

Ultimately I did decide to start just texting people involved their clips directly, which has gone fine. And while once I started doing that it seemed like I was “winning” because it took a lot LESS time than before, it also still took significant time and started feeling like a bit of a burden. What I needed was more automation. But let’s back up a bit…

A while back a friend pointed me to SwingVision, which can analyze pickleball matches quite well. The one caveat is that it requires 60 frame-per-second (fps) video. The reason is simple…the pickleball can move pretty fast at times and it needs to be able to see exactly where it bounced. At 30fps the ball simply moves too fast and you can often have the bounce happen completely between frames and so far away that even reasonable extrapolation can’t tell you for sure if it hit the line or was outside the line.

iPhones and GoPros can easily do 60fps (or higher), but introduce a LOT of complexity in trying to use them for this. For one, to get them in the right position requires putting them on a mount high enough that they require a stepladder. And you have to make sure you align it properly and hit start and stop and then gather the video from the device and a whole bunch of nonsense that happens around the playing that’s just, frankly, frustrating on its own. The NVR and built-in cameras is just way better since they are always recording. The problem is that the only “security cameras” that can do this are either hard to find or VERY expensive. Fortunately some sleuthing turned up an Axis camera that’s no longer sold, but is very available used on eBay for around $150 each or less.

I bought one of those and then setup an open source NVR called Frigate to do the recording. At first it looked very promising and I was actually able to get a usable game from it, but at some point things went sideways and it took a few hours of troubleshooting to make the cameras pretty solid at shooting 60fps. Once done, now I basically had a higher quality video system that was no better than the original in how much time it took ME to get the video from it.

But along this time I had started experimenting with Home Assistant, an open source home automation package that’s really great at being the glue for automating all sorts of things. It knows how to talk to things like Frigate, Flic buttons, the Protect security cameras, and much more. So I had Claude help me convert the Flic buttons from simple timestamp-dropping to actually have Frigate just export the last 60s or 120s (single or double-tap the button) before each button press into its exports container, which works great. Frigate has a reasonable web interface for downloading those, which by itself would save me a good bit of time grabbing clips that are “very close.” 

But I wanted even better, so I had Claude write me an app for the iPhone/iPad to manage the Frigate exports. So it will load whatever Frigate has into a nice list with thumbnails and I can download those to the app. Once in the app, I can very easily trim them down to the proper size. If I find that the export didn’t quite get enough footage, it’s very easy to hit a button and download it again with 30s added to it. Then once trimmed to the clip I want, if I find that I really want that same clip from one of the Protect cameras (which are on the other side from the Frigate cameras, as well as the center court having an aerial camera), I can click one button and it goes and grabs the exact same time range from those cameras, too, and imports them to the app.

Once I have all the clips in the app that I want, I can share them directly via the normal iOS “share sheet”, which means generating an email or text message is super easy. And I can also save them all directly to my Photos roll. Bang, workflow taken from 15 minutes to more like 2, if that. It’s entirely possible to ship the videos to the participants before they can change shoes and walk out the door!

And there we have it. Video captured on the Axis Q3517 that was pulled via a single button press, then processed using my iPadOS app completely. It's pretty perfect at this point and makes this process so much easier. I may go back to posting some things on Instagram, even!

My first from-scratch project with my 3D printer

After much research on 3D printers, I settled on the $750 "CTC" one off eBay.  It's a clone of the original Makerbot Replicator, and I suspect it's made by the same factory that originally made the Replicator for Makerbot.  Makerbot has moved on to fancier and more expensive units, but in my research I just couldn't seem to justify the extra cost for the final product.  In fact, I looked at possibly spending at much as $15,000 on a printer, and yet still settled on this $750 unit.

It really seems like you have to step up to $20,000+ printers to do significantly better things than this CTC printer can do.  You would need to be running it constantly, and I'm merely a hobbyist who was looking to learn a few things and perhaps make a few things that could really be used in the real world.

I started out printing a few things I found on Thingiverse.  I'm kind of surprised more people don't just grab things from there and pay to have them printed at sites like Shapeways.  Before I bought my own printer, I did do 3D model of an enclosure I wanted and had Shapeways print it.  The service takes several days including shipping, but it's not terribly expensive and the quality is quite good.  But all it did was whet my appetite to be able to print my own things NOW.  Enter the research and the purchase of the CTC printer.

The first few prints included some mediocre iPhone cases as well as a cool little GoPro mount, seen here:

Not the most complex thing, but it actually works pretty well.  Here's one used to adapt my mountain bike headlamp to work on the GoPro mount of my bike helmet:

The material is VERY strong and fairly lightweight, too.  If there's a downside it's that the color palette is a bit limited and the time to print is pretty slow.  This little item takes about 25 minutes just to print, but setup and everything included makes it more like an hour for the first one and about 35 minutes for each one after.
 

 A fun thing to do is add a second video camera on the bow of the boat.  Unfortunately there's no good way to do that on these particular boats (and we've tried several different sit-on-top kayaks for surfing, and these seem to work better than most for a 200 pound adult).  So I set out to make something that would work in place of the grab handle in the front.

Here are the parts as I designed them in Sketchup:

 And assembled in place with a GoPro on the boat:

Normally the boat would have a small piece of plastic down where the string connects in this photo attached with a short screw.  I removed that and took the handle off that piece and put it on my GoPro mount.  Then I bolted everything through with a long bolt into the original hole.  It seems every bit as strong as before, except now there's a place to put a camera.  I normally use a chest cam for the best action, but a camera pointed back at the rider is a fun view, too.

There will be more almost-interesting things coming from my evil lab, but not until after the beach.

Brute Electronics

I may or may not have blogged about my AEV Brute before:


It's basically a 2006 Jeep Rubicon with a stretched frame and custom bodywork from AEV to make it a pickup truck. It's also got some other goodies like a 5.7L Hemi, 4.5" long arm lift kit, 37" tires, winches on both ends, etc.

I recently spent some time updating the electronics in it, though. First up was a new stereo headunit from JVC very similar to this one. All I wanted was something that had a built in HD FM tuner and front panel USB port that would operate my iPhone, and this one has it. We added a rear AUX input, too (you'll see why later). The real beauty of this headunit, I think, is that you have the choice of iPod control with the unit or you can leave the control on the iPod/iPhone itself. I prefer the iPhone interface, so I use that. The dash speakers were upgraded and I had a custom rear speakerbox built by the fine folks at Beechwood Metalworks:


That's the AEV logo in the speaker grills. Awesome work. The amps are buried inside the cabinet.

Next up I needed to add my HAM radio. The model I chose is the Yaesu FTM-350R. It has built in APRS functionality with the optional GPS unit, and it's a dual transceiver with crossband repeat functionality. All that adds up to allowing me to relay my mountain biking position from a small handheld through the more powerful mobile unit in my truck. In real time. I mounted the display, speaker, and GPS in the roof of the Brute:


I used a RAM bar mount and arm to mount directly to the top of the rollbar. Then I just used zip ties to mount the Yaesu external speaker to the rollbar. Finally, I put the GPS module in the alpine window for a great view of the sky. The main unit of the radio was mounted right on top of the speakerbox:


The microphone can just lay over the center console and I can use it perfectly. The wiring for the unit runs through a grommet in the top of the speakerbox. I haven't done it yet, but eventually I plan to wire the unit so that it turns on and off with the ignition switch unless I override it with a relay and switch I'll put in.

The antenna is mounted somewhat temporarily, currently. I just put it on a piece of aluminum and c-clamped it to the bed.


The final piece of this was to add mounts for my GPS and iPhone. I simply bolted RAM ball mounts into the tray on top of the dash. Then I used RAM arms and the Garmin 376C mount to put the GPS and iPhone on the dash:


Note the radar detector above the mirror. That's a Valentine 1, IMHO the best radar detector on the market. It's hard wired in to switched power. I used the visor mount turned around backwards and slid under the plastic trim that's above the windshield. To do that I had to take the curved piece off the plastic part that slides onto the V1. I then pulled the trim piece out some to get it in there, and reassembled. Then I used a small piece of sticky velcro to space it out to level it and help keep it from vibrating around.

Anyone who has tried to put a V1 in a Jeep knows that the suction cup mounts don't work well because the windshield is so vertical. It sits at the wrong angle. And the visor mount is fine except, well, you can't use the visor any more. There are mounts that hang from the rear view mirror that work fine, but they block your view significantly in a fairly important spot. This spot doesn't block anything (other than annoying sunlight that can penetrate over the mirror and isn't blockable by the visors, and that's a good thing!).

Here's a final shot that shows the XM puck that the Garmin uses. It's magnetic and stuck to the windshield frame. It's wire is perfectly sized to just push into the gap between the hinge and the windshield frame, which wraps around the corner and just goes into the door jam through the weatherstripping. It goes right into the dash and under the defrost venting over to the middle where it plugs into the GPS:


I'm really loving this setup. The speaker is right near my head, but nowhere I can hit it. That's good, since I can leave the volume low to monitor things while still having the radio on. The controls are very easy to reach and highly visible right above the visor. Yes, it's a lot of visible electronics for theives, but the Jeep is equipped with a full alarm system with power door locks and hard doors and hard top.

Also note that the XM radio on the GPS is piped into the stereo via that rear panel auxiliary input we put on the stereo. The beauty of the Garmin 376C with XM is that it gets realtime weather radar information via XM radio and overlays that on the GPS map. It also puts the turn-by-turn navigation information on top of the XM radio, so if you're using navigation and listening to XM you can't miss any of your directions.

It's possible that I could have used a serial output on my Garmin GPS to the input of the Yaesu HAM radio instead of installing the optional GPS unit. That solution would have taken more hours of work than it was worth given the relatively low cost of the Yaesu add-on. I also consider it a good redundancy to have two GPSs in a vehicle like this. The Yaesu doesn't do navigation, really, but it does show direction, speed, and position, and could be very handy if the Garmin fails. The iPhone has GPS, too, but I really don't feel great relying on that. It's another good backup, though.

Review of the iPad

Well, I know everyone and their brother has already done a review, but I can't resist throwing my two cents in, so here goes...

