Tony is a Geek

So, after having a bit of an issue a few weeks back concerning my own hearing, I started to look into the technology of "old people".  Well, that's a bit of a stereotype, it's not just old people who need hearing aids, it's all ranges of people.  It wasn't until I suffered from temporary hearing loss, that I really appreciated the value of hearing.  Sound a bit odd that, but try it someday.  I don't mean just sticking your fingers in your ears for a bit, or shoving earplugs in, that's not the same as "no sound".  It's freaky.  anyway, it got me thinking.  If my hearing does deteriorate in the near future, what am I going to do about it? I've seen the usual big hearing aids that you clip on your ears and have a little bud that you plug in, these apparently are very good, but very expensive and they have trouble focusing... I mean that in the sense that, if you have a person talking to you in front of you and a car drives past, the he

Why take life so seriously? I actually think this is: 1) quite amusing 2) not that much of a waste of time 3) something I might do to the Lil'van - just for cuteness okay, okay, it's simple.  you have a motor that moves left and right for your windscreen wipers, it's a motor, you have controllers for motors that you can then write code to control them with.  I didn't say it was rocket science....and it'll probably end up burning out the wiper motor, but, hey, they're not that expensive (yay! go recycling activists) and if you can find old/abandoned wiper motors to use even better. On a different note: I'm still very keen to get around to my FarmerBot system.  Next year I really want to have the greenhouse all setup and automated - along with some lovely Machine Learning going on so some lessons can be learnt.  ie. I don't want to just read some sensors and have a hardcoded rule that states, if variable X == y and variable Z IN[1,2,3,4,5]

Sometimes, just sometimes I am impressed.  Today was one of those days. Why? Autonomous ship being built in the UK with help from IBM....weren't expecting that were you? :-) Check it out at all these locations: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-50047449 https://www.ibm.com/blogs/think/2019/10/rethinking-the-mayflower/ https://ibmernews.voicestorm.com/member/post/ibm-boards-mayflower-autonomous-ship-project/da123706-8b4e-4647-875e-b7a5ecedf16a Some of you may or may not know, I originated in Billericay...yep the actual home of the Mayflower, or at least the people who made it, got it down to Heybridge basin, got it to Plymouth and then sailed over to the US and landed there to setup a new life.... okay, my history may not be 100% correct there, maybe just the people came from that region, but I do recall a pub in Billericay that myself and Frank used to frequent, called the 'Mayflower' and it had a pub sign with a ship on it, so that's good enough for

So, I've noticed that there is a fair bit of noise about 5G and the car industry.  When I was involved with this a few years back, I was hearing on the grapevine that we all have to wait for 2020 and 5G will be the saviour and that will make all cars interconnected, they'll have their own network and it'll handle the load etc... Time has gone by. I then just recently saw a couple of articles that were mentioning some ideas that raised my eyebrows.  This one is proposing to use the same sort of techniques that we used to use in the good old mobile development days when we would detect if the device was connected to a network, determine what network, then determine what it is that the user is wanting to do and then switch accordingly.  Wow, that just took me back to 1999-2003!   The theory was good, so not surprised it's being suggested here....but really.... satellites! Satellite internet technology is a more stable solution than 5G or LTE for connected cars, Ky