Knives Out is great film. It’s a country house murder mystery in the Agatha Christie tradition but brought up to date.I’m not going to give anything away. All I can say is that the ending was surprising and very satisfying. And that I got it all completely wrong. There are some “laugh out loud” moments to be had too. Impeccably acted (which is what you would expect with a cast like this) and very… Read more →
Of course Black Friday is a bit of a racket. But there are some bargains to be had. Pimoroni are making a week of it. Today they’ve reduced all their Breakout Garden sensors. These are very well packaged and you can either solder to them or plug them into their “Breakout Garden”. which attaches to the top of a Raspberry Pi. They have a nicely managed set of libraries on GitHub which make it very e… Read more →
A few years ago, at an MVP Summit, I bought a keyboard from the Microsoft Store. The discount was very pleasing and the keyboard was very comfortable. I thought this made me a winner. However, it did come with a bit of a sting in the tail, in that had the american layout, what with being sold in America. I set the Windows 10 language to match, but then I found that my pesky muscle memory was causi… Read more →
Trains, train delays, scary SOAP APIs, coffee and zero hours of sleep were just a few of the things that I experienced last weekend when I took part in my first ever HackTrain hackathon; it was three days of excitement, adventure, chaos and code. So what is HackTrain? It’s a hackathon spent, unsurprisingly, on trains, with a focus on looking at how the rail network can be improved; with a cohort o… Read more →
This is what you get if you try to display a ball bouncing around a screen and you forget to clear the screen. I quite like it. This is what you get if you leave the ball bouncing a bit longer. Read more →
....let's celebrate with the release of v0.20. I got a notification from my calendar system yesterday that Pepperminty Wiki's birthday is today, and since I did a beta release a few days ago and there haven't been any major issues, I thought I'd time the full release to coincide with its birthday. I'm timing it from the first commit I ever made in Pepperminty Wiki's git repository. 5 years is a lo… Read more →
The future of energy will rely on technology more than ever. Here’s my predictions on how the industry will evolve in the next century. Renewable Energy Clean renewable energy will be the energy of the future, there are already entire countries that are fully renewable like Costa Rica and Iceland. Many other countries also have targets to be 100% renewable or at least carbon neutral in the future,… Read more →
When I was younger, more innocent and the internet was a friendly place (remember netiquette?) I thought that picking an out of the way phrase and using it for my passwords was a good idea. Then, a few years later, I realised that this was in fact a silly idea and started using different passwords for all my accounts. Which is just as well.Earlier this week I received an email with my venerable ol… Read more →
I’m trying to create the game of robot rugby. As you do. I’ve no idea how the game mechanic will work. My plan is to rope in some folks at the Hardware Meetup to try and work out the rules. Anyhoo, one of the things that we are working on is some way of tracking the robots around the playfield so that each robot player can know where it is. Brian has been working on some code to track things by me… Read more →
I assumed this would be a simple job. Off I went to Google only to find convoluted methods which still only worked in “most cases”. I am a little surprised by this. Obviously if you can control the expected format this is simple. My situation was different as someone else... Read more →