I really like it. Why? The huge screen, relatively light weight, and incredible battery life. Okay, great, but what does it DO? Well, that's the big question now, isn't it? It's a great web surfing tool. Okay, but you've probably got something for that already. It's a great email reader, and a good email sending device if you mostly send short messages or don't mind adding the optional keyboard. Okay, but you probably already have that covered, too. It's a really nice picture viewing device. And video viewing device. And gaming device. And book reader. And calendar. And note taker. And a whole lot of things.

But nothing you can't already do with a laptop, right? Well, the thing is it does all that better than a laptop. Sure, there are things it won't do that a laptop will, but the things it does are all done exceedingly well. And in a light form factor with a battery that will last OVER 10 hours! Not many laptops can even come close to that.

What can't it do? Things like video editing, running Windows applications, or even someone every day tasks like running Quickbooks. Is there a killer application that makes it a "must have"? Not yet. But the thing you do get is the App Store, which will likely mean there will be a killer app or forty at your disposal soon. What do I dig now? The ABC app, the Wall Street Journal app, the fact that the email client in some ways is better than the OSX one, and how much better viewing video is than on the iPhone/Touch. The Blogpress app is pretty good for entries like this, but I had to add the picture using my Mac.

What doesn't it do yet that it will? Multitasking, a proper Facebook app (don't get me wrong, you can use Safari to do Facebook fine, but the iPhone app is better than using the web in many ways, and I expect we'll soon see an iPad app that's of the same ilk), and printing. There are some workarounds for printing from some applications, but hopefully we'll be able to print from the iWork suite. It just seems really odd to me that you can create and exchange documents so easily yet if you want to print one you have to send it to another machine first.

Does everyone need to rush right out and get one? Not really. But if you have a need for a space friendly device with good battery life that will let you surf the web, do email, and generally entertain you, I can't think of anything better. And heck, even the TSA is getting friendly saying it's not a big enough computer that they want you to take it out of your carry-on bag at the security checkpoint. That's worth something to me, right there.

One hole I hope gets filled is navigation. It should be MUCH easier for someone to build and market a dashboard friendly mount for this device so that the GPS enabled 3G version (coming in about a month) can be used as a navigation device (or the current version with an external GPS). The screen size will be much better than most of the off-the-shelf units, and the fact that it can also be your music player is an added bonus. I don't think it'll be more than a couple months before we see something like this on the market, and likely several somethings like this.

Can it replace a Kindle? Depends. If looking at "computer screens" for long periods doesn't bother your eyes, yes. If, however, you find that "computer screens" bother you and something like the Kindle's special screen doesn't, then no. It's a beautiful screen, but it is still basically "just an LCD." The Kindle is special in this regard, and if you need that particular feature of the Kindle then you need a Kindle. Unfortunately the only way to know if this device will bother you is to spend a few hours reading on one, but supposedly Apple does have a good return policy on in-store purchases. The iBook reader is a free application, and there are even some timeless classics you can download to it for free to give it a try. So you can, in effect, try it out for free to see if it will work for you. They've sold a half million of them in less than a week, so you might know someone who will loan you one, too. Nah, few people are going to let these babies out of their hands for quite some time.

-- Posted from my iPad, mostly

** EDIT: Shoot, I should have tried to put the picture in with the iPad. It's totally possible, and not even that hard. You just switch to your browser, find the picture you want to put in your block, touch and HOLD your finger on it, select "Save" from the menu that pops up. Then you have your image saved in your image library and can select it with the Blogpress app. Dang, should have known it was that easy!

Apple's Fail and Win

First, the win: The App Store. With the App Store, Apple has setup the iPhone and now the iPad to be "game changers." If there's a piece of software that can make the device a winner, someone will likely create it and shove it into the App Store. And that amazing "community" (and it is a community of sorts, thanks to the fact that it's so easy for users to contribute and things to bubble up thanks to reviews and intelligent pricing) is what can totally shape demand for a product.

How did they do it? They created the hardware, then they created an operating system for the hardware along with the Software Development Kit (SDK) that any developer could use to very easily create an application, and then there is the relatively pain-free process of submitting your application to the App Store where Apple will sell it for you and distribute your revenue to you. Yes, I admit that there has been some problems between developers and Apple over problems with the App Store, but you have to admit that on the whole the model has worked very well for both parties. Apple does continue to listen to developers and add facilities developers need to continue to push the envelope, too.

Articles today about the iPad launch are pointing to the fact that a lot of people in line to buy first day iPads are doing so only because they'd "buy anything Apple sells" and thus are just lemmings. I submit that the App Store is mostly to blame for this kind of thinking, though. They know that there already are apps for it and there will be even more apps for it and are counting on those to make the device something they will treasure. You can already stream Netflix to it, watch TV from ABC, read USA Today and NY Times news, and it has complete eBook functionality including an App for those who already have Kindle eBooks. With most of that being completely free. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that they've already got the thing serving some pretty significant markets. It won't just be a success because of some lemmings.

Where does the App Store go next? Only Apple knows. I'm surprised they haven't tried to push it a little more for the Mac platform myself.

