Tony is a Geek

Well, seeing as I spent quite a bit of time there last year , seems right to post the official news: CHECK OUT THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE "Some clients will be a permanent fixture at IBM offices in Munich. BMW employees will work at the new center to place Watson voice control into cars and explore ways to create personalized experiences." CHECK OUT THE IBM OFFICIAL SITE HERE

VR Desktop is an app for Mac that enables you to use a VR headset such as the Oculus Rift to interact with macOS in a Virtual Desktop Environment. With VR Desktop, users can work, game, or otherwise interact with their Mac while using a VR headset. You can load up custom virtual environments such as a Desk or Space scene, and create virtual screens for maximising productivity. There’s been many naysayers ruling out Mac as a VR platform. We’re here to prove that Macs are capable of useful VR applications. VR Desktop works on modern Macs with discrete graphics cards. VR Desktop is compatible with Oculus Rift DK2 and macOS 10.11 and later.  We are targeting Oculus Rift CV1 and HTC Vive support as soon as those devices support the Mac platform. Our sources tells us that HTC will be adding Mac support for Vive in Q1/Q2. Checkout the Product Website HERE Might be about time to dig out the Oculus Rift that is still boxed up under my desk and give it some use? ...

This is where the "magic" happens....well, when I'm not doing the above in various hotels.... You can look at it like this: or, you can look at it like that: and now that "work/work" has finished...time to put on some music and have some fun (you might have noticed some things have moved around) [full panoramic this time]:

On my retro-month journey, as I mentioned previously, I found a drawer with a broken  PSP 1000, a working PSP 1003  and a couple of games. I purchased a new PSU for the PSP 1003 device and a new higher capacity battery, when they arrived, I juiced them up and the PSP 1003 fire up and worked a treat.  I even managed to get it connected to the WiFi (albeit to the "guest network" as it needs to have security turned off). I downloaded the latest firmware, rebooted and it works great. Then, whilst wandering through town over the weekend, I noticed a couple of PSP 2003 devices in one of those cash convertor shop windows.  Whilst the missus was in the "knitting shop", I popped in asked to have a look.  Naturally, it had no PSU and no UMDs to test it.  For £15 I thought I'd take a gamble.... it looked to be in relatively good condition, no damage anywhere and the screen and buttons all felt pretty non-abused. I got home, plugged in the PSU and charged up th...

You have a laptop Mac.  You have a portable MiniDisc player.  You want the two to work together.  How on earth do you go about it?   Read on.....read on...... CLICK HERE TO FIND OUT MORE UPDATE - Enhanced portable MiniDisc player AND a MiniDisc player "in the home"

Want to have a quick walk through the history of the C programming language, my history, look at some beards and then look at some C code written for the Atari ST (on a Mac) and then compiled and linked/built on an Atari ST (emu) and run to prove it works? Well, if you do (and the thought of bearded middle aged C programmers, is your thing): CLICK HERE TO READ MORE

Awesome, just pure awesome. Ah, Prestel !....the Ceefax style internet , before HTML/CSS/JavaScript and all that other noise got in the way.  Actually, I like the interface, it takes me back...maybe someone should make a new front-end to f@cebook Prestel style  :-D I love the fact they have the tape cassette program noise on the end credits, for you to save to tape and then load the program after the programme.  pure genius. Ah....I must be getting old & nostalgic, or maybe the "new" stuff just isn't doing it anymore.  oh look, the new iPhone 8 is coming out.  "8". yes, "8". keep peddling the sequels instead of making something "new".  grouch, grouch, grumble, grumble..... "it wasn't like this back in my day".  LOL HA!HA!HA!   If Google were invented in the 80s : Actually, that gives me an idea for the Atari ST.......

Whilst doing some tidying up between Xmas and New Year, I found myself in the attic/loft and I found that I had a couple of ATARI ST home computer systems sitting in a few boxes. Well....I had a few days spare and it is that time of year to do some pointless things that are not strictly work related, but are technical and retro. After rummaging through the boxes I found that I had bought a Hard Disc drive back in 2007, this got me thinking and I wondered if I could do something useful with the Atari ST, apart from just playing games... CLICK HERE TO SEE HOW I CONNECTED IT TO THE INTERNET! (and fetched some GMail email) I've even got it setup to compile/build C code too.... let's see what wonders I can create during the following year.  Okay, so it's not going to be competing with the Unreal Engine C++ work I've been doing, but it'll keep me out of trouble.

Whilst suffering from man-flu over this initial New Year period, I decided that I could not handle the perpetual boredom of illness.  Without the missus knowing, I snuck a Pi Zer0 into the bedroom and being very small, she didn't notice it plugged in on the bedside table...... I had previously setup this device back in May 2016, but hadn't found a reasonable use for it, it had an 8Gb microSD card in it and a WiFi dongle attached.  It was connected to the network in moments. Using my trusty sshclient from my Amazon Fire Tablet ( the "proper Mac laptop" being banned, as I was "ill" and that would tempt me to be doing work/work stuff ), I ssh'd into the Pi Zer0. First thing I noticed was that it only had 2.2Gb free!!! WTF?!?! This was a default install.  How do I claim some of that space back?  It turns out that this is the norm . After a quick check, I did indeed have a lot of the bloatware installed - time to get rid of it: >sudo apt-get purg...

After working my way through a course on C++ and The Unreal Engine , I noticed some really interesting overlaps between the work I've been recently doing on robots and the work I'm going to be working on next year ( Cognitive computing ). Anyway, just thought I'd link to this great book, that is also available for free to read online (downloadable pdf available, as well as a real physical book). You can use Watson to help out too......