As always, so many great tech things happening out there, so little time to blog them, let alone do anything useful with them.
These posts are like a curated, contextualised version of my Pinboard account. Here’s hoping y’all find something useful below.
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ATOM - The Atom editor by GitHub is coming along nicely and even works well on Windows now. I also discovered that Windows now has a package installer called Chocolatey which is pretty cool. I still think building an editor on a browser engine is somehow wrong tho.
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Google Compute Engine - I moved an old Django web-app to Google Compute Engine recently. This has previously run seamlessly on a variety of dedicated server providers, on Amazon EC2 and on Amazon EC2 + RDS. It has been anything but seamless on GCE with multiple access errors to CloudSQL per week and random server reboots. Sure, cloud servers should be treated like cattle and not pets (my fave Ops phrase recently) but this isn’t good enough from Google. I couldn’t recommend it to anyone for small production deployments. And unless you are willing to pay for support, you are stuck with “community support” on Stack Overflow if you have problems. This is pretty ridiculous when they are providing $300 worth of credits (or 60 days) for free. If the bloody thing is unreliable and support is barely accessible, the free offer basically sends people away for life. If you want public cloud, stick with EC2.
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OpenShift - Now that I’m a RedHatter (getting the red fedora on Tuesday, woohoo!), I’ve been playing around with OpenShift Online. It’s a really easy to use git-based flow into a PaaS and I’ve got both Node and Go apps running on the free tier with no effort. MongoDB is running nicely for me there too. It’s a great way to bootstrap an API server and if you are looking to do something with Open Data, it would make a superb base. It also helps that it’s from a company that has Open Source built into its DNA, not just as a morketing tool.
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Yosemite - If the trackpad on your MBP goes all weird and refuses to click on stuff after you “upgrade” to Yosemite, this trick worked for me where you reset the PRAM.
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Hudl 2 - We got a Tesco Hudl 2 Android tablet for my 8yo daughter for her birthday. If you want to buy from Ireland, you can get from Tesco UK Online and use your Parcel Motel address for delivery. Initial impressions have been overwhelmingly positive. The 8.3" full-HD screen is superb, the Intel CPU is surprisingly fast, the back camera is good and the stock Android experience is great. It also takes SD cards and has HDMI out. XBMC/Kodi runs beautifully on it too. The only two tiny negatives are that it is quite heavy and there are too many unremovable Tesco UK widgets on some of the home screens. If you are in the market for an Android tablet this Christmas, I honestly haven’t been able to find anything that comes close for even a lot more money. I see almost no practical difference between it and my latest-model iPad Mini which is hugely more expensive.
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Google Cardboard Apps - Reality Hacker is a Google Cardboard App which is completely head-wrecking and full of awesome. It basically gives you a filtered view of what the phone camera can see. You immediately feel like you are in a Sci-Fi movie or you are Robocop. If you haven’t bought a bunch of Google Cardboards as stocking fillers this Christmas, you and your Android-owning friends/family are missing out big time. I get mine from Elecfreaks in China but it’s a long wait. I assume someone in Europe is dong them at this stage?
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Just Dance - Chromecast is another bloody bargain that we aren’t using massively but I still like the fact that it is there. It can do a lot more than Netflix. Once I explained to the 8yo that she can cast any YouTube video from her Hudl to the TV, she was hooked. But the app that showed what’s really possible with a €39 TV dongle is Just Dance Now. Instead of the usual Wii and Wiimotes that we use in our house for Just Dance, you use your Android phone, a free App and Chromecast. It works perfectly. The kids were very impressed. The only teeny tiny downside is that they are now moving their arms around quickly with a large €600 phone in their hands rather than a small cheap Wiimote!
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Chromebooks - Still waiting for the perfect Chromebook that I can dual-boot into Linux. It seems all Chromebooks on Amazon UK are 2GB only, which is ridiculous. I want 4GB, 32GB SSD, 13", a Haswell CPU and non-disastrous build quality. Too much to ask?
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Stupid MBP - If Apple are such design geniuses, why do MBPs still have a Caps Lock key and the utterly ridiculous § key? Do yourself a favour and install both Karabiner and Seil. Caps Lock is now a second Shift key for me and the stupid key is now #.
