March 2010 – Roo's View

Earth Hour

The idea of Earth Hour might seem a little gimmicky due to the media attention, but it is an effective demonstration that little things add up and can make a big difference. The 8:30-9:30 pm timeslot wasn’t going to work with our kids who needed to be in bed well before then, so we decided to observe the hour from 6:30-7:30pm (you should see us on New Years eve, doing the count down at 9pm!).

At the top of this posting is a graph from the TED 5000 over the time period. The red line is voltage, which ideally would be a flat line at 120v. Today it seems the voltage varied from 121v to 123v. The blue line is the power in kW being consumed. Today was a laundry day (seems to always be laundry day lately) and while we have energy efficient appliances, the dryer still eats a lot of watts.

So after dinner, we took a reading using the Ted-O-Meter on the iTouch we saw that our consumption was around 1.9kW. On the graph this would be roughly above the word “Data” in the “Real-Time Minute Data”. We then went around the house turning off lights, and powering down stuff that didn’t need to be on (computers, PVRs, etc). On the list of non-essential items were the stereo, pretty much anything with a wall wart, and night-lights too. When we looked again we had dropped down to 0.9kW. After that it was bedtime for the kids, and we left things “dark” until 10pm when it was time to start up the dryer again and do a few things before going to sleep. (Ok, I was sitting in the dark surfing on my new G1)

The TED 5000 combined with the Ted-O-Meter is a great way to bring awareness to you and your family about changing little things to make a difference. To be able to turn off the lights in a room, and see the needle drop is very motivating. You can see from the screen capture on the right that we managed to hit a consumption low of 0.770kW at 7:15pm today.

The computer industry has embraced “green” as there is a direct correlation between energy costs (primarily cooling) and profit. We’re not quite there for the home, but I suspect it will come once more people can easily measure their usage and effect change.

Google Android Dev Phone 1

I’m stoked – I’ve got a G1! This is actually a Google Android Dev Phone 1 that I purchased second hand from a friend. Back in January 2009 I had a chance to play around with one of these while in California (borrowed from a Googler who got it from work), my impression then was “ok, neat – but its basically a computer in your hand” – a different reaction than what I had with the iPhone. At the time both were at a premium price and I had only recently bought my Nokia 5310. Between then and now I bought an iPod Touch that I have enjoyed a lot yet had nearly endless frustration with iTunes.

My G1 is running cyanogenmod v4.2.15.1. The hardware is very similar to the iPhone/iPod Touch. CPU is 528MHz ARM 11, 192MB RAM, 320 x 480 capacitive touch screen. One bonus feature is that this version of the phone supports AWS/1700megahertz/BandIV which is the frequency that WindMobile is using in Canada (T-Mobile uses this in the US).

Today my service provider is Fido. I’m on the $15 plan ($16.95 after taxes), this is sufficient for my phone usage as I’m a light user. Unfortunately it doesn’t include call display or voicemail (+$10 option), nor is any data included. The phone had been wiped and reset when I got it, and I needed to get past the “Welcome to T-Mobile G1” screen. Unfortunately the built in menus only provide the option to configure an APN. Not wanting to incur any data charges (last time I did this on my 5310 it was $12 for a few hundred kb!) – I wanted to figure out how to hack around this.

Not surprisingly I was able to find a solution online that allows you to activate your G1 without using any mobile data. I’m using Ubuntu 9.10 (and the phone is running cyanogenmod) so the directions there were not exactly what I needed, so I’ll briefly repeat them here with the changes.

1) Grab the Android SDK. Install it following the directions, which really boils down to extracting the archive.

2) Now we’re going to modify /etc/udev/rules.d to give normal users (ie: you) permission on the USB port the phone will use.
Create the file /etc/udev/rules.d/50-android.rules with the contents (permissions 644).

SUBSYSTEM==”usb”, SYSFS{idVendor}==”0bb4″, MODE=”0666″

$sudo restart udev

You can skip this step if you want to run steps 4 and 5 as root.

3) Connect the phone and your PC using a USB cable. The phone does need a SIM card installed. Boot the phone.

4) Now we run <install path>/android-sdk-linux_86/tools/adb devices to check if we’re properly connected to the device

$ ./adb devices


List of devices attached
HTxxxxxxxxxx device

(where the x’s are your actual device number)

5) Now back to the phone, tap on the “Welcome to T-Mobile G1” screen to get to the setup page. Then issue the following command on your PC from the tools directory:

$ ./adb shell

# am start -a android.intent.action.MAIN -n com.android.settings/.Settings

The “am” command is actually executing on the phone itself. This should start up the configuration dialog that allows you to setup a wireless 802.11b/g network. After this point it should be pretty self explanatory to get yourself setup with the phone.

The screenshot in this post was done using the Android SDK as well. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about Android and this phone soon.

First sale on eBay

It is not uncommon to have purchased something from eBay, I’ve had an account for several years and tend to buy something every couple of months. Most of the items I buy on eBay are low cost and generally hard to find locally. I’d often thought about selling stuff on eBay but just never got started.. until now.

What started this off was a sweep through some of the gadgets and whatnot that we’ve got cluttering up our home office. This stuff has to go, and if it has value let’s sell it – otherwise its time to eCycle it. I initially thought I’d start by selling some N64 games, but the game values (<$5) far outweigh the shipping costs. So I figured I’d move onto the iPod that was no longer being loved ever since the iTouch arrived.

I used eBay to research what the going price was for an iPod in the condition mine was, and priced it on the lower end as a starting point. I set a $10 USD flat rate for shipping since if I shipped to California it would be around $8 shipping + $2 for the bubble mailer. Had someone in Vancouver bought it, I would have lost money on the flat rate shipping (about $4)! Shipping is the first real hurdle you need to get over as a seller, and I think it is worse for Canadians (both as sellers, and buyers).

Lucky me, as a first time seller my first 5 listings are fee free! Cool. Of course, it took nearly 24hrs for my item to appear in any search results (trust me I tried). No worries, it was a 7 day listing so lots of time for people to find it and bid.

Days passed. I watched several broken iPod’s get more bidding activity and a higher price than my item. I could see from the eBay dashboard that after 6 days, only 5 page views of my item had happened (2 which were mine!). Then on the 6th day, the watchers arrived – 8 watchers tracking my item – there is hope. The number of views rapidly climbed.

With less than 6 hours to go in the auction the bidding started. My $30USD start price, jumped up rapidly. 17 bids later it sold for $76USD + $10USD shipping, the winning bid was made in the last minute of the auction from a bidder with no previous bids on my item.

After that it was smooth sailing. Payment was via PayPal (who take a small percentage). A quick trip to the post office and the iPod is on its way to the winner. It has been an interesting experience, one I plan to repeat.