lil todo / Stuff We Made — Leave a comment
23
May 13

My Windows Phone App Download Stats After Two Years

Two years ago, around April 2011, I wrote a Windows Phone app called lil todo. How’s it doing today?

Before we get to the numbers, some context is useful. lil todo was written for fun and a bit of necessity. I had a Windows Phone and was curious to learn how to write an app for it. I also found there weren’t any good GTD-style to-do apps in the market for the platform, so I wrote my own.

It wasn’t written to make money (it’s free!), so I didn’t do any marketing. It’s been updated a couple of times to fix bugs or add minor features, but for the most part the app you download today is the same one released two years ago. In summary, it’s a neat little app that most people have never heard of, unless they do a search in the Marketplace for it.

LilTodoAmongstTheCompetition

With that out of the way, how popular is the app? Two weeks after release, the app was downloaded 218 times. One month after release, the app was downloaded 342 times. For the first few months, the average daily download was around 5-10. After a year, the downloads eventually plateaued to around 2-3 a day. After one year in the market, the app was downloaded about 1400 times.

Let’s skip ahead to two years. Here’s what we see today:

Screen Shot 2013-05-23 at 8.03.06 AM

There are a lot of interesting things going on in this graph:

  • Today, the app has been downloaded over 5800 times.
  • The cumulative downloads slope is getting steeper. Today the app is downloaded roughly 10 times a day.
  • Each change in slope is preceded by a spike in daily downloads. I suspect these are when either a new phone is released or the platform is made available to new markets.
  • There was a huge spike in downloads in February, 2013. What the heck happened then? (A major new market was added? Bad data?)
  • Not on the graph: Total number of reviews for the US market is 19. That’s pretty low in comparison to a lot of other, more popular to-do apps.
  • Not on the graph: Total US downloads: 1500. Total India downloads: 1400. That means about half the downloads are coming from the US and Indian markets. The next biggest downloads are from Germany, Colombia, Chile, and Finland (around 300, 260, 230, and 230, respectively).

So there you have it. Even an app that was never localized to non-English locales and is barely updated is still getting downloads.

Skepticism — Leave a comment
22
May 13

This Neat Trick Could Make You $200,000

Want to make $200,000? It’s simple:

1. Create some grey goopey substance as a meal replacement.

2. Try it out for a few months.

3. Don’t get ill or weak because of it. (Pro-tip: It helps if you’re 24 years old and in relatively good shape to begin with!)

4. Crowd-fund your idea and make $200,000.

5. Call it “Soylent” in a non-ironic way. (Extra, freebie pro-tip: don’t make it green and definitely do not make it out of people.)

That’s all it takes, folks. You can read more about this crazy idea in my previous blog post, Soylent Snake Oil.

Skepticism — Leave a comment
21
May 13

Soylent Snake Oil

SoylentGreen

Have you read about this? A 24-year old man got tired of having to make meals and, unbelievably, eat. (Who the hell hates to eat?) Instead of learning to cook some nice meals for himself and learn to enjoy the experience of eating like the rest of the human race, he decided to spend his time coming up with a goopey meal replacement. After a few months of experimentation with said meal replacement, he felt pretty good health-wise. Based on that, he figured it was time to hit the Big Time and turn this into a commercial endeavor.

From Soylent Corporation:

What if you never had to worry about food again?

For many people, on many occasions, food is a hassle, especially when trying to eat well. Suppose we had a default meal that was the nutritional equivalent of water: cheap, healthy, convenient and ubiquitous. Soylent will be personalized for different body types and customizable based on individual goals. It allows one to enjoy the health benefits of a well balanced diet with less effort and cost.

There are so many things wrong with this.

First of all, none of the people on the team are nutritionists or have a background in medicine. In fact, the guy who started the whole thing has a background in electrical engineering and computer science. He started this whole experiment just a few months ago. He is not an expert in nutrition. I also don’t see any references on their page about consultation with any experts. Does this not scare anyone?

Secondly, the original copy on the page included the following (it has since been removed):

Soylent is perfectly balanced and optimized for your body and lifestyle, meaning it automatically puts you at an optimal weight, makes you feel full, and improves your focus and cognition.

Extraordinary claims, no? How exactly is it “perfectly balanced and optimized” for anyone’s body and lifestyle? What’s in it exactly? As far as I know, it’s only been tested on one guy for a few months. How do they know it will “automatically” put me at an optimal weight and make me feel full? And how the hell will it improve my focus and cognition?

NaturalCuresBullshit

Perhaps the Soylent boys should team up with Kevin Trudeau?

The testimonials found in the section entitled “What the early adopters are saying” are laughable. Who are these people? Wouldn’t it have been better to include medical trials and scientific data showing that this works? I’m sorry, but subjective testimonials don’t cut it when it comes to things that will be ingested.Screen Shot 2013-05-22 at 12.10.04 AM

Finally, take a look at “The Team”. It consists of four young guys, two who are in charge of marketing and sales. Shouldn’t they have more people dedicated to testing these theories out?

