Tony is a Geek

As you do on a Saturday, I found an old Maplin (who remembers them, before they stopped trading!?) robot arm with a USB connector. I was looking around online to purchase a new one and of course I got carried away and moved from £50, to £250 to £400 devices - I even got carried away and looked at the £7000 versions, but alas - I am being money conscious nowadays and thought, well, if I have this old one, SURELY I can make it work. I had a quick google and indeed the robot arm was from Maplin.  I unscrewed the casing and found the 4 x D batteries inside that had an "expiry date of Mar 2019".  That tells you more than enough.  This unit had gotten quite dusty knocking around in the garage.  I "probably" did something with it back in 2016-2018 ish timeframe, I cannot recall. As I've mentioned, I kind of got distracted by the Corporate world around then and lost my focus - fret not, it is returning! I noticed that it has the USB connected and adapter on the back - ...

These people are looking into doing some smart stuff with robotics brains: https://www.pi.website/ Watch this video for a bit of an insight: Yep, it's been a few years since robotics was going to be the "next big thing", I believe that this year will be the year it starts to make real progress. Do I want to do what these people are doing? NOPE?! But, I would like to use what they are building and apply it in different and novel ways. That is the bit that interests me.  Watch this space, there is going to be a LOT more focus on robotics, AI and how to do novel and creative things and maybe some education training along the way too.  Inspiring others and seeing them get creative & come up with things you haven't thought of is so rewarding, I'm looking forward to 2026 and where it is going to lead to. https://ifr.org/ifr-press-releases/news/world-robotics-2026 https://brightpick.ai/resources/predictions-for-2026-whats-next-for-robotics/ https://standardbots.com/b...

I was asked if I could investigate a "server" that someone had setup and work out what software had been installed onto it, how it was setup and what it was being used for and how etc... I immediately thought, well, this is going to be fun.  Didn't know if it was a Windows machine or a Linux machine, so this could be a very different task & amount of time involved. Digital forensic archaeology at its finest. Then I thought, "what would a Gen Z-er do?". I was being biased there, sorry Gen Z-ers, but let me re-phrase that, "what would someone do in the 'modern world'?".  Yep, they would ask a GenAI to help here. So that's what I did.  Now, I'm not saying it is perfect, however, it did a LOT of work, that looked impressive - I need to evaluate it a bit further in detail later.  I picked the following model:  claude-opus-4-5-20251101-thinking-32k and I asked the following prompt: "you are the most excellent python programmer in the...