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"Big Pizza" & Prime Numbers

Jacob Spizziri — Sat, 29 Jan 2022 20:43:48 GMT

How is "Big Pizza", the way you eat it, prime numbers, and the biggest act of corporate collusion the century has ever seen all connected? I'm about to take you on a journey, my friend.

TL;DR

Sign my petition and join the fight against "Big Pizza" (you're already a soldier but you might be on the wrong side).
Start cutting your pizza in 12 slices.
Check out the math that definitively proves my argument.

Let's Begin

We've all been there more times than we care to remember. Pizza math... How many slices do and therefore boxes of pizza do we need to achieve maximal group pizza euphoria?

But why is it that we always seem to just need that one more box to put us over that threshold? We always just need that one or two more slices but we need to get an entire additional box. Every. Dang. Time.

Is it just me? Or is there something fishy, dare I say insidious going on here?

Well it's not just me, and I'll come right out and say it:

"Big Pizza" knows that by putting 8 slices of pizza in a box they sell more pizza... it's basic MATH!

"Big Pizza" isn't stupid. They know all about math. They probably had a team of mathematicians work out the ideal number of slices per box that would maximize profits! Do you think it's a coincidence that every major pizza chain (that I can think of) uses 8 slices a box? If that is not unequivocal proof of corporate collusion I don't know what is!

How Many Boxes Do You Need?

I'll spare you the math (for now), but here's how it breaks down how many boxes you need. And before you get all uppity and say "well it depends on how big the pizza is and how hungry the people are." I'll just tell you now: it doesn't matter. And I'll prove it later.

Fine. I'll prove it now because I can feel your skepticism penetrating space and time and goading me on my couch as I write.

If you get a bigger pizza, people just want fewer slices, so you'd just be looking at the table respectively. The point is that in aggregate, 8 slices a box increases the overall number of boxes you need to buy because of how it divides pizza slices among the eaters. People don't share slices unless they're freaks.

Number Of Boxes Needed (8 Slices/Box)

	1 Slice/Person	2 Slices/Person	3 Slices/Person	4 Slices/Person	5 Slices/Person
2 People	1	1	1	1	2
3 People	1	1	2	2	2
4 People	1	1	2	2	3
5 People	1	2	2	3	4
5 People	1	2	3	3	4
6 People	1	2	3	4	5

So... what's wrong with it?

Let's look at how many boxes you would need if instead of cutting pizza 8 slices it was cut into 12:

Number Of Boxes Needed (12 Slices/Box)

	1 Slice/Person	2 Slices/Person	3 Slices/Person	4 Slices/Person	5 Slices/Person
2 People	1	1	1	1	1
3 People	1	1	1	1	2
4 People	1	1	1	2	2
5 People	1	1	2	2	3
5 People	1	1	2	2	3
6 People	1	2	2	3	3

If you've been following along you'll see that the maximum number of boxes needed in the worst-case scenario here are 3 whereas with 8 slices a box it's 5. Or to put it in common-speak:

8 slices lots of red. 12 slices not so lots of red.

Pizza Math

Let e equal the number of pizza eaters, s equal the number of averages slices per eater, & p equal the number of slices of pizza per box:

Number of Boxes Needed = (e * s) / p

Now we all know that "Big Pizza" doesn't sell partial boxes, so of course, we need to use a ceiling function (or round up) to the next highest box to achieve the maximum pizza vibes we're going for:

Number of Boxes Needed = ceiling((e * s) / p)

The problem is this rounding up necessity. Enter highly composite numbers (anti-primes).

Highly Composite Numbers (Anti-primes)

I won't get too much into the weeds here but basically, highly composite numbers are:

Positive integers with more divisors than any smaller positive integer.

