#“Tech brain-dump round-up”
Over a month without a blogpost. Possibly a 12 year record. Busy. Good busy. All of these were supposed to be standalone posts but that’ll never happen, so here’s some stuff that caught my eye in the past few weeks.
- Weather Signal - Crowd Sourced weather using the sensors in your phone. I have it installed on my SGS4 already.
- Android 4.3 "Play Edition" for Samsung Galaxy S4 without all the TouchWiz crap. I've been holding off on installing one of these ROMs until I saw some continuity of development. I finally installed this one on Friday. Solid as a rock so far. Only one visual glitch and FitBit won't sync. I will be beating up Bluetooth big-time in the next few weeks as the normal Samsung stack is as garbage as the HTC one. Totally unreliable.
- Running a Raspberry Pi on a battery: I ran an experiment with a Turnigy 2200mAh 7.4V LiPo battery to power an RPi. I put it through a regulator to drop it to 5V and it worked perfectly. Managed to get 5.5 hrs of usage with the RPi not doing very much. The Turnigys are designed for RC cars etc. Unfortunately I was tired when I was doing it and forgot those batteries have no low-charge protection. So it's dead :-(
- 6 weeks using an MBP 13". You Mac fanbois are all smoking crack. It's a perfectly fine laptop with an equal number of (different) problems to a standard Windows laptop. Stupid money for a nice case and mousepad with a pretty version of Unix. Where do I start? 2 USB ports. Bless.
- foauth.org - Brilliant way to access tons of different OAuth based sites/services using simple username and password. I've a horrible feeling they will get C&Ds from Twitter and Co, but in the meantime, you can now try out fun ideas without the horror of server-side or mobile OAuth
- Cloudup - Share files. Drag, drop and stream. Love the idea, haven't had a chance to try properly.
- Octopress - Yes, I've started drinking the static blog koolaid. Will be setting one up in the next few weeks using this.
- Fargo.io - Just try it. In-browser Outliner built on Dropbox for storage by the creator of RSS. I already have two ideas for simple web services built on this DaaB (Dropbox as a Back-End) idea. Totally agree with the idea that all your "stuff" should be on a Dropbox-like service. Then new services you want to use are given permission to use it for storing everything there. It's back to the idea of you owning your data. Outside opportunity for App.Net there?
How are y’all?