Screen shot of webLightSwitch running in the Android browser

I have developed a new project called webLightSwitch. You can find details about the project on the webLightSwitch project page. The project is a simple but useful program to allow me to control some of the lights in my home via a web interface. This allows me to use my mobile phone to turn on and off the lamp or the outdoor lights at my house. The control software is written in JavaScript and runs on a BeagleBone using node.js. The user interface, as seen in the screen shot, is implemented with jQuery Mobile to make the interface touch friendly. The lights are controlled by Smarthome INSTEON controllers. The BeagleBone communicates with the lighting controllers via a Smarthome PowerLinc Modem.

I have been running the software for over a week now. With it being winter right now in Iowa, it gets dark well before I arrive home from work around 6PM. Using my mobile phone to be able to turn on the outdoor lights is very convenient. The experience is similar to my automatic garage door opener: drive up to drive way, press button to open garage door, and press button to turn on outside lights.

I plan to develop a more advanced home automation system, but this simple system has proven itself to be useful. In addition to the webLightSwitch project page, you can find the source code on GitHub and a video demonstration on YouTube.

I created a Google Docs Form to collect my daily step count. The collected data is stored in a Google Docs Spreadsheet. The form can be viewed in a web browser or in Google Docs for Android. Since I have an Android phone, the form lets me use my phone to still collect my daily step counts each morning. And since the data is stored in a spreadsheet, I can perform calculations on the data to get my total and average step counts and even graph my daily totals. Here is the process that I use.

I first created the form. From Google Docs, I selected “Create new” > “Form”. This opened the form editor. I entered the form title of “Step Entry” and description of “Daily step count entry”. My form currently has two questions; “Date” and “Steps”. The first question, “Date”, has help text of “Date steps were accumulated”, it is a “Text” question type, and the question is required.

Step Entry - Edit Form - Date Question

The second question, “Steps”, has help text of “Number of steps accumulated”, it is a “Text” question type, and the question is required.

Step Entry - Edit Form - Steps Question

Once this form is saved and created, it is linked to a spreadsheet. I renamed the sheet “Data”.

Step Entry - Data Sheet

I created a new sheet and named it “Statistics”.

Step Entry - Statistics Sheet

On the “Statistics” sheet, I added the “Total Step Count”, “Daily Average”, and a time line trend chart.

For the “Total Step Count”, the formula used was pretty simple: =sum(Data!C2:C109). Basically, the “Steps” column in the “Data” sheet are summed together.

For the “Daily Average”, the formula is a little more complex: =sum(Data!C2:C109)/countif(Data!C2:C109,">0"). First, the “Steps” column is summed and then divided by the number of “Steps” cells that have a number greater than zero. There is an “AVERAGE” function, but it would include cells that are zero (or don’t have a step entry). I found the technique to calculate the correct average from this web page: Excel Average Formula/Function Without Including Zeros.

The chart is a time line trend chart. The “Data” used for the chart was: Data!B2:B109, Data!C2:C109.

As new steps are entered, the statistics are kept up to date.

At this point, the web portion of the technique is complete. But I wanted to be able to add data through my mobile phone. My phone is an Android phone and I could use the Google Docs for Android app to directly edit the spreadsheet. But using the Step Entry form can provide a more “app-like” experience. I got the Step Entry form URL by selecting “Form” > “Embed form in a webpage…”. A new window was opened with a dialog that had the URL to paste into a “blog or website”. I copied the whole “iframe” code and pasted it into a text editor: <iframe src="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/embeddedform?formkey=foo" width="760" height="623" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0">Loading...</iframe>. I copied the “src” attribute value, https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/embeddedform?formkey=foo, and pasted it into a new Chrome window. I then used Chrome to Phone to send the form URL to my phone. The URL opened on my phone in the browser. I bookmarked the URL. Then I added the bookmark as a shortcut on one of the phone’s home screens. To do this, I “long held” my finger on the home screen and the “Add to Home screen” dialog was displayed. I selected the “Shortcuts” option. From the “Select shortcut” dialog I selected “Bookmark” option. I then selected the “Step Entry” bookmark that I had previously created.

Step Entry home screen shortcut

Now, when I want to enter my daily step entry, I select the “Step Entry” shortcut. The first time I select the bookmark a dialog allowing me to complete the action using “Browser” or “Docs” is displayed. I can optionally choose to select the checkmark to use my selection by default.

Complete Step Entry bookmark action

I used the “iframe” URL for the “embeddedform” so that there is no extra formatting. Since I am using the form on my phone’s smaller screen, not having the extra formatting actually makes the form easier to use. I also like the layout of the form when opened in Docs better than the Browser so I choose to complete the action using “Docs”. Here is the Step Entry form that I can use to enter my daily step total.

Step Entry data entry form

I enter the date, total number of steps from my pedometer, and then press “Submit”. The data is uploaded to the Google Doc spreadsheet.

This process is very convenient and easy to do. It allows me to continue tracking my progress. Entering the steps daily also helps keep me motivated.

