Tony is a Geek

A previously mentioned, I have purchased pre-assembled Z80-MBC3 and RC2014 electronics boards and components, waiting for "that" rainy day to come along.... Well, yesterday was that day, and boy did it rain!  Today, however, lovely sunshine and blue skies.  It's early and I'm killing time until I can go and pick up my Jaguar STR, after she's had some bodywork repairs done by an expert/professional.  Don't know what one of those is? click here. very rare actually, they only made 129 in the '07 year and there is probably about 30 left on the road.  As the paperwork says, "it was the fastest production road car when it was released.  faster than any supercars out there...", food for thought, huh? anyway, side-tracked. So, I have a couple of Z80 CPU based computers I'm going to build - except, they are new, but they are old, retro-vintage, if you like.  What's a Z80, you ask? (then you must be <40yrs old), here you go: Basically, without ...

I just forced myself to do an initial inventory check of the "toys" I have in my current "to hand" tech-cave.  I need to draw a picture.  and I'm going to be a rebel and NOT use UML, just cos... (it'll probably end up looking very UML-like, but shush, don't tell the rebel part of my brain that)....so, where are you draw.io (oh it has a new name now, I must remember that) Not that I use the online version, I use the installed offline version - y'know, cos I'm old-skool and (insert lots of reasons here and move on). Okay, I've gone even more old skool and used a pen & paper (I missed a few, believe it or not!), I'll do a digital version later: What am I actually "doing" with these devices? Well a variety of things... okay, nothing really all that useful.  They were purchased / used for various tasks at a specific point in time.  For instance the Pi Zero was bought when it was the latest thing and I naturally bought two, I use...

Using "Watson Conversation Speech to Text" to control a simple physical IoT device It has been a couple of months since I did anything "exciting", I just noticed this great developerWorks recipe and thought, "Hey, I've got to share that, it's pretty awesome!". So, CLICK HERE TO SEE THE ARTICLE It also contains the code to get you up & running, see section (6) at the bottom of the page.

It's all about the IoT..... Apparently, Gartner predicted in November 2015 , that during 2016, 6.4 billion device will be connected to the Internet and will be classified as "The Internet of Things".  By 2020, that figure will rise to 20.8 billion.  Staggering. Just connecting devices to the Internet is one thing, but it will mean that the devices will be pushing a tremendous amount of data around.  I'm pretty sure that being able to make sense of that data, to gain insights from the data is also going to bring great rewards to the companies that get smart to this. Now, as you may or may not know, I've been making "stuff" that we used to call "Client-Server" apps (back in the day), which is great for small proof of concept stuff, ie. getting my robot to send data to a server humming away in the corner of the room, triggering events and sending a signal to activate a solenoid that opens a door before the robot hits the door.  This i...