I posted recently a video of me unboxing the Xteink X4 reader and I said that I would post a longer review once I had a chance to use it. This is that review.
I’ve never really considered myself to be an avid reader, but when compared to the rest of the country, it seems that I am a voracious reader. Where 40% of people in the UK don’t read any books at all in a year, I find myself in the top 8% who read more than 30 a year.
I read a mixture of both … Read the rest
I’ve been having a bit of an e-reader renaissance recently with the purchase of an Xteink X4 reader, the tiny pocket reader. This is my first e-reader in about 16 years since my Sony Reader all those years ago. Something that hasn’t changed in all those years is the page flashing when the display needs refreshing.
If you don’t know what I am referring to, take a look at this video below, which shows page refresh in action on the Xteink X4.
Here is why that refresh (often called a “full page turn”) is necessary:
The Xteink X4 is a brand new eReader with a difference – it is tiny, about the size of an iPhone. Designed for reading on the go, this nifty little device is small enough to shove in a pocket and take with you everywhere. In this short video I unbox the device and take a look as to what’s included.
Having only received the device yesterday I haven’t spent much time with it but I can really see the X4 becoming part of my EDC. I will report back in a few weeks when I have spent more time … Read the rest
Late 2024, I decided that I was going to provide more focus for my development in 2025, and to that end, I would attempt one new project a month, and so 12 apps in 12 months was born.
I very much stuck to my knitting with these projects as every one of them was written in a language that I know very well: PHP. Ten out of the 12 also used a third-party API to source data that was then used as the basis of the project.
Here’s a full list of all the projects completed … Read the rest
On a recent trip to Washington DC we discovered the Metro’s smartcard “SmarTrip” which can be used to tap-in and tap-out at stations and on buses too. This was pretty convenient, but it meant yet another plastic card to carry around and potentially lose.
However, there were signs up saying that it was possible to transfer the balance from a physical card to your Apple Wallet (or Google equivalent if you were that way inclined). The instructions were simple enough:
… Read the restTo transfer your SmarTrip card to Apple Wallet, open the Wallet app on your iPhone, tap the “+”
Over the last year I have been reevaluating how and were I store the data for my projects. Traditionally I have added a new database in MySQL for each but I thought that was a bit overkill for some of the smaller, single user, projects that I was working on.
There are several options for storing your data, but each comes with its own trade-offs in setup time, performance, and scalability. Here I look at the ones I have used in my prejects — flat files, SQLite, and MySQL — and see where each one shines (and where … Read the rest
Handheld chip and pin machines aren’t as universal as I thought they were. On a recent trip to the States, I found that it is still much more likely that they will take your card away to some dark corner to produce you a paper receipt, no doubt cloning it in the meantime!
In the UK that almost never happens but the vast majority of restaurants will come to the table with a machine these days, demanding payment before you’ve even seen this bill!
While holidaying in Greece earlier this year I found in a number of places where not … Read the rest
I’ve recently been getting into home automation and Home Assistant in particular (expect more posts on that as I get my head around it).
Words that frequently come up when dealing with home automation devices are Zigbee, Thread and Matter. I was familiar with Zigbee but was confused about Thread and Matter and how they worked together so I asked my friend ChatGPT to explain. I found it useful so decided to tidy it up and post it here.
Thread and Matter are two of the latest smart home standards, often mentioned together, … Read the rest
If you contact customer support, literally any customer support, with any technical issue, depending on your device, you are likely to be met with one of the following responses:
In their defence, those in customer support would say that this solves 90% of issues, but it is annoying that these are the first things offered up, and they’re not happy if you tell them that you’ve already done them.
Of course, many more issues could be … Read the rest
On a recent trip to Keukenhof, the Netherlands, I was struck by the crowd gathered around a windowed box. I had sort of assumed that it contained some rare plant, given where we were, but in fact, it was Ella, the Robot Barista. Ella is, apparently, able to “brew more than 300 coffee combinations at 200 cups per hour” using data, Robotics and, of course, AI.
Here she is in action: