It was a privilege to be a spectator at the First Lego League (FLL) UK Finals at Loughborough University yesterday, where my son’s school team (Beechen Bots from Beechen Cliff School) had qualified in this youth championship for Lego robot design, problem solving and engineering. The thirty teams had members ranging from 9 to 15 […]
Cogs
I was discussing with my son how gears work to increase or decrease speed and to increase mechanical advantage. We demonstrated the principles with some lego he had, but I got the idea of coding something in Processing, it being such a great language to prototype ideas, and produce visual results quickly. It was a […]
40 hours, 40 Minutes
Trying to study and learn technology/programming part time, alongside work and domestic demands has proved challenging. In part this is because to make significant progress it seems that I need a decent run at things, whether it is e-book based, online tutorials, or just hacking away on your own. I set myself a target, at […]
Socket.io
My new project has me looking at the use of Node.js and socket.io to send data between two (or more) independent web pages. Let’s not worry about why for now. The point is, I want to be able to have web apps receiving and sending streams of data without having any other awareness of each […]
Code or Die!
New Year may be an arbitrary line in an arbitrary system for measuring the passage of time (so reports Oliver Burkeman in last week’s Guardian magazine ), and the rituals of new year resolutions may seem doomed to fail. Nonetheless I decided to approach my Code Everyday mandate again with the renewed optimism that this […]
Happy Node Year
In 2013, my first full year of UoD, and effectively the start of UoD in earnest, I wandered all over the place in terms of learning topics. November and December were not great for clocking up the hours and so I start 2014 needing to find a sense of focus and direction. Right now I […]
Code Everyday
Last month, I set myself a target to code a little bit everyday. It didn’t have to be for more that 15 minutes, and it could be anything – HTML, CSS, JavaScript and the plethora of frameworks and libraries, or my beloved Processing. The point is that I learn new concepts and techniques from my […]
Web of the Web
One of the challenges I face with UoD is the vast universe of stuff I don’t know. And, for the sake of this post, let’s just talk about web technologies, web enabled applications, users, culture, development etc – that whole sphere. Not only that but I don’t know what I don’t know, and when I […]
TEDxBristol
Like many people, I enjoy a good TED talk. At typically 15 minutes or less, they are only ever a window into someone else’s viewpoint or wisdom, but it really is not hard to find something new, each time you go on the site that will inspire, provoke, reinforce or contradict. I heard that TED […]
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence. Not just the title of a great compilation album on Warp Records cataloguing some great ambient techno and IDM tracks from the early 90’s, but also, it seems, a branch of computer science. Having had a break from learning, I though I would try another MOOC, this time through Udacity rather than Coursera. […]