Now, the fail: Apple is far too limiting on the hardware integration side. They simply haven't embraced anything resembling an open model for allowing other companies to integrate the iPhone, iPod Touch, and now iPad in with their hardware. The first sign of this was how closed the Bluetooth is on the iPhone. It allows you to connect your iPhone to a Bluetooth headset, but the rest of the Bluetooth API is closed to third party developers. This means no Bluetooth keyboards, no syncing to a computer via Bluetooth, and no talking to a whole host of other Bluetooth devices that were starting to appear on the market. There were many $50 devices out there that were Bluetooth that manufacturers have now made into $150 wifi devices just to talk to the iPhone. This is not a win for consumers, obviously. Bluetooth is a perfect mechanism for a digital camera to get GPS information from your iPhone so it can geotag your photos, for instance. But Apple makes that impossible, even though all the building blocks exist already.

The problem runs much deeper than Bluetooth. Apple very closely licenses its dock connector, so anyone who wants to connect to it must pay Apple and go through a process to validate what they want to do with the device. So far this has been very limited. We've seen alarm clocks and a few basic stereo docks, but little more. Will we see refrigerators let you dock your iPad for easy recipe access and podcast playing? Will we ever see an aftermarket car stereo where the face is just an iPhone dock? Will we ever have the ability to control any aftermarket device via the dock part in a generic form? Ie. RS-232? There are currently a ton of possible industrial uses for the iPhone/Touch/iPad that we can't even try thanks to Apple closing up their serial port. The bigger problem is not the things I have thought of that we're missing, but the things the truly inventive hardware folks might find that would really kick some serious butt. They're not even trying, because they know Apple won't let it happen.

I don't know why Apple doesn't want third parties to let people control their devices with Apple products. Seems to me they've been a perfect mass market device that they'd sell even more of if they would. But for some strange reason they just won't embrace third party hardware like they have third party software. Could it be that they just can't take the step into a realm where they don't (and can't) have the level of control they have now with the App Store? I don't know, but it's pretty maddening to those of us who can see all kinds of awesome uses for these devices only to have an Apple roadblock in the way of making it happen.

Confusing the message with the delivery vehicle!

So, I genuinely love my man, Chris Grams. I'm pretty sure we first met when he was hired at Red Hat, but somehow we have several non-Red Hat mutual friends we've since found. I don't see Chris often (not nearly often enough, that's for sure), but I do follow him in the social networking scene. So when this post popped up on his blog, I had to respond.

Normally, one might respond to a specific post like his through the comment section of the original site. I'm not doing that because I haven't updated my own blog enough lately. pause Okay, that's not true...I'm really doing it here because I'm going to disagree with him somewhat vehemently yet at the same time I believe his general point is still valid. It's more the metaphor and some of the quotation I don't agree with. Oh, and I'm also putting it here because this is a topic that my Dad and I were discussing just a few days ago (no kidding).

I had already noticed a trend that traditional albums on vinyl (or LPs, as they are commonly called) had started to make a bit of a comeback. It's long been known that serious musicians haven't given up on tube-type amplifiers, either. In fact, there was a long period where there were no mass produced turntables being made, yet now you can walk into any Restoration Hardware and buy one (thanks to the fact that the Beatles stuff was re-released recently). Chris points this trend out as well, and goes on to give some of the reasons why people are going "lo-fi" (which is short for "low fidelity", the opposite of the trend toward higher fidelity sound systems based on digital music and such).

I just don't get it. These days one can record with incredible accuracy for cheap. There's simply nothing stopping you from sitting in a basement with a dog on the floor and getting a precise recording of "the best stuff." So why would you then dilute your "best stuff" by sending it out the door via what's not only lower quality, but adds errors (cracks and pops)? To me that's using lo-fi to help hide your own flaws that might happen in your "best stuff." And if you do that, aren't you being less "authentic"?

Okay, I do get why someone would want to listen to a 1966 recording via LP. In fact, I see both sides of that coin. There's obviously a market for the remastered stuff for the folks who don't care, but it most definitely is more authentic to listen to it as everyone had to in 1966. What I don't get is why anyone would want to do that with a modern recording. You're just diluting your own authenticity, in my opinion, by lowering the quality of your product intentionally. (And for the record, pun intended, I'm the proud owner of a Seeburg jukebox that sits in my basement full of original vinyl that I dearly love.)

I think you can be "real" as a musician and still release your music in unaltered digital form. I think you can be fake in recording in a studio, obviously. But you can also be fake by recording in your basement with your laptop, editing to high heaven, and then releasing on vinyl. The vinyl and the CD and iTunes are all just vehicles. The vehicle does not define the message. It can't enhance the message, but it can take away. So what's the real reason for the resurgence of vinyl? I think it's just a cool fad. Nothing more.

How a company markets is no different than how authentic a musician chooses to be. A company can go hire a big corporate ad agency and end up with a lie as an advertisement that's nothing more than actors saying what writers who are completely disconnected with the actual company tell them to say. Then they can edit to complete "perfection." But I think we've seen companies hire big corporate ad agencies and get "authentic" advertisements using real employees and real messages. We've seen plenty of companies get even more "authentic" by doing contests to let customers create their advertisements for them and show the winner during the superbowl! The spectrum is there, and a company can certainly do a good job of getting their message out in a lo-fi way.

I'm a big HAM!

So a week ago I took the test for the Technician Class amateur radio license. I passed, and today I received my first callsign, KJ4RIC. I'll probably get a vanity callsign, but for now, that's my unique ID on the airwaves! Made my first transmission on the OCRA 442.150 repeater this afternoon thanks to a lot of help from Troy getting the radio setup properly. There's nothing terribly hard about it, but just a lot of little details to get figured out. Fun stuff!

Still getting my feet wet figuring everything out. Looks like some pretty neat stuff will be possible. At the very least I'll now be much safer when I mountain bike as I'll have communication capability pretty much everywhere.

Car racing heart rate data

So, I wore my Garmin 405 GPS and heart rate data logger during a session at the race track today. What's interesting is we did a "mock" race start during this session and I don't see any extra spike thanks to it. But my heart rate is in the 140's on average for the driving portion (had to start the data pretty early before even getting in the car and getting belted up).

That's actually a little higher than I thought it would be. Given the temperatures we see inside the car, it's easy to see why race car driving should be considered a sport. I can't sustain that kind of heart rate while paddling a kayak! Anyway, check out the data. I'm curious what others think. The dip at the end in speed to zero was a pit stop to change the rear wing angle on the car and then we went back out to see what effect it had.

(And in case you care, the 158 and the 223MPH speeds are data errors. Earlier in the day we were seeing 132 or so, but that's near the max that car can do at VIR.)

iPod Fitness Earphones

So a lot of companies, including Nike, have fitness headphones and earphones for the iPod. So far, however, nobody but Apple has any with the controls built in (please send me links to other products if I'm wrong!). That's only important for users of the newest iPod Shuffle, because it only has a power switch. Everything else is controlled by the little "stick" on the right earphone cable, which basically has three squeeze buttons. That keeps the unit tiny and easy to pack away somewhere, as well as making it really easy to control while running or biking or whatever.

The problem with the Apple ones is that sweat can render the control useless until it dries back out. The other problem is that they don't like to stay in your ears (and Apple only has in-ear earphones, I believe). The ones that come with the iPod go in your ear, but not really into the canal. They won't stay in during exercise, in my experience. The higher end Apple earphones actually extend into the ear canal and come with three different sized cups. They work fine for a lot of stuff, and might work well for the right sized ears during exercise. For me, however, they wouldn't stay in while running or biking.

I decided to take matters into my own hands and customize mine. I took a set of real earplugs (the kind that you squeeze with your fingers and stick in your ears where they expand to fit) and cut them to about the same length as the cups that came with the earphones. Then I used a soldering iron with a fine tip and melted a hole through the center. Careful here as supposedly the fumes from this kind of foam can be very toxic! Some trial and error and one wasted set of earphones (they're cheap in bulk!) got me a set that would stay on the earphones very well and also stay inside my ears just about no matter what I do. They also cancel ambient noise VERY well. That's great for airplanes and such, but BE VERY CAREFUL using something like this for exercise. I wouldn't use these if you run or bike on a road. I only use mine on trail and on a very tiny private road, and even then I'm VERY careful. You really can't hear anything else.

The problem with sweat was significant, too. There are probably a lot of different ways to solve this one, but the one I chose was to cut some clear plastic from a ziploc baggy and wrap around the button "stick." I made the plastic about an inch longer than the stick so it went a half inch on each end. Then I used some 3/8" dental rubber bands to go around each end to seal it up (thanks for the rubber bands, Shelley!). Seemed to solve the problem fine, and I can still use the buttons while running and biking. You can see everything below.

Wii Motion Plus!

Yeah, so I'm following up a Health Care Reform post with a post about a video game system. So sue me.

But the Wii Motion Plus is very cool. It definitely adds more realism to the Wii controller for games that support it, and Wii Sports Resort is a HUGE improvement over the already much-loved Wii Sports pack. Not only do you get a new 18 hole golf course, but the game is much more realistic in the swing. I'm not sure I'm a huge fan of that now as I really liked the old game, but I'm guessing it'll grow on me.

The new games are pretty killer. The jet-ski game is fun, basketball rocks, and there are a ton of games I haven't even tried yet. Currently there seems to be no problem getting Wii Sports Resort (which includes one Wii Motion Plus controller add-on). Target had them in the video game section and a huge pile of them at the check-out line! What was missing was additional Wii Motion Plus controllers, however. Not sure if those are available elsewhere. I wanted Tiger Woods 2010, and they had that in stock both by itself and with one Wii Motion Plus, and the one with the WMP was only $10 more, so I got that so we'd have two controllers. So one can presume that additional WMPs will be fairly cheap when available by themselves.

So for all you Wii fans or those on the fence, get on this. You won't regret it.

Hello, Apple, time to wake up!

Dear Apple,

Your anti-Google policies are alienating users fast. Last week it was reported that the Google Latitude application was rejected because it might confuse people with the native Maps application. Confuse who? The people that CHOOSE to download and install it? Please. Give me a break. So now we have to use a somewhat crippled version over the browser. But the point here is that the latitude functionality is something the native Maps application DOESN'T EVEN HAVE. Plus, the native Maps application is based on the maps from Google anyway. Just let us have our latitude without having to run it in the browser for crying out loud.

