Leap Motion Controller, Revolutionary Tracking Device or Nice Toy?

This week my Leap Motion Controller finally arrived.  When I first saw it a year ago I thought what a great idea, and put in my pre-order.  For a year I bragged about how great it would be to wave your hands in the air, and not have to use a mouse or a touchpad.  Theoretically it is a great idea.  So how is it really?

Out of the box it is a very cool little device.  Leap Motion was smart enough to include two USB cables, one short, one long.  A very nice touch.

When you plug it in though nothing happens.  You have to read the little protective plastic to learn that you must build an account on the Leap Motion Site and download your software.  That part wasn't so bad but it downloaded five different programs.  I just wanted a mouse replacement.

After doing the setup and the training, I was impressed with the graphics as it shows you on the screen what the little device "sees".  That part was amazing.  The problem was the demo software took over my computer so it couldn't multi task.  If you are expecting an important skype or email, don't set up your Leap Controller.

After the training was all finished with my Leap, I couldn't get any mouse or touchpad functions to work.  After digging around I found that I had to download more software.  Touchless.

The part I don't get it that the App isn't at the apple store where it should be.  It is downloaded into the Leaps proprietary app on your Mac.  I don't know how it works on a PC.

With "Touchless" installed and running I started the training.  When nothing happened, it was back to the support website.  It turned out I have too much "light" in my office.  So I closed the blinds, and it finally let me set it up.

After doing some training I got used to waiving my hands in the air without touching the screen, and it worked ok as a mouse.  That is about it.  A lot of reviews complained about it being "jumpy".  I didn't have that problem once I stopped moving forward and backwards as I made motions with my hands.

The next test was to put a keynote up on my big screen and control it using my wands over my Macbook air.  This worked pretty cool.  I felt like a magician waiving my hands over the hat and magically the next slide appeared.  To bad it won't work with an iPad.

Moving back to my desktop Mac, I tried to control the browser window opened on my second screen.  Here is where I hit the wall.  The Leap only will let you work on one screen.  Back in the box it goes.

If you are looking for a cool toy to do some simple screen controls, this is a huge winner.  My biggest problem is humans are very tactile animals, we need to have feedback.  Even the conductor has the weight of the baton to help guide his hands through the air.  Poking the air just isn't accurate enough for me.

After having several HP Touchscreens before I got my Mac, I might have been setting the bar too high for the Leap.  The problem is the touch motions are so good on the iPad, I just want dual 32" touchscreens on my desk.

My ending thoughts are that the Leap Controller is still a year away from being really usable and it is both, a revolutionary tracking device and a nice toy.  As an addition to my trackball, if I could just point at the second screen to get the cursor to jump over there, it would be really a nice addition.  For now, it isn't for me, and more likely that voice control will remain my secondary cursor controller.

Final Note - Leap Motion returned the controller no questions asked.  Great Service.

Bosch Dishwasher - Super Energy Saver - Super Quiet - Super Annoying Buzzer

If you read my blog, it shouldn't be of any surprise to you that we have the latest and greatest energy star appliances in our house.  For the most part these appliances are quieter, clean better and save energy.  All good right?  Well It's all good until the Bosch dishwasher buzzer won't turn off.

Now that we have a Chevy Volt in the house, and have changed our electric plan from the standard to the "Home and Auto" plan.  The Home and Auto plan allows us to charge the Volt at night at very very low rates.  The tradeoff is higher than normal mid peak and peak rates.  Our Bosch Dishwasher is prepared for just such a plan with delayed start.  

The delayed start feature lets us load the dishwasher, go to bed and it will start when electricity is cheap.  If you notice the time of this post you'll see that I am up quite early for a Monday morning, even for me.  That is because the engineers at Bosch thought it would be nice to let people know when the dishes are done with a very annoying beep.

Being a pilot, when things beep in the airplane, we are trained to fix them.  My wife can ignore this beeper, I can not.  Our lives are full of warning beepers.  My Volt warns me if I get to close to another car, and chastises me for changing lanes without signaling.  It thinks I am "wandering" out of my lane so it beeps.  This might come in handy tonight when I am tired from getting up so early.

Apparently no one at Bosch thought that if you delay start the dishwasher that you might not want to hear the beeper at 3:31 am.  The manual says to hold the power button and the delay start button at the same time until the display says "0" to turn off the beeper on the Bosch Dishwasher.  The problem is you have to power off and on every time.  Another "feature" I can't figure out.

So if you don't want to hear the the load finished buzzer or beeper or whatever you want to call it, starting your dishes becomes a binary programming exercise.

First you must power off your dishwasher.  This is required every time of our model.

Second you must hold the power and delay start buttons to turn off the buzzer beeper warning system.

Third you must select the delay time to start at the lower power rates

Fourth and finally you have to select the wash cycle.

The next dishwasher will require some method to skip the first and second steps.  Some friends have the Fisher Paykel drawer style dishwashers, and the beeper is way quieter and is simple to turn off via the display.  Maybe that is the trick, Bosch wants to annoy me into spending more money.