Separator Screen Shot

Lifehacker had a pretty neat post yesterday which added “a Handy Separator Between Commands in Your Terminal on Mac OS X and Linux.” I use a Cygwin terminal on my Windows machine, and the Linux script almost worked: the dashes didn’t print. I tracked down my particular problem to the COLUMNS variable used to calculate how many dashes to print in the separator. In my Cygwin terminal prompt, running “export $COLUMNS” showed the variable was blank; meaning that no dashes were used for the separator. Looking at the Mac modification, I noticed that it used the command “shopt -s checkwinsize” to check the window size and if necessary update the LINES and COLUMNS variables. So after adding these two lines to the beginning of the Linux “.bash_ps1″ script, here https://github.com/emilis/emilis-config/blob/master/.bash_ps1, the separator worked for my Cygwin terminal.

shopt -s checkwinsize
export COLUMNS

I finished the book Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey last Saturday — I think it took me a week to catch my breath. This story was basically non-stop action. It a story about a man, Stark, who is seeking revenge on the people who killed his girlfriend after these same people sent Stark to Hell. Yep, Stark was a live human living in Hell. He had to escape Hell and return to Earth to track down the magicians who sent him Downtown. The story follows Stark’s investigation into where the responsible parties can now be found after living in Hell for 11 years.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I could not put it down because it moves so quickly from one scene to the next. One reason may be because the book is not arranged in chapters; it is just one continuous story. It is full of magic mixed together with Hellions and Angels, God and the Devil, and Stark’s vendetta against his old “friends”. The language used in the book is quite colorful. The descriptions of other worldly locations provide depth to the story. I could almost see one of the Whedon brothers turning this book into a movie.

Snow covered Icealert indicator

The Icealert System™ indicator is showing “blue” because there is a potential for ice. Well, I guess there is more than potential, as half of the indicator is obscured by snow! This “obscured by snow” indication is not listed as a feature of the indicator on the The Icealert System™ web page. (In fact, in the pictures of the indicator on the companies web site, none of the picture show the indicator in snow.) This snow indication may be a hidden feature of the indicator–sweet.

This kind of reminds me of The Weather Rope. It is typically a board with one end of a small length of rope tied to the board and the other end of the rope is left dangling. There is some variation of this legend included on the board:

My Droid received the Android 2.2 (Froyo) release last night. Last night I was here, at Folly Beach, SC.

Screenshot: Airplane Flying Handbook cover

I have completed converting the Airplane Flying Handbook into EPUB format, a type of digital book. The Airplane Flying Handbook is an FAA publication designed to teach basic piloting skills. I used the Airplane Flying Handbook in ground school when I was studying for my private pilot certificate. You can purchase the EPUB version of the Airplane Flying Handbook in my store.

The digital version contains all of the content from the paper version. But since it is digital you can easily search for terms using your reader. (It still has the index from the paper version too.) I found it to be very convenient to read on my Droid phone, an Android based device, using a program called Aldiko. Having the book on my phone allowed me to make use of my idle time: it was very convenient to open the book on my phone and read a couple pages as time allowed. I have provided a little screen tour of the EPUB Airplane Flying Handbook rendered by Aldiko, captured from my Droid phone.

Airplane Flying Handbook on shelf - thumbnail

Here is the Airplane Flying Handbook sitting on the bookshelf. I installed the digital book by downloading the file with the link provided in “Your Account” to the phone with the phone’s web browser. Once downloaded, Aldiko recognized the file and imported it to my bookshelf. Aldiko also supports uploading the digital book file from your computer to the phone via USB to a special Aldiko directory. Aldiko can then import the book to your bookshelf.

Airplane Flying Handbook cover - thumbnail

Pressing on the book will bring up the book’s cover. You can page through the book by swiping your finger across the screen. Or, the phone’s volume control rocker button can be used to page up or down.

Airplane Flying Handbook Table of Contents - thumbnail

You can also pull up the table of contents to jump to any chapter or section in the book.

Airplane Flying Handbook Figure 2-10 - thumbnail

Images are displayed along with the text. Aldiko lets you press an image and display the image in a zoomable format. This lets you zoom in to see more detail on the relatively small phone screen. Once done looking at the image, you can go back to the book and continue reading. The book also includes hyperlinks that let you jump to referenced sections, just like a web browser.

Airplane Flying Handbook Glossary - thumbnail

The glossary provides definitions for many different aviation terms. Aldiko provides full text search through the entire book. Together, this provides a useful and effective tool for looking up unknown words and phrases. You can also bookmark sections for quick reference later.

Some of the above features are reader software dependent. Depending on your reader, you may find different ways to interact with the electronic book. I have loaded the EPUB Airplane Flying Handbook to an Apple iPad by adding the file to iTunes and then synching the book to the iPad. I was then able to open the book and read it with iBooks. With the larger iPad screen, more text was available per page, which is one of the benefits of the EPUB format: the layout of the book changes to fit the reader.

“Remember that all the authentication in the world will not protect against a privileged user doing the wrong thing. It’s just that logging may help to determine what happened after the fact.”