My wife and I are not into television and have not had a television for a very long time. A couple of months we bought our first new television in five years.

Both my wife and I were not sure how much time we would actually spend in front of it and hence the decision to go Froogle. That and I wanted to be able to control my devices and something like a Raspberry Pi is much more customizable than a locked down android television. We settled for a regular, not smart Vu TV and then build our own media center using a Raspberry Pi.

The TV is a 49 inch Grade A+ panel. So the display hardware is not Ultra-HD but on the Full HD side it is as good as it gets. Pretty nice and does what we need it to at a price that's almost half that of a Sony. Very soon we run into a couple of bumps:

My TV is Shocking Me! Strange Electric Shock on the Television Frame:

I initially start with the assumption that this is an issue with my earthing and call an electrician who tells me that my earthing is just fine and the TV is flawed. He asks me to file a request with Vu and walks out.

I look up the forum and discover there are even more expensive TVs out there that have the same issue. I call up support and they replace the TV but the new one has the same issue. This time around they can give me a refund but aren't willing to help with fixing the issue.

Frustrated I end up deciding to put some basic electronics they teach you in class eight to use. The idea is that the TV missing grounding unit that would connect the current flowing with the grounding socket inside the TV but we can do that externally without even opening the TV.

So let's buy a 50 cent copper wire from a local electric shop. Next, we find a spot on the TV that has electric current running through it. In other words, the area that shocks you. You can test this with a regular tester. We tie one end of the copper wire to the frame that has the shock and screw it up securely behind a screw that holds the TV mount.

The other end goes to the earth pin. The  basic idea here is that since the TV does not provide for any grounding or earthing we earth the current running externally on the TV frame directly to the earth pin of the 3 point socket. This works for countries that support 3 pins and the 3rd pin is for grounding.

With the earth pin wound with the copper wire you ensure that any current running through the frame of the television runs through the copper wire, grounding pin and is eventually earthed effectively ensuring you don't get shocked which you touch the TV frame.

That actually works. I touch the TV and no more shocks. I guess Vu is skimping money by not grounding their circuits, but a 50 cent copper wire fixes that. We now have a really simple home made earthing on the TV frame. No more shocks. And the end product looks pretty elegant with the copper wire concealed behind the TV:

The overall result looks pretty neat and you can barely see the copper wire running from the back of the TV frame to the earth socket. Yes, the Pi and the Firestick and all those wires still need to be organized and concealed but the copper wire itself is that tiny green bit you see in the picture. Nothing objectionable.

I've seen a bunch of articles out there about TVs and monitors shocking people but no solution as such and I hope this helps someone who has a similar problem in future. It's simple class eight electronics you might have learned in your physics class put to some basic use.

Strange Skin Tone

The other day my wife and I were watching a stand-up comedy show and the skin tone of characters seems a little… artificial. Turns out this setting is controlled by something called 'Tint' in most TVs and the default Vu settings don't allow end-users to modify tint settings. The tint option is disabled by default, which means you can't change the setting:

When I first see the setting, I realize it's bumped up all the way to 100 and no way to lower it. I wear my nerd glasses and hop on to a special hidden service menu most Vu TV's provide which can be reached by going to the sound setting menu, clicking on sound balance and then typing 1969 on the number pad in your remote. For some reason the folks at Vu like the year on the moon mission and have picked that to open up secret service menus on the TV:

Notice that this mode is pretty powerful and pretty much allows you to control most tiny aspects of the TV a regular user may not even care about.

Once in, you can tell the TV to not use any special intelligence for skin tones by turning off the tint setting (which you are completely allowed to do in this secretly hidden service menu):

I turn the tint down to zero using the special service menu and the problem is gone.

The Backlight is still way too strong:

The backlight of the TV is still too strong and hurts my eyes. Vu doesn't give any option to change that. Even the service menu doesn't have any backlight settings. I panic and think of returning the TV.  But then service menu allows me to change the RGB gain on the LEDs which are all bumped up to 100 by default:

I realize if I bring those down proportionately I can control backlight of my panel. I do just that. The backlight goes much smoother and the strain on my eyes is gone.

Sorted.

The AI Is A Little Too Smart.

AI is the new thing and most TV's want to run the race of adding AI to their picture rendering. Companies like Vu however mostly do a mediocre job at it. The good part is they let you turn this off by disabling noise reduction setting to off.

Much better.