Someone on Hacker News put it best:

This is pure hubris! This idea has been pursued for decades by people who have dedicated themselves to scientific rigour.

I’ll say it again. The founders of Soylent have Engineer’s Disease. They think because they’re engineers they’re experts in food science. That’s delusional.

As far as I know, a sample size of ONE GUY is not enough to conclude that something works. If the original experimenter wanted to do things right, he should’ve consulted with experts, done a ton of science, tested it out a bunch of times, gotten his ideas peer-reviewed, and THEN gone to market with it. But no, it’s 2013, why not just come up with an idea, write a blog about your “experimentation”, and then immediately take it to market with some crowdsourcing scheme.

There’s just something wrong about a bunch of tech people thinking that because they’re good at software development and they’re smart, they can take those skills and apply them to any other field.

Let’s be honest. Software development is trivial to get into. You just need a laptop and the internet. That’s it. You can download all the tools you need. Most of it is free. If there’s knowledge you need, just go online and Google it. Go to StackerOverflow.com and get answers to any questions you have there. Want to write an iPhone app? Tons of examples online. Want to write a cloud-based service? No problem. That does NOT translate to other fields, like medicine or nutrition.

I hope this fails. Miserably.

Arcade Repair — Leave a comment
17
May 13

A Heater-Cathode Short

Last time I posted, I mentioned that I installed a new cap kit, new flyback, and new HOT on the arcade monitor. However, it was still giving me a green image. Here’s a video of what it looks like:

After some investigations online, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s a heater-cathode short. What is that exactly?

Every CRT monitor has three electron guns, one for each of the three color components, red, green, and blue. These electron guns fire electrons from the back of the set to the screen, lighting up phosphor, which glows either of the three colors. The electron guns are located inside a vacuum tube and are aided by a heating element. The heating element heats up something called a cathode, where the electrons originate.

The problem is this: if debris collects on the cathode and comes in contact with the heating element you get a “short” in the circuit, which causes the electrons to always fire, even when they shouldn’t be. For instance, if the green gun has a short, instead of firing only when there are green elements in the pixel, it will always fire. I suspect that’s what’s happening with my screen.

To fix it, I’ve read that you can try plugging a CRT rejuvenator device into the back of the set. What this thing will do is send higher than normal levels of voltage through the electron guns, hopefully burning off the collected debris found in the short. After you burn off the debris, no more short.

A Gallery of Heater-Cathode Shorts

What I found interesting online is that there are very few posts with pictures of this heater-cathode short phenomenon, so I decided I should post some links below in case someone googles this info in the future.

First off, this guy encountered it with his NARC machine and got a green screen very similar to mine above.

narc

Someone else has a bad gun on their vertical setup.anothergreen

The red gun can also be shorted, as seen by this guy’s Golden Tee machine.goldenteeMore red screen madness on this Mortal Kombat machine.

redscreenYet another red gun shorted.

yetanotherred

It May Not Be Heater-Cathode Short

Sometimes you may have a problem in your neck board or the monitor chassis and it may not be a heater-cathode short. To check for this, the general advice I’ve seen is to try check your neck board. The neck board has similar circuits for each of the three color components. If you have a problem, it may be a bad transistor. To test this theory, simply swap transistors between two colors. For instance, if you see too much green on the screen, try swapping the green transistor with the red one and see if the problem becomes too much red on the screen. If it is, then most likely you have a bad transistor.

Arcade Repair — 1 comment
14
May 13

K7000 Chassis Repair: Installed a cap kit, new flyback, and new HOT

arcademachine

If you’re just joining us, a few weeks ago, I got a free, yes, free, Street Fighter II: Champion Edition arcade machine. I turned it on and found there was no sound and the screen was all green. Since then, I’ve determined the original arcade board (the PCB) was bad. However, the screen remains green, so I’ve been doing research to find out what exactly I need to fix on the CRT monitor to get it working again.

My monitor chassis is a Wells Gardner K7000 and on the advice of several people who have worked on monitor repair before, I was told to replace the capacitors, the flyback, and the Horizontal Output Transistor, i.e. the HOT.

Over the course of two late nights, I made the repairs. (Boy, I learned a lot. I’ll have a separate blog post on some tips for replacing the flyback and caps.) I put the monitor chassis back in the arcade machine today to see the results of my hard work.

Here she is after getting a new flyback, caps, and HOT. I cleaned up the PCB and wires as well, so she’s looking real clean:

installed

The good news is nothing blew up. I can also adjust the the screen enough that I can actually see some gameplay! The flyback is working much smoother. The old one had high pitched hiss. When compared against the YouTube video I took of this a few weeks ago, you can see that there are no more wavy vertical lines on the right. I suspect the replaced capacitors fixed this up.

The bad news is that it’s still green and still has horizontal lines. :( Actually it’s green with hints of blue. If I crank up the brightness or contrast, I see even more blue. This was what I was seeing before the repairs as well.

Here are a couple of pics:

titlescreen

 

fireball

In the end, I am happy with my work doing the cap kit and flyback repair. I can’t believe I actually did it. However, there’s still more work to be done, so stay tuned.

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