The Quantitative Self….or yes there are people worse off than I

Posted on January 14, 2011 by Randy

Nothing like letting your iPad educate and inspire you whenever you’re not busy. I had my iPad propped up running TED (a great little app) while I was making lunch and it played a speech by Gary Wolf on the joys of tracking everything you do. Clip on a couple of devices and viola … you can track how many steps you take, how many calories you burn, what your sleep patterns are, how many minutes of REM sleep you get…….

So if you thought tracking your electricity usage every 2 minutes and posting it to Google was over the top….How about you heart rate and exercise levels?

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IPad on the road

Posted on January 10, 2011 by Randy

Using an iPad as a GPS seems like a match made in heaven….oops,the wifi only version might not have been the way to go since the GPS capabilities seem to be embedded in that cell phone chip that’s missing.

Well, after playing around with it and a road trip with my apple savvy son, it seems to work…sort of.

The trick seems to be that the apple location services work really well with the verizon MIFI card. Although, you need to get used to watching the little blue dot sit there not moving and then you crest a hill and switch towers and the dot quickly zooms down the road you’re on and catches up.

So it REALLY helps if you use it like a map since it’s very likely to get to your turn AFTER you drive through it. But once you crank up the brightness, it’s perfect to glance at and you can see it without those reading glasses on 😉

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Ipad breaks the web…

Posted on December 26, 2010 by Randy

Or at least most websites. Like millions of folks this Christmas I got an iPad. but i’m amazed at how many websites say that they’ll be creating iPad apps instead of fixing their websites for safari. I for one don’t want a “mobile” version of the site with a subset of the content and functionality. Just do it right! We know how to do cross browser development and testing…

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Google Apps

Posted on December 8, 2010 by Randy

Never one to shy away from experimenting on the family, converting to Google Apps at home seemed like an interesting learning experiment.

My experiment consited of

  • Gotta have a domain, rumfordhills.com as you no doubt guessed
  • Also had it hosted at bluehost and added a few toys like wordpress
  • Gave everyone a rumfordhills.com email address
  • Signed up for the free Google Apps edition

Lessons learned:

  • Google Calendar is pretty neat.  Set everyone up with their own calendar, imported my son’s school calendar (ASU has their academic calendar available on Google) found a lotus notes-to-google calendar sync tool and now everyone in the family can see everyone’s schedule.
  • Google Mail.  I found it easy to switch from outlook to Gmail.  Having the Google mail reader pull in all my email accounts makes the migration easy and their migration tool loaded all of the email from my local outlook folders with no problems.  For those younger family members who don’t really like email anyway, lets just say user adoption is lagging behind 🙂
  • Google Mail Contacts.  One restriction of the free version is that you can’t share contacts.  Would be nice to have the family address book be shared.  But I wouldn’t say that it’s worth upgrading to get this feature.
  • Google Docs.  It’s nice to store files at Google and not worry about what computer your logging onto, or to review and collaborate on homework projects.  But I can’t say I’d ever recommend converting to google apps.  Libre Office or MS Office is a much better choice, but you loose the online collaboration and browser based editing.
  • Google Apps.  Tripit it a nice way to get those travel plans posted to the calendar.  StreamWork from SAP is now available, it seems like it would be fantastic for small teams, like school projects or a small business that needed to do some collaboration.
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Oops, Ted can’t talk to Google

Posted on December 4, 2010 by Randy

I managed to break Google’s Powermeter — again.  But at least this time I know what I did.

I was reviewing my router firewall logs and was not too happy with all the active connections and unknown addresses that were talking to devices in my house.  So after dumping them all into a spreadsheet and banging away at reverse DNS lookups I tightened my firewall rules.  But that shouldn’t have dumped google… Turns out I also went with a more restrictive set of rules on NAT.  If you’re using google power meter don’t select address and port restrictions.  Here’s what the D-Link manual has to say on it:

NAT Endpoint Filtering
The NAT Endpoint Filtering options control how the router’s NAT manages incoming connection requests to ports that are already being used.

Endpoint Independent
Once a LAN-side application has created a connection through a specific port, the NAT will forward any incoming connection requests with the same port to the LAN-side application regardless of their origin. This is the least restrictive option, giving the best connectivity and allowing some applications (P2P applications in particular) to behave almost as if they are directly connected to the Internet.
Address Restricted
The NAT forwards incoming connection requests to a LAN-side host only when they come from the same IP address with which a connection was established. This allows the remote application to send data back through a port different from the one used when the outgoing session was created.
Port And Address Restricted
The NAT does not forward any incoming connection requests with the same port address as an already establish connection.

Address restriction works, but Port and Address breaks it.

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