Cross Dominant

Two things happened in early 2012 that have made the past almost-decade a geeky joy - I discovered the Arduino project and the first Raspberry Pi was released. Since then I’ve had a ridiculous amount of fun with both and built a ton of useful and useless projects. Despite having a Masters degree in Electronics, I’ve never worked as a Electronic Engineer and have always lived in the software world. I’d often wanted to dabble over the years but everything seemed just too difficult. »

It looks like I first started talking about MongoDB online back in 2011 - We’ve come a long way baby. Right, need to finish watching the MongoDB vids (easier than I thought) and then do an Amazon ELB setup for kicks. — Conor O'Neill (@conoro) May 28, 2011 Mongo has remained one of my favourite tools for getting things done. I always think that’s why it succeeded. Whilst the factions argued it out on HN, developers just got on with using it for practical purposes. »

Every Halloween for the past decade or so, I’ve built something silly to scare or entertain the trick-or-treaters. Some years it works brilliantly, other years, not so well. But the basic idea is always the same - detect arrival of kids and use sound/light/motion to jump-scare them. And every Halloween is a last-minute race to assemble electronics, plastic, duct-tape and code. That code is often a horrendous unreliable mish-mash of Arduino, Espruino, Python, Node. »

TL;DR - Gordon Williams has a new Espruino Kickstarter for the fabulous Bangle.js 2. Go and back the project and enjoy every geeky minute of playing with it. I have one of the devices already and it’s a massive leap forward over V1. Imagine running JavaScript and TensorFlow Micro machine learning on your wrist! I’m still not sure how I heard about the Espruino project originally back in 2013. Hackaday maybe? »

As long-time readers of my blog(s) know, I come from an Embedded Systems background and still love to play with home electronics and IoT. And of course, since last year I’ve been noodling around with CO2 monitors and other environmental sensors because of you-know-what. So I decided to see if I could connect my sensor setup to Low Code platforms like Node-RED, parse the values, persist them and alert me somehow if CO2 in particular got too high. »

I saw two related threads over the past few days about computers in education. Walter retweeted one which called the Rasperry Pi a failure as it didn’t achieve its original mission. Clickbait title time: The Raspberry Pi failed (a thread). The original mission statement of the Pi was to be a modern BBC computer - a cheap educational resource that could be scattered throughout schools for kids to learn on. »

Gen-X nerds continue to ruin the internet for Gen-Z by implementing RSS feeds for TikTok 😁 I was really intrigued by the launch of GitHub OCTO Flat Data, having already been a longtime fan of Simon Willison’s work (all the way back to the early days of Django). There is something very powerful in there that is not obvious on first look. Connecting it to Low-Code platforms could unleash lots of crazy fabulous new ideas. »

My Huawei P30 Pro takes great panoramic photos but Instagram isn’t able to use them properly. The trick is to split them into multiple 1080x1080 photos (up to 10 of them) and include all of them in one post. People can then swipe right and left to get a pseudo-panoramic view. There are lots of ad-supported or pay-for apps to do this in the Google Play Store. But I figured it was hardly difficult to do. »

Many of us remember the cultural ignorance of Yahoo deleting GeoCities and Twitter deleting Posterous off the web. Those responsible are no better than library arsonists. Whether you think all of that published creativity was rubbish or amazing, there is something very wrong with it all just disappearing. The Internet Archive does an amazing job but it’s simply impossible for it to keep up. So I’ve taken it as a bit of a challenge to try and keep as much old content as possible online if I’ve been involved with it. »

I’ve been thinking about tools for non-developers for several years. It seems to me that all the big players are leaving behind this important group. They keep talking about citizen developers, low-code and no-code. But the focus is on “code”, so most of the world will self-select out of using any of those tools, including the no-code ones. Even the title of Satya Nadella’s article this week is “Want a More Equitable Future? »