In simple terms, they're numbers that are super friendly to dividing up neatly. It's probably easier to just see it, so below is a list of the first 10 highly composite numbers. And wouldn't you know it, what number is conspicuously absent? And look what number happened to be on the list? 🤔🤔🤔

Number	How Many Numbers Evenly Divide It	The Numbers That Divide It
1	1	1
2	2	1, 2
4	3	1, 2, 4
6	4	1, 2, 3, 6
12	6	1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 12
24	8	1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, 24
36	9	1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 12, 18, 36
48	10	1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, 16, 24, 48
60	12	1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30, 60
120	16	1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 20, 24, 30, 40, 60, 120

*credit wikipedia

At this point, you might be thinking: "Well why not 6?" And I say to you: "Just chill." I'm down with 6 too, so long as it's not 8. In all honestly "Big Pizza" probably could've done us worse by choosing 7 as it's prime, but the logistics of getting pizza cut nicely into 7 slices would've been an operational headache, not to mention being even more blatantly obvious than 8.

What You Can Do About It

Sign My Petition And Let "Big Pizza" Know The Jig Is Up

"Big Pizza" has been getting fat on our extra pizza dough (that's right, I said it) for far too long. Sign my petition and as a great man once said let's "save the change we want to spend elsewhere in the world.

Start Cutting Your Pizza In 12ths

It's not hard, simply start the way you normally start cutting pizza and then modify it slightly:

Slice your pizza right down the middle.
Turn the pizza 90° and cut down the middle again.
Now divide each 1/4 section into 3rds (I.e. rather than just one big cut down the center of each quarter, do 2 evenly spaced cuts.)

Power-User

Jacob Spizziri — Sat, 23 May 2020 11:11:00 GMT

TL;DR

Install F.lux
Install Rectangle (macOS only)
Install A Tab Suspender
- Firefox
- Chrome
Install Hidden Bar
Sign up for Grammarly & install it's plugins

Night/Red Shift

For those of us who spend most of their lives staring at a computer screen (and sometimes do so late into the evening). It's recommended that you install/use a Night/Red shift application on your machine to make it easier on your eyes. I'd recommend f.lux) as it's been around a long time and it's multi-platform (Windows, macOS, Linux). However, macOS does come with a native utility which handles this if you'd prefer.

You can download and install f.lux for free by going here and following the instructions.

For your health!

Move & Resize Windows (macOS)

You've got a lot going on when you're working. As a result, you've got a bunch of programs open constantly and you're endlessly shifting them around and repositioning them, and that gets annoying.

You could spend $2 and get Magnet...

OR you could checkout Rectangle which is an amazing free and super helpful little tool that allows you to easily move windows around (Ex. snap a window to the left half of your screen, and another to the right).

As an added bonus, it's opensource!

Suspend Browser Tabs

You know all those tabs that you have open? They're secretly sucking the precious computer-juice out of your machine, making it harder for you to do what you’ve gotta do.

There's a solution. Most popular browsers have plugins called "Tab Suspenders", and they simply "pause" or "suspend" any tabs that you haven't used in a certain period of time (which you can control) and make it easy to go back to them when you need to. Thus reclaiming all the precious computer-juice for it's rightful owner: you.

Here're some that work well:

Trust me, you may not notice it, but if you use a lot of tabs all the time, this will dramatically improve your performance.

Hidden Bar (macOS)

Tired of your cluttered menu bar? Hidden Bar is a free app lets you hide menu bar items to de-clutter your visual space.

Install Hidden Bar, or you know you could spend $15 dollars!!!! on bartender. I get everything I need out of this awesome, completely free, and open source app. Take a look.

Grammarly

I get it. You don't spell so good:

First, know that you're still valued and loved.
Second, try to make a conscious effort to get better.
Third, please use Grammarly so you don't look like a dingbat when you're emailing important (or regular) people.

Grammarly is free to sign up, has browser plugins that are easy to install, and helps make sure you're using actual English. I even used it to make sure this document was 💯, and yes it told me there were mistakes, but an editorial decision was made to leave those in for dramatic effect.

Why (And How) I Ditched Netflix

Jacob Spizziri — Sun, 02 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Why

Once upon a time there was cable and/or satellite TV. It was too expensive, was heavily Ad supported, and had mostly crap content. And the Millenial saw that it was very bad.

And then the Millenial said "Meh...", and Netflix flashed into existence. And it was very good. A reasonably priced alternative to cable, with no Ads, and solid content. The Millenial had forced the hand of the money mongering content provider, and had changed the course of television.

Then, the dark days began. The Streaming Wars, broke out with aggression as content providers said "WE WANT MORE MONEY!".

