After 7 long years, Twitter finally added people muting recently. Meanwhile those of us who never use the official apps and use Janetter etc instead have had powerful keyword filtering for years. I see Twitter has some silly “which team do you support in the World Cup” nonsense now. But they really aren’t thinking this through. There are many many many many people on Twitter who would happily never see a World Cup tweet. »
One thing I’ve run into many times is the lack of internet bandwidth at events. It doesn’t seem to matter whether it is a big pay-for thing or a BarCamp - once everyone was online, things slowed to a crawl. This was a really big problem at Dojo Camp last year where we had to get a ton of kids setup with the Arduino IDE and other tools. In the end it was faster to pass around a USB key but we lost a lot of valuable time doing this. »
This Post is no longer relevant. Please do not follow the instructions here. Our 8yo wanted a local server on his laptop today so I grabbed the latest 1.7.9 server exe from the Minecraft site and ran it in its own directory. It created the usual files and gave a GUI-style interface with no obvious console like the raw Java version. Fionn then asked me to make him an Op so he could change things. »
I’ve been meaning to go to 3D Camp since it first started. It has been about a lot more than 3D for many years. I finally did it on Saturday and had an absolute blast. I met people I’ve been tweeting at since 2007 and really got the full BarCamp mojo whilst I was there. James Corbett, the organiser, was kind enough to mention that I helped to organise the first BarCamp in Ireland with Walter and Damien way back in 2006. »
Messing with hardware and software can be both a joy and incredibly infuriating. Yesterday I spent a few intermittent hours trying to get Arduino and Espruino communicating reliably over NRF24L01+ wireless transceivers. I only half succeeded. I followed this with some reading up on both CloudPebble and Simply.js. Literally 5 minutes later I had my first Pebble App installed on my watch and was remotely controlling the electric blanket in our bed. »
Now that I can talk to the Efergy remote control switches using Arduino and DigiX, it’s time to do the same thing with Raspberry Pi and Node.js. But first, check out this gorgeous Pimoroni Pibow Timber case that the RPi now lives in. Makes me smile every time I look at it. Start by plugging in one of the Efergy switches and using its remote control to set its code. Use the sniffer program from the last post to find out what that code is. »
A major ongoing struggle in our household is convincing one of our many children to go upstairs and put on the electric blanket for us. I honestly don’t know how we get through the winter. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if we could use technology instead of children to do this? Last Thursday I came home from work to discover that Electric Ireland had sent us three Efergy remote control power sockets and a plugin energy monitor. »
As I said in the previous posts, the move from WP to HarpJS was not exactly smooth. But I’m glad I’ve done it as I finally learned how to use a lot of things like Jade that I’ve long-fingered for years. The first step was to get the original content out of WordPress. This had the added twist that the conoroneill.net blog actually started out as a Posterous blog which I imported into WordPress when I realised that Posterous was a dead-end. »
My blogging history goes back to 2001 when I setup a Blogger/Blogspot blog in the hope that I would update things more quickly than with Geocities or my Frontpage98 home page. 4 months later I wrote my second post :-) For a long time it involved writing the posts on Blogger and then publishing them via FTP to my own domain. It was fiddly but it worked ok. Then around 2005 I discovered WordPress and realised blogging could be much much much easier. »
I’ll shortly be moving this entire blog from WordPress to HarpJS generated static pages over on GitHub. It hasn’t been as smooth a process as I’d hoped but I’ve learned lots. We’re also using HarpJS in a work context and it works great there running under Node. I’ll write it all up either this weekend or next. Then this evening I asked myself the silly question “I wonder can I run Node. »