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.

Goodbye Pebble, I think

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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.

AsteroidOS:

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.

Cronologics:

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.

  1. I’d started looking into building my own Pebble app as I couldn’t find any that really did what I wanted.
  2. I’ve got a Pebble re-phone kit that I literally got out the day before Pebble got bought.
  3. I’m still waiting for a Deus Ex Aria smart strap from kickstarter

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.

Apple opens up iMessage to developers, maybe in response to FB Messenger bots?

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This is what they announced yesterday at the WWDC keynote. It was an interesting but not entirely unexpected development. Apple probably want to compete against the FB developers deploying bots into messenger. So they’ve responded with developer access to iMessage. I wonder how that will work out?

Then I found my old VL-1 MIDIfier kit!

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VL1 MIDIfier kit
VL1 MIDIfier kit

I was looking for something else when I found this! I knew, or at least I seemed to remember that I’d bought one of these ages ago. Well I’ve found it and I’m planning to get it going soon(-ish). Ideally I’d like to get it running so that I can get it to work with my VL1 bot. We’ll see about that.

And then I got this (Timex 1000)

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Timex 1000
Timex 1000

The Timex 1000 is the US equivalent to the ZX81. I was given it when in Canada last week and it looks like it’s in pretty good shape actually. I’m going to be very careful about firing it up though as I don’t want to get the power supply wrong in any way. When it’s all up and running I’ll post some stuff about what I’m doing with it.

Still waiting for the KDJ-One

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So it feels like this has been ‘on the way’ for a very long time. There’s still no news in terms of a specific delivery timeline and it is a year overdue already. I’m still just hoping that it will eventually turn up. I guess I should be pleased that at least they’re staying in touch. When projects go silent it’s usually then that you know your money has gone down the toilet.

I’d like to think that I’m going to get my KDJ-One this year. Maybe.

Messing around with chat bots

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So I’ve been experimenting with the whole chat bot thing. Messenger chat bots to be precise. It’s a very interesting area actually. Creating a bot that can respond in a rudimentary way to what people are saying to it is quite a fun thing to experiment with. The main idea so far is to make a bot that can respond to questions for PalmSounds. My first attempts are up and running and working though. I’m quite pleased so far, but it needs more work before it’s ready for prime time.

Arduboy (and a little retro comparison)

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I got this last week, which was much sooner than I’d expected to see it. It is tiny. About the size of maybe 3 or 4 credit cards stacked on top of each other. That’s why I thought it would be interesting to see it with a Rex 6000. Of course the Rex has a lot more memory than an Arduino and is of course designed to be a PDA where the Arduino nor the Arduboy is. Even so, it’s an interesting comparison.

When I get some time I’m going to try and see what I can make with the Arduboy as you can code to it via Codebender. So that’s really the next step.