Love-Hate Relationship With My TV

At this moment I have a love-hate relationship with my TV. I love gadgets which I can customize and root into. Most phones I've owned thus far, are rooted. The service menu of Vu essentially gives me root access to the TV and is very powerful. I dig that about the TV.

The fact that I can hack into my TV and have complete control over my TV makes me feel powerful.

The fact that Vu doesn't handle this little gripes out of the box and expects end users to wear their nerd glasses on to fix these issues make me a little annoyed. Meh!

Either way, all my problems with my TV are sorted and I have a two year extended warranty during which I can return the TV if I face any additional issues. So for now, this will have to do.

If you are thinking of buying a Vu TV - here is my honest advice: Buy it only if you are willing to wear your nerd glasses on and do a little bit of tinkering with the TV, both on the hardware and software front. If you are expecting it to work out of the box like a flawless appliance, Vu isn't for you.

Having said that, the TV is a Froogle choice and once you've made the modifications you feel really happy about spending half the money than what you would have spent of other TVs and getting similar picture quality and overall experience.

Couple the dumb TV up with a Firestick TV (which I bought at discount on Amazon) and a Raspberry Pi 3b+ (bought locally) and you'll have a full-blown smart TV with a pretty decent media center, but that's a whole new post in itself.

Being a Nerd Helps.

This post was just about my gripes and issues with Vu TV and how to fix those. If you own a Vu (or any other TV) and are facing similar issues (particularly electric current running through the TV frame), feel free to use some of these fixes and let me know how it goes.

If your TV just works fine, you can still take solace in the fact that even though most of what you buy or download online today is broken it can be fixed with a little bit of tinkering and geeking.

There is value in being a nerd today. You can stop feeling bad about being a geek. Being a geek is no longer a curse. In today's world it is actually a blessing.

Now go fix something that's broken.

Have you ever wondered why your life, literally and physically, moves out of balance when you are going through a stressful time? Your diet is usually the first thing to go out of control. You stop cooking, and even when you eat out you stop taking the right decisions and start picking all the wrong foods.

Your closet, room and home is usually the next thing to go out of control.

Give me your diet journal for the last one month and I can probably tell you how productive or nonproductive your month was. Let me visit your home on a surprise visit and I'll probably tell you exactly which phase of life you're going through.

And then as these little things go out of control they create a cycle of more panic and anxiety in your life, which in turn leads to more things going out of control.

On the other hand, have you also noticed how doing just a few simple things, can have  a profoundly positive impact on your life and your self-confidence? For example, when you consistently wake up early in the morning, work productively (just for a couple of hours a day), when you consistently eat right, play music, workout; go for a run; or do whatever it is that you do; life feels so… awesome and even your work life and productivity begins to improve.

All of us has at least one thing which if we do right and consistently, we feel in control of our lives and when we don't do that one thing… that's usually a sign that we are losing control and going into a state of depressed helplessness.

That one thing can be different for different individuals. For some, it's waking up early. For others it’s making their bed after they wake up. For many others I know, their daily workout happens to be that thing. Everyone is different but most people have at least one thing which creates a perception of control for them. It makes them feel happy, makes them feel like they are in control of their lives and doing that one thing, makes them feel strong.

We are creatures of control. In an uncertain world where most of us have very little control over anything, including our survival, any perception of control that we can create for ourselves makes us feel safer and stronger than folks who are unable to create that perception.

In the larger scheme of universe where you are an insignificant speck of dust, who  could cease to exist because of a simple road accident, an illusion of control makes you believe that what you do matters and as a result of that, you matter.

If you can pick up one habit, and stick to it, even when life throws its shots at you, you are telling yourself that you take active deliberate decisions and your life runs on those decisions; not a random chain of events controlled by mere chance. You are taking a stand against helplessness.  This is why social scientists call these keystone habits.

This is why when you pick up a keystone habit your life starts to change. For example, most smokers who cultivate the habit of running quit smoking. Most folks who start working out or practicing a musical instrument get better at their work life.

You might say that the perception of control is just an illusion, and I might even agree with you, but that perception of control is exactly what allows us to get up in the morning and go to work. That perception of control is what allows survivors to fight dreadful diseases and even though this would sound a little cliché I would argue that this perception is exactly what powers most of our space programs and allows individuals to climb mountains. Of course rockets have exploded in the past and people have died while climbing mountains but that perception and illusion of control is what enables the astronauts and the climbers to roll the dice, take a chance and succeed.

I have a personal theory that as nerds most of us love programming because in an uncertain world, programing computers creates a perception of control and that perception makes us feel strong and empowered. Hey, we can't change everything, but at least we get to control what's behind the screen of that machine.

