Selfie sticks - like most modern inventions - are utter tosh. But they've rapidly brought down the price of Bluetooth buttons. So who am I to complain? Let's take the venerable AB Shutter 3 - You can find it on Amazon for around £2 including postage - or around $2 on AliExpress. Frankly, that's stupidly cheap. OK, let's put this to work as something other than a vanity clicker! There are no instructions which come with this, it's delivered in a little plastic bag and that's it. Time to …
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Last week I was invited to attend a product launch by BQ. They're a small company based out of Spain who create some curiously innovative products - including smartphones which natively run Cyanogen. I'm particularly looking forward to reviewing their Ubuntu Tablet later in the year. The thing which really caught my eye was Zowi (pronounced Zoë). It looks like this: And it dances like this: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/zowi.mp4 Ok, but what is it? Here's what you …
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I'm really enjoying driving the BMW i3. I'd love to have it tweet its driving efficiency, or upload its location to my server, or let me turn on its air-conditioning when the temperature gets too warm - there are a hundred interesting things to do with the car's data. The official app has some of these features - but is slow, ugly, and a pain to use. BMW used to have an API available for hackathons, but they shut it down. Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentReplying to @BMW@BMW I've just got…
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I've been busy writing the definitive Sercomm Camera API documentation. (No, you need a hobby!) While doing so, I noticed that I couldn't get my Pan/Tilt/Zoom camera to... well... pan! No lateral movement whatsoever. It'd move up and down - but its left and right movement was non-existant. I could hear the stepper motor whirring, but it wasn't producing any movement. Weird... TO THE SCREWDRIVERS, ROBIN! The Sercomm RC8230 is remarkably easy to open. Behind 4 rubber stopper are regular…
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In the glorious past, Amazon had an API for interacting with its "Wishlist" service. Not any more though. So, here's the inspiring story of how a rag-tag band of adventurers brought it back from the dead! Several years ago, Justin Scarpetti created a tool to extract data from an Amazon wishlist - the imaginatively named Amazon Wish Lister. It used that most vulgar of programming practices - Screen Scraping! Yup, gobble up the HTML and attempt to parse it. Needs must in a dire situation. …
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I had dinner with the outgoing editor of The Guardian the other night. Clever chap, sure he'll go far in life. The Guardian is very hot on security. Many of their writers have PGP keys which they publicly advertise. In theory, that's great (complaints about PGP notwithstanding) - but the reality shows just how tricky it is to act in a security conscious manner. Have a look at Alan's Twitter profile. In the bio, we see a link - http://bit.ly/1g4S9WR which points to…
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There are two very clear signs that I'm getting old. The first is that I bought a domestic robot to help me with the chores. The second is that, rather than spending my evenings and weekends reading decades old forum postings, reverse engineering serial interfaces, and soldering components together - I plunked €99 on a bit of kit which "just works". Enter the Thinking Cleaner - it's a replacement faceplate for Roombas which adds WiFi and a sweet hackable API. This post looks at how the unit …
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I don't usually get involved in legal blogging. I am not a lawyer, and I find the finicky details somewhat hard to follow. That said, I do appreciate how (most) judges in the UK write their judgements in a relatively clear and unambiguous manner. Jack of Kent today pointed out the recent judgement on Operation Weeting - which is looking into the alleged illegal interception of voicemail messages. The full text of the judgement is fairly simple to understand - although one curious part…
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The leaders of several huge corporations have issued statements saying that their companies do not allow the US Government to illegally spy on their users. I'm sure they believe that. I'd even go so far as to say that I'm sure the entire board and top management genuinely have no knowledge of any malfeasance. Why would they? We're talking about spies - experts in the art of subterfuge and espionage. Why would a spy agency do anything as crude as ask permission? Consider the Greek…
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I was inspired by Matthew Petroff's Kindle Weather Display to do something similar with my old Nook Simple Touch Reader. I had planned to use a salvaged eInk screen - but the Nook STR (or NSTR from now on) is only £29 due to a massive price drop. The Glow version is a mere £69 - so I bought that and have set my old NSTR to work as a "Family Display Screen". The idea is that this will stay by the front door, show today's weather, mine and my wife's calendar, as well as other useful bits of i…
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I recently picked up a new Nook. Their manufacturer is dumping stock and the prices are ridiculously cheap for an eInk touchscreen running Android. One thing that annoys me about the Nook is the fact that you have to register for a Barnes & Nobel account before you can use it. I dislike their geo-restrictive terms and conditions, and the fact that they place advertising on my home screen. I also don't particularly want my reading habits fed back to anyone. No one needs to know that I like…
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Like many people, I've collected a fair number of CDs over the years. As hard-drives and MicroSD cards have got larger and cheaper, I've gradually been ripping them to FLAC. Most CD rippers automatically tag the music files with the correct metadata and, nowadays, they will also download and embed album artwork as well. (As an aside, it always boggled my mind that CDs don't come with metadata burned onto the disc. Even a single spare megabyte would be enough to hold detailed track listing,…
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