Recent content on Mixed Laterality
I recently created a local hybrid search plugin for Obsidian , powered by ZVec . The original announcement is over on my Substack Atomic Currents . 
 I’ve used it heavily over the past two weeks and it has proven invaluable. It just works better for me than anything else I’ve tried. As a result, I decided to bundle it up and make it a proper Community Plugin with single click…
I’ve been thinking a lot about LLM proxies lately. Mostly because we’ve written two of them in the past few weeks. And the more I think about it, the more I’m genuinely surprised that every company making serious use of LLMs doesn’t already have one sitting in front of their API calls. It feels like one of those “how are we not all doing this?” moments in tech.…
Two posts in one day? Monsieur, with these Rocher you are really spoiling us. 
 I realised earlier this week that we have now entered the era of Disposable Apps and Disposable UIs. 
 Not single-function Apps but single-use Apps, with a GUI and a Backend. 
 Generated in < 5 mins by Claude Code or Codex and lots of APIs. 
 Here’s a sub-screen of my throwaway Bedrock Mantle…
I honestly can’t understand how Amazon is doing such a dreadful job of communicating how to use Bedrock Mantle or even what it is. Every blogpost about new supported models links to information pages that are factually useless if you want to use them. 
 
 Yesterday I finally figured out, with the help of some random Python script in a random GitHub repo, not made by Amazon, how to…
In an early Christmas gift to everyone, the legendary Fabrice Bellard released a tiny new JavaScript engine called Micro QuickJS . As someone who has been using Espruino for years and was responsible for ushering the NodeConf EU 2017/2018/2019 digital conference badges into being, this obviously caught my attention immediately. 
 I looked at the small stack of ESP32 C6, H2 and S3 boards on my…
For personal projects, I generally follow Andrej Karpathy’s original definition of Vibe Coding - I don’t look at the generated code, I just tell the LLM what I want, paste in the error messages and iterate until it gives me the output I need. But that’s a lot easier to do when you’ve been writing software for 40+ years and know what to ask for! 
 But when it comes to…
Whilst we’re all accelerating 10x with Vibe Coding, it’s only one piece of the process. 
 We need an entire Vibe Pipeline. 
 I want to move that fabulous Vibe-Coded app on http://localhost:3000 to a fully secure deployed solution with Auth, CI/CD, a domain and a cert by literally saying “take that fabulous app on http://localhost:3000 and deploy it securely with Auth,…
I’ve never given up on RSS. It still provides enormous utility for me. The silly number of RSS converters in my GitHub account are testament to that. 
 The recent removal of all RSS feeds from the EPA Ireland site was a major disappointment and I’ve been forced to Vibe Code a horror of a replacement scraper using their dreadful API instead. 
 In contrast, my heart skipped a…
I’ve been using Node-RED for many years, mostly for fun and personal projects. The coolest thing I did with it was to build the prototype for the NodeConf EU 2018 badge back-end. 
 But 2024 is the first time I’ve worked with it in production, with the ServisBOT team doing some pretty incredible things using it. One aspect I’ve been interested in recently is local persistence…
Over the past 18 months or so, I’ve been replacing various IFTTT and Low-Code functions with my own code running either in GitHub Actions or AWS Lambda. The latest one is a simple function to save all my latest GitHub Stars to Pinboard once an hour. 
 This way, no matter what IFTTT/Zapier/etc decide to change this month, I don’t have to change anything. Some of my Serverless…
My wonderful late mother-in-law Mary bought us an original massive George Foreman Lean Mean Grilling Machine more than 10 years ago. Like most people we discovered it was pretty rubbish at cooking almost everything but was a superb toasted sandwich maker. With 5 kids, we have easily toasted thousands of cheese-based sambos. 
 