Amazon Prime, HBO Go, Hulu, Disney+... Even the occasional Ad support for paid content...

It was then that the Millenial realized that they hadn't changed anything. That they had been duped into a different flavor of what they had before. And the dollars began to drain from their bank accounts in large lump sums at the end of each month. Their favorite content was even pulled occasionally.

And the Millenial wept, as they were both emotionally available and shallow enough to do so.

But then, at the first light of the fifth day, at dawn; the Millenial looked to the east. And so emerged the final savior, the personal Netflix.

How

Buy physical media, rip that media to digital format, and then setup a home media server.

There are a number of programs that are free to use, that work pretty much exactly like Netflix, but for the content that you own. Check some of them out:

Plex
Emby
Jellyfin (if you're a hardcore open-source champion)

Buy a home NAS or build one yourself.

Start ripping content to it with MakeMKV (yes it looks sketchy, but it's legit). MakeMKV will not convert or compress any of your content, but will give you the raw content on the disk in it's full resolution. Be prepared for Blu-rays to require 30 GB, and DVD's to require 4 or 5.

The Math

So lets say you're the average American citizen. According to an article published in Forbes that means you're paying for around 3.4 streaming services at an average of $8.53/mo.

$8.54 * 3.4 = $29.036/mo
$29.036/mo * 12 months = $348.43/yr

Bottom line, the average American spends around $348.43/yr on streaming services. Let's say the average Blu-ray (so you're getting all the sauce of a UHD experience) costs around $20. That's around 17 pieces of content that you could own each year. Aaaand that's if you're foolish enough to buy them new. Buying used could make that number orders of magnitude higher. As an example, I once bought 3-4 complete trilogies, and 3-4 complete TV series for around $60 (good ones too, classics).

Think about it, how often do you just want to re-watch Friends, or The Office, or Parks and Rec., or Seinfeld, or The Sopranos, or Breaking Bad, or Stranger Things, or whatever again? Right now if you wanted access to all of those, you're going to have to subscribe to at least 3 streaming services. Instead you could just OWN them forever. And it comes with the convenience of modern streaming services like the ability to watch on any device and download content for offline playback.

Conclusion

In the long run, owning content is going to be more cost effective (and potentially immediately), plus you get the added benefit of having really good content. The only thing to stop you is the feeling that it's too complicated, and to that I say: "If you could navigate to this blog post, then you'll be able to figure it out just fine."

Privacy 1st

Jacob Spizziri — Fri, 31 Jan 2020 16:09:08 GMT

TL;DR

Here are some steps to take to make your digital life more private.

Switch to Firefox as your internet browser (on all your devices).
Use DuckDuckGo instead of Google Search.
Get a VPN if you can afford one.
- NordVPN usually has pretty good deals.
- If you don't get a VPN, look into using the 1.1.1.1 app.
Remove Geolocation/metadata from your photos.
Stop using Google Maps
- iOS: Use Apple Maps.
- Android: Use Maps.me.
Switch to a privacy-focused email provider (i.e. Zoho or Protonmail instead of Gmail).
Replace your messaging app (e.g. Facebook Messenger, Google Chat, etc) with Signal.
Finally, if you're savvy enough, configure your router/other services to use 1.1.1.1 as your primary DNS.

Let's Get Started

This article is intended to be an introduction to the concept of "Privacy" on the internet for those who aren't familiar with the concept and may not even be "tech-savvy". I'm going to cover some of the ways you are likely unknowingly giving away your privacy and outline a few action items you can take to fix them.

We're going to focus on 5 areas:

Your Internet Browser
Your Search Engine
Your Photos
Your Emails
Your Messages
Your ISP and DNS

Your Internet Browser

This topic is one of the most well documented and reported on issues, so I'll keep it brief. A simple browser search will yield a plethora of articles detailing how various browsers **cough* Chrome *cough* invade your privacy. Basically, there are ways websites track your activity across the internet and some browsers protect against it, while others don't *cough* Chrome *cough*. Additionally, your browser has the means to know everything that you do on the internet (what websites and pages you go to, what you click on, how long you're there, etc.), and that data can be stored and leveraged by whatever company owns that particular browser *cough* Google *cough**.

