I am Ashley Elsdon

someone who's doing some things

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.

Numerous, the dashboard I don’t know what to do with

Posted by on in Tech, The Internet of Things

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

Posted by on in Tech

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)

Posted by on in Mobile Applications, Tech

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

Posted by on in Tech

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Added to the fact that they also announced this not so long ago, and this littleBits thing is going to start to get expensive soon. Although, probably, that ship has sailed already.

 

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littleBits going to the cloud

Posted by on in Tech

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This is a really exciting development in the littleBits world and will hopefully open up loads of possibilities. It’s just a shame that it won’t be available until Q3 this year. I just hope it lives up to my expectations.

Modular stuff at Musikmesse

Posted by on in Events, Music, Tech
Doepfer A-100 at the ALEX4 booth in Musikmesse 2014
More modular goodness at the ALEX4 book at Musikmesse.
I couldn’t get enough of ALEX4 booth

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

Posted by on in Tech

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.

iPhone 5 external battery experiment: Day 3

Posted by on in Tech

So, day three and the external battery is still going strong. It did flicker around between three and four bars or circles on its display, and after a little while it went back up to 4 bars. I guess this sort of thing isn’t too precise. Anyway, it charged the iPhone 5 again. I let the iPhone get down to 30% again and charged it back up to 100%.

So let’s see what day 4 brings.

iPhone 5 external battery experiment: Day 2

Posted by on in Tech

So, day two of my experiment to see how I can get more life out of my iPhone 5. Today I let the iPhone run down to 30% before I plugged in the battery. Once again the battery charged it up with no problems at all. Neither device got hot or anything like that. It got the device back up to 100% and stayed at 4 bars, or circles to be precise.

So far so good. Let’s see how it works out tomorrow.

iPhone 5 external battery experiment: Day 1

Posted by on in Tech

So, I got my external battery and decided that I would try it out each day by only using the external battery to recharge my iPhone 5 whilst out and about rather than using a mains power source or a PC or something similar.

I started the day fine. My battery was at 100% at 7am and I used the device normally. About 2:30 or 3pm it had dropped to 20% so I connected the external battery. I switched it on and all was good. I kept a close eye on both the iPhone and the battery as I’d heard about issues with overheating, but I had no such problems at all. In fact, the entire process was completely smooth and incident free.

Once the time the iPhone 5 had gone back up to 100% I disconnected the battery, which was still showing 4 bars (actually circles, but it means the same thing).

We’ll see how the process develops tomorrow.