Scott David Brown's Blog, page 2

Goodbye Scott

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It’s been almost a year since I became an Apple App developer. Anyone can do it if they pay the $100 to have access to the App Developer site. I did so last November and in a few days, the Hello Scott app will be taken off the store. This is due to the fact that I don’t have $100 to spend. That could change once I get a job, but for now, Hello Scott will be on hiatus. That means you won’t be able to download the app anymore. If you already have, it should still work. I don’t think Apple will force you to delete it. However, I won’t be able to update it or offer any kind of technical support.

The fact is, I have lost interest in the app, though I was thinking of making some changes. Add a tab, move things around, and try to make it better. At the end of the day, I don’t think it matters much since the app never became very popular. That’s okay. It’s something I can revisit in the future. So hopefully no one is disappointed. If you did download it and hope it gets supported in the future, let me know.

I’m also curious to see what happens once my subscription expires.

Watch Me On Twitch

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Well you can! Just check me out at: https://www.twitch.tv/sdbmania. I’ve been spending a lot of time streaming on Twitch since early September and I’m loving it. What games do I play? Well, it’s been mostly Heroes of the Storm and Friday the 13th. There’s also The Sims 4, Fortnite Battle Royal, and Dead By Daylight. I try new games and sometimes I get a mood for something different. Stop on by!

Why All the Fat Shaming?

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Image from: http://www.adiosbarbie.com

The obesity rates are high in America. Just take a look at some of the facts from the CDC. 36.5% of adults in this country have obesity. It’s probably on the rise too. It’s sad, but should not be surprising. Fast food, ineffective diets, and psychological issues contribute to this statistic.

Usually you hear that all you need to do to lose weight is diet and exercise. That’s generally true, though there can be other factors that make losing weight harder. Genetics, body chemistry, or other physiological issues can make it nearly impossible to lose weight even if you are doing everything right. Metabolism also plays an important role as efficient metabolisms are really good at storing fat even when eating right.

We do have tools to help get the job done. The BMI standard, which is really just a guide, can help you determine what weight you should be at to stay healthy based on your age and height. It doesn’t take into account fat vs. muscle mass., so you could still be fat but at the right weight, technically speaking. That’s the situation in. I’m at a good BMI, but I still have too much body fat. I never really cared about it enough to do anything about it until a few years ago, when I started playing Wii Fit. I began losing weight gradually, from around 155 pounds to what I’m at now at about 143.5 pounds.

I’ve talked about my body weight with my friend Mark Mushakian often in the past. His feeling is that any excess body fat is bad. I don’t feel like my body is unhealthy, but I do realize that I could use some more muscle. My advice, if you are overweight to the extent that it’s becoming a real problem, you should get help. I know it’s not easy, be it fear, pride, or some other reason, we can feel like getting help isn’t an option.

What you need to do if figure out why you are overweight. Is it bad eating habits? Are you using food to feel better cuz you are bored, have anxiety, or worried/scared of something? It may surprise you, but you could be over eating because of a psychological issue. It doesn’t make you crazy, actually it’s perfectly normal. Occasional I catch myself eating something because I don’t want to feel anxious. If you have tried exercise and a healthy diet and are still overweight, one reason might be because you are avoiding an uncomfortable feeling.

If that’s not your issue, there may be something physiological wrong. Like maybe your metabolism is sabotaging you, like I mentioned earlier. Some people have a biological reason they have trouble losing weight. Obviously you should talk to your doctor to rule out any physical or biological issue that might be the problem. Then you can think about the potential of a behavioral issue.

Bill Maher’s show Reel Time on HBO brought up this issue, bringing up a political side. He argues that both The Right and The Left in politics are both enablers, allowing the obesity epidemic to continue. The Left wants to protect people’s feelings while The Right doesn’t want to feel like someone is telling them what to eat, was his point, essentially.