Really all you need to do is ditch your current browser for one thats more privacy focused

Options:

Action Item: Switch to a more privacy-focused internet browser like Firefox.

Your Search Engine

Simply put, Google Search makes money by selling your data. So it's in their best interest to collect and store every single scrap of data they can get their grubby little hands on. Not only that, but based on the profile that they build for you over time (based on the data they collect about you from various Google services), they create what's known as a "filter bubble" for you.

A filter bubble means that Google is not showing you objective search results for a specific query, but rather they are showing you the results they think you want to see. While a filter bubble isn't particularly important from a privacy perspective, it's still a quite important concept to understand. Let's take a practical example of what this could mean.

Let's say theirs a major election coming up, you want to first research the candidate affiliated with your party (George B. McClellan), and then the candidate affiliated with the party which opposes yours (Abraham Lincoln). The search for George B. McClellan is more likely to contain positive articles that someone of your perspective would be interested in, whereas the search for Abraham Lincoln is more likely to yield results that portray that candidate in a negative light.

In Psychology, this is called Confirmation Bias. Effectively, when you want to achieve a certain result or believe a certain thing, you search only for evidence that confirms it. Hopefully, we can agree that this is a very bad thing.

In contrast, DuckDuckGo does not track your search history, nor does it tailor results to you. Plus, it's available as a default search option on pretty much every major browser (including mobile browsers on your smartphone).

Action Item: Switch from Google to DuckDuckGo.

Your Photos

Assuming you use your smartphone as your camera, it's important to realize that when you take a photo that photo contains more than just a picture of you flexing in front of a mirror. It also contains metadata about the photo. Most significantly the time the photo was taken, and where the photo was taken (in the form of GPS coordinates).

This means that when you post that cute pic of you eating some delish Gnocchi at that fab restaurant to your blog or other such websites/services, someone can download that photo, and then find exactly where and when you took it.

The simplest way to prevent this issue is to simply disable location services on the camera app (iOS). However, you can also leave it on, and iOS provides utilities to remove metadata when sharing photos.

Action Item: Disable location services in the camera app.

Your Emails

Your email service provider (think Gmail) is effectively reading all your emails (unless of course you're already using one that focuses on privacy). "Read" here doesn't mean that a human being is physically reading your emails (although that is within the realm of possibility). There are computer programs that are parsing the text of your emails and extracting information from them that is then used however the service provider sees fit (e.g. marketing to you or selling it to other companies).

Something else that's worth taking into consideration is how readily these service providers will give your data to the government at their request. In the post-Snowden era, it's important to understand that mass surveillance programs are violating the privacy of law-abiding citizens. Most citizens are largely uninterested in such topics and haven't done much research or considered the nuance of the arguments at play. If you fall into that camp, then I'd urge you that it's your civic responsibility to become educated on the matter.

Action Item: Switch to a privacy-focused email provider like Zoho or Protonmail.

Your Messages

Using Facebook Messenger? Google Chat? [Insert Name Here]?

Yeah... they're reading your messages. Basically, this situation is identical to the Email one, so make sure you're using a secure messaging service; I highly recommend Signal. If you want to get all nerdy about it Signal is end-to-end encrypted and all messages and communications are ephemeral in the context of Signals servers (meaning they don't store your data longterm). Moreover, they're a non-profit, meaning that they can't get purchased by a large corporation and then turned against you (think Facebook). And their code is all open-source, which is a plus, as it means you could personally verify there's nothing nefarious going on if you were so inclined.

Action Item: Switch your communications over to Signal or (Telegram)[https://telegram.org/].

Your ISP and DNS

ISP

Your ISP, or internet provider (think Comcast), doesn't just make money off of you by charging you a monthly fee to be connected to the internet. Nope. They also track all the data they possibly can on your internet traffic and store it, then turn around and sell that data to other companies.

"How can this be?!?!", you wonder. "I always use HTTPS, and my network has a password. Shouldn't that mean that no one can spy on my internet traffic?"

Well, most of your traffic is private. However, there's still a lot of information that isn't. Like what websites and you're visiting and when. All of this gets stored on a profile that your ISP builds for you (more specifically for the IP Address they assigned to you).