The bigger complaint here is Google Voice. This has been rejected completely and it's not likely it can be done as a web-only service. Sure, we'll be able to get to parts of it via the web, but you likely won't be able to make a voice call that way. You've already seen fit to allow for VOIP applications in the App Store as long as they don't use the cell data connection, just wifi. Okay, fine, but Google Voice is no different than this (well, except for being BETTER). Come on, let us have Google Voice. You really can't say this is a threat to AT&T service. If people would consider dumping their cell coverage altogether on an iPhone, well, they can already do that with an iPod Touch (yes, you need a headset currently, but rumors seem to indicate you won't need to do that any longer with the next Touch generation).

Come on, get with it, and let customers have the full funcationality provided by the hardware. Locking things up like this is playing silly corporate games at the expense of the end user and could only serve to make Android devices that much more compelling to us down the road. Don't go there. It's gonna bite you.

How does this work?

How can an entire industry with millions of customers be terrible? You might have guessed I'm talking about the cellular telephone industry, but in reality I could be talking about several different sectors. I'm going to focus on the cellular industry in spite of the fact that it's so common for people to complain about their carrier that it has become quite tired to hear people do it. I mean who cares to hear about how bad someone else's carrier is when your own carrier is so bad?

The thing here is that it seems that every single carrier has serious customer service issues. Everything from the technical side of the world (no coverage in needed areas, data being slow, etc) all the way to a complete inability to solve basic problems with billing or even selling proper accessories. Companies have come and gone and consolidated and been acquired and sold and split in so many different ways it's crazy. But the only result of all this seems to be things stay the same or get worse, never better.

Companies only seem to get customers by acquiring them, by having an exclusive phone contract (can you say iPhone?), or having coverage in just the right place. But I think a poll of cellphone users would find that there are very few that don't have serious problems with their current cellphone carrier. That carrier just happens to "suck less" than everyone else.

So how does this happen? How can there be no room in the market for a company to actually do a good job of solving the customer's needs? I have no idea. I do know I don't see any of the current carriers doing anything much to make the situation better. AT&T doesn't seem to be expanding their current network to new areas, they're just making the data side faster where they currently are. Verizon is stuck with none of the new wave of awesome smartphones (iPhone and Palm Pre). Sprint has always had network coverage problems in big ways, so they went and bought Nextel, which was worse. Yeah, that makes sense.

My theory on how these things happen is that the stock market puts so much emphasis on growth yet very little on actual, oh, profit that companies make decisions based on growth. And when they have a captive customer base (we all require cellphones in our lives now), well, it's easier to acquire/merge/whatever than it is to do the right things to take your competitors customers. The contract model seems to also hurt their ability take customers with upgrades in actual customer service. Perhaps it's time to end that as a major business model? Or at least regulate the telco industry again? I really don't know, but I know there's something significantly broken right now when an industry so large can suck so bad.

Dear Apple,

I love your products in general and really don't want to sound like I'm whining, but I have a couple requests. The first is that the iPhone needs the ability to do unified messaging similar to the Blackberry. Yes, I'm sure you hate having your products compared to that of others, and I'd point out that the Blackberry isn't perfect at it. You can improve it. But it would be so nice to have the ability to configure SMS, email, Facebook, Twitter, AIM, etc to all "go" to the same place. Now that you have push notification capability this should be easy to do. But since the main requirement for this to make sense is email, well, you're gonna have to lead the way here.

We also need iChat for the iPhone. Sure, you can get an AIM application, but I want a full iChat. Please include voice and video chat capability, too. And the ability to direct message files like pictures.

Add "shake to reload" as an option in Safari for the iPhone.

That's it, nothing major. Just a few tidbits that will make the greatest electronics gadget ever conceived by man just a little bit better.

I'm not cool enough to be a Mac person?

Huh? Oh, no, I'm not talking about me. I'm definitely cool enough to be a Mac person. Especially since I don't think you have to be cool to be a Mac person.

But apparently Microsoft is now targeting customers who "don't think [they're] cool enough to be a Mac person." That's the line in their latest advertisement, anyway. To me that says "if you are insecure, we want YOU as our customer!" Doesn't it? Most of the commercial is really about how much more Mac laptops cost than PC laptops, I know. But that part just struck me as really odd.

As for the cost thing, well, all I'm going to say about that is you get what you pay for.

UPDATE: I hate doing updates to existing blog posts, but it hasn't been long since I posted this and then I ran across this article about this same ad spot. Sheds a little more light, but doesn't change my initial point about Microsoft leaving that bit in the ad about her not being "cool enough."

Three mile trail run.

Okay, so I'm not setting any records here, but you can check out my latest run via Garmin Connect. The data was collected with the Garmin 405 GPS that's really just a watch. It really looks just like a watch. Has heart rate monitor capability, but you do have to use a chest strap for it. Works great, though. Nice gadget if you're into training. I'm going to start capturing all my workouts with it, even the indoor ones where I can't capture movement, just heart rate.

What am I going to do with the data? I have no idea. Suggestions? For now I think I'll just post it much like I do what I ate today for public scrutiny. It'll make me try harder. The question is whether I post the workouts here, on the food blog, or on a new one. Hmmph.

In search of the perfect watch

So at one point I thought an analog watched powered by your arm motion (dubbed "kinetic" by the watch industry) was the way to go. Many higher end watches like this, however, require you to set the date again at the end of every month that isn't 31 days, and what's worse make you crank through all 24 hours of the day to move forward a day (ie. you can't just set the day one day forward easily). I had both a Rolex and a Tag Heuer like this, and while both are great looking watches, I simply stopped wearing them because of this, and because if you did go a day or two without wearing them, you then had to wind and re-set them, and both are annoying to set. (Yes, I know you can get a "winder" box to fix this, but even those are annoying to put the watch in every time you take it off. I simply didn't do it.)

Having a cellphone does preclude the need for a watch these days, but I still occasionally thought it would be handy to have an actual watch on my arm. Besides, a good looking watch is a whole lot better looking than a cellphone. I wasn't actually searching for a watch when I saw a TV commercial for the Citizen Eco-Drive watches. I'm pretty agnostic when it comes to TV advertisements, but the watch in that ad just really caught my eye. So I started doing some research...

Turns out that "Eco-Drive" is a fancy name for "solar powered." The nice part, however, is that the watch doesn't look solar powered. The solar cells are embedded in the face in a very hidden fashion. Interesting. No batteries to worry about and no kinetic business. That also means the watch is electronic, so it turns out that setting it is easy. But since it's electronic, it can know what year it is and will always get the months right. Okay, great. But then I find they have a LOT of different Eco-Drive watches. Hundreds. Ugh.

Then I started to find there are different types. I've typically been interested in larger "diver" type watches, but only because of the look. I don't scuba dive and may never scuba dive. But upon further research, I found that there is also a "pilot" genre of watches. Interesting. Similar look to a diver's watch, but different features entirely. Like the bezel is actually a circular slide rule. Apparently pilots have long used circular slide rules because of their compact size in a cockpit for navigational calculations and watch companies started incorporating them into the bezel of a watch. Neat. I found a lot of different pilot watches I liked, and almost bought one.

Then I happened upon the smaller "race" genre. These are sort of a hybrid between a pilot's watch and a more powerful stopwatch. The Citizen Promaster series looked great to me. Upon further research, I found via forums that Citizen watches in the US didn't often come with sapphire crystals, just mineral (which scratches fairly easily). This was disheartening as I now found myself in the $500+ price range for an electronic watch that looked analog and couldn't get a good crystal. There was some chatter that perhaps it was possible to get the US repair shop to put a sapphire crystal in most models since most models were sold worldwide and the Asian market watches do have sapphire crystals, but nobody had confirmed you could do that.

I was fairly certain I wanted a titanium case and band in whatever I got, too, since in the size watch I was interested in the weight savings would be significant. So finally I zeroed in on the Citizen Promaster SST. Somehow in my travels I found that a while back Citizen had done a limited edition version of this very watch in black titanium. The icing on the cake was that this model also had a sapphire crystal! Oh, but where to find one. Turns out a few still sat unsold even though only 1500 were made. The original list price was $1,499.95 and I found a couple online retailers with them still listed at MSRP. But I found an eBay seller listing one for $950, which had been the going rate on eBay for them when they came out. The seller looked legit, so I ordered it. It's number 82 of 1500.

Turns out it was better than I ever expected it to be. It's big, but not heavy. Once sized it seems to work in all conditions better than any watch like it ever has (my arm swells when I'm hot and most watches are too "floppy" when I'm not hot or too tight when I am...this one works both ways fine). The features are awesome. I'm lazy and when I travel I like to not have to try to remember what time it is at home. This one lets me put the time for a second timezone in the digital area. It has a 20 lap memory for lap timing at the race track. And a lot of other features I may never use. Best of all, I think it looks great and I wear it everywhere. Now I just have to learn how to use a circular slide rule!

Facebook Rant

Okay, I admit it. I love Facebook. One thing that helps make it great is the fact that Facebook provides programmers with an interface to let them write their own interface applications. And the Facebook folks have even written a few interfaces other than just the standard browser interface. So here are all the ways I use Facebook:

• Firefox web browser on the Mac
• Opera Mini web browser on the Blackberry
• Facebook for Blackberry application
• Safari web browser on the iPod Touch, iPhone version
• Safari web browser on the iPod Touch, mobile version
• Safari web browser on the iPod Touch, full version
• Facebook for Chumby
  

Now, there are a TON more Facebook clients out there for different platforms. These are just the ones I use. And I'm glad I can use Facebook on different devices, but note that I use it on my iPod three different ways and on my Blackberry two different ways. Why? Because all five clients are basically broken in some way. The only one that doesn't seem to be is the full web version on Safari, but even that is hard to use thanks to the tiny screen. All the others are broken in some way...they won't let you comment on statuses, or see status comments at all, or let you click links posted in statuses, etc. Same goes for the Chumby client (which is really just my alarm clock, but it's cool to be able to see status updates by the bed...okay, it's not cool, it's a wee bit obsessive).

