albitron limited

  It's me! In the Colosseum!  Good grief, James, why are you talking to us about Italy?? OK, so I went to Italy over Easter. We wanted a city break and my daughter had just finished doing The Romans at school, so we thought it would be cool to go visit Rome, Naples, Pompeii et al.  I went with fairly low expectations - I've only ever been to Italy once before, when my wife and I visited Pisa and Florence - and I didn't really like it. Beautiful architecture, obviously... but everything was a bit dirty, there were a lot of scammers everywhere trying to get money off you...and it just didn't feel like the nicest place I've been to.  But, it's fair to say, I had a blast in Italy this year....and now I've had a couple of months to reflect, I feel like I definitely learnt things about myself, and a bit about tech.  I wasn't sure whether these were appropriate things to write about on this blog... but I figure "what the hell" - it's my blog, I ca...

Create a cartoon of the person in this photo sharing a coffee and laughing with an anthropomorphised computer Vibe coding is a term coined by AI researcher Andrej Karpathy to describe a coding approach that relies heavily on natural language prompts to instruct AI tools to generate, refine, and debug code. - Google For a while now I've wanted to try vibe coding something from scratch. So, let's do it.  What are we vibing on? Remember my treadmill? I shared this little graph of my progress:  This graph was generated by manually punching data into Excel and creating the chart from there. Then remember I gave the treadmill brains?  The StepCounter 6.0 stores its results internally as CSV files. It would be cool to make a graph of them, as above. My initial plan was just to copy these CSV files into the Excel doc every time I wanted to update the graph... but could we do something better...Could vibe coding help? Let's find out.  How did I pick a tool?  I googled "...

Most of my blog entries are written for fun...to flex my awesome writing skills and to share a few of the silly things I get up to in my spare time.  This one's a bit different... I thought I'd write it for two reasons:  1) There's a chance that a combination of keywords ( DETA 3500 TRANSFORMER, RING DOORBELL ) might work their magic in the almighty algorithm and help someone out there repeat this project in their own home. 2) Should my house burn down imminently, it will be easy for folks to identify the cause ;)  So, doorbells? Yeah... I've had a hardwired Ring doorbell (2nd gen) for a few years now - along with a number of their cameras. And I should say from the outset, I'm not a fan.  They just don't work very well... I remember a few years ago when we were trying to sell our house... on a number of occasions the real estate lady was able to come and go with potential sellers without any of the cameras picking it up at all. And if people can enter and leave...

Giving My Treadmill a Brain ChatGPT really delivered on this one! "Draw a cartoon of a treadmill walking, with a cartoon brain added to its head" Long-time readers will remember the main issue I have with my desk treadmill from my acclaimed article about it : it’s dumb. Whilst the treadmill came with a companion app, it required me to start and stop the treadmill via this app in order to collect any usage stats. And there was no option to export that data. That was the spark that led to StepCounter 6.0 , a project to give my treadmill a brain. The Plan I'd get one of these little screens, which I could program to record how many steps I'd done: The screen is 0.99" across. Diddy.  It contains a  Raspberry Pi Pico and an accelerometer —all for under £20. I'd write some simple step detection and logging logic. And it would just work, without me needing to start or stop anything.  Requirements Wait until I start walking. Detect steps using acceleromete...

OK...right off the bat..this is a crushing loss for ChatGPT. I just wanted to be in the matrix! I didn't want to be in the matrix AND look like the lovechild of Rick Astley and Simon Cowell. Good luck sleeping after this, folks. A brief preview of the post's purpose Could ChatGPT do a better job of writing for this blog than me?  There's only one way to find out! On fading into irrelevance I'm used to feeling past it.  I've accepted that I'll never be a F1 world champion.  The two hour marathon? I think I'm gonna have to leave it for someone else.  Honestly, as I wallow in middle age, I feel too old to do anything noteworthy. I've now transitioned to living vicariously through my children and hoping that this, in time, will help them to make something of themselves - in the way I never seemed to manage. So feeling past it, with age , isn't new to me. But feeling past it just beca...