DNS

To make matters worse, your ISP isn't your only problem. Without getting into to much detail, every time you go to a website, your computer first asks a computer called a "DNS server" where that website exists. The companies who own these computers collect all the data they can on these requests, file it away, and then sell it.

You can stop all this from happening by purchasing something called a VPN service. Whenever your VPN is enabled it wraps all of your internet traffic in an additional layer of protection which makes it impossible for your ISP to spy on you. Some examples of companies that provide such services are NordVPN and ExpressVPN.

It's important to note that there are some tradoffs that come with VPN's. There are some services that will attempt to detect if you're using a VPN and deny you service (e.g. not being able to stream videos on your favorite streaming platform). Of course you can always temporarily turn your VPN off when using such services. Lastly, they will make your internet a tiny bit slower. Bottom line though, before you purchase a VPN you should do a little homework to make sure that it's going to work well for you.

If you can't afford a VPN service (and you're moderately technical), you can simply start using 1.1.1.1 or 1.0.0.1 as your DNS Server.

Action Item: Get a VPN like Nord or Express.

Shutting Down Marianberry

Jacob Spizziri — Thu, 26 Dec 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Friends,

Marianberry was a project I started as a way for my wife and me to more easily practice NFP with the Creighton method. It's been a labor of love over the last 2 years as it was something I really believed in. For a variety of reasons outlined below, Marianberry will be shutting down for good January 31st, 2020. Thank you for using Marianberry. It's been fun.

To see why we're shutting down, and what it means for you please read on.

God bless, Jacob Spizziri

Why Are You Shutting Down?

1. A Cease & Desist

The Pope Paul VI Institute has asked me to cease and desist my efforts on Marianberry, as it incorporates some of their work. Despite my efforts to work with them to make Creighton a better place, including offering to donate the Marianberry platform to their organization they seem intent on ensuring that Creighton never leverages the power of technology. It would be wrong of me to pretend as though this wasn't deeply frustrating for me; however, I'm sure that they have their users' best intentions at heart, albeit misguided from my perspective.

2. Increasing Costs & Growing Needs

As Marianberry has grown over the years, there's been an increasing number of users with an increasing number of needs. Marianberry is really a team of just one person: me, and as such it's been increasingly difficult to give it the attention it deserves, as it's relegated to my free time, which is becoming less and less (especially now that I'm a father 🎉). Moreover, it actually costs money to keep Marianberry running, which has been something my wife and I have been happy to do until now, however with the growing costs it's something we've discerned to stop.

What do I do Now?

1. Migrate Your Data

Please make sure you download all your data from Marianberry before it shuts down. I will be archiving the data and keeping it stored for 6 months after Marianberry's shutdown to help anyone who wasn't notified of the shutdown in time to get their data.

2. Find An Alternative

As outlined above, I believe that the Pope Paul VI Institute will never allow for or provide a digital platform for their method, despite there being rumors or suggestions that it will happen. Their actions in this instance and numerous past instances support that in my opinion. As a result, I firmly believe that the Creighton Method as we know it now is going to be completely left behind in the next decade. My advice would be to change methods now, to a method which is going to provide such support. My recommendation would be FEMM (this is what my wife and I will be switching to). FEMM is based on solid research, is available on Android and iOS, and is, more importantly a company which I strongly believe is ethical, pro-family, pro-woman, and pro-life.

Inbox Zero

Jacob Spizziri — Fri, 19 Jul 2019 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR

Think about our emails in 3 distinct categories:

Emails that are actionable immediately.
Emails that are non-actionable.
Emails that are actionable, but not immediately (actionable at some future point).

Then change your behavior:

Archive any email that is non-actionable.
Archive any email that you just responded to.
Snooze any email that are actionable at some future point.

Here We Go

If you want to be effective in your job or even maybe your life, you need to be effective at email. But it can be maddening! You're getting floods of emails constantly, how do you keep them straight? How do you not get stressed? How do make sure you're getting everyone the answers they need? How do you make sure you don't forget something?

Enter: Inbox Zero, an email management strategy that can work with pretty much any email provider.

