London's Technology Scene and Local Community

Social media is transforming London's underground society.  My experience of using meetup.com to build a community around shared interest in technology demonstrates both the impact of social media and the ground swell of technology in London's underground society.

Using Raspberry Pi GPIO Interface

I have a Raspberry Pi - this post is about beginning to explore it's control capabilities using the General Purpose Input Output (GPIO) port and is aimed at total beginners assuming that you have already got your Raspberry Pi up and running as described in my earlier post Fire up your Raspberry Pi.

Fire up your Raspberry Pi

I was loaned a Raspberry Pi.  It was brand new and still in its box when I got it.  This post is about how I breathed life into it. There are two main jobs to do: preparing an SD Card to be the Raspberry Pi's hard-drive and complete the initial setup.

I used my MacBook Air to do this so the process is Mac specific in some areas i.e. using Terminal.

Pibow: The Raspberry Pi Case

I didn't like having my much prized Raspberry Pi (loaned to me by a good friend) resting on a cardboard box looking cool but vulnerable to my quite regular drink spills and clumsy dropping of heavy and/or pointy items.  I wanted a box to put it in - so I got one.

Self-employed poacher?

Poaching is where you 'steal' work from your employer by going direct to the client.  This is good because you get more work; this is bad because you annoy those that employed you and kills off opportunities for future work with them.

I am self-employed but only for a very short time - I have learnt so much during this first year. One of the most difficult things to get to grips with was not poaching work from others while proactively seeking much needed work.  I'm still not sure I got it right.

Set up Android SDK and NDK

This describes how I got the tools required to develop an Android application written in Java with a portion of 'native' C code. It's only really worth using native code when you have existing libraries written in C you wish to use without rewriting them in Java

Playing Around with a Linux Server

This post describes how to install Linux and set it up as a home webserver from scratch.

Replacing Android Tablet Touchscreen

My niece cracked the front of her Vimicro Flytouch Android Tablet.  The tablet still booted up, the screen still worked but the touchscreen was broken.  This post is about how I replaced the broken touchscreen.

Mobile World Congress 2013

I received a call from Visionmill in mid-November 2012 about a job to create a video wall out of mobile phones for Mobile World Congress 2013 in Barcelona.  This work was officially confirmed as a World Record by Guiness in March 2013.

if (Self-employed = good) ? Sole Trader First : Private Ltd Company;

Being self-employed is a rollercoaster.

I strapped into the fairground ride as a sole trader about 7 months ago during which time it feels like I nearly spilled out of my seat a couple of times.  There have been times during a quiet period that I wasn't sure if I was being dragged up the slope ready for the next wild ride or genuinely stuck at low-point.

When I first went self-employed I looked into the options (e.g. Ltd. LLP) and decided on sole-trading because there is little reporting and easy accounting.  One of the biggest drawbacks for me was that I wouldn't own a company, be a Director or have a cool name to trade under - pure ego strokes.

Quartz Composer Image Composition

I have used Quartz Composer to display messages from for example Twitter.  The raw data I am displaying includes the author's profile image, author's name, message content and the destination of any URL within that message.  I feed that data from a Mac OSX application written in Objective-C as a number of arrays.  This post explains how to take these constituent parts and arrange them within a single image that can then be easily manipulated.

Objective C Singletons

I was writing my first app in Objective C using Apple's wonderous XCode IDE.  I had two view controllers launched from the nib to control a couple of views.  I needed to send data from one controller to another and had real difficulty.  The problem was that I couldn't use accessors to pass data, as I would prefer, because the viewcontroller objects weren't aware of each other.  After much reading, googling and 'youtube tutorialing' I settled on using a 'Singleton' object.  This great youtube tutorial by barrowclough was particularly helpful.

A Singleton is a custom class you create that can be accessed by any other objects.  It is declared in such a way that different objects instantiate this class they all end up with the same object. This means that the variables/attributes/properties of the Singleton can be get/set by any of those objects.