After going through my latest case of 5 Hour Energy shots (a relative bargain at $1.60 a bottle in bulk), I got curious about what it would cost to make your own energy shots. I took the red pill and I'm still finding out how deep the rabbit hole goes.

First thing I found out, caffeine is cheap. I picked up 400 grams of caffeine from Amazon.com for less than $23 when I "subscribed" to auto-shipping it. The average can of Mountain Dew contains 54 milligrams of caffeine. That means I picked up the same amount of caffeine you'd find in 7,400 cans of Mountain Dew for the cost of .3 cents per can. With coffee running 2x-3x the caffeine of Mountain Dew, I realized the caffeine in that $3 cuppa from Starbucks has a street value of less than a penny.

Second thing I found out, caffeine is bitter. If you just take the powder, stir it into a drink, and chug, it's mostly going to taste bad. I say mostly because putting milk in your coffee seems to have some science behind it. Of the different things I stirred straight caffeine powder into, milk neutralized the bitterness fastest and best. A little milk, some Kahlua flavored syrup, and a scoop of caffeine... perfect buzz shake.

I researched ways to neutralize and minimize the bitterness and found out three things:

1. Caffeine powder needs time to dissolve. If you drink the beverage right after stirring it in, it will be more bitter than if you give it a few minutes.
2. The warmer the water, the more caffeine you can dissolve in it. Boiling water can dissolve 670 grams of caffeine per liter and hold it in solution. But as that water gets cooler, the caffeine will precipitate back out. At room temperature, the solubility of caffeine in water drops to about 21 grams per liter.
3. The best way to add it to beverages is to dissolve it in water first. Not only does that pre-dissolve it so you don't need to wait, but adding powders to carbonated beverages makes them react almost like you dropped in a Mentos.

Learning the last bullet point allowed me to start successfully adding caffeine to beverages. Having a handy source of pre-dissolved caffeine in an easily measured, non-powder form made experimentation a lot easier. Measuring out 100 milligrams of powder is very difficult and precise work, but if you dissolve a larger, more easily measured amount in an easily measured amount of water, you have a quick and easy way of pouring caffeine shots into carbonated and non-carbonated beverages. Here's my recipe for caffeinated water...

Put 10 grams caffeine in a large measuring cup (1 liter or greater). Pour in enough boiling water to bring it up to 1 liter. Stir. When it's cooled to room temperature, put it in a bottle.

Now you have 1 liter of solution at a concentration of 10 milligrams of caffeine per milliliter of solution. A teaspoon is 5 milliliters, or 50 milligrams of caffeine, which gives you the approximate caffeine of a Mountain Dew. A tablespoon is 15 milliliters, which gives you 150 milligrams of caffeine, approximately equal to a strong cup of coffee (anywhere from 80-180 milligrams), a 5 Hour Energy shot (138 milligrams), or 2 cans of Red Bull (80 milligrams per can). You can add as much as you feel you really need to any drink.

From this point on, it's all about personal preference. I found a quick and easy energy drink that costs less than 25 cents is to take a 1/2 liter bottle of inexpensive drinking water (Costco's is about 10 cents a bottle), take a sip, add a packet of Hawaiian punch or Wyler's lemonade (available at 8 to 10 packets for a dollar at Walmart or Dollar Tree stores), and pour in up to 1 tablespoon of the caffeinated water solution. Cheap and easy energy punch.

If you want to add it to sodas, remember that it is bitter. You will want to add it to sweeter sodas or add a little sweetened syrup. For example, you can pick up a 2.5 liter bottle of lemon lime Shasta at Dollar Tree, giving you an 8 ounce serving for 10 cents. Add a tablespoon of caffeinated water and a tablespoon or two of grenadine and you've got what I call a "Shirley Temple on Speed". Meanwhile, the more sugary Shasta Tiki Punch can stand up to a couple teaspoons of the caffeinated water without help.

ONE CAVEAT ON CAFFEINE: Just as with many legal recreational substances, caffeine is lovely in small doses, and toxic in large doses. It's hard to consume enough caffeine to kill yourself, but you can. If you consume just 5% of what you need to have a heart attack, you can start feeling sick with symptoms like a panic attack. If you know your limits, pay attention to them. If you don't, proceed cautiously.

But What About Vitamins?

Many energy drinks contain propietary blends of herbs, vitamins, and amino acids. The B vitamins are very popular, as are vitamin C and the amino acid Taurine. Some of them contain megadoses while others contain more moderate amounts. This is where things get tricky. You can buy various vitamin supplements in powder or liquid form. They can be bitter, sour, not dissolve well... I made a bottle of "vitamin water" with a bunch of B vitamin complex capsules. It came out an ugly shade of a sort of orangey brown with powder floating on the surface, looking and sort of smelling like a bottle of scummy pond water.

If you like vitamin C, you can buy ascorbic acid, a powdered form of vitamin C. Adding it will be like squeezing some lemon into your drink, so if you use a lot, you'll need to add sweetener to compensate. And, as with any powdered supplement, dissolve it in water before adding it to carbonated beverages to prevent messes.

