Thanks for this mobile productivity goes to the following iPhone apps: NextBus (actually a mobile site, not an app), DropBox, TTC Exit Guide, Kindle, FourSquare and WordPress.

Some of this might seem trivial, but these things enhance my life and make me more productive. Knowing when the next streetcar will really arrive tells me whether I need to take a taxi to avoid being late. Accessing active project documents allows me to some work done even thought I’m in the middle of a haircut. Knowing which subway car to board can save me battling through crowds on the platform, only to end up at the wrong exit. Even reading a book is business in this case: ironically, it’s “Empowered”, all about allowing people to use their own tools and methods for getting things done better.

In case you were wondering, the ringer is off: I take calls and read email on my schedule, not just because my device tell me to. Use your mobile device to work the way that you want to, not to turn you into a phone and email slave.

Being green is a trendy thing to do, but some people have been doing it long before it became fashionable: the members of Tower Power Toronto, for example, who focus on energy savings for multi-unit buildings such as condos and co-ops. I attended a meeting of the Tower Power group earlier this year to hear all about solar photovoltaic (that is, solar panels that make electricity directly rather than heating water) and some of the recent government initiatives to make this a reality for small condo buildings like mine. We met at the Windward Co-op, where they have already undertaken a number of green initiatives such as thermal solar (solar hot water heating as a pre-heat for domestic hot water) that has reduced their hot water costs by 40%.

My other half is an electrical engineer, and when I told him that I was attending a meeting about solar PV, he pooh-poohed it as inefficient and expensive, costing more per kWh than we could save. He’s right about that: the high cost (and relative inefficiency) of solar PV panels makes it infeasible for generating power for our building directly. Furthermore, even if we felt that it was a good thing to do, the condo reserve fund cannot be used for solar PV projects, meaning that we would have to create a special assessment such that the owners would pay the costs directly. In a building like ours, where the resale timeframe is fairly short, that just wouldn’t fly.

This is where the government incentives come in: the provincial government would really like us to start greening up, in part to reduce the load on current electricity infrastructure, increase the resiliency of the power grid, help phase out coal-fired electricity generation by 2014, and reduce the cost of having to buy electricity from other provinces or states during time of peak loads. If you take a look at the ISEO website, which shows Ontario electricity demand and the price paid for external electricity during peaks, you’ll see that prices for buying electricity from outside the province can be as high as $1.50/kWh. This also has a social value as well as an economic value by promoting micro-generation and green thinking.

To that effect, the Ontario Power Authority started the Feed-In Tariff (FIT) program whereby you can sell up to 10kW of electricity that you generate (e.g., using solar PV) back to your local power authority (in our case, Toronto Hydro) for $0.802 per kWh on a 20-year contract. Given the current cost of installing solar PV, and the fact that the panels are expected to have nearly zero maintenance costs during the 20-year period, the panels pay for themselves in about 13 years: in other words, that provides seven years of electricity revenue free and clear after the panels are paid off. Current domestic electricity costs in Ontario are around $0.012 per kWh, so OPA is willing to pay you over six times the current price of electricity in order to subsidize your solar PV installation, since they will eventually save the cost of having to build new power generating facilities.

As mentioned previously, condo reserve funds can’t be used to fund solar PV installations, so there needs to be some other form of financing. Alternatives include:

• Work on getting the condo laws changed so that reserve funds can be used for projects like this. Our local MPP, Rosario Marchese, is working on this, but this could take some time and may never occur.
• Sell debentures to raise the money for the initial costs, then use the electricity revenue to pay off the debenture with interest. Residents of the building may choose to buy debentures, or anyone who is looking for an investment with a decent interest rate. The risk is that electricity revenues are not sufficient to cover the debenture costs, or that unexpected maintenance costs reduce revenues.
• Use PV venture, venture firms that specialize in solar PV installations. They effectively own the solar PV system, installing the panels and taking the electricity, then pay a percentage of the monthly revenue to the building on which the panels are placed.
• Non-profit organizations (including co-ops, but not condos) can take advantage of 0% loans available from the city of Toronto’s Sustainable Energy Funds including the Toronto Atmospheric Fund, which I heard about at a green energy panel that Olivia Chow hosted last year.
• Live Green Toronto (another city initiative) has some limited grant funding for education and feasibility studies; condos are not eligible but could partner with a not-for-profit.