All my life, one of the most valuable things I’ve learned it is the idea of inching forward slowly and yet consistently using keystone habits and creating a perception of control is your only chance at that forward movement.

This is why every time I start feeling a sense of helplessness, I fall back to some of my keystone habits to regain that perception of control again. I start writing code each day; I start my daily work out session and I come back to this blog and start writing consistently. And I begin reading. These are four keystone habits that help me inch and claw out of dark and depressing times.

And before I know it, I feel empowered to change things and I'm control. I know the control is just a perception but it still works magically when it comes to taking me out of a state of helplessness and making me productive again.

What are your keystone habits? Did you do them today? Did you take a stand against the punches life throws at you, and actively take out time to do something you committed to? If not, please give yourself a moment today to think about which your keystone habits are and then make an active effort to execute on them.

I won’t say it’ll change your life, but if you are experiencing a sense of helplessness, there is a good chance it’ll pull you out of it and empower you to change things. One inch at a time. This is your way of telling yourself that you may not be in control but at least you are not completely out of control either.

Go on. Pick a few keystone habits and give them time, consistently. There is a high chance you may regain your perception of control and life will begin to come back in balance soon. If you haven't given keystone habits a chance, you should. I wish you good luck.

When I finally patched together a couple of android applications with some custom code that would capture what I did with every minute of my awake time, push that information into a SQL database and then extract intelligent reports out of it, I was so darn excited that the first thing I did was show the system to my wife.

She smiles and thinks I am completely nuts and monitoring every minute of my life is a little too insane, even for a nerd like me. "Why would you want to monitor your time like that?" - she wonders. For me, as a geek though, the question isn't Why, the question is 'Why Not'. I love the idea of monitoring my time because:

1. Now I can monitor how much time I spent getting ready to go to work, eating, working, watching TV, reading and even having fun. In the scheme of my life, time is one more dimension that I can now log into a system! How cool is that?
2. I'm excited to find out what new insights and correlations about my life the data can provide me. For example, does the amount of time I spend in getting ready to get to work change based on when I wake up? If yes by exactly what percentage? What impact does that have on the amount of stress I experience when I start my day? What impact does that stress have on the number of productive pomodoro sessions I have for the rest of the day.
3. I'm excited to find out how those insights will change me as a human being.

What can I say? I'm a typical nerd and I love my data.

My obsession with monitoring started with my very first endeavors with Fitness back in 2009 when an extremely skinny, underweight nerdy version of myself set a big hairy audacious goal of gaining 33 pounds of body weight in a year. It was about food and fitness logs back then. How much proteins was I taking in, how much cardio was I doing, how much strength training was I engaging in and how different combinations of cardio, strength, food and sleep were impacting my weight. I did eventually end up gaining 33 pounds in 11 months. Recently, when I started exceeding my BMI I used the same monitoring and lost 14 pounds in 2 months and have not gained the weight since. I discovered that as a nerd, what I can measure, dissect, read about, study and understand, I can improve.

My long life as a developer has taught me that big changes are all about profiling the right data and making small tweaks based on the insights the data provides. Almost every time you see a manager and a developer fighting over performance, the question to ask the developer is: Have you profiled your application? Do you know what's slowing down the system? OR are you just working on a hunch?

Hunches are great, when they lead you to an answer instantly. When they don't, they send you on a long trip to an infinite loop of random guesses. But collect enough data about your code, analyze it and you realize that the fix is usually a small change in a function which hits a database inside a for-loop or something really as simple as that. The fix itself isn't hard; gathering enough data about the issue and then deriving enough insights from that data that leads you to the fix, is.

For most Nerds, me included, it's the same thing when it comes to life.

Which is why when I started collecting data about my Finances and started recording every financial transaction in my life to the very last cent in a well designed system with apps and some basic reports I used on top of the data, my savings rate jumped by more than 50% in just 3 months.

Did my life style change significantly? Not really. We still eat out and we still spend money on things that matter to us. However, we realized that we were paying for over a hundred television channels me and my wife were never going to watch, that go-daddy was auto-renewing over 30 domains on my credit card that I never used and my bank was looting me by skimming off the interest rates of my investments. Well that and a dozen other holes that had been leaking hard earned money constantly for years.

