Bringing Handwriting to the 21st Century

April 12, 2016 | Comment

Over the years I have had all manner of tablets and writing devices but I have never come across one that did the trick for me. Most styluses either have a big fat end which is fine for replicating your finger but no good for emulating handwriting. Or there are the more “active” styluses that only work with certain apps, or have calibration issues, or have terrible palm rejection. In most cases they suffered from all three issues.

And then along came the Apple Pencil…

I have to admit that I was pretty skeptical about how accurate the Pencil … Read the rest

Adding MicroSD Storage to a Laptop

March 15, 2016 | Comment

I have, amongst other things, an Acer Chromebook which I really love but it is a bit tight on storage at 16GB. I know that Google wants me to store everything in the cloud but that just isn’t possible when you are disconnected and want to watch a movie.

My requirement was to have something with a reasonable amount of storage but didn’t stick out too far from the machine so I could leave it connected all the time. I somehow stumbled upon this
Micro SD USB Card Reader adaptor which pretty much does what it says on the tin.… Read the rest

Pebble Health Review

March 1, 2016 | Comment

As I have said a couple of times before I use a Fitbit to record my steps and have toyed with Misfit on my Pebble when that became available. My issue was that the gap in number of steps recorded was too great. So when Pebble Health was released I was keen to see whether this might finally be a replacement for my faithful Fitbit.

Pebble Health is a native watch app that does all the same step and sleep tracking as other fitness trackers such as Fitbit and the on-Pebble Misfit. Difference being that as this is developed by … Read the rest

Raspberry Pi GPS tracker – Connecting Without a Network

February 24, 2016 | Comment

All articles to date have been about getting the GPS working with the Raspberry Pi and converting the original Python code to PHP. All of this works well (for me) but what if you want to make changes to the settings or download the log file while you are out and about and away from your home network?

Normally what happens is that you configure your device to connect to a known network but as you are going to be using the GPS/Pi combination away from known networks you need a way to access anywhere without having to connect a … Read the rest

Raspberry Pi GPS tracker – Converting Code to PHP – Part 2

February 16, 2016 | Comment

In the last post I looked at converting the original Python code to PHP. This all ran without issue but I quickly found that because the Pi wasn’t connected to the internet the date and time of the device never got updated. This meant that the log files always had the wrong timestamp when they were created making it difficult to find the one I needed.

Turns out that there is a simple answer to this problem. As the GPS satellites include the current date and time as part of the detail that is sent along with the location we … Read the rest

Raspberry Pi GPS tracker – Converting Code to PHP – Part 1

February 9, 2016 | Comment

Last week I looked at getting the hardware up and running for a Raspberry Pi GPS tracker. However, as I said I was using some Python code and I don’t speak Python so I wanted to convert it to PHP. So this week I am going to look at what I did.

Before I could even begin to look at the converting the code I had to see if it was even possible for PHP to access the serial port. Turns out this is exactly what Direct IO (dio) is for but it isn’t included as standard so you … Read the rest

Raspberry Pi GPS tracker – Getting it Together

February 2, 2016 | 8 comments

Having secured a Pi Zero from the cover of a the magazine MagPi I thought I would start out simple by trying one of the projects shown there. The one that caught my eye and required no soldering was to build a GPS tracker.

Getting hold of a cheap USB unit was pretty easy but make sure it is Linux compatible. I bought this one from eBay.

The first thing I did when I got the unit was to try it out on the Pi and while it was working I could see that it had got a satellite … Read the rest

Microsoft Universal Folding Keyboard

January 16, 2016 | Comment

Now that screens are getting bigger on mobiles it is becoming increasingly more practical to do work on them, especially now that Microsoft Office is available on most mobile devices.

The biggest issue I have though is typing on the screen. While it is fine for short emails and text messages it isn’t really practical for longer pieces such as this blog post. One issue is that the on-screen keyboard covers too much of the screen real estate. To overcome this I’ve had portable keyboards before but they have either been clumsy or heavy to carry.

Now enter Microsoft to … Read the rest

Pebble Time Long Term Review

November 26, 2015 | Comment

So I have had my Pebble Time Steel a few months now so I thought that it would be good to revisit it and put down my thoughts having had it a while. The first thing is that I have now received my steel band and the watch looks so much better for it than the “leather” strap it was originally sent with. I’m really pleased with the look and it is a step up from the original plastic version (original Pebble) I had.

The Good and the not so Good

The watch interface has had an overhaul and there … Read the rest

Halo Back: Good idea, but does it work?

Halo Back: Good idea, but does it work?

October 21, 2015 | 1 comment

A while back, although in terms of Kickstarter dates it was positively recent, a project was posted that caught my eye called Halo Back. This was a glass screen protector with a difference – the bottom left area was “mapped” to the top left making it easier to click the back link on apps. That’s poorly explained but this cheesy video from the project does a better job:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/haloband/halo-back-make-your-iphone-perfect

Last week the Halo Back arrived and so I stuck it on. Unlike other screen protectors the positioning is quite important and so the makers have included a frame that fits … Read the rest