As much as I'd like to do custom mixes of vitamins and minerals, if it becomes too much work, it stops being something I can do regularly. Enter Vplenish, which is currently $25 for a 2,000 packet box at Amazon (with free shipping and a $5 discount code which is available on the product page as of this writing). It looks like a packet of sweetener you'd get in a restaurant, but it's pretty much neutral in taste and can be stirred into non-carbonated drinks without needing any extra flavorings or sweeteners to compensate. Two packets of Vplenish gives you the approximate vitamin profile of generic vitamin enhanced waters. So, for less than 3 cents, you can vitamin enhance your beverage.

Note that these aren't megadoses like you'll find in some multivitamins or B complex supplements. A packet of Vplenish provides 10% - 30% of the RDA of its various components instead of 1,000% - 3,000%. But the thing about megadoses is there's a valid question of whether your body needs that much or can even use it. Common wisdom is that most of these megadoses are like trying to put more gas in your car when the tank is full. The rest just spills out and makes you pee pretty colors.

Vplenish and the vitamin enhanced waters/punches with low doses take a more moderate approach of topping off the tank instead of flooding it. I take a multi-vitamin and a B supplement in the morning, then top off periodically during the day.

As for other additives like Taurine, guarana, yerba mate, and any number of other vitamins or minerals, you can usually find powdered or liquid versions at your local health food or supplement mart, and you can almost always find them online. Just remember to pre-dissolve any powders you plan to mix into sodas.

Advice For Energy Shots

In these cases, I tend to make a punch at quadruple strength, whether it's sugar free Hawaiian Punch or a punch mix. You're not going to have 6-8 ounces of the beverage to dillute the bitterness of the caffeine and all that sweetening power to counteract it. A quadruple strength punch allows you to get 5-6 ounces worth of punch flavor and sweetener into one shot. You can also do a mix with a flavored syrup at 2 or 3 parts water to 1 part syrup.

Use a 2 ounce shot glass, or save some of your energy shot bottles, wash them well, and re-use them with a funnel. Toss in two packets of Vplenish, two or three teaspoons of of your caffeine solution, and top off with your quadruple strength punch or watered down syrup. Give it a chug and you're good to go.

Current Release 0.5.0 Beta (download - .zip - 16k - CC 3.0 Attribution license)

What Is A Heatmap?

Thanks to siewlian for our underlying photo

A heatmap is a way of visually overlaying hostspots of incidence/concentration on a grid. The hotspots can represent a clickstream (I set up a little AJAX script to record every time I clicked on the photo above and then rendered the data of where I clicked as a heatmap), or it could be the incidence of robberies or concentrations of zombies on a map.

Long story short, I got curious about heatmaps last year, but all the solutions I'd found were not in PHP, used the ImageMagick library, had a complex API, produced a heatmap I thought sucked, or multiple elements from that list. Eventually, because it produced the kind of map I wanted and could work simply, I first ported "The Definitive Heatmap" from Ruby to PHP.

I still didn't like the fact that it used ImageMagick (because many people on shared servers might not have access to ImageMagick), plus it executed the ImageMagick commands to the shell, which is not as secure as I'd like. So I re-wrote the whole thing to use PHP's built in graphics library, GD. That came with its own set of pitfalls, most notably being that GD has no Multiply blend mode. I had to create a GD Multiply blend in PHP from scratch. For those of you who arrived here specifically because you were Googling for a PHP script to do a Multiply blend with GD, you'll find that code in the overlayDot() method of the class.

I added a few functional modifications, did about an hour of testing to make sure it worked, wrote up the README, and packed it up.

The download package contains the class file, a README with instructions on how to use it, and a graphics folder with a color strip and dot image needed to create the overlay images. You'll need a basic knowledge of PHP and arrays to install this and make it work with the sample code.

Enjoy the class and if you have any questions, comments, bug reports, feature requests, or just plain praise, please post your thoughts below.

Current Release 0.5.0 Beta (download - .zip - 16k - CC 3.0 Attribution license)

September 2011
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I recently switched from Sprint to T-Mobile and I am regretting it more and more with each passing hour.

I ordered 2 Android phones with a family voice, text, and data plan. I gave them the two numbers to port from Sprint. And I waited. The phones shipped a day later than I hoped, but that was not a big issue.

On the morning of the delivery day, problem 1 occurred. They ported my number off my Sprint account and to my new phone before it was delivered. For the next 6 hours, I had no cell service. It's been my experience in the past that you order the phones, you get them, you call to activate them, and the number is ported then. This was new... and annoying.

When the phones arrived, there was no indication which had which number. In fact, the Android phone identity screen in the settings said the phone number was unknown on both phones. I called T-Mobile and they told me to call #6# to find my number. This is where we encountered problem 2: they had ported my number, but had not ported my wife's. They put my wife's number through the porting system and got it from Sprint, but then there was an issue with the SIM card being "reserved" and they couldn't issue my wife's number to her phone. They said they could request the reservation be removed, but that would take 24 hours and might not work.

