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HOW MANY HOURS IS IT TIL 5AM?? TELL ME NOW!  Stressful, isn't it? It's been a while since I've shared one of my stupid personal dev projects with you all, so thought I'd treat you! Got a new tumble dryer last week:  Snazzy, eh! I've done this for energy saving reasons. This is a "heat pump" tumble dryer. Which a) uses less energy all the time and b) is safer to run overnight.  (NB - full disclaimers apply...manufacturers would never recommend large appliances run overnight, etc) By using less energy, and running overnight, I can drop costs from ~£1.50/load to £0.16. Winning.  There's one issue... the way the delay timer works is really counter-intuitive to my mind. You have to tell it in how many hours you want it to end . The eco cycle takes 3.5 hours, so I want it to end around 5am to make the most of cheap energy. So, back to the original question...how many hours is it til 5am?  Actual footage. I worried that the mental load of figuring this out wo...

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 "...

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...

I've no idea who the girl going in the other direction is. Disclaimer!  Not a great start, I know...but I'm gonna start off by saying this article isn't as...scientific...as I hoped it would be. And I know my adoring fans flock to my blog posts for their unyielding scientific rigour.  I kinda hoped that I'd be able to track the use of the treadmill...and track my weight...and show a lovely correlation - that using the treadmill a bit made me beautiful and thin...but life got in the way: The sun came out! I got the treadmill early in March... but this was also when spring decided it had sprung...so there was sunshine, optimism, a sense that maybe the world isn't all that bad after all. So, could I claim that the treadmill had single-handedly made me all energetic and happy? Nossir.  We finished a house project! I've been quiet on here for a long while, because we've been doing a house project (a little more on that later)... this project has taken far more ti...

  My biggest fans will note this is a different old photo to the one I've been photoshopping into images lately. This photo is from my meetup profile. As I'm talking about meetups, it seemed appropriate. I used to do a lot of meetups pre-pandemic...but I didn't really adjust to them being remote during lockdown (I've always felt that getting out of the house is part of the point!), so kinda got out of the habit. I've made it to a couple of geek nights in the last year or so, but that's been about it.  But, I knew a couple of people that were going to .NET Oxford , so I figured "why not?". Needless to say, it was really interesting! And it triggered in me a kind of muscle memory. Whenever I went to meetups in the olden days, I'd blog about it and share it with my team at work. So I figured I should write a blog post to "share my learnings".  That said, there's no point in me regurgitating content a little worse than the original presen...