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iBeacons and BLE - Android 5.0 now lets phones act as (i)-Beacons. Very useful for event check-in.
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Plex Media Server - I’ve had a few goes at installing Plex over the years but never had much success with it. I hate “library” features on most media apps (glares at almost all Android music players) and much prefer a folder view of the world. But Plex gets very confused if it finds multiple directories called something like “Season 1”. So after a big media clean-up on directory names, it now seems to work ok. We need it in our house due to the inability to install XBMC on iOS devices and their lack of any media playing app that can use SMB shares. So far so good and they have just announced the one thing I needed before I let the kids use Plex - family controls.
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Hook.io - Marak, one of the original founders of a certain Node company, is back promoting his hook.io platform again. Very interesting approach to webhooks and micro-services. Open source now too.
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Hackathons - I cringed recently at a conference in London where some big name tech companies were running a “hackathon”. Participants were directed to build web-apps which had to use the “sponsors” products and which would result in some really shitty prizes. A Raspberry Pi, for fucks sake, all £35 worth. I was stunned to see people had turned up to waste their day working for free for someone else on this. To what end? Which is why I adore Stupid Projects from the Stupid Hackathon which has the best/worst ideas from the Stupid Shit No One Needs & Terrible Ideas Hackathon.
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Espruino - I’m really delighted that the Espruino Pico Kickstarter by Gordon Williams got backed and hit several of the stretch goals. The idea of a tiny USB stick that can emulate a KB/Mouse and is fully programmable to control hardware in JavaScript via your Chrome browser is just too cool. It also has Scratch-style blocks programming. I said it already on Twitter but I think this might be a better tool than raw Arduino for getting kids into programming and hacking and hardware. But it needs a bigger community of contributors which I hope it’ll get from all the Pico backers. Speaking of which, I am 7 months overdue doing a full debug of the NRF24L01 code to figure out why they can talk Espruino to Espruino and Arduino to Arduino but not Espruino to Arduino or vice versa.
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Wireless Comms - Also speaking of the NRF24L01, this branch of the main Arduino and Raspberry Pi library seems a lot better than the one I used previously. Next week I’ll blog about my wireless switch which uses the sample code with a few tiny changes.
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Hot and Sticky - I love hot glue but so far I’ve hated hot glue guns. Unreliable, clunky, awkward pieces of crap that take 5+ minutes to heat up. Then a few weeks ago, I discovered the Bosch GluePen. A lithium battery powered piece of brilliance that charges via micro-USB and heats up in 10 seconds. 10 seconds! Of course I bought one. Love it to bits.
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Ron Swanson - Nick Offerman’s Handcrafted Wood Emojis. Nuff said.
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Lenovo and Dabs Hell - Absolutely horrendous experience buying a Lenovo E555 laptop from dabs4work.ie. I’ve been a Dabs customer for absolutely years and previously never had hassle with them, even with returns. But they now have a brain-dead policy that you must deal with the manufacturer first to arrange an RMA and only then contact them. The E555 that arrived was a piece of garbage. The space bar was hanging off, the keyboard looked like it cost 15c to make, the screen was randomly covered in colour blocks, the USB ports would’t recognise a mouse and the whole machine froze solid every few minutes and needed a hard reboot. It took days of trying to ring Lenovo/IBM/Medion (which one depended on who you talked to) to get a return approved. Eventually I got an email saying I had contacted the wrong department followed 10 minutes later by an RMA approval! Complete clowns. Avoid avoid avoid Lenovo. Then I got on to Dabs where I clicked “arrange collection” which of course failed on the last step. This was followed by a series of emails, at a rate of one per day, where I tried to arrange collection. The courier arrived 2 days after promised and I finally got a refund whereby I immediately bought an Acer on Amazon instead. 18 days of grief spells the end of a very long buying relationship with Dabs. When are these companies going to realise that people may come for prices but they stay for customer service (ditto Google Compute Engine). In comparison I bought some second hand DDR2 memory from an eBay seller in the UK. One of the RAM modules was faulty. They sent me a replacement immediately and asked me to return the dodgy one only when I got it. That’s how you keep repeat business.