What were my other options, I asked. They asked if I had a spare SIM card. Yeah, I'm coming from Sprint which doesn't use SIMs, so how would I have a spare SIM lying around? I asked what I was supposed to tell my wife when her phone was basically out of commission for two or more days. They suggested I call Sprint and ask them to port her number back until they'd run the fix through their system. "Um, hi Sprint. I know I just tried to leave you, but could I come back for a day or two while T-Mobile gets their asses in gear?" Seriously?

I asked if I could go to a T-Mobile store and get a new SIM from them. Yes. So off I went to the closest store. First thing that happened was I pissed off the manager... not intentionally. See, web orders started 8 days before the stores were supposed to get the phone, but T-Mobile had told the manager they wouldn't be shipping until close to the store release date. Instead, I had mine 6 days before store release. But he assigned me a service guy who took the phone, put in a new SIM, called T-Mobile and got my wife's number put on the phone.

If only it had ended there...

Problem 3 occurred when we discovered that somehow in all that craziness from problem 2, my wife's data plan got stripped off her phone. We never really noticed because she mostly used the data features at home when the phone was getting its data from our WiFi, not T-Mobile. But when she was out with the kids on Sunday and trying to Google something, she was told she did not have a data plan and would need to upgrade to one.

I called T-Mobile that night, after we got back from "Captain America", and they told me that was correct. She had no data plan. I'd have to add one for $20 a month. I said I'd signed up for a family plan with voice, messaging, and data for both phones... just give me the plan I signed up for. No, they said, we had to upgrade her data plan. I gave in, figuring if the numbers didn't add up, I'd haggle it out with billing. They said it would take 2 hours for the data plan to kick in.

At this point, the stress of them switching my plan without my authorization and the rest of this bull gave me a massive stress headache. So when the 2 hours was up, a bit after midnight, I was still awake, because I had this terrible headache that wouldn't respond to ibuprofen and wouldn't let me sleep, and I could determine that it wasn't fixed. Luckily I was still awake from the headache at 3 a.m. when their east coast customer service opened for the day. I was too worn out to be upset, and yelling would have made my headache worse. I got on with a rep who tested various things, escalated it when they didn't work, and basically got it fixed. Somewhere around 5 a.m. I got to sleep, but I had to call in sick to work, and since I'm a contractor, I have no paid sick days.

Today, I checked my account to see how they'd screwed up my service and encountered problem 4. According to their web site, whatever messed-up stuff they'd done had raised my monthly charge by $40. So I got on chat with customer support. They said the web site was wrong and I was on the plan I signed up for at the rate I signed up for. So why was the web site wrong? Maybe I'd briefly been shuffled onto something more expensive, but it was corrected, and the web site can take 72 hours to update.

They also mentioned I had two activation fees pending. I said they should pay me activation fees for all the trouble I'd had to go through cleaning up their mistakes. They said they couldn't do anything.

I pressed. This had taken so much time, been such a series of screw-ups on their part, why shouldn't I just return the phones, demand my money back and be done with them? They hemmed and hawed, then said since they messed up the activation on my wife's phone, they'd give me a $35 credit for the activation fee, but that I was only allowed one "goodwill credit" on my account, and if I accepted it, I would not be able to ask them to compensate me for anything for the rest of my contract term. I tell him that it's not enough and their massive series of screw-ups demanded a greater level of consideration.

Then the guy addressed me as Richard (my name's Greg) and I asked him if he was trying, in a veiled way, to call me a dick. I demand to talk to his supervisor. He said his supervisor had reviewed the account and approved the $35. I reiterated it wasn't enough. He said that's all they would offer. I said it wasn't enough. He asked if there was anything more they could help me with, and I said "I think you've done more than enough to alienate me, Richard."

The problem is I love this phone. There is no phone currently on the market that presses my buttons like this one does. But I've got a 14 day return window that I'm only 5 days into.

T-Mobile insists on not only screwing up this badly, then low-balling me on the "goodwill credit" AND telling me that if I take it, they're free to screw up as much and as badly as they want and I can't ask for anything again.

I'd have to switch to a phone I wasn't as wild about on a more expensive carrier, but I am so gobsmacked by T-Mobile's unparalleled combination of incompetence and arrogance, it's really hard to justify staying. I mean when I had a problem with my DVR on Verizon FiOS, they comped me a whole month of my cable bill to say "sorry". They showed they meant it and I stayed.

T-Mobile says "sorry" too, but an offer of $35 to cover what they put me through PLUS a stipulation I can't ask for another credit if they screw up again? They're not sorry, and they're either telling me that I'm a grinder who they think will try to get a credit at every turn or they're so sure they'll screw up again that they want to make sure they cover their butts.

Either way, I've got 9 days to decide if I'm returning these phones. Unless T-Mobile has a serious attitude adjustment, I can't see why I'd reward this kind of mistreatment by keeping them.

It only takes a dollar to win a 300 million dollar lotto jackpot, but it takes 1.5 billion dollars that didn't win to get the lotto jackpot that high.