Part of this is because of mobile device limitations, but most of it is just the application developers are doing a poor job of keeping up with the new features the Facebook folks are adding. The Blackberry folks author the Blackberry specific application, and it hasn't been updated in many months, for example.

So if you try to use Facebook on another device and find features missing, it's probably not you. For now, anyway, sometimes you just have to go to the computer and use the full version.

Video camera in your pocket?

Think it's too good to be true? A decent camcorder in your pocket? Think again. I just got a new Flip MinoHD and I love it. It's so easy you can't imagine. Hit the power button and hit record. No muss, no fuss. Hit the play button to go back and view your recorded videos. Want to watch them on a TV? No problem...the included cable has normal RCA video and audio plugs that work with almost any TV with spare inputs. But best of all, the ease of which you can send them to your PC is incredible. Pop out the included USB plug and just plug the entire camcorder into your PC or Mac. Copy the files over. You can upload straight to Youtube or your favorite video editor easily.

The video in this blog entry was shot with the Flip MinoHD and I should have more videos uploaded shortly. The zoom works, but I will say it's really just a digital zoom and thus when you zoom in you do lose some resolution. But it's simplicity and ease of use and size make up for this minor difficiency, in my opionion. It recharges from your computer's USB port and has one hour of storage built in (and probably not much more than that in battery life, but that's all you need!). It does take some time to offload the video to the PC...fifteen minutes worth took about ten minutes to copy over, so it's not terribly fast in that department. But that's WAY better than trying to send video tapes to a PC as that can generally only be done in real time.

Real camcorders with good optical zooms and other nice features do still have a place, but this thing is smaller than many cellphones people carry and thus you're likely to have it on you when you need it. That's worth a LOT right there, especially if you have kids. Oh, and the price is pretty good, too. At the time I got mine the HD was $230 with the normal resolution one at $170. Well worth it, I think. The video recording in any cellphone I've ever tried was pretty horrible. This is way better.

Of music collections, iPods, the Airport Extreme, and being a freak

So I've got a pretty good CD collection. My "system" is any time I get the urge that I need a particular CD, my trusty assistant gets it for me. She rips it to our MP3 server and emails me. I then add it to iTunes via our network and it gets sync'ed to my iPod automatically. Lovely little system.


My main computer is now an Apple MacBook Pro. I like it, but in Apple's infinite wisdom they choose to believe users don't need a docking station. This annoys me a little, because it means I have to plug and unplug USB cables and power every time I want to take the laptop from my desk and return it. Lenovo has always made a nice thin docking station with USB, sound, video, keyboard/mouse, and power and that's the ONLY thing I miss from the days of using Linux on a Thinkpad.

Now, I can use a USB hub and only ever have to plug/unplug one USB cable. And Apple does have this AWESOME little magnetic power connector, so power is very easy. I'm fine with the built in screen/keyboard/mouse, so I don't need that stuff. That just leaves sound. This is where I turn into that, uh, occasional geek. Apple has another product called the Airport Extreme. It's a neat little box that can do things like be your wifi router. But it also has a sound port. And if you have an existing wifi network you can make it a client and then plug it into a set of amplified speakers and it becomes a remote sound output device for iTunes. Neat little trick for streaming audio to your stereo system if you like.

For me, this means I can have "wireless" speakers. That's a neat trick for me, since the way my office is laid out I prefer to have my music speakers behind me across the room on some built in shelves. So I plugged in an Airport Express there and hooked up some nice amplified speakers. Took a little doing to get it working (see that previous blog post about support issues, standards, and voodoo?), but Troy figured it out.

So where does "being a freak" come in? Well, for some reason I have a mental block. I hate selecting my own music. I can't make myself make playlists. I hate digging through my album or artist lists. I don't know what it is. I love music. I love my music collection. I just don't love going through it. So once I got this great setup, I still didn't care because I still had to go pick the music. I'll do it in the car with the iPod because when I'm driving I feel like I have nothing else to do anyway. But on the computer there's this whole great Internet thing, and well, I'll just surf with no music before I'll bother picking it. Freak.


But just a few days ago I had to subscribe to Sirius Satellite Radio for Ashley's new Jeep (it came with it). I've been an XM Radio subscriber and lover for a while. Part of the Sirius subscription is the ability to listen online, so that was fresh in my brain. Then it hit me. Listening to satellite radio is the bomb because I only have to pick a station, not actual music. I do that in the car a lot, too, so I had to do that.

One problem. The Airport Express only supports streaming from iTunes, not from any general application! UGH! But never fear, there's $25 shareware out there that will fix that and let you stream the sound output of any application (in this case, the web browser) to your Airport Express. Troy pointed me to that (or I would have never thought to look for it!) and it's working great. I'm digging some random tunes in my office.

And you might ask "why don't you just shuffle your iTunes collection?" Because I'm a freak who buys a good many albums only to find I like four songs and HATE the rest. And I don't like having to skip songs often. I'm nuts, I know.

The big plus of this scenario is that if I only ever listened to my great collection then it would get stagnant. At least with this exposure to satellite radio quite often (particularly at home where I can note what I'm listening to) will allow me to find and buy new music. But my mental block on making playlists and picking my own music still bugs me.