Today I thought I’d have a proper play with the Azure IoT Devkit. There’s a ton of content out there about getting started. It’s actually quite simple to follow. In it’s simplest form you just follow the instructions here, but since the device has a proper security chip I though I’d veer off and see about using the Azure IOT device provisioning service and an X-500 certificate to create a very sec… Read more →

You're probably already aware that Adobe announced that they are ending support for flash at the end of 2020. You're browser has probably already disabled the plugin by default. This is good news for the web as a whole, but what about everything left behind? What if I said that at the end of 2020 we'll lose an entire chapter of the Internet's history? I'm talking about the masses of content on the… Read more →

I was in the lovely Little Bookshop in Leeds today and I noticed that they had display filled with books about engineering and coding for kids. Lovely stuff. I’ve bought a couple of books from the shop, and I thought I’d mention them in ye olde blogge. I’ve put these in the blog post as Amazon items because I’m lazy and its easy to do (which is, in a nutshell why I use Amazon) but what I really wa… Read more →

It turns out that I really want my watch to have a high opinion of me. I’m slave to a piece of program code somewhere deep in side the software that goes:if(exercise_value>30) printf(“Well done Rob”);It’s reached the point that when I do a job where I can’t really wear the watch (for example painting a summerhouse with horrible, gloopy paint that goes everywhere) I get rather resentful of the way… Read more →

At the hardware group on Thursday, when we were talking about hardware for new members. We have a kit of parts that we make available for those who want to have a play with Arduinos and I realised that I had absolutely no idea how many devices I had in stock. So on Friday I spent a while going through all my little boxes from China and counting devices. I then thought it might be a good idea to la… Read more →

I installed the latest Windows 10 update over Wednesday night on two machines at the same time. I was quite amused to see my lowly Surface Go upgrade in around same time as my proper desktop. The Surface Go is really growing on me. The installation just worked. On Thursday morning I had the new system running. I’ve not noticed much different to be honest. The biggest change for me so far is that t… Read more →

I can’t help thinking that HullOS has a much better ring to it… A couple of weeks ago I was at the Hull Arena marvelling at how Hull could put on such a fantastic digital awards ceremony. Today I’m at the same place marvelling at how Hull can host a splendid technical event. One of of the first thing the delegates were told about Connexin was that they are a Hull company. Born and bred. And proud… Read more →

I’ve been doing a lot of 3D printing lately. What with josh lights and everything. Today I thought I’d replace the print nozzle on Una, my 3D printer. Turned out that hardest part of the process was finding the replacements that I’d rather sensibly bought a while back. I looked where they should have been and didn’t find them. This triggered a huge hunt all over the house, loft and garage. All to… Read more →

After my last glossary post on LoRa, I thought I'd write another one of C♯ and .NET, as (in typical Microsoft fashion it would seem), they're seems to be a lot of jargon floating around whose meaning is not always obvious. If you're new to C♯ and the .NET ecosystems, I wouldn't recommend tackling all of this at once - especially the bottom ~3 definitions - with those in particular there's a lot to… Read more →

NASA Space Apps Challenge is a worldwide hackathon. We did it last year at c4di and it was awesome. So awesome that we’re doing it again. You can find out more, and sign up, here. And you should, you really, really should. Read more →