 Unfortunately, as with all non-stick surfaces, eventually it…
Yesterday I was amused and faux-shocked to see that the company who did more to damage RSS than any other, got rid of the RSS feed for its Chrome Developer Blog . 
 So this morning I gave ChatGPT a few nudges/samples and it generated a basic Python script to create the feed. GitHub Copilot took care of some refinements and GitHub Actions took care of generating the feed once per hour and…
Whilst there is a ton of useful data on the EPA Ireland web-site, it’s not exactly easy to track what’s going on. After my recent RSS post , I got a request from Ashley to see if something better was doable with the EPA data. 
 After a bit of playing around I was able to scrape the thousands of individual RSS feeds and generate what is hopefully helpful to those of you who wish to…

 Bring out your dead
 I’m that guy, the one who never gave up on blogs and never ever gave up on RSS. “Let me tell you, young whippersnappers, what the Internet was like in 2007, it was glorious,” etc. 
 My GitHub account is mostly just a collection of scrapers to turn webpages into RSS for all those companies who have killed their feeds over the years. RSS and…
Sir Clive launched the greatest home computer of all time on April 23rd 1982, almost 40 years ago. I got mine in late 1982 and I still have it. Better, faster, stronger. 
 
 I wanted to do something to mark the occasion and decided to play around with Z88DK , a C Compiler and toolchain for 8-bit micros like the Speccy. It runs on Windows, Mac and Linux and it turned out to be ridiculously…
Two things happened in early 2012 that have made the past almost-decade a geeky joy - I discovered the Arduino project and the first Raspberry Pi was released. Since then I’ve had a ridiculous amount of fun with both and built a ton of useful and useless projects. 
 Despite having a Masters degree in Electronics, I’ve never worked as a Electronic Engineer and have always lived in…
It looks like I first started talking about MongoDB online back in 2011 - We’ve come a long way baby. 
 Right, need to finish watching the MongoDB vids (easier than I thought) and then do an Amazon ELB setup for kicks. — Conor O'Neill (@conoro) May 28, 2011 
 Mongo has remained one of my favourite tools for getting things done. I always think that’s why it succeeded.…
Every Halloween for the past decade or so, I’ve built something silly to scare or entertain the trick-or-treaters. Some years it works brilliantly, other years, not so well. But the basic idea is always the same - detect arrival of kids and use sound/light/motion to jump-scare them. 
 And every Halloween is a last-minute race to assemble electronics, plastic, duct-tape and code. That…
TL;DR - Gordon Williams has a new Espruino Kickstarter for the fabulous Bangle.js 2 . Go and back the project and enjoy every geeky minute of playing with it. I have one of the devices already and it’s a massive leap forward over V1. Imagine running JavaScript and TensorFlow Micro machine learning on your wrist! 
 
 I’m still not sure how I heard about the Espruino project…
As long-time readers of my blog(s) know, I come from an Embedded Systems background and still love to play with home electronics and IoT. And of course, since last year I’ve been noodling around with CO2 monitors and other environmental sensors because of you-know-what. 
 So I decided to see if I could connect my sensor setup to Low Code platforms like Node-RED, parse the values, persist…
I saw two related threads over the past few days about computers in education. 
 Walter retweeted one which called the Rasperry Pi a failure as it didn’t achieve its original mission. 
 Clickbait title time: The Raspberry Pi failed (a thread). The original mission statement of the Pi was to be a modern BBC computer - a cheap educational resource that could be scattered throughout…
Gen-X nerds continue to ruin the internet for Gen-Z by implementing RSS feeds for TikTok 😁 
 
 I was really intrigued by the launch of GitHub OCTO Flat Data , having already been a longtime fan of Simon Willison’s work (all the way back to the early days of Django). There is something very powerful in there that is not obvious on first look. Connecting it to Low-Code platforms could…
My Huawei P30 Pro takes great panoramic photos but Instagram isn’t able to use them properly. The trick is to split them into multiple 1080x1080 photos (up to 10 of them) and include all of them in one post. People can then swipe right and left to get a pseudo-panoramic view. 
 
