During a recent holiday in England, I spent a few days in a location without any links to the internet at all. No mobile phone signal, no Wi-Fi hotspots. Nothing. It was interesting to see the impact this had. There were countless times when I wanted to check something on a map. Or the opening […]
Recently, I attended #offcamp – a barcamp style discussion around open data which was organised by the Isle of Man branch of the BCS and was free to attend. The morning sessions were OK and it was good to see that some thought is being given to making data open and available, especially data that has […]
This week, I tried some different firmware on the ESP8266 modules that I have. I flashed a version of NodeMCU which allows Lua scripts (and other files) to be uploaded. By using this software: https://github.com/reischle/CaptiveIntraweb I was able to turn the ESP8266 into a Wi-Fi access point which serves a static site, regardless of what web […]
I was lucky enough to get some vouchers for Amazon for my birthday recently. I bought some things I needed, but then had a couple of pounds left on the voucher. I decided to ‘waste’ this on some MiFare Classic 1K RFID cards. These can be formatted to the NDEF standard, which means that many […]
I first saw an ESP8266 board at OggCamp as part of a central heating control project. Recently, I’ve been researching a project for CodeClub that needs to control devices remotely over some kind of radio link and so I thought it was time to get to grips with these devices. They turned up in the […]
Analogue signals are great in that they are simple enough to generate and demodulate, but they suffer in that the signal quality degrades when sent over a noisy radio link. With radio voice systems, this is heard as pops, crackle, hiss etc. and the problem gradually gets worse as signals get weaker. Human ears do […]
Chromebooks are nice machines, but of course they dance to Google’s tune. Google are usually pretty good at adopting open standards but occasionally they think they can do better. There are established protocols for printing over a network, but Google have ignored these entirely by ensuring that all Chromebooks only support Google Cloud Print printers! […]
I attended my first ever OggCamp on the weekend of 31st October / 1st November. Having never been to any kind of “unconference” before, I didn’t know quite what to expect. So here’s a few thoughts on what I learned: Free culture and free software types are a friendly bunch. This happened even before I […]
On a recent trip to the UK, I called in to a Lidl store because I know they often have interesting (well, to me anyway) bits of tech for low prices. I picked up this camera for a shade over thirty quid. When you consider it contains Wi-Fi hardware, a web server, pan & tilt […]
So, the nice HP Chromebook 11 seems to have a design fault. If you let the battery run flat, the Chromebook will no longer charge. Symptoms are that there is no charging LED, and no matter how many hours you leave it with the charger plugged in it simply will not charge the battery. It […]