For buildings within the city of Toronto, you’d be selling power to Toronto Hydro, but the contract would be with the Ontario Power Authority, who are backing the FIT and microFIT programs. OurPower, part of the Toronto Renewable Energy Co-operative can perform assessments on a building to estimate the feasibility and costs: there needs to be a place with good sun exposure (usually the roof) to mount the panels, a method for connecting the panels to the electrical room, an inverter to convert the DC electricity generated by the panels to AC, and a metered connection from the inverter to the power grid. That means that you’d have two meters: one for inbound electricity at the usual market rate (e.g., $0.013/kWh), and one for the outbound electricity that you generate at $0.802/kWh. Ideally, installation would be coordinated with the building roof replacement schedule; otherwise, you’d have to remove and remount the panels during any roof repairs. In addition to the panels, costs include cabling to the electrical room, any modifications required to the roof membrane, insurance, and maintenance (considering a 20-year replacement cycle for the panels, but more frequently for the inverter). Solar PV panels are usually stationary; although panels that move to track the sun generate more electricity, they also have higher maintenance costs due to the moving parts. In order to qualify for the FIT/microFIT program, 50% of the equipment must be manufactured in Ontario, but that can include the framing, inverters and labour costs in addition to the panels. There are some local solar PV manufacturers, including Photowatt and SolGate, making it possible to put together a solution that pumps some money back into the local economy as well as providing green benefits.

How much energy could we really generate with this? Well, our building probably has 200-300 square metres of roof space that could be used; using the estimate of 1 square metre generating 150W in peak sun for a total of about 1kWh/day, that means 200-300 kWh/day, or $160-240/day in electricity revenue. I’m not sure if that 1kWh/day/square metre is an average over the year, or the value for a sunny summer day; assuming that that amount could be generated 1/3 of the time, that’s still $19.5k-29k per year in electricity revenue. As for costs, using a provided estimate of $10k/kW; I’m taking a leap in logic and assuming that’s equivalent to 1000/150 = 6.7 square metres of solar panel, which would be a cost of $300k-450k for the initial installation. That gives an ROI of just over 15 years; assume that my estimate of electricity generated is conservative, I can see how this works out to an average 13-year ROI.

At the end of the 20-year contract to deliver electricity to Toronto Hydro, you’d be in a position to renegotiate a contract with them to continue to provide power, or switch to providing power directly to your own building if then-current price of electricity makes that a better deal.

When you talk about residential solar power, many people think of thermal solar, but there are some fundamental differences:

It used to be the case that thermal solar was the only economically feasible alternative for residential buildings; however, the FIT/microFIT program brings the cost-benefit calculations for thermal versus PV much closer together.

If you’re in Toronto and interested in learning more, come out to a Tower Power Toronto meeting. OurPower hosts a wiki page for Tower Power Toronto; it’s sadly out of date, since it shows the next meeting as the January meeting, but it contains contact information and I may take it on myself to update the page when I receive notice of the next meeting.

I’ll leave you with a video of Rob Hopkins from last year’s TED conference, on transitioning to a world without oil:

We are an international volunteer network of professionals drawn together by a call to service. We create technological tools and resources for responders to use in mitigating disasters and crises around the world

We’re here today to work on anything that can be done to help, in collaboration with other Crisis Commons teams all over the world, on the various projects that have been defined by Crisis Commons based on requests from NGOs to fill a need that they have. The bulk of the projects fall under the category of software development, but there are also teams for social media, logistics and more general duties.

