Category: Tech

At times wonderful, and at times totally frustrating too. That’s technology, my experience of it anyway. I do a lot of stuff with technology and I suspect I will continue to do that.

The PowerUp 3.0 is pretty awesome

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I only got to try this out for the first time the other day but it is pretty amazing. Not easy to fly though. Not easy at all, but fun. I really underestimated just how much space is needed to fly this thing. You need a fairly large flat park and you need a very windless day to do it too. Even the slightest gust of wind can take the thing as it’s so light.

The app is amazing though. You get real control with it. The only thing I’d have liked is a front facing camera on the airplane which sends real time footage back to the app. That would have been so cool. Even so it’s loads of fun to play around with, and when the wind dies down a bit I’ll get another chance to mess around with it.

I had one, and yet, I still want one

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But I have to ask why? It isn’t like there’s anything you can do with a ZX81 that I can’t do elsewhere, and so I constantly battle with myself, sometimes wanting to get one, and other times deciding that it really is a bad idea and I just wouldn’t use it, and that is really a lot closer to the truth as that happens with stuff I buy, I’m sorry to say.

I also sometimes think about some of the things I could do with one, and then try and use an emulator, and don’t really get into that and that also tells me that getting an actual ZX81 would be a bad idea. Even though I think they’re awesome.

Investing in Chirp.io

Posted by on in Tech, The Internet of ThingsLeave a comment

I remember seeing Chirp.io back at a Music Tech Fest when it was at Ravensbourne college. It was an interesting idea and I was quite curious about it, but I wasn’t sure how I would use it and how it could be useful. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing of course. Sometimes it takes a while for things to find a place in my world and I like stuff to be actually useful to me.

So when I found that Chirp.io was equity funding on Crowdcube I thought I’d take a look. At the same time they’re expanding chirp into the IoT world with an SDK and Arduino code. It’s getting interesting now. Also, they’ve just announced a Chrome extension, which could be fun.

I wonder where they’ll go next.

Finally starting to do something with my TouchBoard

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TouchBoard up and running
TouchBoard battery
Back of the TouchBoard
TouchBoard in packaging

I backed the TouchBoard on kickstarter, but ever since I got it I haven’t either had the time to do anything proper with it, and haven’t had any ideas of projects to start with it either. But the other day I started having a few ideas of things I wanted to try out. So I got the box out and started to investigate what was in there as I hadn’t looked in ages.

It’s a nice kit, and everything works or at least seems to work just fine even though I haven’t touched it in ages. I’ll hopefully get to use it for a couple of projects soon enough.

So I saw an Apple Watch …

Posted by on in Tech, Wearable ComputingLeave a comment

And after all that it just wasn’t as amazing as I thought it would be. It was also thicker than I thought it might be. I’m just not sure that it is for me right now. I also think that the price for a reasonable model is too high right now. It might come down, it might not, and I’m not sure that Apple will want to replicate the same update cycle as their other hardware. People just don’t replace and update their watches with the same frequency. Or maybe Apple wants to change that too.

Anyway, for now I’m going to see how things pan out with my Pebble Time.