 There are lots of ad-supported or pay-for apps to do this in the Google Play Store. But I figured it was…
Many of us remember the cultural ignorance of Yahoo deleting GeoCities and Twitter deleting Posterous off the web. Those responsible are no better than library arsonists. 
 Whether you think all of that published creativity was rubbish or amazing, there is something very wrong with it all just disappearing. The Internet Archive does an amazing job but it’s simply impossible for it to…
I’ve been thinking about tools for non-developers for several years. It seems to me that all the big players are leaving behind this important group. They keep talking about citizen developers, low-code and no-code. But the focus is on “code”, so most of the world will self-select out of using any of those tools, including the no-code ones. Even the title of Satya Nadella’s…
It’s always this time of year when I say I’ll definitely blog more next year. I was also sure I’d blog tons during lockdown but I was busy doing other things. 
 This is the type of post I used to do very regularly on this blog so I thought I’d ease myself back in with a simple one. 
 If you access Samba/SMB shares on your home network via the stock PCManFM file…
When NearForm Research announced Bangle.js at NodeConf EU with Gordon Williams from Espruino , we highlighted the uniqueness of having an inexpensive off-the-shelf Chinese smartwatch running both JavaScript and Google’s TensorFlow Lite for Microcontrollers . 
 Whilst hardcore technology people got the implications of this, most people didn’t. You can now run Machine Learning models…
Like many people I’m excited by all of the possibilities opened up with WebAssembly/WASM . Most recently I’ve been keeping an eye on Wasmer and similar projects that enable WASM outside of the browser. 
 So when I saw that you can now run it on a Raspberry Pi , I had to give it a try. But it’s not quite as straightforward as the article suggests and this is what I had to do…
First things first, Gordon Williams’s KickStarter for Bangle.js finishes in three days. If you have interest in any of: sustainable Open Source, JavaScript, Machine Learning, wearables, Open APIs, health, hacking or IOT, you should back it. Heck even if you want to see what Chinese manufacturers are able to cram into an inexpensive device in 2019, you should get one. 
 
 Second - how…
Ten years ago today, I received my first Android phone, an HTC G1, from a US eBay seller. 
 Here it is, still working! It’s sitting on an Amazon Fire HD (stunningly good value) beside a Huawei Honor Play (a stand-in for my broken Galaxy S8+ and a fantastic phone at a crazy low price). 
 
 It’s hard to imagine now, but back then, Android was nowhere. The G1 was the first…
For nearly 10 years I relied on Twitter as my primary source of news. Now that I have left Twitter and Facebook mostly behind, I have turned back to email newsletters and RSS for non-tech news. I never stopped using RSS for tech news. 
 Of course, in that time, many news sites have forgotten about RSS. e.g. The Cork Evening Echo in Ireland has some pages that refer to RSS but they are no…

 Ben Heckendorn recently ended his YouTube show with Element14 after several years of wonderful maker videos. Whilst the channel continues with a new name and other presenters, Ben has moved on. 
 I had a hiatus from electronics for 20 years after I left UCD Elec Eng in 1992. In 2012 I discovered the world of Arduino and quite soon after, the Raspberry Pi launched. I’ve had so much…
I gave up on Twitter in Nov 2017 due to their complete inaction around 
online abuse, particularly that of women. I setup a Mastodon account at 
that time and didn’t use it much initially but ramped up activity recently. 
 Despite all the articles written recently about how Mastodon is the nice 
anti-Twitter, the sad reality is that asshole behaviour has nothing to do…
My most productive period of blogging here was when I used the late lamented Posterous . That was due to its blogging-by-email feature. Whilst a similar feature is available for hosted blogs like WordPress, things are a lot more difficult if you have a static blog. 
 That Posterous blog (e.g. this one) was converted to several other systems over the years and is currently generated by Hugo .…
My RasPad arrived this morning and I’m very impressed after just a few minutes of checking it out. 
 
 I grabbed a Pi3 that has RetroPie installed on it and inserted it into the bay. 
 
 Loved playing SNES Galaxians at lunchtime! 
 
 Update October 13th 2018 - Dead RasPad
 For a few weeks the RasPad was awesome. I had a Pi3+ installed and a wireless keyboard. I…
I have almost completed a simple new tool which enables you to send blog 
content via email. The emails are converted to Markdown files and then 
uploaded to my Hugo source repo, along with any inline images. 
 CircleCI then automatically rebuilds and redeploys my blog to S3. 
 I’ll post full details and source code over the next few days. 

