Fitness, Fitbits and Friends

Since managing to get my hands on a fitbit back in the Black Friday sales, I've been fairly complacant with my activity and logging around 7000 steps a day. Now considering my job involves not moving glued to a screen all day - its not a bad figure at all but I've decided that I need to lose a little weight so need to improve it.

What I have found however is motivation to do so is pretty hard. It's easy for a few days but as the months roll in, it gets lost in the pile of things to do but not really a priority. Fitbit actually offers you almost a digital personal trainer to motivate you but I am skeptical as to how well it would work because if it were that simple, I'd be rich from helping a prince become reunited with his lost funds because of their persistence.

So introducing Paul, one of my co-workers. He's been using his Fitbit to compete with one of his friends and to be honest - putting my efforts at fitness to shame. 

So why has he put in so much extra effort? It's a competition. He wants to "wipe the floor" with others and so more exercise than them which is a great motivator. So much so he has been asking for a while to add me as a "friend" to his fitbit profile so he can see my progress. I reluctantly allowed him full access hoping the shame of not doing enough will motivate me to get more active.

It's worked. So far for the past month, I've increased my activity to around 11,000 steps a day and even 16,000 sometimes just to move up the leaderboard.

As for a full review of the Fitbit Flex, there are enough out there but as a brief one. Overpriced at £80, if you find it for £40, buy it. Great battery life

Mesh networks in disaster relief

Recently I participated in #hack4good by Geeklist and it was amazing but sadly, our concept did not get off the ground in the way we'd like. With that said - I would like to write it up in the hope it sparks some inspiration for someone to build on.

The initial concept started about 4 years ago while on the London Underground while having no internet. Now this is a problem since solved with WiFi on the majority of the tube but at the time, I spent my connectionless hours every day working out how someone could in theory get some form of connection. It played through my mind that the one thing you are guaranteed to nearly always have in every station, is people. Each one of those people has some form of digital device and that device itself can communicate with either a network or each other.

This led to the idea that you may not be able to get access to the internet, but someone just enetering the tube can, and if they are about 30m away from someone on an escalator, so could they and taking it further all the way to a person standing on the platform. 

Now this is no revelutionary idea but it is one that in disaster situation, could prove vital to getting communities back up and running. If a sector of the grid is out and backup systems have failed, a call can be connected via a series of people who also may have no outbound communication liks but someone further out will be able to. With population density very high in towns and cities (at least a few other people within 50m of you) it would be quite feasible to create such a mesh.

Sadly, this wont happen anytime soon.

After going over all the niceties, there are some rather large problems that mean it wont work in general population and therefore would be unlikely to work in disaster situations.

1. Prioritisation of Data
How do you tell what data is a priority via such a peer-to-peer protocol? With things in a disaster situation, you do not want more than a handful of people using the connection. The simple reason being if the network (be it WiFi/3G/GPRS or otherwise) will already be at capacity and there are no guarantees that you send out a message that it is received correctly without some form of delivery receipt. What's to also say that a message from one person is more important than another. If someone is using such a system to call someone, that is a much larger data requirement than 200 characters of text but the call could block the entire data allocation.

2. Data Usage
Imagine you had one of the end phones/computers/tablets in a mesh and all data was going through your device. I hope you're on an unlimited plan or else its going to cost and cost big. This is also the case if you are unfortunate to be roaming at the time.

3. Latency
Let's not beat around the bush, the data will get from A to B and maybe even C but it will not be quick by any means. If you think of the sort of transfer throughput you could get, is not actually too bad but in a fast moving world with devices being replaced quickly, the packet loss and latency would be gigantic.

4. Connections
Your device will have a finite amount of connections it could make. You can use Bluetooth, WiFi and even say GSM (obviously unrealistic but technically possible) but you will only be able to have around 2 AdHoc WiFi networks along with a couple of bluetooth devices meaning you realistically can connect to 4 things. Now switching between them (like to sustain 2 WiFi networks) would have to be quick so as to not lose any data and only modern phones would actually be able to make use of it

5. Battery Usage
It's the new bugbear of our time. If you are processing this sort of information, it requires a huge amount of protocols that consume battery like crazy when discovering networks. If you're using this in a disaster recovery scenario, you do not want to have your battery die on you. Especially out in the field.

6. Application of Theory
To make such a system, I doubt many OS providers would allow an always running, peer-to-peer networking system as it would be a huge battery suck. So this would be done as an app that people would download and seeing as most of the time, people would be in an area where such an app was not needed - how would you distribute this app to those who actually need it in a period of crisis?