You before Inbox Zero

You after Inbox Zero**

**Note: inbox zero will not magically make you able to do a backflip

How Does it Work?

Inbox Zero is pretty simple. The basic idea is that at any given point in time, your inbox should contain 0 emails. That's the goal: zero, zilch, zip. We want no emails 0 our inbox! Before you freak out, the below concept will easily help you achieve this.

The first thing that we do is we start thinking about our emails in 3 distinct categories:

Emails that are actionable immediately.
Emails that are non-actionable.
Emails that are actionable, but not immediately (actionable at some future point).

Note: By "actionable" here, we mean emails that require you to do something with them (or in other words to take some action).

Then change your behavior:

Archive any email that is non-actionable.
Archive any email that you just responded to.
Snooze any email that are actionable at some future point.

Deep Dive

If at this point you get it, no need to read further. There's just more juicy details below.

Emails that are actionable immediately

Really, this is the only kind of email that you should actually be concerned with. These are the emails that require you to do something. So what do you do? Take the necessary action. Respond with the answer to someones question, etc.

Once you've done this these emails are now considered part of "Non-actionable" category. Why? Well... because you've just taken the action that was needed, and the ball is no longer in your court.

Emails that are non-actionable

These emails are done :confetti_ball:. They could be spam emails, marketing emails, or even the emails we just responded to in from the first category. We still want to keep them around for historical purposes, so we don't delete them, however we need to get them out of our inbox. What do we do?

We ARCHIVE them. This gets them out of your inbox, and out of your face!

Don't know how to archive an email? Here, this may help.

Emails that are actionable, but not immediately

A lot of the time these are the worst offenders for cluttering up our inbox and creating stress:

We get an important looking email, we open it and read through it only to find that it is important, but not until next week, or some time in the future where we need to do something (respond/perform some task and then let someone know, etc.). So now we have this email, which is marked as "read" sitting in our inbox, and slowly being buried alive. Quite naturally this creates stress in a normal human. We need to make a mental note, or some sort of note to make sure we don't forget about that email until next Wednesday or whenever.

This is where your email tool will help you out. Any modern email service will provide a "snooze" functionality, which effectively allows you to pick a date that you want that email to magically reappear in your inbox, as if it had just been sent to you.

Here's how to do it with Gmail (for real this time).

If your email provider doesn't have a "snooze" feature, well... I'm sorry, you're pretty much out of luck. When we have caveman tools we have to live like cavemen. I'd suggest switching email providers at this point.

Baby Cams & Nest

Jacob Spizziri — Sat, 22 Jun 2019 00:00:00 GMT

My reflections after 7 months of using a Nest Indoor Cam as a baby monitor solution.

Problem: I need a baby cam... but they all suck.

Baby cams are one of the many things that seem to still be stuck in the early 2000s technologically speaking. Moreover, who wants to spend $50-$100 on garbage hardware in software that has such a limited use-case you're just going to throw it away in a few years. So naturally, as a new father who is a tech professional, the standard baby cam products on the market weren't going to cut it.

Here are the requirements:

Modern Hardware & Software that'll last several years
A corresponding smartphone app to live stream video
2-way audio support (we can hear baby, we can talk to baby if needed)
Great Security (no creepers please)
Do I need CCTV or a non-wifi enabled device? No. those are just security measures. If we find a camera that we can trust the security of, then we should be good to go.
Something that can be repurposed and isn't pointless when baby's a little older

Solution: Smart Cams

Not a problem, a minimal amount of creative thinking and problem solving yielded the obvious answer. A smart cam.

Alright, I'm already bought into Nest ecosystem at this point with some Nest Protects and a Nest thermostat; so a Nest Cam it is. It's a solution that seems to check all the boxes. So here's what we'll get:

Nest Indoor Cam
My old iPhone 6 (for the stand-alone monitor)
Spigen Kickstand

Sure, it's a little more expensive, but for a solution that can be reused to solve other problems, it's a small price to pay.

The Con's

You can't take them with you

Ok. So you can take them with you, it's just not super convenient.

The first time the grandparents want you to stay over at their house the panic sets in: "How will we make sure she isn't screaming? We can't easily take our smart cam with us?". My recommendation here is to just buy a super cheap audio monitor. It's good enough for a night or two here and there.

