I am Ashley Elsdon

someone who's doing some things

Month: January 2012

Tasker makes Android completely awesome

Posted by on in Tech

I’ve been messing around with Tasker for a few days now, and I have to say that it is one very good reason to move completely to Android. Tasker is so flexible and modular that it can do pretty much anything in terms of automating an Android device.

If there was a Tasker like app for iOS it would be a massive seller, but of course it doesn’t fit with the whole sandbox approach from Apple. Big big shame.

I found myself seriously considering a move to Android away from the iPhone on my next contract renewal, and if Apple don’t pull something stupendous out of the bag with the iPhone 5 I might just do it.

I’ll post some of my Tasker automations soon too, then you’ll see what I mean.

Remembering Mick

Posted by on in People

One year ago today the world lost an amazing musician. Mick Karn. He was too young, much too young.

Mick’s music was an inspiration to so many, me included. His music lives on and I’ll be listening to a few of his albums later this week and posting some thoughts on them. If you don’t know Mick Karn’s music then stay tuned as you’re going to find some amazing music to listen to soon.

I can’t believe it was a year ago he passed away.

Einstein on Android

Posted by on in Tech

I only discovered today that there’s a relatively stable port of Einstein the Newton emulator, available for Android 2.2, so I’m going to try and get it running on my newly rooted San Francisco which could be very cool indeed!

RJC1000 doesn’t work on Lion

Posted by on in Creative Process, Tech

That’s pretty much all I can say about that really. I was thinking about making my own scenes and remembered RJDJ’s RJC1000 application for the mac. I’d tinkered around with it before but not to any serious degree, so I thought I’d give it a try again, but it won’t load properly in Lion, so I may have to try running it on Leopard on my old mac mini.

Not ideal, but I can’t see RJDJ updating it any time soon as they’re too busy with loads of other stuff. Not that I’m complaining you understand.

New RJDJ scenes

Posted by on in Listening, Tech

I tried out a couple of new RJDJ scenes today. I hadn’t noticed them before. They are:

  • I site & hide
  • Norra Vinter

The first one I wasn’t too impressed with as it was more of a thing to promote the artist, which is fine, but not for me really. The other one is a bit more interesting, but I haven’t had enough time to get into it properly as yet. Once I’ve spent a little more time with it I’ll write a bit more about  it. Even so, it’s nice to find some more scenes to play with.

I should really get on with writing one of my own shouldn’t I.

WW2 Daleks

Posted by on in Exhibitions

Another shot from the Doctor Who Experience. I thought that the WW2 daleks were such a great idea, and so I was really pleased to see them at the exhibition.

Android success and failure

Posted by on in Tech

I’ve spent some time today trying to get this Android device rooted and then updated to 2.2 so it can be a bit more useful. I was about to post that everything had gone really well when it started playing up so I rebooted it. It then got stuck in what seems like a loop where it just displays the Android logo then displays it again, and never gets any further.

So I completely reinstalled the ROM for 2.2 and it seems to be working ok now. I’ll be checking it again regularly tomorrow to see how it gets on, but hopefully it’ll hold up and prove to be a useful device.

Android progress

Posted by on in Tech

Well, having lost the use of my iPad for now I thought I’d try and get my 1 year old Android device running again. A couple of days ago it looked like this device had failed completely, but this morning it seemed like it was working ok, at least for now anyway. It installed loads of updates, and I seem to have access to get to the apps on it now too, which is great for testing on the 3G with Android 2.3 installed.

Getting into ‘if this then that’

Posted by on in Stuff, Tech

If you don’t know ‘if this then that’ then you should. It’s an amazing way to automate services on the internet.  For example, you might want certain items matching a specific search criteria from an RSS feed to always end up in your ReadItLater items. No problem. You can automate that using ITTT (if this then that) and it will check the feed every 15 minutes and drop items straight into RIL for you.

ITTT can connect to a whole host of services that are brilliant when put together. I’m only just starting to get into it at the moment, but I can see it being really useful. You can try it out here.