Anyone who has any interaction with technology benefits from all of the work done by Open Source developers around the world from the past few decades. Unfortunately there are far more takers than givers. I think there is a strong chance that many OSS developers will become burnt out and disenchanted with building things for free when others reap the commercial rewards. 
 Many of the Chinese…
The 1980s home computer retro scene remains very vibrant. I dip a toe in every so often and recently have been enjoying the new Speccy games that I’ve found on Indie Retro News . 
 One thing that caught my eye with these releases was the mentions of “engines”. It turns out that people have been building games engines for the ZX Spectrum for years. Mostly in C it seems and…
Yesterday I read that Open Source is offically 20 years old . This doesn’t mean free software or GNU or anything like that, just the definition and initiative itself. It made me think about all of open source (lower case) and free software that’s had an impact on me since I was a teenager. Here’s that as a quick brain-dump. I’m sure I’ve missed tons and will update as…
One of the all-time great tools of the internet era is youtube-dl . It enables you to download any YouTube video for watching offline/later. It has been a fantastic boon over the years for watching all my hundreds of subscribed channels when in planes, trains, automobiles and treadmills. It’s also the basis for my own YTPodders tool for generating podcasts from videos. 
 Normally I run…
If you attended NodeConf EU 2017 in Kilkenny, Ireland, you’ll know all about the digital badge powered by Espruino that we created with Gordon Williams. You can read more about it on the nearForm blog and check out the docs site . 
 I hope you’ve continued to learn about Espruino and the power of JavaScript on tiny microcontrollers. Don’t forget it’s entirely Open…
Our journey with media players started a long time ago by adding a hardware hack to an original pre-360 XBOX so it could run XBMC. We’ve gone through a bunch of devices since, with the Raspberry Pi being the mainstay since 2012, until its lack of x265, 4K and Netflix meant we had to look elsewhere in 2017. 
 Quick side-note: By complete coincidence, XMBC has just been released today on…
The parents both got new iPhone 8’s for Christmas. I figured it’d take 10 minutes to tranfer them from a 5s and a 6 respectively. Boy was I wrong. 
 Five hours later I finally had them both working ok. Hopefully this post will save you some of my pain with these magical seamless awesome incredible devices (as Tim likes to call them). 
 
 Builtin transfer process - Make sure…
Last night I setup a monitor in the 12yo’s room for his Android media box and his Nintendo Switch. He told me not to bother setting up the Wii. And I was kinda sad. 
 We became a Nintendo house in 2005 with my US purchase of the original DS for the 6yo. This September he started college. In that time we have bought DS Lites, DSis and 3DSes. And some of them are still in intermittent use…
I have a massive backlog of tech posts to do but I never quite finish the projects to the level I want and they are left hanging. So I’m going to start posting more WIP stuff from now on and hopefully they’ll be useful to someone. 
 I’ve been a long-time fan of the Espruino project created by Gordon Willams and have had great fun with the original board , the Pico and Puck.js…
Intro
 After the silly complexity and Hackaday article ! of last year, I decided to keep it simple for Halloween this year. Of course that worked out :-) 
 The kids’ favourite thing from all our Halloweens was the doorbell that made scary sounds. So that became the focus. As I hadn’t really done anything with my two C.H.I.P.s , I picked one to handle the bulk of the activity. I…
A couple of weeks ago, I took my Galaxy S6 out for a run in the rain and it died. Based on previous experience with the horror known as Vodafone Ireland Insurance, I figured I’d be looking at 10 days minimum to get a replacement. This proved 100% accurate as the usual completely inept software that connects Vodafone’s PDP-11 to Stay Mobile’s Commodore 64 had cancelled my…
Like my kids, I love regular YouTubers. My particular favourites are the tech, craft, metal and woodworking people who make amazing things every week. Those gals and guys have to be watched to really get the value from them and here’s a few more worth looking at too , of course not forgetting these other gems . 
 But there are others I love equally where it’s mostly about what they…
I previously wrote about using gccgo to build Go binaries for the Onion Omega due to Go’s lack of support for MIPS CPUs. But TBH it’s a pain in the butt. Things were looking up when it was revealed that Go 1.6 would have MIPS support but sadly it’s for MIPS64 only, for datacenter applications I guess. 
 
 However Cathal Garvey discovered a GitHub repo where some lovely…
My Car Insurance Broker, 123.ie just offered me up to 10% off my 2016 premium if I installed a driving monitoring app on my phone. 
 No thanks 
 But when does it go from “get a discount” to “we won’t insure you unless you install this app”? 
 The email: