Random Stuff

There are 112 posts filed in Random Stuff (this is page 1 of 12).

How much electricity does the Facebook app consume everyday by making phones vibrate with push notifications?

My silly little goal is to convince Facebook to pre-configure its mobile apps so they don’t make phones vibrate by default and push silent notifications to mobile users.

Help me make an estimate, we need to know on average how many milliwatts the average phone will spend per notification, and an estimate of how many push notifications are received by smartphones worldwide from facebook.

Say a phone consumes 150 milliwatts per push notification, and in one minute alone facebook sends 1 million notifications, Facebook would be consuming the world about 9 Megawatts/hour. This would be just a number thrown out there since I don’t know for sure if that’s the average power consumed, nor I know how many notifications are received per minute, I bet it’s way more than 1 million per minute.

Would love the help from people who work at Facebook or who have stats on push notifications, as well as any engineer working with phone hardware at any major phone manufacturing company.

Twitter is also sending a lot of notifications to phones.

Turn off vibration on your Facebook app, you will save a considerable amount of battery every day.

How I finally started losing weight

Me on Aug-18-13 at 1.04 PM Miami

On January 1st 2013, like so many people all over the world I took that pledge of getting back to my healthy weight.

Ever since I’ve not missed a single week of weight lifting, running and swimming.

In the process I’ve tried different diets like controlling portion sizes, diets where you eat only during certain hours but then you have to fast, but all of that is simply unsustainable and you gain the weight right back. My biggest achievement with those “diets” was just going from 200lbs to 196lbs, despite all the hard work at the gym, despite running 6 to 8 miles (I like running) several times a week, I’d just gain the weight back.

So then I read about the Paleo diet, and some of the things in that diet don’t really convince me very much (like not eating beans for example), so I started a Paleo-ish diet with a simple rule: Eat as much as you need but whatever it is you put in your body it has to be non-processed, it has to be natural and organic if possible. I’m now like a vegetarian that adds beef, chicken or fish on the other half of the plate.

This meant basically getting rid of bread, pasta, white rice, and lowering my cheese and milk consumption (but I think I’ll be bringing back milk since I’m lactose tolerant something which I’ve confirmed with a genome scan)

In only 4 weeks of eating lean meats, a lot of vegetables and fruits to accompany the meats I’ve finally lost 10lbs and after a run this morning for the first time in about 3 years I saw my weight into the high 180s (188).

I’ve found that this simple rule has controlled my appetite, I get full with less food, and since I’m eating so healthy now I don’t feel guilty if I eat something outside of the diet whenever the opportunity is presented, I just have this mentality now of seeing some things as “not food” and I just don’t put it in my body anymore. It’s as if my palate has been retrained after just 4 weeks.

In the process I’ve learned to cook a bit more, and now I find it very enjoyable the act of cooking, specially with other people in the kitchen.

If you’re struggling with weight, stop putting poison in your body, working out will only make you stronger and agile, more toned, but you won’t lose any weight. It’s absolutely true when they say eating is 80% of the weight loss equation.

Eat natural, be kind to your body.

Once I reach the first goal of 175 lbs I’ll post pictures of how I looked on Jan 1st, and how I’ll look then, I’ll try to wear the same clothes.

The final goal will be to reach my natural weight of about 165 lbs.

19 Reasons to switch to eBooks/eReaders

So I’m tired of evangelizing eBooks/eReaders in person and I guess I’ll do a lot more good by writing this so that you can share it next time you want to convince a friend to live in the year 2013 and stop the mad romanticism about the handicapped physical books, it’s just ludacris reading a book on paper unless it has no digital form.

Here is an ever growing list of why I prefer eBooks to physical books
(got more reasons, leave a comment below)

  1. They are cheaper.

  2. They are available immediately, no need to order, wait, or move physically to get them.

  3. They never get lost.

  4. They don’t take any space, or weight, this brings many added benefits to the world:

4.1. You can have a library of thousands of books with you wherever you are, on different devices (since they can be stored in the cloud)

4.2. You will free a lot of shelve space at home/office, which also means less dust being created at home.

4.3. If all students were forced to use eBooks they wouldn’t have to carry such heavy backpacks which can deform their spines.

4.4. If all students used eBooks exclusively, there would be CO2 emission reductions since that’s a lot of weight that doesn’t have to be transported by cars/buses/trains.

  1. You can read them on different devices: e-readers, computers, smartphones.

  2. You can copy and paste.

  3. If you lend them you never have to beg your friend to give the book back, it comes back to you automatically.

  4. You can search inside them.

  5. If you don’t know the meaning of a word, a dictionary is always there for you, just touch/click the word in question.

  6. The same book may come in different languages.

  7. You can change font types, font sizes, color of the screen, margins, line spacing.

  8. You can have lots of bookmarks, you can navigate your bookmarks.

  9. You can read them with the light turned off.

  10. You can read them with one hand, turning pages is effortlessly. Awesome when you go out for a walk and you have only one hand available.