For now if you want to turn off the beeper on your Bosch Dishwasher, there you have it.  Power off, then hold the power and delay buttons at start, and select "0" for no buzzer.  Do this everytime you don't want the buzzer on.

Things I would change if I were King....

As a society, sometimes we do a great job helping those in need and other times we make their lives worse with good intentions.  One of the most important tools we can give people is an education.  Regrettably, our system is a failure.

Electricity is just one place where we do some very funny things to “help” people.  My recent acquisition of an electric car highlights the problem.   In order to encourage people who have an electric car to use electricity right, my local utility has a plan where the night rates of electricity are 25% of the day rates.  If I charge at night, I can get 40 miles out of my car for about 64 cents.

Lets put that into gas price terms.  My record is 60 miles per gallon and I have averaged 40 miles per gallon, and 40 miles per electric charge.  I can pay 64 cents for electricity by charging at night or $4.10 cents for premium gas.  I have a Chevy Volt which can use electricity or gas.

Very quickly I have learned how to program everything in my house that uses electricity from 6pm to 6am when my rates are dirt cheap.  The the day rates are three or four times higher than the night rates so I adjusted everything.  My home is 100% CFL and LED lighting, all of our appliances are the newer energy star and we can program them to run between 6 pm and 6 am.

Out of curiosity I did a little research and found that my rates more closely resemble the way utilities pay for electricity.   So my question is, why doesn’t everyone pay for electricity this way?  If we want to train people to use electricity smarter, we should charge them in accordance with costs and educate them to use electricity smarter.

Why don’t we?  My guess is the people who work less have more time to argue with the politicians.  The politicians make the rules to appease the “vocal minority” and stay in office, nothing more.  

The people who really want to use electricity more in the day time can add solar panels that can create power during the high cost hours.   I work from home so I would still benefit from solar panels, and I am planning to add them next with my new roof.

At the end of the day, I would set electric rates based on the costs to the utilities.   Instead of taking the easy way out and subsidizing day time use with higher night rates, the rules should encourage smarter use and to reduce day time generation costs by increasing the number of commercial buildings that have solar power.  Looking down across the country I see acres of flat roofs that look like great candidates for solar panles.

When the demand is highest for Air Conditioning it is also the best time for solar panels to generate power.  If I were king, I would start by aligning the costs of using electricity with the real costs of generating it.  This alone should be a major influence to getting commercial interests to support solar and create an overall greater benefit to everyone.

What would you do?

Have You Ordered Your Free Car?

Well Have You?  Did you know you could get a free car?  I did.

Would you like to know how?

Like many things, the answer is simple, but not easy.  

Currently auto companies are under legal mandates to sell a number of zero emissions cars.  Electric and Natural Gas are the two energy sources that fit this bill in California.  There is also a mandate on Electric car sales.

Tesla, as a 100% electric car manufacturer, isn't making money selling cars, rather they are about to announce a profit because they sell electric car credits to manufacturers who don't yet make electric cars or who don't sell enough on their own.  

So how does this help you get a free car?

Chevy needs to sell Volts.  Honda needs to sell electric Fits, and Nissan needs to sell the Leaf.  For whatever reason people aren't buying so rebates are flowing.

With the rebates you can lease a base model of any of these cars for $0 down and $299 a month for 36 months.  That is a total of $10,764 to drive the car for three years.  If you have the income, Uncle Sam will give you a $7500 tax credit.  That leaves $3264 out of your pocket over 36 months.  The state of California will rebate $1500, and you can get another $1500 to add a charger to your house.  Now you are down to $264 plus the charger.  

Honda is now including the charger, and the dealer kicked back the $264 to make the deal work when I picked up my Volt.  

There you have it, a car for three years that doesn't cost me anything.

It gets better.  Charging at home the Volt runs about $2.00 for 40 miles, half the price of gasoline if you get the 38-40 mpg most are getting when they run gas.  My record is 60 mpg on gas, and my monthly savings on "energy", that is my new combined gas and electric bill are $300 a month less than they were before I got the Volt.

My Volt is money in my pocket.  What are you driving?

Follow up note: You have to be careful when you lease a Volt, the dealer can take the $7500 Federal Tax credit and build it into the lease without telling you.  When you lease a car, the leasing agency is the first owner and normally gets the tax credit.  Electric Cars can have the Tax credit assigned in certain circumstances.  So watch your paperwork and talk to your tax advisor.

Finish One Thing At A Time To Succeed

This week has proven quite interesting in all areas of my work.  Like most entrepreneurs, I am a little ADD or ADHD or something like that.  My mind is always spinning at all hours of the day and night.  I got up at 3am this morning with ideas just pouring out.

I met two different business owners who had the exact same problem.  They had major projects somewhere between 70 and 80% complete and we already looking to the next project.  The problem was they weren't finishing the ones they already started.  Do you know anyone who has trouble finishing a project?