I’m personally torn in this issue. Body weight and type are personal and most of us don’t like to talk about it. It’s certainly not nice to use a person’s body as an insult or use negative motivation to try to get someone to change their behavior. It often is received as bullying, which just makes things worse. Yet in comedy, weight can be used as the subject of jokes. Take Christ Christie for example. Late night comedians have used his body type as a subject of their jokes quite a bit. Take the most recent example of the Governor and the beach scandal. One person’s personal experience dealing with a fat joke.

Some people think that by insulting and humiliating people will get them to change their behavior. It never works as far as I know. People won’t change because you point out a problem they have and then tell them how horrible they are. It may make them want to eat more in order to feel better or avoid facing what real issues they may have. Ridiculing and insulting people in general is down right mean.

It’s better to try to be understanding. Walk a mile in their shoes, as the old saying goes. At the same time, we can’t make being overweight something that is okay, because it is a significant health issue. Being overweight increases the chance of getting certain diseases later in life. It causes stress on some internal organs and makes the body work harder. That can lead to other problems down the line. While it feels better to enable people with weight problems, it’s not good for them in the long run.

At the end of the day, we should all want to be healthy. No excuses. Work on yourself, be a good example. Bullying, shaming, and other negative social behavior is not going to solve anything. At the same time, leaving things the way they are isn’t the answer. Better education, healthcare, and positive motivation is the better way. Being fat for some can feel like a prison sentence. It comes without a lot of dangers but also social stigma. Let’s not demonize people who are overweight, but encourage them to get fit through positive social behavior. What do ya say?

Solar Eclipse

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Yeah, so I got to see this today. Pretty cool. The picture is something I drew, obviously, so it’s not a perfect representation.

Minecraft Addiction

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Old photo of my bridge on SDBmania Land

Last week I played Minecraft ALOT. Possibly almost too much, but to be fair I hadn’t really played the game much for the last couple of years. Minecraft is the kind of game that you can play for hours at a time until you run out of ideas to build things. For me, I play a lot when I have a cool idea for a project in the game. The last thing I did was build a residential area in my town and wall it up. Now my villagers are pretty safe.

SDBmania Land is quite a sight, if you ever get to see it (which you can if you want to watch hours of YouTube videos). I’ve built up a nice size town, added a nether tunnel, killed stuff, and ventured in the nether world (hence the tunnel). Not to mention I have a kick ass mine cart track and partial subway.

Getting Older

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It’s funny how much we dream about growing up as kids, only to then wish we would stop aging as adults. Toys R Us used to tell us that we shouldn’t want to grow up, and the stuck for a little while, but not for long. There are just too many benefits to being an adult! I like to think of cars in the same way. They get older, and show their age, sometimes well and sometimes not. I still remember my ’81 Honda Civic. I’d probably still be driving it I could, probably would have turned it into an electric car!

There’s no need for any electric car conversions anymore, thankfully. I like to refer to them as EVs (electric vehicles). I’ve been driving them for several years now and I’m never going back to gas, at least for my personal car. As amazing as they are, EVs do have potential issues as with any car. The main and most important one is the battery pack, which operates like a gas tank.

Maintenance and refueling is much cheaper in EVs, but if you end up having to replace the battery it can cost several thousands of dollars. Thankfully there are warranties that cover the batteries in case they fail or have unintended problems. But after several years of use, eventually the batteries will need to be replaced and that is going to cost something.

The photo up above is taken from my used 2013 Nissan LEAF, showing my mileage and my battery range. In the photo, my car has 76% charge. This is also expressed on the bars on the right of the photo, the long rectangular bars that hug the range estimator at 52 miles. What’s important for this discussion are the bars on the right of those, what we LEAFers “capacity bars.”