  11. No more wrinkled, stained, or broken pages.

  12. You can share your highlights on social networks.

  13. You can open a web browser right from the book if there’s a web reference.

  14. There’s no such thing as “out of print”

  15. It learns your reading speed and tells you how much time left you have on the current chapter or the whole book.
    …

need more reasons?
or you will keep reading books because you like the smell of paper, even though there’s really a lot of stinky books out there.

are you still using cassette tapes, vinyl discs, hell are you still using CDs?

Make the switch, you will enjoy reading like never before.

Google Glass to enrich Google Maps/Earth with fine grained 3D Models of reality

I was imagining a world maybe 5 years from now, where there’s an insane amount of Google-Glass-like devices out there.

If Google was bold enough to map the streets with cars equipped with GPS and cameras, I think one of the top uses they must have somewhere on their master plan is to use every Glass user’s video feed to map reality to a more fine grained level. It’s easy to see how this data could be used to create 3D detailed models of every city in the world, not just out on the street, but inside buildings to provide us with navigation everywhere, outside or inside.

This will def. be another level of creepy, I foresee a battle to preserve the privacy inside homes and office once this starts happening. How do you prevent someone else from not mapping the inside of your home or house and uploading it to the web?

Finally my genome tells me where I’m from

Screen Shot 2013-06-21 at 3.59.44 PM
Sequencing my DNA in 2013 just cost me $100, exponential technological advancements in effect.

Maybe in 2 years it’ll only cost $10, and in 4 years only $1.

23andme.com rocks, I highly recommend you try this and know in advance what you can do to preserve your health and learn so much about genetics and how they define and affect you.

Call to an end of keys and locks as we know them

Screen Shot 2013-05-30 at 8.45.12 AM

I’m personally trying to simplify my life as much as possible, getting rid of the things I don’t need/enjoy. Keys are one of them. When you have too many locks in your life, this is particularly uncomfortable, and those few electronic locks in the mix that you find nowadays with fobs/passwords can only help so much, fobs still can be lost (lost my office’s key fob this week for example, it’s been a nightmare and it’ll cost me $50 to replace if I don’t find it)

In an ideal world, whoever solves this problem in a way that it’s cheap, safe, uses as little energy as possible (none would be sick so it can compete with regular keys, or at least human energy) wil have a billion dollar in his/her hands.

The ideal solution should work like magic, and these locks should be installable in doors, gates and vehicles. No passwords should be shared, and the lock magically opens to those who are authorized to use them.

These news by Motorola/Google are very promising, however I don’t buy the “pill” solution, but I’d definitively be willing to apply some sort of invisible electronic NFC tattoo in my hand or my arm, so that when my hand is near the lock it gives off a unique magnetic signature so I can be validated. Think NFC chips for your body.

For those of you who don’t want to have a tattoo, perhaps there could be a version of the NFC tag that we could place on the back of your watch if you wear one, or if you wear rings or some kind of jewelry at all times it could be attached there.

The idea is that you don’t have to carry your authentication mechanism in a wallet or a key ring, so that you can just go out not worrying about carrying keys with you because you are or have the keys on you all the time.

How to use Google’s calculator to convert Amps and Volts, to kWh

Say you have an electric engine that consumes 8 amps at 12 V, and you would like to know how much this would translate in kilowatt hours?

Go to Google’s search box and type

8 amps * 12 v * 1 hour

Screen Shot 2013-05-26 at 8.27.15 AM

And you will get the total output in Joules, which is 345,600 joules.

Then tell google

345600 joules to kwh

And google will tell you

0.096 kilowatt hours (which is what a small electric fan will consume in an hour), or the same as 8 * 12 = 96 watts * 1 hr, 96 Wh

Screen Shot 2013-05-26 at 8.29.47 AM

What do you carry in your backpack?

my backpack contents as of april 26 2013

I’m a software developer and this is everything I was carrying in my backpack today April 26th 2013 (from the top, left to right)

  1. A case for SD cards.
  2. Raspbery PI I’m toying with at the moment.
  3. A roll of #punsr stickers
  4. US Passport, you never know when you get a crazy invitation (or emergency) to fly out.
  5. Emergency Icebreaker underwear, you never know if your luggage might get lost, you can at least take a shower and have a fresh pair.
  6. Checkbooks, electronic bank keys.
  7. Snes-like USB gamepad (for the Raspberry PI video game console project)
  8. pens
  9. Microsoft USB wired optic mouse, still my favorite, never worry about not having batteries for it.
  10. Punsr business cards, Tech Consulting business cards.
  11. Amazon Kindle Fire HD
  12. iPad
  13. Beats Pro headphones
  14. toothpicks, so you never have to suffer with food between your teeth for hours.
  15. coins (I try to not have coins, I keep them in the car for parking meters)
  16. Nexus 4
  17. Galaxy SII
  18. USB power adapters
  19. WD My Passport 2TB backup drive (I keep another at home attached to my monitor for automatic backups)
  20. Macbook PRO Power adapter
  21. European power converters
  22. Ethernet cable for the raspberry pi and because you never know when you might need it.
  23. prescription sunglasses, needed in sunny florida.
  24. MacBook PRO 2.3 GHz Intel Core i7, 8 GB ram, 500GB SSD