You can watch all my Pebble videos here:
RunKeeper for Pebble
Pebble have slowly been making good on all that was promised when the watch was announced on Kickstarter. This week saw the launch of RunKeeper integration, as you can see from the image below.
It is incredibly easy to use mainly because there aren’t options whatsoever. When you start an activity the details (time, distance and pace) are all clearly displayed on the watch. The centre button allows you to pause and resume the recording, which is useful, but that’s the lot. It works well.
Since delivering the watches the team at Pebble have been steadily delivering on a number … Read the rest
Changing the Colour of your Pebble Watch
If, like me, you entered the vote to choose the colour Pebble option and they didn’t pick your colour and had to go with the black or maybe you are fed up of waiting for your colour Pebble to arrive and so have switched to black – good news! You don’t have to stick with it, slickwraps.com make a whole range of wraps just for the Pebble that can quickly change the look of your watch and are really easy to fit.
The video below shows you just how easy it is.
Also check out my video on adding a … Read the rest
Is Google Keep a Keeper?
So Google have released a new product roughly one week after axing a raft of others including Google Reader, much to the angst of the general tech public.
Google Keep is a note taking application allowing you to keep important information in your drive for searching and reviewing at a later date.
It is similar in thought to Evernote but without any of the usefulness of it. As it says in the image above Google Keep is just a bit too simplistic right now. All you can do is create a note with a title and some text content and … Read the rest
Twitter Patent = Death of App.Net?
So Twitter have finally been granted a patent for, well, Twitter. They applied for the patent in 2007 and it has only just been granted given that these things take a while to work their way through the system.
From what I understand the patent is pretty widely worded and could be interpreted as many things and cover all multitude of sins, however, if it covered things that look like Twitter then APP.NET should be worried.
APP.NETÂ looks and feels like Twitter and the only major difference is that it is a paid service with a limited free account also … Read the rest
What we did Before Google
I was away over the weekend and spotted this on my in-laws book shelf – The Internet Atlas by Richard Dinnick. A guide to the “best 1,000 sites on the web”.
Even though the book is only a few years old, it was published in 2000, it is a fascinating snapshot on what the web was like only thirteen years ago.
It includes sections on the browsers available which besides Internet Explorer 5 and Netscape also includes the first alpha version of Mozilla.
There is also a section on search engines which includes Altavista and Ask Jeves along with … Read the rest
Documenting MySQL Tables in MediaWiki
The last few companies that I have worked for we have setup an internal wiki that everyone uses to hold information about all aspects of the business including, of course, the technical team. We use MediaWiki for this mainly because it is easy to setup and is also familiar to users through Wikipedia.
One area that we try and document is the database structure. Having this on hand and searchable in the wiki allows new employees to quickly get to grips with it and makes us all more productive.
The issue is that creating the MediaWiki tables by hand is … Read the rest
Keep Your Cables Together and Tidy
Having multiple devices that need regularly charging and no universal agreement on a standard connector for doing so creates a problem of having to keep track of numerous differing cable types.
Now I know that there is a European agreement to have the micro-USB as the de facto charge cable standard but none of the three items I have to regularly charge conform to this: my iPhone, iPad and Pebble watch.
I’m not going to get into the debate of whether manufacturers should be compelled to meet the standard rather than charging an eye watering £15 for an adaptor that … Read the rest
My First Two Weeks with the Pebble Watch
I decided to wait a couple of weeks before writing a review of my Pebble watch and passing any sort of judgement as I felt that would allow the dust to settle a bit. So now those weeks are up here are my thoughts.
The Pebble, for those that have missed it, is a “smart watch” that is connected to your phone. iPhone in my case but it is also compatible with Android. Pebble was a project on the crowd-funding site Kickstarter where it set out to raise $10,000 to fund its project and ended up raising $10,000,000. This … Read the rest
Recognising the Opportunity: I Could Have Written WordPress
Over the last few weeks I have been moving the content from one of my other sites, The Williams Database, to WordPress. This means that all my sites are now running on what I consider to be the premier content management system but if I had acted differently a few years ago that might have not been the case.
In 1996 I launched a fan site to the Williams formula one team. In those days there wasn’t much of an internet to speak of, connection speeds were slow and access was costly but it was new and great fun. … Read the rest