If this is you or someone you know, you might like to know why this happens.  To begin with we start projects for a couple of reasons.  One of them is to prove we can do it.  The problem here is that you don't actually need to finish the project to see that you can.  When this happens, you get bored, realizing that there is no question that you can finish, and you start looking elsewhere.

The problem I have with this is that you can't win until you finish.  This is true in life, racing and projects.  Imagine if you got on my flight to Dallas and we went 80% of the way and got on the PA and said "OK folks, you have seen that we made it this far, and we are sure you all believe we can make it the rest of the way so we are stopping in Austin so we can go do something else."  Crazy right?  And yet we do it every day.

Following through on a project or task until it is completed isn't easy. Anyone can enter the race, and many can run a lot of laps.  Only a few will finish, and only one will win.  

When these business owners come to me short on patience, money, time and focus while looking at the next project, it is easy to see why they are right where they are.

Imagine if I were a real estate investor and I kept buying property.  First I bought a condo, cleaned it up, got it ready to rent, and said "See, I can be a condo landlord" without ever actually renting it.  Then I went and bought a house, cleaned it up, got it ready to flip and said "See I can flip a house" without ever selling it.  I would go broke doing this, and this is exactly what I see business owner after business owner do over and over.

I must admit, I have done it too.

So what is the solution?  The simple solution is not to start a new project until the old project is truly complete.  Simple yes, obvious yes, easy, no.  If it were easy, everyone would do it.  

One of the keys to success is knowing what you want to do before you start, and then finishing it before you start something else.  I can't fly a jet while I am still racing a car.  Why do we try to start one business when the first one still isn't complete?

If you start, commit to finishing before moving on, and you will see your success sooner than you think possible.

Affordable Lighting Control - Yes, It Really Exists.

The iPhone has been a game changer in just about every business out there, and now lighting control is no exception.  Several years ago when I ran a home technology business, our lighting control packages could run several thousand dollars just in programming, never mind the actual lighting controls.  A touch screen remote could be $9,000 without any programming at all.  Now you can use a $199 iPod Touch with WiFi to do the same thing, or a $299 tablet.

Today with an iPhone or Android, you can upgrade your house with complete lighting control for less than the cost of programming some of the lighting systems from the big names like Crestron or Lutron.  Best of all you can do the programming yourself from your couch with your iPhone or Android phone or tablet.  Just sit back and make the magic happen.

My current home has the lowest cost lighting control I have ever installed, and so far it has proven just as reliable.  Don’t bother with X-10, they are basically gone anyway, and  this is far easier to program and surprisingly less expensive overall.  You don't need fancy testers or electrical bridges for this lighting control.  About the only thing I can’t do with my current system is set triggers, and I can do that if I get a smart alarm system or leave a computer running to be the “brains” of the house.

A trigger is something like "if night and party, then lights stay on, else lights off at 11:30 pm"  Where "party" is the trigger that prevents the night lights from going out.  Another example might be if "Driveway motion" and "dark" then lights on.  Some of these can be done other ways though.  You just need to be a little creative.

There isn’t a need to pay ADT or any big alarm company $20, $30 or even $49 a month to have remote access to your home.  This little system includes it for free.  WiFi cameras are as little as $99 for indoor and $119 for outdoor.  

I picked up a Lamp and Appliance Control Kit by Insteon at Costco since it was less expensive than going to SmartHome and I didn’t have to wait for shipping.  This gave me control of my landscape lights, one appliance and three table lamps for $199.  The house looks lived in and I used the appliance control to turn off my wife's watch winder before I go to bed.  Yes I bought her the cheap one and it is very loud.

At $49 per dimmer or switch at Smarthome.com, the Insteon system is also the lowest priced replacement switch I know of.  My entire house is now done except for the closets and bathrooms.  Those are on commercial grade motion sensors from Leviton.  You only need to go to bed once and hit "all off" while your wife is in the closet to realize why those rooms don’t belong on the system.

Unlike the old X-10 switches, these will work just fine with dimming CFL or LED lights too.

So how easy is it really? 

Installation:

1. Turn off the breaker for the lights where you are going to change the switch.  
2. Replace the switch.  
3. You flip the breaker back on. 
   Installation complete.

Programming.

1. Download iPhone or Android Ap
2. Click Add Device
3. Following instructions on screen, push little button on bottom of switch
4. Set Lights
5. Create a “scene” like “night”
6. Add devices to scene by checking on the list.

I don't recommend more than 5 scenes.  After a dozen years of analyzing my clients, I learned that the same five scenes are used in just about every house.  After those five, they are to confusing or not used.  They are "Morning", "Night", "Night Light", "Party" and "Movie Time"  which in most houses is just "TV Time".  Anything else can be done one switch at a time.

That’s it.  Yes, that is really it.  Save energy, never come home to a dark house, control your lights with your smart phone or tablet all that fast.  My wife even programmed some lights just for fun.  Affordable lighting control that makes sense is finally here.