someone who's doing some things
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.
Currently I don’t even have a ZX Spectrum, but I did, a long while ago, and one day I’ll have one again. When I do I’ll be running this among a number of music programs that I used to use a long time ago. That’ll be fun.
Ever since the last Apple event I’ve been thinking more and more about going to Android. I’m not thinking that I’d replace my iPad, more just the more non-musical apps on my phone. But for the life of me I can’t work out what device I need or what would be useful.
To be fair I’ve got a reasonable amount of time before I need to make a decision about this, so it isn’t a big problem, but I don’t really know where to start in order to work out what would be a good device.
I love how Apple always tells you how much all their products and services make life easier. Well not always! Over the last couple of weeks I’ve had terrible trouble with iCloud. To the extent that it’s deleted all of my calendars, forced me to change passwords all over the place too.
Not much fun at all. Not in any way. Thanks so much Apple.
Which is positive as there’s no real future for Pebble watches with Pebble or FitBit, Rebble could be a possibility. It seems that they’re making progress albeit slow progress. The latest update is the 23rd of April. I’m hopeful that this will bring the Pebble back to life, but it is early days.
It’s been an age since I used my molecule synth, and I was surprised to find that it actually still powered up too. It powered by batteries, 9 volt PP3 batteries, and they all still work. That’s quite impressive.
Anyway, it’s good to get back to it and experiment with it a bit again. It feels like there’s a lot more to experiment with too. So expect some more on this soon.
I backed this app on Kickstarter and had a lot of trouble with the beta, but the latest version seems good and the display on the Pebble is pretty good. Now all I need to get it to do is work with Spotify. I haven’t really tried as yet, and I’m hoping it won’t be too difficult.
Pebble’s latest iOS app (and I guess Android as well), removes the Pebble watch reliance on Pebble’s servers and means that the device can last a lot longer than the end of 2017, or at least that’s how it seems.
I’m still hopeful that someone else will bring out a real alternative firmware for Pebble soon. I’m hoping that Rebble will do something, but there’s been no update on their site since the end of January. There will certainly be enough Pebble users to make it worth their while, or at least I would imagine so. I’d happily pay for something new from them.
I’ve been a fan of all things ZX, especially the 81 since they first came out and I’ve always been drawn to them ever since. I realise that as a computing platform they are really ancient, retro, vintage even. But even so I think that these are somewhat lovely old computers. So when I saw this today I thought that it was something I’d love.
My ideal would be a ZX device that was portable. A bit like the retro gaming devices made with raspberry Pi, but I haven’t heard of anything like that. So the Minstrel ZX80 Clone is currently the nearest thing, and looks pretty spectacular too.
There is a ZX81 emulator on iOS, but that’s not the same at all. It’s good, don’t get me wrong, but it isn’t the same as having some hardware to play with. I’ll be keeping an eye on the ZX80 clone.
For ages I’ve been trying to find better ways to make use of my Pebble Time. I’ve tried music related apps. There weren’t many. You can see above the ‘chordinator’, but there was also a metronome, and even a synth controller that I could never make work sadly.
I did stumble over some other briefly useful apps, like a headline app for BBC news, and a public transport app that was brilliant, although it seems to have given up now. They were good, but never amazing.
So now it seems that at some point in the not too distant future the Pebble will stop working completely. Which is really disappointing. Apparently Fitbit intend to keep things going for a year. That’s nice, but what’s going to be more interesting is what alternatives might spring up for Pebble users. Things like alternative operating systems. I’ve been doing some research on this. There were a couple that looked interesting.
This is quite an interesting OS but doesn’t support Pebble, at least not at the moment anyway. It looks good, but as Pebble isn’t even listed I’m not too hopeful.
This was another possible, but has now been bought up by Google so it looks like it’ll become a part of Android Wear. So it’s a dead end.
Pebble-Bits:
This is actually an iOS app that lets you create and install custom firmware. Which might be useful in time.
Aside from that it doesn’t look particularly good. I’m hoping that users will develop a community based solution to this. That’s the best outcome. The worst outcome is that Pebbles will be bricked and become obsolete. I really hope that doesn’t happen. I’d like to think that my Pebble has some life left in it. This is especially important for two or three reasons.
So it would be nice if the Pebble itself lasted a bit longer.
Time will tell what happens next. As for my own next steps, I still plan to tinker around with this stuff, and as I do I’ll post any results worth sharing.
I’m really loving experimenting with the Fossil. It’s a great old smartwatch from before we called things smartwatches and before we knew what a wearable was. Hopefully in the not too distant future I’ll have some apps for it too.
I am Ashley Elsdon 