Bandwidth & Service Outages

The Nest Cam App is apparently not built for continuous video streaming for extended periods of time. After about 45min of streaming on the app, there's an error that takes you out of the stream and you need to click back into it. The big problem with this is that if you're not paying attention and restart the stream when this occurs, your device thinks that it's not being used and goes to sleep. This means that you might think you're monitoring baby, but actually your device is sleeping, so if there's any screaming or movement going on, you're going to be completely unaware of it.

It's possible that this is a network connectivity issue; however, we have average internet (a mid-grade cable package). When you're downstairs streaming Netflix because baby is finally asleep and your monitor keeps going out because of you apparently don't have enough bandwidth to support both video streams and whatever else is randomly going on on your network, it kind of harshes the let's-finally-spend-some-hang-time-as-a-couple-vibe that you just had going for you.

Additionally, Nest goes down... a lot... (looking at you Google :angry:). Perhaps this has been a particularly frustrating 12 months for Nest & Google, but they've had a pretty significant service outage at least once a quarter if not more, and quite frankly, I'm over it.

This has been probably the single most frustrating thing about using the Nest Cam in this capacity.

Internet Dependency

That's right, it needs a connection to the internet. No internet. No worky. No monitor.

So that means when your electric provider decides to do some work on the power lines or there's a storm in the area and screws up your cable: No monitor.

This leads to my second largest beef with the Nest Cam.

Cloud Storage Only

If you want to access historical video with your Nest Cam, your out of luck unless you want to pay a ba-gillion dollars for their cloud storage service. So that means you get realtime only with some occasional completely useless still images when it detects activity.

Nest does not give you the option to stream your video to a local storage device on your local network. Which again, is not only frustrating because they want you to take out a second mortgage to get video streaming, but it would also greatly alleviate the issues mentioned above with the bandwidth and internet outages.

If I Did It Over Again

If I were going to do it over again I'd add 2 requirements to my original list:

Modern Hardware & Software that'll last several years
A corresponding smartphone app to live stream video
2-way audio support (we can hear baby, we can talk to baby if needed)
Great Security (no creepers please)
Do I need CCTV or a non-wifi enabled device? No. those are just security measures. If we find a camera that we can trust the security of, then we should be good to go.
Something that can be repurposed and isn't pointless when baby's a little older
Local streaming & Local Storage
Get a cheap audio monitor for travel

The local streaming would solve bandwidth issues, and provide a better service where I could scrub to earlier in a day and see exactly what was going on without having to pay Nest every month.

This is what my shopping list would look like:

Nest Indoor Cam
My old iPhone 6 (for the stand-alone monitor)
Spigen Kickstand
A Synology
Probably something from their "Value Series" like the DS418play or DS218play
Something like a FosCam or an Amcrest Cam

The Synology is a little expensive sure, but they're awesome and multi-purpose. They can be used for network file storage, computer backups, a dropbox replacement, aaaand they have something called "Surveillance Staton" built into them, that'll record video streamed from an IP cam.

I'd connect my IP cam up to my Synology, and I'd be off.

Hope you found this helpful!

Angular + Cordova

Jacob Spizziri — Sat, 21 Jul 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Lets port a new angular project to Cordova without using Ionic or NativeScript. Why? Because those frameworks can sometimes be too opinionated and constraining. By the end of this article, you'll have a functioning angular/cordova project which will be as loosely coupled with Cordova as possible. You'll be able to conform to the angular style conventions, and install whatever plugins, frameworks, or libraries you desire. (e.g. bootstrap, ng-bootstrap, pug, etc.)

First, I'd like to give credit to this post as it's what got me heading in the right direction however I found it to be a little incomplete.

You can find the demo source code here

Ok. Lets Get Started.

1. Setup A Vanilla Angular App

First we're going to create a vanilla angular 6 project called hello-cordova with the following command: ng new hello-cordova.

Some things you may want to do at this point would be to install and configure things like bootstrap & ng-bootstrap or any other angular library's you're interested in working with.

2. Basic Cordova Setup

Now that we have a basic angular app running with npm start we're going to create some basic scaffolding to setup our cordova build.

