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Showing posts with the label Tech

Techie Tinkering: Come vibe with me - Episode 1

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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 "...

Techie Tinkering: StepCounter 6.0

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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...

Techie Tinkering: ChatGP-Me

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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 have a desk treadmill. So I'm hip now.

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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...

I prefer Working From Home.

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There, I said it.  I prefer working from home...and in this blog post, I'm gonna explain why.  I wonder if the fact I prefer working from home comes as news to anyone.  On the one hand, I've been an advocate for working from home for years, long before the pandemic made it trendy. Speaking of which, I've also worked almost entirely from home since the pandemic - so over five years now. I even wrote a whole blog entry on here about Making Remote Work Work ...So maybe it's obvious that I like it.  On the other hand, I'm often slightly outspoken against remote work. I dislike the stereotypical image of the hipster hunched over the macbook in a coffee shop...it just seems awful for your body and productivity. I also feel very sad when I walk through my estate and see individual people locked up in their individual houses all day working away. It all feels very dystopian and....unhealthy. Additionally, I feel like a lot of arguments online conflate working in an office a...