These bars in the Nissan LEAF tell the owner how the battery is aging. The LEAF, as with most EVs, have two batteries. A traditional 12volt battery powers most of the electronics in the car while the traction battery handles the action motion. The traction battery is actually made up of many small batteries similar to AA batteries. As the packs are used and recharged, the life of the traction battery is affected. On my car, you can see from the picture that I have lost one bar. I should have 12 bars total, instead of the 11 I currently have.

This means that I have less range than when the car was brand new. I’d guess at a full charge I have somewhere around 70 miles, down from 84 when the car was new. That’s a significant drop in miles, though should I lose another capacity bar, the range will not drop as much. That’s because the first bar represents much more of the capacity then the other bars.

If you have a new EV or bought a used one recently, here’s a few things you should know:

Never leave the battery at 100% for more than 3 hours or so as the battery will degrade faster if it sits at a full charge. Instead, charge to 80% or leave the car at a low-ish charge if you aren’t going to use it for a while.
Heat is bad for the battery. Try not to charge the car in extreme temperatures. For the LEAF, don’t charge if the battery temperature indicator is 7 bars.
Try to charge before the car gets into a low power state. To be safe, try not to get an EV lower than 20% charge regularly.

Automakers have different ways to deal with heat. For example, Ford uses liquid cooling for their Ford Focus EV. Nissan decided to not use any kind of cooling technology in order to save money. Instead, the automaker has relied on developing heat-resistant batteries.

The current LEAF battery pack is supposed to be very good in hot climates thanks to the chemistry they use. That’s good news for people who live in those areas. However, heating up the battery isn’t great, which is more likely to happen with rapid charging or by leaving the car outside during a hot day for a long time.

The other day, I noticed something surprising, my mom’s LEAF lost a capacity bar! It was surprising to me since she only has about 15k miles on the car and it’s a 2016 model. I think the culprit is bullet point one, leaving the car topped up at 100% for too long.

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When the original 2011 Nissan LEAF became available, Nissan told customers how to charge the car. The basic advice was to only charge to 100% when needed and stick to charge to 80% most of the time. This was believed to help keep the battery healthy and make it last longer. In my car, I can set it to only charge to 80% or to 100% if I want to. However, this feature was eliminated in the 2014 model year in order to boost the EPA estimated range of the car. (A few other small features were removed in the 2013 model year, sadly).

Now most customers are told not to worry about charging to 100% regularly. While the newer batteries in the LEAF can probably be charged to 100% frequently, they shouldn’t stay at that percentage for many hours. It’s a good thing Mom’s LEAF is a leased car, so she probably wont be keeping it at the end of the lease.

Even if you have an EV that doesn’t have an easy option to stop charging, it’s obvious that you can still unplug the car before it reaches a full charge. That might be a pain in the but, but some automakers allow you to stop charging by the push of a button on a smart phone app. And most EVs that I know of have no easy way to tell you how healthy the traction battery is, unlike the LEAF.

Overall, I’m happy with the direction Nissan has gone with EVs. I think it would be great if the automaker put the 80% charge option back into the cars, but it won’t stop me from sticking with Nissan, at least until I can afford a Tesla (though I’ll probably end up with both).

Hello Scott is Live!

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In case you are wondering, the picture above is showing what the “Hello Scott” app looks like in the Apple App Store. That means it’s now official, my app is now available on iOS! A big thanks to Apple for approving it! Also a big thanks to Todd Perkins for his useful and easy to follow instructional videos on lynda.com (link will take you to his videos).

Last year I began working on creating my own app. I even briefly considered in majoring in Computer Science in order to improve my app building skills, which turned out not to be my thing. However, before that, I was working on the “Hello Scott” app. For those of you who aren’t aware, the idea came from an April Fools joke about two years ago. The What’s Up Scott? App was one of my favorite joke posts, but it did get me thinking. What about an app for my blog?

