Cross Dominant

#“The AND100 Android Box is perfect for Netflix, RTE Player etc” David in TV Trade very kindly gave me an AND100 Android Box before Christmas and I’m only now finally getting around to reviewing it. I’ve been keeping an eye on the whole Android TV Stick/Box market for a while. There are so many out there, it is almost impossible to pick one and I haven’t been overly impressed with the sticks due to all the compromises involved in getting everything into such a small form factor. »

#“When a 10 year old tiny utility program saves your ass” After many many years on a barely-used 1024-bit GPG/PGP key, I decided to go full-blown 4096-bit recently. More for the principle than anything else, but also to mess around with some secure apps like Retroshare, as mentioned by Cathal Garvey. Whilst I was as it, I moved to a new much improved longer password and made sure to drill it into my brain over and over. »

#“The FrankenLego RC car is progressing nicely” The idea behind this was to highlight how Lego could do something really powerful for a much wider range of kids than the insanely priced Mindstorms. I started with this really impressive Lego Technic Dune Buggythat some of my kids assembled ages ago. I then butchered it and added a geared motor, a motor shield, an Arduino Uno, a LiPo battery, an nRF24L01 transceiverand a servo to create FrankenLego: »

#“DisplayPort to DVI to HDMI to VGA to Monitor - And it works” Yesterday I got caught out in a meeting by having an MBP and a DVI adapter whilst the customer had a VGA projector. Luckily someone else saved the day with a proper Windows laptop with a VGA port :-) For giggles I just tried daisy-chaining a bunch of adapters I’ve collected from various Chinese sources over the last two years. »

#“My Pebble watch just fits, in every way.” I have hovered over the Buy button on the Pebble site more times than I’d like to admit. But I always stopped at the last minute. $150 is a lot of money for a watch when you haven’t worn one in years, even if it’s a “Smart” watch. The dreadful reviews of the RunKeeper App didn’t help, since that was going to be my main use case. »

#“Our first Arduino Christmas Turkey” Take one turkey, an oven with the temperature markings rubbed-off, a food thermometer with a broken probe and you have a recipe for either incineration or salmonella. Enter an Arduino Uno, a K-Type thermocouple, a sample MAX31855 IC, some dodgy soldering from a few weeks ago, an Adafruit library and a Sparkfun LCD and you get this: All rustled up in 15 minutes. Code and circuit to follow. »

#“Slightly obsessing about the Doctor Who theme music” I watched a superb Culture Show documentary on Doctor Who last week. Several people really stood out for me including Delia Derbyshire, the absolute genius who, at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1963,turned Ron Grainer’s simple tune into the iconic music that is burned into my brain since I first heard it around 1972, aged 4. I’ve just been wondering this week how she did it. »

#“Introducing the Bandon Bluetooth Button (BBB) using RN42 HID” TL;DR - A Bluetooth-enabled Button/Joystick to control music/podcasts on your phone whilst driving. One thing I find very dangerous in the car is changing tracks etc on my phone when it’s in its screen mount. It’s impossible to do so without taking your eye off the road even for a second. And it’s illegal in many countries. I used to love the steering column controls for the old car radio but they don’t work over A2DP or AVRCP Bluetooth to my phone which streams to my Lidl car stereo. »

#"[No Longer] a Product and Support failure by Adafruit with the Bluefruit EZ-Key" UPDATE: Incredibly fast response and resolution from Adafruit. Feel free to ignore my negative post below. But still some good tips for any biz about handling product change and support. Back in? with Adafruit. I’ve been working on a simple-ish project recently which required Bluetooth comms between some hardware and a phone. I’ve had lots of success with those cheap HC-05/HC-06 modules from China and made some progress with a Slave module. »

#“Adding a realtime clock to the Raspberry Pi and the Sweetbox II” I got one of these $3 RTC modulesa few months back and I finally set it up this weekend. It simply has a battery-backed clock so when your Raspberry Pi (or Arduino) boots up, it has the correct time immediately. For a network-connected Pi, it’s not really necessary as you can have the time updated regularly via NTP but not all Pis spend their life connected to the network. »