Our first goal today is to find a development project for the bulk of the Toronto team to get involved with, and learn how to plug into other Crisis Commons groups around the world. There is quite a bit of infrastructure already in place to connect up, including IRC channels (retro, I will definitely need a refresher course) and voice conference lines, plus a rapidly growing wiki.

I have a pretty broad range of skills to apply here: although I don’t really write code any more – unless I’m really inspired – I can do all the other stuff around development (requirements, testing, documentation). I also do a lot of social media stuff, and have attended more unconferences than you can shake a stick at, so can help with the local social media efforts such as wiki gardening, Facebook and Twitter updates, and more.

The main goal of today is to get ready for next Saturday’s CrisisCampTO (time and venue to be announced shortly), by getting some basic team structure in place and selecting one or more projects to which we will be contributing. That way, when newbies show up next week, they can start contributing immediately.

One of the things that we learned about today is Sahana, an open source disaster management system that was created in response to the Sri Lanka tsunami in 2004. There’s a Sahana instance set up just for Haiti, although it still needs a lot of content added, and possibly some development to add specific requested functionality. We also saw OpenMRS, an open source medical records system, and Ushahidi, an SMS-to-web service that accepts requests for assistance sent by text message to a specific shortcode, and makes them available to aid agencies. If you check the feed from Haiti, you can see requests for food, water and medical assistance that have been received, translated if required, and logged for followup. In summary, there are a ton of free, open source projects that can be applied to the Haiti disaster; some of them as is, others requiring some customization. This is were we all come in.

This is cross-posted from my business blog, since I couldn’t decide where it belonged.

This week, I replaced my mother’s old computer, and was left with a working (although underpowered, by today’s standards) computer with keyboard and mouse. I immediately thought of Little Geeks, a program that refurbishes old computers, provides them for free to kids in need, along with 12 months of internet access and some training on how to use it. They use reBOOT Canada as their drop-off depot; reBOOT is a charitable organization that “provides computer hardware, training and technical service to other charities, non-profit organizations and individuals with limited access to technology”. I headed off to reBOOT yesterday to drop off the computer, and had a chat with Nicholas (I believe this was Nicholas Brinckman, the Executive Director). He mentioned that they’re trying to get funding from the Aviva Community Fund to build 50 learning centres across Canada, in partnership with community centres and schools.

If you support this idea, go to the reBOOT project page on the Aviva Community Fund site and vote for their project (registration required). You can vote once per day until this round of voting ends in 11 days, and I encourage you to drop in there daily to cast your vote if you believe that this is an important initiative. They make it easy to link to the page on Twitter and Facebook, so use your social network for good. You can also help out by dropping off your old computer equipment – and encouraging your employer to do the same when they sunset old computers, printers and other equipment – or volunteering some of your time to help with computer refurbishment.

Cross-posted to my business blog.

Ignite T.O. Sandy Kemsley -The Hungry Geek from Ignite Toronto on Vimeo.

The slides may not make a lot of sense if you didn’t hear the presentation, although you will get the gist of it. Basically, I’m part of a local volunteer committee that’s charged with promoting the market within the neighborhood to help drive traffic to it, and I’m using various social media methods and some technology to tie them together as part of our campaign. All presentations last night were captured on video and hopefully will be posted online somewhere soon; I’ll link to that when I see it.

Since I’m pretty geeky, I used the technology in ways that non-techies may not: see slide 17 for what could best be described as a context diagram for my market message delivery framework. One piece of this is based on some Python scripting that my other half did to help automate a list of Twitter messages each week, and the picture at the right is the point in the presentation where I said “…and this picture is why he’s not here tonight”, since it depicts him wearing a cardboard cone with the label “800 MHz” on his head. What I didn’t have time to explain is that the cone was part of a prototype of a discone antenna with a central frequency of 800 MHz, part of his home-built HD OTA project.

I had great feedback from audience members after the presentation, and I hope that I inspired a few people to take on projects like this in the future to help community projects that don’t have a big marketing budget. I also had a ton of fun, and look forward to my next Ignite! presentation.