With all that said - if anyone can take on such an idea, I wish them the best of luck and to let me know if they get anywhere with it.

Lob thoughts over to @ne0 on twitter 

Modern Battery Life

It is mentioned a lot that batteries dont last as long as they should and furthermore charging your phone every day is a pain. The problem is, we expect more from our digital devices than ever before.

There are hundreds of complaints on forums about phones not lasting more than a day without needing to be charged and comparisons to old Nokia 3310's that "never ran out of battery" so lets have a look at the top ways to reduce the eternal escape from a charging cable.

1. Dim the screen
While technology has gotten smaller over the years, actually take a second to think about how big the screen was on say a Nokia 3310. Its nothing in comparisson to the glorius "look ma' - no pixels" screens of today but the power usage is phenominal and when you consider how much the backlight uses to show your phone in full daylight - its incredible how much can be saved by dimming it by just 5-10%.

2. Location services
Now everywhere you go, your phone tries to keep up and act as a virtual assistant and give you useful information as to where you are and whats around. That's brilliant but not everything needs it. Apps like Facebook get your location information every time you go to make a post and keeps your location "warm" somtimes allowing them to quickly find your location. This does mean receiving data from 9-12 satellites and running some fairly simple maths to calculate your location. Obviosuly however, this on a minutely basis can suck battery life. Even background apps and services - looking at you Siri and Google Maps.

3. Turn off 4G
Woohoo - 4G internet is great but if you live in an area without 4G and you know it - turn it off. The searching for a 4G signal takes up a large chunk of power.

4. Get an external battery
Now with most modern phones, they charge over USB and this has the advantage of being able to buy a battery pack which you can simply throw in your bag for when you are caught short. Personally I have an external battery pack by New Trent and I get a load of iPhone charges out of it and even enough for a few iPad ones.

5. Use your phone less
People seem to forget the age old trick of you were not always on Facebook, Snapchatting, Tweeting, Instagramming and you didn't have 4G access to terabytes of cat pictures. Its amazing how many people spend their time absorbed in a fake reality while ignoring whats around them. 

[Glass] Anatomy of digitally overlaid vision

Infographic on how Google Glass worksWhen looking at the way Google Glass works, we have several stumbling blocks. How do you show a screen to the user without obsuring their view. 

Looking to the Google patents for any clues, the Google glass unit uses a mini projector and projects (via a polarising filter) an image back to the user (reportedly onto their retina). The problem with Google Glass is because very few people have actually even used one, a lot of information regarding how they work is still unknown.

Near-eye displays are not a new thing of course. Video glasses have existed for years and a quick search of Instructables finds many implementations (some better than others) to give the user is seamless computer/realworld interaction. 

Unfortunately a lot of these systems rely on the either blocking or partially obsuring one eye with a viewfinder style screen. Other implementations include complete lack of vision and a camera to mix together the real world and the digital world with overlays.

Other options for allowing the user to still see the real world and have a digital overlay include usings small screens and mirrors but all these solutions rely on one thing - the digital data being optically overlaid with the real world and not blocking or obsuring the natural vision.

[Glass] Creating a UI

When creating a you why, you need to think about how he usually is going to input data into the system. This is my Google Glass, he's not have (nor want) the ability to have a physical keyboard. You ideally wanted to be as intrusive to your workflow as possible. This includes using technologies like speech to text recognition cameras and natural gestures.

One of the other major downfalls of using technologies like speech to text recognition, is the ability to having some feedback. Without instant feedback, users left feeling like you're talking to me inanimate object and this can lead to users not being able to fully utilise the technology at hand, or feeling like it got it wrong after waiting for it to process the speech.

In Google Chrome (version 25) and using the Google Search app, you have been able to do continuous speech recognition which gives you near instantaneous feedback on what was said. This is thanks to Google's undocumented "full duplex" Speech API. More to come on this in a later post.

The next issue with computer human interfaces, is one of gestures. Getting someone to do a gesture command using a limb, finger or otherwise can be a bit embarassing if you're wearing something like Google Glass which is meant to be seamless, and integrate into your life. Better approach is to use what the person is very doing and to make a judgement upon whether they are taking interest in the subject matter on the device.

The Samsung Galaxy S3 highlights disability by recognising when you look at the screen, and dimming when you look away. It is primarily a security and power saving feature for the Samsung but in applications such as Google Glass, it can only be useful to see if the person is actually utilising the device (or wishes to) and to silently disappear when needed. Another practical use would be to use the devices camera, to see whether it's appropriate to display information to be user.