First let's make sure we have the cordova cli installed: npm install -g cordova.

Now let's create a basic cordova app. We're going to create the cordova app in a cordova subdirectory and give it an id of com.hellocordova.www and a name of Hello Cordova.

cordova create cordova com.hellocordova.www "Hello Cordova"

Now let's add some git tracking files to ignore some build files and keep directories:

touch cordova/.gitignore
touch cordova/www/.gitkeep

And add the following to cordova/.gitignore:

node_modules
www/*
!www/.gitkeep
platforms
plugins

Finally, let's add the iOS platform. To add platforms (and plugins) we'll want to make sure we're in the cordova directory and then run the following:

cordova platform add ios

3. Add Scripts

In the root directory of our project (not the one in the cordova folder), lets add some basic scripts to the package.json to automate a few things:

"clean": "rm -rf dist cordova/www/* && touch cordova/www/.gitkeep",
"build:cordova": "npm run clean && ng build --base-href=. --output-path=cordova/www",
"cordova:prepare": "cd cordova && rm -rf platforms plugins node_modules && npm ci && cordova prepare && cd ..",
"cordova:build:ios": "npm run build:cordova && cd cordova && cordova build ios && cd ..",
"cordova:emulate:ios": "npm run cordova:build:ios && cd cordova && cordova emulate ios && cd ..",
"open:xcode": "open $(find ./cordova/platforms/ios -name '*.xcworkspace')"

We're also going to modify the build script to be the following:

"build": "ng build --base-href=/"

This will give you the following utilities:

npm run cordova:prepare - Other devs should be able to run this script to initialize the Cordova app in their environment.
npm run open:xcode - Run this to easily open the project in Xcode
npm run cordova:build:ios - Run this to rebuild the iOS project
npm run cordova:emulate:ios - Run this to run an iOS emulator of the project

4. Performance Improvements (400ms delay)

Yes. Now let's remove the infamous 400ms delay that iOS defaults on webview clicks. We're going to add FastClick.js to our angular app.

$ npm i fastclick

Add the following to the top of your src/main.ts:

import * as FastClick from 'fastclick';

// attach FastClick.js
FastClick.attach(document.body);

Note: this should be added to main.ts as close to the top as possible so it executes immediately.

5. Initializing Plugins

Now if you want to install other plugins you'll need to configure them. This can be done in the ngOnInit() of your app.component.ts:

// src/app/app.component.ts
import { Component, OnInit } from '@angular/core';
import { CordovaService } from './service/cordova.service';

@Component({
  selector: 'app-root',
  templateUrl: './app.component.html',
  styleUrls: ['./app.component.css']
})
export class AppComponent implements OnInit {
  title = 'app';

  constructor(protected _cordovaService: CordovaService) {}

  public ngOnInit(): void {
    this._cordovaService.initialize();
  }
}

// src/app/service/cordova.service.ts
import { Injectable } from '@angular/core';

@Injectable()
export class CordovaService {

  protected hasBegunInitialization: boolean = false;

  constructor() {}

  public initialize(): void {
    // listen for 'deviceready' event in case it hasn't
    // already been fired during application bootstrap
    document.addEventListener('deviceready', () => {
      window['isDeviceReady'] = true;
      this.init();
      console.log('deviceready fired after bootstrap finish');
    }, false);

    // check if 'deviceready' has already fired during
    // application bootstrap.
    if (window['isDeviceReady'] === true) {
      this.init();
      console.log('deviceready fired before bootstrap finish');
    }
  }

  protected init(): void {

    // lock initialization
    if (this.hasBegunInitialization) {
      return;
    }

    this.hasBegunInitialization = true;

    // do init stuff here
  }
}

Make sure you add a provider for the CordovaService class.

Troubleshooting

Error: Cannot read property 'replace' of undefined run cd platforms/ios/cordova && npm install ios-sim
Images/assets not showing up?
Whitescreen of death?
- Cordova doesn't like <base href="/"></base>, instead use <base href="."></base> for your cordova distributions. This typically isn't what you want for your web distribution however as it can mess with your routing.
- If you're having this issue please take a look at the Add Scripts section and take a look at the --base-href flags.