On a full desktop platform, their news items in the feed reader contain insufficient information: far from publishing full feeds of the news articles, which would be my preference, their posts often have no description, or a completely inadequate description that doesn’t tell me enough about the article to want to click through to it. Some of the posts also have all-caps headings, which are difficult to read and unattractive (and recognized as SHOUTING by anyone who has used the web for more than 5 minutes).

On an iPhone in Google Reader, it gets much worse:

The lack of descriptions (and full feeds, for that matter) requires you to click through to the item to see the content. Unfortunately, when you get there, it displays 13 screens in order to show a single screen of content.

I realize that you can’t test every website on every possible platform, but c’mon: if you’re not testing one of the most popular feed readers on one of the most popular mobile platforms, you’re not doing your job.

I’ve been trying to change my price plan online for 3 days now, and keep getting the above error. After 20 minutes on hold, I got through to a CSR who changed my plan, but think about what that costs them in terms of that person’s time, not to mention the ill will from me because I couldn’t do this on the website?

I’ve moved to a month-to-month plan now that my contract is up, and will be waiting for the new GSM entrants into the Canadian wireless market in the spring to see if there’s one who can provide the wireless service that I want and have a decent self-service website.

It’s not the nirvana of free airport wifi, but better than nothing: 15 minutes of free wifi via Boingo in the Toronto airport, which is enough time to sync your email in a pinch.

First up was actually the most expensive of the home-builds, since he bought heavy-gauge wire instead of using the coathangers suggested in the YouTube video that inspired it. It was mounted on a piece of Ikea shelving that we had lying around (if it had been the final version, we would have trimmed it back just to a single wooden stick), and consisted of the above-mentioned copper wire ($13), a TV matching transformer (needed on all the antennae to convert the signal to the coax connection to go to the TV, $1) and some screws for that shelving that we already had. With no amplification, it worked as well as the commercial one that is amplified, although we couldn’t find the sweet spot that allowed us to get all 7 HD channels — or at least the 5 that we care about — without moving it around. Also, it could have put out someone’s eye.

That night, he took his copy of the ARRL handbook to bed to brush up on his antenna theory.

The next model, a discone model, never made it past the early prototype stage. Shown here is the cone part (he was still working on the disc part), which would have been covered with aluminum foil. He later found this to not be the right type anyway, but he had fun making (and wearing) the cones.

More research ensued.

The 3rd version, a.k.a. HD antenna 4.0, is what we’re sticking with for now. It’s made of two sections cut from aluminum foil (yes, the type from the kitchen) taped to an old wooden ruler. The sections are connected on one side by a 390 ohm resistor (4 for $0.25), and on the other by the TV matching transformer. You can see a close-up of the construction in an earlier phase when he was trying it out on a larger board here; he calculated the exact size of the foil pieces from his antenna theory textbook. Technically, it’s a T2FD antenna.

The antenna-on-a-ruler is attached with 2-sided sticky pads to an old wooden salad server, then mounted on an unused tripod to allow us to easily move it around to find the right spot.

With this configuration, we get the five main HD digital channels that we wanted without moving the antenna: CBC, CTV, CityTV, Global and Sun TV. We can also get Omni 1 and Omni 2 if we move it around, but we rarely watch those so aren’t concerned about it.

Keep in mind that we are less than 1km from the CN Tower, but are west of Spadina and face west, so we’re bouncing our signals off the surrounding buildings. When we tried our Philips antenna (the one that we bought) at a neighbour’s place that has a clear line of sight to the tower, it picked up 7 or 8 HD channels with no fiddling, and several VHF channels as well (since her TV used a single feed for both analog and digital tuners).

I’ve now cancelled our Rogers cable, which will take effect mid-August. The only remaining thing is to use the (currently unused) Philips antenna as a VHF antenna to pick up the lower-range analog channels and feed them to the DVR (which has no digital tuner) and then on to the TV via the HDMI connection — if we get any decent reception on VHF, that will allow us to watch and record those channels.