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.
The littleBits bitLab that is. I’d always wondered how sustainable it would be, but apparently there’s already an answer to that question. So it’s a shame. I think that there were some very nice projects in there but obviously not enough money to make it work.
It’s a shame. It was a great idea.
For a long time I’ve been thinking about the idea of being able to create a synth in hardware which reacted to the virtual world, more specifically, to being tweeted at. To that that end I got myself a littleBits CloudBit, which works quite well, albeit it isn’t able to provide as much data as I’d like it to. However, that’s something that I need to overcome with a little bit of ingenuity rather than just complain about it.
So I’m starting to build the synth and get it to respond to external stimulus. The goal being to create a little system that reacts to a twitter message, creates a sequence based on that message, and somehow records that and uploads it somewhere. We’ll see. That’s the plan. Who knows how it’ll work out.
I’m always after useful sites for iOS apps and automation, so it was good to find this site called ‘the sweet setup‘ which has some good recommendations for apps, many of which I found I was already using. It’s always nice to have your suspicions confirmed.
Anyway, I’d certainly recommend this site. Go check out ‘the sweet setup‘.
I was a massive fan of NinerPaint for Palm OS and now it’s coming to iOS soon, which I think will be brilliant.
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’m a big fan of Workflow. It’s an amazing app for automating pretty much anything in iOS. I’ve been using it since it first launched and it’s got better and better with every release.
Now Apple has bought it. In some ways I think that might be good. It might mean that automation and even scripting becomes a part of iOS at its core. On the other hand it could be a bad thing. I’d hate to see something as innovative as Workflow get dumbed down by Apple. That would be terrible.
Only time will tell what happens next but my hope is that Apple really build on the foundations that Workflow have laid down and add more to it.
Today I got an email from IFTTT with news about their service. This is quite normal. They add to their service on a very regular basis. However, I wasn’t expecting the new addition to be a city. Louisville to be precise.
Whilst this was a bit of a shock, and also somewhat confusing as well initially it now makes perfect sense. IFTTT started off by connecting web apps and social services. Now it’s so much more. It moved on to hardware, IoT and more. Now it’s connecting physical locations and it makes perfect sense.
I hope that this continues. I’d like to see more and more connected cities hooked up to IFTTT, especially London. Well done IFTTT.
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.
I am Ashley Elsdon 