Steele Bit programming & development musings by Andrew Steele

In August 2011 Jamie and I cut the cord. It has been almost a year since this "dramatic" move. Even after clarifying points from the original post, I still get plenty of quizzical looks and probing questions regarding our decision so I figured another post was in order.

Since June 12, 2009, full-power television stations nationwide have been broadcasting in a digital format. (DTV.gov)

Meaning that basic television from ABC, FOX, NBC, CBS, etc. is available in High Definition. To receive these stations we purchased a digital antenna. After some research including checking the DTV Reception Maps I determined the Terk HDTV Indoor Amplified HD Antenna to be sufficient for our needs.


In our home this antenna gets great reception. The antenna is primarily used to watch news broadcasts and the Today Show. It has also come in handy for the occasional sports broadcast. The quality is as clear if not clearer than the basic stations provided on cable and renders at 1080i.

Between Netflix, Hulu Plus, Pandora, Amazon Instant Video, Redbox and Apple TV we have access to plenty of content. We pay subscription fees for Netflix, Hulu Plus, and Pandora, but at $8.55, $7.99 and $3.00 the total cost of $19.54 is nominal. Amazon Instant Video, Redbox and Apple TV gives us access to current run television and movies we cannot access via our streaming services. How much each costs depends on how many movies or shows we rent/buy in a given month.

Service	How we use it
Netflix	Movies, documentaries and previous season TV shows
Hulu Plus	Current run TV shows
Pandora	Streaming a huge selection of music
Amazon	Purchase current run TV shows and rent the occasional movie
Redbox	Rent new release movies
Apple TV (iTunes)	Rent movies

Hulu Plus covers many of the current run shows which we like to watch. However, there are a few shows which are not available. Thankfully, both ABC and NBC offer iPad applications from which most of their current content is available. Unfortunately, neither FOX nor CBS offer similar applications. This is not a huge deal as we don't watch many current run CBS or FOX shows.

Many shows which are not available via a dedicated app are available from the web. Via Apple AirPlay we can easily stream content from our iPads to our Apple TV. Meaning that anything we can watch on our iPads we can watch on our televisions. With AirPlay being added to the latest Mac OS X revision we will be able to watch anything on the internet on our Apple TV.

There are a few shows that are only available to us via purchase. Right now we are buying content from Amazon Instant Video. We pay for How I Met Your Mother, Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, In Plain Sight (for obvious reasons) and Mad Men. That said all of the past seasons for these shows were recently added to Netflix so we may reevaluate how imperative it is for us to watch the current season.

Aside from what we can purchase, Amazon Instant Video continues to increase in value. The service is quickly adding many free options for Amazon Prime subscribers. If you are not familiar, Amazon Prime is a subscription service which allows you to receive Amazon orders in two days, borrow one free Kindle book a month, and stream an ever increasing library of free media content. Since the question of price is already in your mind Amazon Prime only costs $6.67 a month, but you pay for it via an upfront fee of $79.99.

Without the ease of cable stations sports are still difficult to consume, but if I really cared I could purchase streaming passes for all of the professional sports leagues. College sports are still the most difficult to watch with via streaming. However, I still maintain an Xbox Live subscription (got a great deal for a year's subscription at Christmas time) and use it to watch some college basketball. In fact, a few non-conference Lobo basketball games were streamable via ESPN3 on the Xbox. Even better in two instances the games were shown in HD whereas the local Comcast feed was not. When we cannot stream a Lobo game we listen to it on the radio, go to a friends house, sports bar or skip it. Outside of Lobo basketball sports are not a huge deal to us so our inability to easily consume sports content is inconsequential.


Even with all of that said slowly but surely it seems that sports are becoming more convenient to stream: the 2012 Super Bowl was streamed live for the first time and we are watching the 2012 Tour De France via the NBC iPad app. The app provides all kinds of statistics and information about the riders. While not perfect at $14.99 it's still a pittance to pay when compared to a full blown cable subscription.


While reading this you may not have picked up on the number of devices that we use to consume streaming content: That number stands at seven devices:

• Xbox
• Apple TV
• iPad / iPhone
• Roku
• Antenna
• Computer
• Blu-ray Player

The way we consume content varies between devices and is not always the same even on the same device. To Microsoft's credit they continue to add apps and services to the Xbox which make it our go to device for streaming. The variety of ways to watch TV is not a huge deal but does require consideration each time you want to watch a program. With cutting the cord there is no "turn on, tune in, drop out." Even with the minor inconveniences we are still incredibly satisfied with our decision.

tl;dr

We use a variety of devices and mechanisms to watch television. It can be inconvenient and is rarely consistent. Cutting the cord has definitely worked for us, but is not for everyone.

The [Tour de France] streaming is better than the TV coverage. Has lots more data (Speed, Heart Rate, Power Output, GPS tracker etc...)

As of Monday, August 22nd, 2011 my wife and I are no longer cable television subscribers. For both of us this is the first time in our lifetimes that we have not had cable television in our home. While this sounds like a dramatic change in reality it will not be that much different from when we had cable.

Service	Monthly Cost
Hulu Plus	$7.99
Pandora One	$3.00
Netflix Streaming	$8.55
Amazon Instant Video	$30.00 est.
Xbox Live	$9.99

Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley approaches teaching through learn by doing. This approach emphasizes group work in simulated real world situations in all courses. As a capstone course students partake in a practicum which “offers an educational opportunity for students to work for corporate clients doing real-time work, under the guidance of faculty.”

For my capstone course at I am working on the GeoCam Project. From the GeoCam blog:

The GeoCam Project aims to build a network of citizen disaster responders out of people helping people every day.

Google funds the project and the team works at the NASA Ames Research Center. The project will put me out of my comfort zone as it relies upon languages, frameworks, and platforms I do not have much experience with. I am excited to begin work on the project and will be documenting some of my experiences here.

I am in the process of preparing a presentation on Stack Overflow for the Sandia .NET User Group. In simple terms Stack Overflow is a programming question and answer site that's free. If you have not heard of it you are either not a programmer or have not been standing near me when I am singing the site's praises.


I will link to the presentation when I have it prepared, but for now I wanted to thank Jeff Atwood and Emily Yacus at Stack Overflow for being so cool as to provide me with t-shirts and stickers to handout after my presentation.



Thanks again guys and keep up the great work!

Setting up an Android development environment is not a terribly hard task, but there are several steps involved. Before I document those steps a note about the hardware I used for my forays into Android development.
Development Machine Specs

• Windows 7 64 bit
• Processor: Intel Core  Duo T9800 @ 2.93GHz 2.94GHz
• RAM: 4.00 GB

Android Platforms

• Motorola Droid
• HTC Incredible

The following steps are merely the ones that I used to develop Proximity Alerter and are definitely not the only options for setting up an Android development environment. Accounting for download and installation time the following steps should take less than 2 hours.

1. Step 1 - Android SDK & Components
   
   • Download and install the Android SDK
   • Once the SDK has been installed, you'll need to manually add the 2.1 platform and Google APIs, see Adding Android SDK Components
2. Step 2 - Phone Drivers
   
   • Download and install the Motorola Mobile Phone USB Driver
     
   • At the time of this writing I could not find an easily downloadable HTC driver but the Installing HTC Incredible Android SDK Drivers instructions provided by Andrew Westberg work.
3. Step 3 - Setup Android Devices for Debugging
   
   • On the device, go to the home screen, press MENU, select Applications > Development, then check all three options
4. Step 4 - Setup MOTODEV Studio (a fully contained Eclipse plug-in) for Android
   
   • Download and install MOTODEV Studio for Android (might require account creation)
     
   • Start MOTODEV Studio for Android, create a new workspace
   • Select: "Use an existing SDK from the file system" and point MOTODEV Studio to the location where you installed the Android SDK

At this point your Android development environment is setup and ready for the obligatory Hello, World.

I have spent the month of June recovering from a lot of travel and catching up on work. Thus far it has been an outstanding summer filled with a lot of learning. We started a new project at work which is stretching my capabilities and providing excellent learning opportunities.

In addition to work I've spent the last six weeks in a Smartphone Application Development course. The course focused on developing applications for the Android Platform. The course was taught by Ted Selker who pushed us to come up with innovative project ideas. I had some of my own but polled my social graph for additional ideas.

The best ideas are below

Service Disabler

An application that is location aware turning off features depending on location. This would have practical use for the government as even government owned portable electronic devices have restrictions inside of limited areas. This idea could be extended to the consumer market to turn off specified features/notifications when at particular locations i.e. I am at/near my desk I don't need to be notified of Twitter mentions.

Bicycle cadence measurements

Bicycle cadence measurements. This measurement could be obtained by listening for the "swoosh" of a bicycle pedal using a Bluetooth headset or by calculating a virtual cadence using the accelerometer. In either case as a cyclist I am interested in this application because I presently have no option like it.

Photo Geo-tagging

A photo geotagging application. The application would communicate with your service of choice (Flickr, Picasa, etc.) and update previously uploaded photographs with a prior recorded geotagged location. The application would be smart enough to ignore photographs where it was not on at the time of the picture being taken. This would be useful for photographers who already carry additional devices to provide similar utility.

Grocery Food Item Locations

An application that provides the location of food items based on a specified grocery list. I.e. cereal can be found on aisle 3 and produce in this section of the store. This application would provide the details of where to go in the store to get all of the items on a list and provide suggestions for available coupons. To make this truly work would require the eventual buy in from multiple grocers as keeping store layout information up to date would be difficult.

Exposure Calculator

An exposure calculator for pinhole photography. Capturing light values and displaying flash calculations to photographers. This would be of value as photographers already carry additional devices to provide such calculations.

Advanced Phone Locker

Provide the ability to lock the phone with more than a simple pin or connect the dots unlock mechanism. This application would use multiple sensors to unlock the phone. It’d be interesting to allow for audible, location, gesture, and accelerometer based unlocking. A user could create a profile combining up to two unlocking mechanisms.

Some of these are more cute than useful. I ultimately chose to write the Service Disabler application though it morphed into Proximity Alerter.