[XBoxBoy]

[quote=harvey]I understand why homes in cold climates DO have basements.

But why do homes here NOT have basements?[/quote]

Basements aren’t that cheap to build. (You have to excavate away the dirt, build foundations and with modern codes do a good bit of water sealing) As a builder, if you don’t have to add a basement you will make more money building above ground square footage. After all, when someone goes to buy a house the basement isn’t counted in the house’s square footage. If buyers would pay the costs builders would build basements, but they’ve found that in most cases buyer’s would rather pay for above ground square footage than basements. Note that in areas with real expensive land and houses (Del Mar, La Jolla, etc) more and more of the top end houses are being built with basements because the cost of the lot is so high it justifies the additional cost of the basement.

[XBoxBoy]

[quote=ucodegen][quote=spdrun]”Still in therapy”. Come on.

Court should have awarded her a ten grand plus lawyer fees. Half to be paid by whoever made up the policy, the other half the the teacher herself.[/quote]
I would tend to agree with you on that except for one little thing. They were originally claiming $25,000 and San Diego Unified School District stonewalled them. I think the court was in effect telling the school district that stonewalling them and forcing them to go through the courts was a waste of the court’s time.[/quote]
The problem with that argument is it wasn’t the court that awarded the $1.25m it was a jury.

[XBoxBoy]

[quote=zk]Our new president is a “bull in a nuclear China shop.”
[/quote]

And now he tweets: “The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.”

Yup, “bull in a nuclear China shop” seems to fit.

[XBoxBoy]

[quote=FlyerInHi]Xbox, that’s not a bad idea, but i can think all kinds of insurance scams by the obese. They buy enough veggies to feed a child using a trackable system, then they buy junk using cash.

How about BMI and blood test results?[/quote]

If the insurance companies get far enough to monitor your grocery buying (not likely if you ask me but I just wanted to give an alternative side to spudboys paranoia) then I’d assume they will be monitoring lots of other things. Personally, I don’t like the idea of being heavily monitored, but I’ve more or less come to believe that it’s inevitable. So, if that happens I’m hoping to be able to use it to my advantage at least.

[XBoxBoy]

[quote=spdrun]Hopefully that idea will go over like a lead balloon — can you see the negative aspects of having one’s eating habits tied to an online account with one’s real name? Bet the newly deregulated hellth in$urance piggies will just lurrrrrve this.
[/quote]

As someone who eats healthy I’d gladly let my health carrier see my grocery receipts in exchange for no more waiting in checkout lines. And wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t have to put up with a total stranger, who is your cashier, trying to make a “personal connection” as their marketing dept has trained them to do?

And what about the positive aspects of having one’s eating habits tied to an online account? If my health insurance took into account my eating habits, my exercise habits, my weight and cholesterol, my sleeping habits and my general lifestyle I bet my health insurance would drop in half. But no, I gotta be lumped in with a pool of people who eat like crap, never exercise, and in general don’t take care of themselves.

[XBoxBoy]

Would Trump’s upcoming immigration reform impact this?

[XBoxBoy]

Just thought I’d post an update. (And probably rant a bit!)

So after all the posts I decided I should really see if I couldn’t make this work without a laptop. I’ve got a nice iPad Pro with a decent sized screen so it should be doable. I’m connecting to a Trackman 4 which is a device that tracks your swing and the flight of your golfball. It has apps that do this for you, but I need the raw data, and that is only available through their debugging tool. To access that I launch a browser and open a web page. The trackman and the browser open a socket and then the trackman starts streaming JSON data. It takes only a dozen shots to get to about 10-20k lines of JSON.

I went today to the range and I was able to easily get the data into the browser. Now here’s the incredible rub. iPad browsers don’t support select all. The only way to select all the text was to highlight a word, then move the little blue ball to enlarge the selection. It takes over a minute to scroll all the way up and down to get the data for about 8 shots! I find this incomprehensible. Why in God’s name did the designers of the iPad browsers, (I tried Safari, Firefox, and Google Chrome) feel that they should not support select all? Other iPad apps have select all, so why not the browsers?

Once I’ve managed to select all, it’s not too bad to copy and paste to my text editor (textastic) which I can get the files off later with out too much trouble. (Although this weird invention called a file system would probably make it much easier, but I guess that’s too advanced for iPad.)

However, I’ve got to say. It’s absolutely dumbfounding to me that the designers of these systems have decided to abandon support for basic computer operations like, select all, copy, paste. I guess that’s my real problem with these devices (tablets, smartphones, etc) if you are facebooking, taking selfies and sending to friends, or twitting, I guess it’s all great. But if you want to do any real work, to actually be productive… forget about it!

At any rate, I realized after I struggled for so long trying to select all that I do have a bluetooth keyboard for my iPad, but I hadn’t brought it to the driving range. Tomorrow or the next day I’ll take that with my iPad and Trackman and see if it goes better. (The keyboard does allow me to hit cntrl-A to select all.) If it still is an awkward pain, I’ll look into a low cost laptop.

XboxBoy

[XBoxBoy]

[quote=flu]

So correct me if I’m wrong it sounds like what you need something that polls an HTTP url and grabs the response, saves the response, and then makes it available for a computer used elsewhere where you want to analyze data afterwards, right?
[/quote]

Well, yes I think that’s correct. I’m not that knowledgeable with web related tech, my expertise lies with graphics rendering, AI, and game related type technology. The output from the device is a series of JSON messages. Having them in a browser means that I can monitor what I’m getting, making sure that data collection is going ok. (Although it’s a bit cryptic) After a dozen or so shots, I’ll copy the data and save it, then clear the browser page and continue collecting data.

[quote=flu]
If so, I’m thinking you probably don’t need a laptop just to do this… Would a very simple app on a phone that polls the web url, grabs the HTTP response, and then at the the end of session, sends you an email and/or uploads to a cloud account (like google drive) work?

This shouldn’t be hard to do, on Android or iOS. If it was Android, I’d put something together for you in 10-15 minutes. For iOS, I need to fire up my old xCode IDE, which I’ve neglected for the last year… I don’t mind slapping an iOS project together. But, you’re going to have to sideload it yourself onto your phone, since no way I can get something like this onto the app store quickly.[/quote]

If you think this is feasible, then maybe pm me. I have xcode, and I currently upload our tech to my phone and iPad, and while I know very little about the logistics of an iOS app itself, I can probably manage to build and run an xcode project that someone provides. Not sure how much hand shaking would need to be done to make the connection. There is a login process that requires a username and password.

XboxBoy

[XBoxBoy]

[quote=no_such_reality]

Is it 10 to 20K individual lines or one entire section? i.e. is the data in the same location, same format and just happens to rather long raw data?

Will a select all work on it before the copy?

you can get a cheapy laptop, but really seems like overkill since there’s already a $600+ computer hanging on your hip.[/quote]

Yes, it’s all in one window although it has obviously scrolled off the visible area. So, the idea is select all, copy, paste, save file. I’d like to be just that easy. A couple keystrokes.

At the risk of starting the flame wars over Apple which I don’t want to do, I’ll point out that the $600 computer on my hip is an iPhone and copy and paste is a pain, then what to paste it into? I have a text editor (textastic) so that’s doable. But then getting from the phone to the computer is a pain because iOS doesn’t have a finder. Yeah, it’s all doable, I grant you that. It’s just awfully clunky. I have a coworker who uses a laptop to do the same thing, and that has worked well for him, so I’m inclined to go that route.

Thanks for all the advice.

[XBoxBoy]

[quote=all][quote=XBoxBoy]
I’m thinking 8megs memory and at least 512meg SSD drive…[/quote]

512MB SSD might work, but with 8MB of RAM you will need MS DOS, or Windows 3.11. Win95 should also work.[/quote]

Opps… yeah gigs not megs

[XBoxBoy]

[quote=no_such_reality]
Blu 5.0 Android phone for $59.99 on Amazon, using a free screen grabber to automated the webserver connection and copy to a text file.

[/quote]

Don’t think that’s going to really work as we’re talking about 10-20k lines of text per session that needs to be copied. That’d be a whole lot of screen grabs.

[XBoxBoy]

[quote=flu-redux]

Macbook air $850.[/quote]

Sorry, but as I said in the original post, I won’t be going with Mac for this.

[XBoxBoy]

[quote=no_such_reality]You say “places” and then say “into the field” along with “collect some data … via wifi” and “might do a bit of coding”.

So having supported field staff for a couple decades in various roles couple questions come to mind.

First, will you have access to a decent flat surface (like a desktop/table, etc) to work on? Yes, you see people working with it on their lap at the airport, but really, that’s just because they’re desperate to get it done. You don’t want to work that way

Second, is the “field” basically clean? i.e. Indoor office/store type environment or is it “field” like oil field rig, truck stop, construction site, etc.

Third, are you dependent on interacting with local staff while collecting data and will busting out a laptop be intrusive on that interaction?

Fourth, if this is truly a uni-purpose device, can a simplified tablet or phone be purposed to talk to the data collection device? i.e. could you just use a $59 Amazon BLU android phone with an app to collect the data?

The answers determine if you really what just a $200 disposable laptop, low-end tablet or tabletesque PC like the Surface or Ipad with keyboard.[/quote]

1) No. I will be on a golf course or driving range. I won’t be doing a lot of typing but hitting balls and collecting data on the flight of the balls. This data will appear in the browser that connects to the device (over wifi) and I will then copy the data from the browser into a txt file to be analyzed later. (The device has a built in web server that any browser can connect to)

2) See answer to 1

3) Nope I’ll be doing this on my own. No concerns about clients, staff or anyone I’ll need to impress or interact with.

4) While this will be the laptop’s main function I might use it at night in bed to code a bit(visual studio) or surf the web a bit. I have tried this with an iPad and it connects but iPad (and iPhone) are awkward if not impossible for copying data from browser and storing to txt file. A laptop seems like a simple way to go. (Don’t get me started on the Mac iOS way which seems to include not allowing access to files!)

I don’t want to spend a ton, but it will be a tax deductible business expense and I would probably like it to last a while. I’m thinking 8megs memory and at least 512meg SSD drive, reasonably lightweight would be good, but it doesn’t have to be the lightest laptop ever made. Preferably under a grand.

[XBoxBoy]

Amazing! A thread on piggington about home ownership! What will they think of next.

Actually, thanks for posting this link, a really interesting article. Too bad it doesn’t give more data or go into detail. Would be well worth knowing if this trend was going on in San Diego as well. My hunch is that in San Diego due to the price rises those who would normally be move up buyers can’t afford to. Heck, I know in my neighborhood most people couldn’t even get close to buying the house they currently own.

[XBoxBoy]

For a cheap plan I suggest Ting.com. They buy bulk time on the major carriers networks and resell to their customers. My phone bill is typically $13 a month since I don’t use data and talk less than 100 minutes a month. And there is no commitment to a 2 year plan.

[Author]

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