This is where I was on the last Saturday of this show at the Science Museum. It was good. Smaller than I expected, but a reasonable amount of stuff to see. Of course there were the usual things like 3D printing and that, but good to see some soft circuit stuff, and more experimental things too. I like that the science museum try this stuff out.
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.
And then I got my littleBits Arduino Module
Getting Patchblocks
I’d almost forgotten that I’d funded these on kickstarter, so when they arrived it was a lovely surprise! I’ve barely had a chance to get to grips with these as yet, but having opened up the software and loaded a sample patch they look like great fun.
Numerous, the dashboard I don’t know what to do with
When I saw that IFTTT had integrated the Numerous app into their ecosystem I was intrigued. I hadn’t heard of the app before, but when I read about it I knew it was something that I’d want to play with. And it was. However, what I hadn’t bargained for was the that I’d very quickly realise that whilst it’s interesting to be able to collate all these numbers into a dashboard, I wasn’t really sure of what numbers I wanted to track. It was in effect a dashboard with no need for any information. Which is a little bit defeating.
So I’m still wondering what to use this for. What I can usefully measure or track that won’t be obvious or boring or pointless. I do hope that something comes to mind in the not too distant future as I think that Numerous and IFTTT are a great combination.
IFTTT comes to Android, and what I’d like to see next
Well it had to happen sooner or later. They’d done the iOS app, the iPad version, Android is the obvious next stop on the route. But I think they did it right. Adding a whole bunch of Android only functionality into the delivery. I thought that was a really nice touch.
Of course, on the day they launched their app didn’t support the 7″ tablet, so it wouldn’t install on my nexus, but it didn’t take long to fix at all which was impressive. I haven’t really had a chance to test out the Android only channels and functionality. Hopefully late this week or early next I might be able to do that, but what I’ve seen so far looks pretty impressive and should allow some interesting cross platform working to occur.
IFTTT have made themselves completely indispensable when it comes to web automation, I do wonder where they’ll go next though. They’ve added so many apps that their service is really comprehensive now, but what I’d really like to see is some improvement in some of the core services, like the simple ability to add multiple accounts for a service under a single IFTTT account.
All I’d like to be able to do is to add more than one twitter account in IFTTT. That would make it so much more useful. I expect that they will do this at some point, perhaps with some kind of ‘pro’ account feature.
I’d pay for that.
IFTTT comes to Android, but not your Android (well not mine really)
I got really excited today when I heard that IFTTT was finally coming to Android. It was always something I knew that they’d do, just a question of when, and the when was now. So when I opened up my Nexus 7 to find the IFTTT app on google play, and it wasn’t there I was a little disappointed. Of course, it was there, but just not for me, or rather, not for the Nexus 7.
I suppose it will come to Android tablets eventually, but it’ll take a little while I guess, which is a shame as the Nexus 7 was Google’s flagship 7″ tablet. I suppose I just don’t get why apps like this can’t come to the OS fully universal from day one? It doesn’t make sense to me.
So I’m back to waiting again for this, and what’s worse, I know about the Android specific channels that IFTTT have built into their Android app. So I really do know what I’m missing!
littleBits announce an Arduino module
littleBits going to the cloud
Modular stuff at Musikmesse
It was pretty amazing to be at Musikmesse this year. There was just so much to see, and there’s so many pictures to share too. This is just a little start really.
iPhone 5 external battery experiment: Day 4
Day 4 followed the same pattern. I let the iPhone drain down to 30% charge and then charged it with the external battery. Once again the battery did very well, but after getting my phone back up to 100% charge it gave up itself. So, 4 days and 4 charges. Not bad going I’d say. The battery was certainly worth the money.
However, the power loss on my iPhone is terrible now, so it’ll probably need replacing anyway. Even so I think that the battery will come in handy in the future.
So, experiment over for now.