Apps are a big deal these days and much like websites, everyone seems to have one. Well, at least most commercial institutions seem to have one. It wasn’t sure how hard it would be to create my own app, but why not give it a shot? Thus the idea of “Hello Scott” was born. At first, I thought the best thing to do was to create an app that gave people access to the main content on my blog. I started learning about the basics of Xcode from Todd Perkins’ videos. Some of the videos were slightly outdated, not a surprise since tech companies update their software constantly. Thankfully, I was still able to get through the videos without much trouble.

I learned how to make a calculator app, which was fun and easy. It’s not really something that people would want to download, but it was a good way to start coding. I was able to learn other aspects of Xcode and I even toyed with creating my own video game for iOS. Haha, that’s more complicated. I did start using Unity, which is software for game designers and I tried Game Maker Studio. Unity seems like a better platform.

Sadly, I haven’t stuck with app or software development as of late, but after working on “Hello Scott” for as long as I did, I realized recently that it was pretty much done. I still need to learn about debugging. Xcode kind of does some of that automatically; it tells you if the app can run or not. However, I think I could improve the code and make it faster and use less memory. Let me go over the features real quick:

First, the app begins with a nice loading screen. It’s a photo of me outside, squinting. In just a few seconds, the app loads the main screen.

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Here we see the first tab. It shows the main page on my blog. From here, you can see all of my most recent posts and by scrolling down with your finger, you can see older ones. It’s essentially just like browsing my blog with an internet browser. In fact, that’s really what my app is, an internet browser, except that you only have access to certain sites.

There are four tabs in total. One for my website, and the others for Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin. Each tab is related to me in some way. They are linked to my social media accounts, allowing users to see what I’ve said online. The Twitter and Linkedin pages are my real, personal accounts while the Facebook tab is linked to this website’s page, so not my personal Facebook page.

The app has some functionality. You can easily switch between tabs at the bottom and there’s a navigation bar. On the “Most Recent” tab there are navigation buttons for forward and back. I did have those buttons on the other tabs during the beta test, but I found them unreliable. For some reason, they work fine on the main tab, but when I had them on the other tabs they would not function properly, often times not moving forward or backward. So, for the release version, I removed them. Hopefully I will be able to figure out the issue and update the app in the future.

I think the best feature of “Hello Scott” is that it allows users to log in to their social media accounts right from the app. Tired of using separate apps for Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin? Now you can check your own feeds from one app! I really like being able to check Linkedin without using their app, since it often has pop-ups asking me to find new people, which gets really annoying.

For the Twitter tab, once you log in to your twitter account, you can easily tap the back arrow on the website and see what the latest tweets are from your own feed. And by hitting the home button on the tab, you can go right back to my Twitter feed. Heck, you can even login to your WordPress account and blog from my app!

What’s next? Well I have to update my website to add an Apple Store icon and link to the app. Then I’m going to start working on the Android version of the app. I’ll first start designing the UI and the different tabs. Once I do that, I’ll have to learn how to write the code so the different tabs can work as a “web view.” Hopefully it will be similar to how I did it in Xcode. Once I’ve created the app, I’ll be ready for the beta stage, where I’ll need to test out the app. I’m sure I can get my Android friends to help test it out! But for now, I’m celebrating.

Android and Apple Get Along

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Android phone or iPhone? Many ask themselves that very question. For a little backstory, I had two Android phones before I switched to the iPhone and that was because Sprint didn’t have the iPhone for a long while. I never thought I’d have an android device again, until I got my Kindle Fire HD for Christmas last year.

Recently I found a sweet deal on Amazon for a special edition of the Moto E4, a new version by Motorola (yes that company still exists!). It seemed like a great deal for just $99, as an Amazon Prime member. “But Scott,” you may ask, “don’t you have an iPhone? Why would you want an Android phone?”

It’s been suggested on Reddit that it’s a good idea to have a second phone just for driving with Lyft. And since I tend to get annoying telemarketer calls on my iPhone, which I block, getting a second phone made since. It’s also good for tax purposes. Plus, I wanted to use Android Auto since Lyft uses Google Maps and it would be nice using the Ford Escape’s in-dash screen. It’s possible somehow telemarketers will get my number. I’ve already had a few wrong numbers so far and I’ve only had the phone for a few days lol!