They were all little things, but when the number totals up and you see those things add up to over 20% of your actual monthly savings, you have a reason to pick up the phone and cancel a few subscriptions. And when you do that and that results in considerable savings, you get the confidence to save more and then you defer buying that fancy new electronic toy that you don't really need by a few months - not because you can't afford it - but because it's not in your planned budget and you need to save up for it.

And then it gets exciting, because suddenly before you know it, you've added some new investment goals into the system and now you're tracking your progress towards those goals and your wife has also seen the data and is actively helping and supporting you in moving forward towards those goals, even when you are tempted to spend. That's what data does to you; especially if the insights the data gives you are clear and out in the open. 'I'm spending way too much on things I don't need' is nowhere close to as powerful as 'I'm spending x% of my income on things I don't need' especially when x is large.

Monitoring turns out to be so important that, Author Gretchen Rubin, has an entire chapter dedicated to monitoring in her book, "Better than before" (which happens to be book #3 of 52 books on my list this year) - where she explains the kind of impact monitoring can have on your behavior by giving her sister's example:

Elizabeth has type 1 diabetes, which means that her pancreas doesn't produce enough insulin. (In type 2 diabetes, which is far more common, the body produces insulin but doesn't react properly to it.) Without insulin, blood sugar can spike to dangerous, even life-threatening levels, so Elizabeth must give herself multiple daily insulin injections, and to inject herself correctly, she must know her blood sugar level.

For years, she'd tested her blood sugar by pricking her finger to check her blood, but she'd recently gotten a device inserted under her skin to monitor her blood sugar continuously. I wanted to know if she found the monitor effective.

"Monitoring is key," she said. "For years, I hated the idea of having a device attached to my stomach, but with diabetes, accurate tracking is so important that I finally caved. Now I can't imagine not having the monitor."

When she told me she was getting the device, I'd imagined that it might administer insulin directly, or tell her what she needed. Nope.

The monitor merely provides a continuous record of her blood sugar levels—but that information makes a big difference.

"Without a monitor, I might test my blood sugar ten times a day, but the monitor checks it constantly," she explained. "I know where my blood sugar is and where it's heading. Also, I know the effect of what I'm doing, so I can't kid myself. Like I was eating this frozen yogurt that claimed to be low-carb, but from the readings I got on my monitor, I know that can't be true."

"Even though the monitor doesn't actually do anything, seeing the numbers makes you behave differently?"

"For sure. Without a monitor, if I ate something questionable, I might unconsciously wait a few hours to test, so I'd get a better number, but that doesn't work with a monitor. I can't fool myself."

That's why the Strategy of Monitoring works so well: no more fooling ourselves. I decided to exploit it for my own habits. If I had a better handle on what I was doing, I could focus my habit-formation energy in the right place. I suspected that in certain areas, I was giving myself more credit for good habits than I deserved.

If you want to see the kind of impact real time monitoring can have, specially given the devices and the technology we have at our disposal today, take a look at Scott Hanselman's IoT demo on monitoring his sugar. Scott's excitement of the technology and the kind of insights that it can provide is a reflection of how any geek would react when he sees huge volumes of personal data analyzed to provide insights that you never had before.

As for my time monitoring system, I realized that the system still had a lot of manual entry points, which is why I wasn't consistent with it, but that failed attempt helped me monitor windows of my time that I really wanted to monitor and that in turn has actually made me a lot more productive than before. After all, some data is still better than none. And I am still working on a system that can monitor more and more of my time without me actively logging things.

The Point? Data collection on yourself and self monitoring isn't all about buying the hottest fitness band in market. It's about building systems which have the potential of providing you insights about yourself that you never had before. And then having the courage and conviction to change based on those insights.

In the posts to come in this series I'll try to document some of my efforts at monitoring my own life in near real time and showcase how I monitor aspects of my life, how I draw correlations between the data and how I tweak my life to bring about some of these changes.

Of course, in the larger scheme of things I'm just a data point of 1, I suck at Mathematics and I'm not even a social or a data scientist, but I hope these experiments inspire you to capture parts of your life that you feel are important and then tweak them ever so slightly to get huge benefits. That's what this series of posts is going to be about.

What aspects of your life are you monitoring actively with data? Of course if it's an area of your life that needs improvement you would know things are bad and if you know things are bad you can fix them, but sometimes, quantifying just 'how bad' things are is the nudge that we as nerds need to change things. And it can teach us things about ourselves that we thought we knew before, but we didn't.

After all, most of us aren't really as mindful as we think we are but we have the gift of data and of the many things data can do, one of the most powerful is brining you face to face with yourself.