Tony is a Geek

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......

I don't know what you were doing a couple of months ago?.... but I know what I was doing with one of those BMW i8s :-) This was my "office desk" There are times I love my job..... "The Internet of Things is transforming our relationship with the physical world. In Munich Germany, IBM is creating a new global center for collaborative innovation side-by-side with clients and partners. IBM will invest $200 million US to make Watson IoT HQ one of the most advanced facilities in the world. BMW is one of the first collocated partners and together, we will start a new pilot program to explore the role of IBM Watson in the BMW i8 hybrid car. BMW engineers & IBM experts will work together in "collaboratories" to explore Watson technologies for personalization of the driving experience. With conversational interfaces & machine learning, cars will get to know their drivers better."

Interesting, Google have announced their new Android of Things : CLICK HERE to access the PREVIEW certainly something to keep an eye on. https://developer.android.com/things/index.html If you have a Raspberry Pi 3, you can download an image and get going pretty quick.  I'll give it a look over the next few weeks.

This one? or this one? https://vapor.codes/ https://vapor.codes/ "Create modern web apps, sites, and APIs using HTTP or real-time apps using WebSockets. Nearly 100x faster than popular web frameworks using Ruby and PHP. Swift is fast by every meaning of the word. The latest cryptographic ciphers, digests, and LibreSSL's new TLS (SSL) make security easy. With middleware and Swift extensions, you can add custom functionality to Vapor that feels native. The static type system allows you to write less and do more. Vapor apps are very concise and even more powerful. With autocomplete, debugging, and breakpoints you'll spend more time creating and less time fixing. " I like the definition of "fun"......not quite how I would describe it, but, hey-ho, I'll let you decide :-)