There must be something useful here…

After months of deliberation, I am finally back to write my experience with the Wakemate. Let me start by saying this incredible device has helped me track an analyze my sleep. It has also helped me feel more rested when I wake up in the mornings. Overall this system has been pretty good.

Hardware – The wrist band was a little bit snug for me, but has relaxed more as I wear it. Its a bit bulky when your not used to sleeping with something attached to your wrist. I also have not had any issues with it connecting to my Droid X phone. The main computer in the wristband comes out easily for washing. It has a standard mini USB plug which worked with a USB charger I had kicking around.

Software – The software is extremely easy to use. The App installed without issue on my Droid X. I quickly setup the alarm and was able to start my sleep cycle. The only beef I have about the App is that if you go to another program or switch to the homescreen, then when you come back to the app, it is as if you opened it for the first time. It should be able to run in the background like other alarm applications. The included ring tones are quite pleasant.

Success – This product works by measuring your body’s movement through the accelerometer and transmits via Bluetooth to your phone. Once you wake up it uploads the entire nights data to the cloud for analysis. I have had a number of nights where I needed to stay up late working on a project and then wake up only after a few hours. After a few times of using the Wakemate, I was able to get nearly the same quality of sleep, but with alot less time actually asleep.

One night I went to sleep at around 3:30 am and had a meeting at 7:00 am. I set the Wakemate and it woke me up at 6:45. I didn’t feel the same groggy that I would normally feel because it woke me up from higher levels of sleep and not from within REM. The coolest part of this system is that it attaches a number to the result of your sleep. 100 being the best, 1 being the worst. It calculates the amount of time you were in REM, and each level sleep to determine how quality of a sleep you had. My average is 80 which isn’t too bad. You can also add tags to your sleep to describe your sleep so that you can further analyze your sleep pattern given certain tags. For example, I have the tag “Working Late” which I attach to any of my scores where I go to bed right after I finish work. I can go back and see if I get as restful of sleep when I fall asleep directly from work or when I have some down time.

Final Thoughts – This system is a great system if you are consistent with it. My biggest problem is that I forget to charge the device when I leave for work and then am unable to use it the next night because the battery is low or dead. The next problem I have is leaving enough time each night to set it up with and connect the Bluetooth. It is literally 2 steps to do this so this is pure laziness. I recommend this product to anyone looking to get more from their sleep, or that is a nerd and loves stats.

Cheers,

Mike

AirOS is a custom Linux that is used on Ubiquiti equipment.  I have found some sweet commands that I didn’t want to forget.

To make a script or command persistent use the following:

/etc/persistent/rc.prestart
/etc/persistent/rc.poststart
/etc/persistent/rc.prestop
/etc/persistent/rc.poststop

Let me explain the execution of each of the scripts:

• rc.prestart – This happens before the standard bootup items are running. Be careful when setting something here so that you have the proper prereq’s first.
• rc.poststart – This happens after the standard bootup items.
• rc.prestop – Before the shutdown command was executed.
• rc.poststop – After the shutdown command and after the shutdown items.

Here is a cool command that is directly from Linux that is very useful:

iwconfig

This is like ifconfig but gives information directly about the wireless connection.

More to come soon.

Mike

At this point I feel very confident with the inner workings of IspCP.  I have modified suexec, postfix, and other core stuff.  In the process I have started to learn Apache2′s inner workings as well.  Today I am going to talk about issues with Postfix.  The issue is that a Ubuntu installs PostFix with a LAMP install, and IspCP has some custom configs to make it work.  YesterdayI thought I was smart enough to make modifications to the master.cf and main.cf.  Wow was I wrong.  After the changes I made, when you would telnet to port 25 (587 too) it would give you a blank screen and would just hang.  When I looked at the logs all i got was:

Jan 30 06:34:56 [host]postfix/master[28195]: warning: process /usr/lib/postfix/smtpd pid 4838 exit status 1
Jan 30 06:34:56 [host]postfix/master[28195]: warning: /usr/lib/postfix/smtpd: bad command startup — throttling
Jan 30 06:35:56 [host]postfix/smtpd[4876]: fatal: dict_open: unsupported dictionary type: inet:  Is the postfix-inet package installed?

From the error, it would seem that I am missing a package for postfix.  Not the case, in-fact that package doesn’t exist.  Why would they reference a package that doesn’t exist?  I was able to bring the whole thing back up by restoring the master.cf and main.cf from the /etc/ispcp/postfix/working/ directory.  When in doubt, return to the default config file and start over.

Mike