This is the second part of a series of ESP-IDF tutorials that I will complete as I learn stuff. Read part 1. One of the best things about Arduino is the ability to just block for a period with: delay(1000); // hang on a second, buddy It’s also one of…

This is the first part of a series of ESP-IDF tutorials that I will complete as I learn stuff. Consider the following Arduino code: Serial.println(“begining”); I call this the “Arduino debugger”. It’s a joke. Arduino has no debugger — don’t be silly, Ali! It’s not really debugging, it’s logging. How…

Introduction I have started to try to learn the ESP-IDF. What will follow is a series of short articles as I learn the individual components of the IDF and how to do things that are easy in Arduino. Why? Arduino has been getting me down for a while. Note: I mean the…

Coral dev boards are rather amazing single board computers. They are designed to run Tensorflow in a tiny little box. They run NXP’s iMX8, have a sound card, ethernet, USB-C, HDMI, and a built-in USB serial terminal. Google shipped these with a custom Debian-based Linux distribution called Mendel which is…

I know. There were even jokes about it. But this is a little story about how and why I learned to love the web platform. There are no accouterments, no hint-of-cardamom, and not even a sprig of mint. The first thing I realised is that the web platform is really…

I spend a good chunk of my life coding web apps without internet access. It’s been an interesting experience. And I learned something: offline web apps are easy to write. When I say offline, I mean that a browser should have to hit a website for its data exactly one…

(And back to regular programming with my humble apologies for interrupting the flow of drivellous technodetritus with trivial matters of social justice.) I’m a web noob. I recently wrote a web app. It is a single-pagey progressivish thing and I learned much web development. Some thoughts… One aspect I really…

You may or may not know that the incidence and relapse rates of schizophrenia in African-Caribbean males in Western countries has been reported as being much higher than equivalent white male cohorts. E.g. We found remarkably high IRRs for both schizophrenia and manic psychosis in both African-Caribbeans (schizophrenia 9.1, manic…

I’ve been thinking a lot about IoT recently. Mostly because we built these foosball tables for Google I/O 2016. At the same time, my friends in the web world have been talking about Progressive Web Apps (PWA) for a while. The general idea, I think, is that applications “work for…