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 ...

So this came up during the week.... "I need to be able to connect to a Cloud Service that uses authentication and make calls to it to get results.  I've used POSTMAN, but now I need to do some load testing, so I want to use JMeter to doing some load testing, but I cannot get it to work.  Help." Putting aside the initial chest puffing "sigh", as this was at 9pm and I had finished work and was back at my hotel, I thought to myself... "hey, why not help out"...... Turns out I had an ancient installation of JMeter from back in 2015, (must have been back in the IBM MobileFirst days), so I didn't bother to upgrade but thought I'd use that setup as-is. After taking a look at the UI for a bit, it started to come back to me and I also do remember having to setup getting access tokens for authentication way back then.  Okay, now I was hooked.  Digging through my laptop for old .jmx files and hacking about I finally solved the problem and shared...

Saw this article this morning and I have to tip my hat (did you see what I did there?!) to the creator/inventor, this is an ingenious idea to use a Raspberry Pi and Sense Hat in a cool way. https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-sense-hat-impact-recorder-for-your-car/ Let the accelerometer and gyroscope of your Raspberry Pi Sense HAT measure and record impact sustained in a car collision. Instructables article available here In fact the instructable article goes into a lot more depth, even shares some python code. good stuff. I'm interested in this article for many reasons...one is I have a senseHAT sitting on a bench at home doing nothing, two, I have an RPi3 sitting on a bench at home doing nothing, three, I have four vehicles that I can use this device within.... okay, I'm not thinking of 'impact recording', but more about gathering telemetry data and associate it with a particular vehicle/driver and store that data so an ...

As much as I've been in denial....yes, I can now admit I have a problem... ..and that problem is that I've un-expectedly been moving into senior-management. I don't know how it happened, one-day I was happily skipping along, enjoying myself, gorging on all the new technology, new projects, new clients, new colleagues, life was awesome, it was great...and then slowly but surely as the projects started to change, the people started to change, the tasks I was 'expected' to do changed, there was more emphasis on planning, resourcing, organising, 'getting the right people' and it became less about myself being hands-on, physically making solutions to the problems....and then one day last week I was sitting at a meal with the latest project team and a work colleague turned and said to me, "So, how do I become a senior manager like you?". That stumped me.  I'm not a senior manager, am I?  I'm still (mentally at least) young and driven t...

oh no, not another buzzword / Javascript framework for me to be aware of?!? nope.  well, maybe, possibly, actually no.  It's the "new tool" on the block. Okay, so you managed to get through your IT career (from 2000->) by using SOAP, you all recall the lovely XML that was being passed around, hugely complex, nightmare to navigate and get right, schemas always changing, people doing custom stuff and then having the immensely lovely job of parsing all that bloated XML, even if all you wanted was 1 field value. Then REST APIs came along and we all rejoiced, JSON will destroy XML and life will be good.  REST allowed us to use GET, POST, DELETE and we could make endpoints that made sense.  Life was good. As with all things new, the old ways soon caught up. Then we started to pass back via REST lots and lots of data and the UI layer would then have to extract out the actual data it needed.  There was no harm in sending back 10 fields that we currently didn...

Fancy running some Quantum stuff on a Raspberry Pi? Well, now you can....sort of, well, you can run a simulation, it's not going to be a proper Quantum computer is it?, it's a Raspberry Pi. Check out this original article here to find out more . Check out this video to see how you can use QRasp: https://github.com/ordmoj/qrasp

“There are an estimated 3 billion smartphones in the world, and 7 billion connected devices," Googlers Alex Ingerman and Krzys Ostrowski  waxed lyrically . "These phones and devices are constantly generating new data ... Wouldn’t it be better if we could run the data analysis and machine learning right on the devices where that data is generated, and still be able to aggregate together what’s been learned?” https://www.tensorflow.org/federated/ TensorFlow Federated (TFF) is an open-source framework for machine learning and other computations on decentralized data. TFF has been developed to facilitate open research and experimentation with  Federated Learning (FL) , an approach to machine learning where a shared global model is trained across many participating clients that keep their training data locally. For example, FL has been used to train  prediction models for mobile keyboards  without uploading sensitive typing data to servers. TFF enables developers ...