The first phone I was looking at was the LG Tribute from Sprint. At $120, it seemed like a good budge phone. Plus, it would be “free” after a Visa gift card. Then Amazon gave me that great deal, so I thought I’d go for the Moto e4 instead (plus the Moto is a newer phone with more features). So now I have both Android and iOS phones, which means I’m a double agent! But who am I working for?

Baby, You’re a Firework

My brother couldn’t celebrate with us on the 4th of July, so I recorded the fireworks show and uploaded it on YouTube. I think it turned out pretty well and you can hear a little bit of my family being goofballs, myself included.

Switching Cars

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Lyft is a fun experiment. How much can I actually make with it? How much taxes will I end up paying and will I end up getting that money back in write-offs? How long can I drive before I get bored and want to go home?

These are some of the questions I’ve been asking myself since I started driving with Lyft. While taxi companies aren’t thrilled with the competition, in my area it’s much too expensive to call a cab to come over and take you somewhere. I imagine you have to pay to have the driver come to your house including the fare. With Lyft, you don’t have to do that!

Lyft is not only convenient for riders, it’s also pretty nice for drivers too. Yesterday the “schedule pickup” feature finally became available in my area, yay! Thanks to the new driver only app, I can now see if there are any pre-determined routes to snatch up. Riders have been able to pre-schedules routes, but now I have access to them ahead of time too!

Normally you have to “go online” and drive around waiting for someone to pop up on your screen needing a ride. Now you can start your shift by looking at a list of scheduled rides. I got to try it out yesterday and it worked out great in my electric car since I knew what range I was going to need. Of course, I didn’t tap to go offline after that ride so I ended up getting another route during my first trip, waiting for me when I was done with my scheduled ride. I drove my LEAF until I was at about 44% battery power and made it home at about 33%. I definitely was fine starting with only a 80%.

It’s the first time that reality set in, making me think that this could actually work out pretty well.  I don’t see myself driving 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, though it’s possible I could do that. Here’s the busy times in my area:

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If I just drive mornings and afternoons M-F, I could see some decent profits. However, in my electric car, I would have to charge in between shifts. It’s doable, if I started with 100% charge I should be able to drive 7-9am. Still, what if someone wants to go farther than 10-20 miles? I might have to charge after, which would mean finding a quick charge station or sitting for an hour or so at a slower charging station. Then there is always the small chance of getting a ride that goes farther than my range would allow.

So, to solve these issues, I’m going to start driving my brother’s 2016 Ford Escape instead of my Nissan LEAF. My EV will stay home and be my off duty car, so the Ford will be my company car! Mom helped me fill it up today, putting in 11 gallons of gas for about $32. Less than I was expecting. According to the car, it has a 266 mile range. Of course this is just an estimation, but still it seems like it won’t be as costly as I thought.

I’ve driven the car a couple of times now. It’s a bit of an adjustment. The car has a lot of power, so it’s a bit tricky to get used to the acceleration. And of course there’s the fact that I’ll be driving with gas instead of electricity. It’s just a different experience. However, the interior of the Ford is nice and I think not having the range anxiety is going to make driving with Lyft much easier. The Escape get’s about 22 miles per gallon, which isn’t great, so I don’t know how much that will cut into my profits. I’d really prefer to drive a hybrid.

So the Lyft experiment is changing drastically. I think this will help me feel more comfortable driving longer, once I’m ready to do so. I’m going to work towards driving a couple of hours a day, 5 days a week, hopefully in the morning hours during prime time hours. I also may buy a phone just for Lyft driving. It’s ironic that I’m trying this out as a job since I’ve never been a fan of driving. I’d rather be the passenger! However, making my own hours, driving a car I’m familiar, help make it easier.