They say it’s often been observed That folk get the government they deserve The current case is not exempt A government guilty of contempt But surely this is not our fault? A general public never caught In hyperbole and outright lies. “It’s not our doing”…
Year: 2018
Back in April this year, I wrote to the ICO (Information Commissioner’s Office) for “official guidance on GDPR for purely personal, non-commercial, use of data”. I made the point that much had been published about how GDPR applied to organisations and companies, but I had…
A few months ago, I discovered that as well as the familiar (to me) “Alexa, what is the temperature”, which gives the outside temperature, based on something like Accuweather, I could also say “Alexa, what is the temperature inside” an be given a fairly accurate…
I’ve been playing with writing Alexa skills recently, using the Storyline tool. Storyline is great for writing scripted skills, and also has facilities for connecting to other online applications to exchange data, via JSON and simple GET/POST connections. I wrote this very simple PHP routine…
I have been playing with Alexa Skills for some time, and having great fun. Until recently, all of my skills were private. If you design an Alexa Skill but never publish it, it remains in Dev – it is accessible to all of your own…
I’ve been using a number of web integration tools to do various tasks, ranging from cross posting from one social network to another, through to on-line automation. I think many people may be familiar with IFTTT (If This Then That), but the two relative newcomers,…
I’m not talking about failure in a big way, but failure in terms of petty little tasks. I may make plans to do something that I haven’t done before – like fit a lock to my garden gate – that I should be totally capable of doing. But something nags me in the back of my mind – what if I run into problems? How will I cope? So I put off the task, rather than discover if I can do it (or do it well).
I’ve been playing around with making it easy to log what I eat/drink, together with calories. The idea is that logging what you eat can be tedious, and prone to “I’ll do that later (oops forgot)”. By doing it with a voice interface, I can…
So I took the Echo Dot, a very old phone (running Android KitKat), a SIM from GiffGaff that I ordered Thursday and which arrived yesterday, plus various cables and adapters, and went outside in the sunshine to play with my car.
More techie fun. It’s actually fairly easy to do, it was the idea that was brilliant (is there an emoji for an exploding head?) Plex media server has a “watch later” function, that can be used for watching *selected* YouTube videos. See a video while…
I have a shelf of vinyl that hasn’t been played in about 10 years. Nothing valuable, just stuff from the late 70s and the 80s. Some has been repurchased in CD form; the rest – well, if I haven’t dug it out in 10 years,…
But one of the things I will be using the time for is working on the update on my board game forum site, Posh Games.
This is long overdue. Official support for the version I am on ended in 2009, although I’ve managed to keep it going and secure. I have made 2 attempts, over the years, to upgrade, both vexed by the new version lacking features that are central to my website – mainly a fully integrated calendar/scheduler, allowing you to attach dates to specific topics (so people can schedule a game session, then discuss who is coming and what games to bring).