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I’ve been working on another app as a home-cooked meal. A few years ago we had some solar panels and a battery installed, so I cooked up an app to show the position of the sun, how much energy was coming from the solar panels, how much was going to the battery and how much was coming from the grid. I wrote it “caveman” style: i.e. by hand, without LLM assistance.
I’ve made two paddles over the last few years - both for stand up paddleboarding. The first was my first ever woodwork project, where I fumbled along to a YouTube video and couldn’t beleive I ended up with a functioning paddle. The second was meant to take some of the lessons learned from the first and channel them into a slightly more ambitious paddle. I didn’t really know what…
I’ve been thinking about natural rhythms. I made Home Tide so I could tune in to the rhythm of the tides, but I also included the rhythm of the sun - by colouring the background of the Home Screen widget to match the hours of daylight, nighttime and the three types of twilight: I like growing some of my own food, which helps put me in tune with the rhythms of the seasons.
I’ve got Home Tide to a point where you can very quickly get a handle on what’s happening with the day’s tides by tapping on the map: This view tells you: How high is the tide right now? Is the tide going in or out? When are high and low tides? Which parts of the tide cycle will be in daylight? So you can answer questions like: When is the surf going to be working?
Earlier in the year I wrote about how I wanted to get in tune with the tides. I made an iOS home screen widget that let me take in the day’s tides at a glance. It worked - I saw the tide every time I unlocked my phone - and I had a lot of fun making an app that was just for me and my family - an app as a home cooked meal.
Five years ago I wrote: Over the last few years I’ve started a lot of hobby projects and I haven’t finished a single one of them. A lot has changed since then. Now I finish projects. Sometimes it takes a while, but I do finish them. Some of them even get written up on this blog. Most of the projects last weeks or months, with the occasional one stretching to over a year.
The tides play a big role in our home. They dictate when we play in the sand, when we swim, when we surf and when we SUP. For a long time I’ve been thinking about ways to be aware of what the tide is doing, even though we can’t see the sea from home. I had the principles of calm technology in mind. I wanted something ambient; some way to know what the tide was doing without having to…
We believe privacy is a fundamental human right. As such Home Tide doesn’t collect any data at all.
If you have any comments, questions or suggestions about Home Tide please let us know.
I made a toy xylophone for a toddler. It was a fun project and it didn’t require any woodworking skill - or any tools beyond a tenon saw and a drill - but it did take a while to get my head around some of the parts. I’ve put together a few notes here in the hope they’ll help someone who wants to do the same thing. The rules of xylophone keys The keys must be roughly twice as wide…
I wanted to make some toys for the young people in my life and I wanted a woodwork project that I could complete with hand tools in the kitchen. I found this and I made three of them. None of them work very well - that’s down to me, not the excellent blog post - but they were great fun to make and have brightened up bath time for the kids.
In the last post I started an experiment: I set up four NKN nodes in different regions around the world, to see which (if any) would earn mining rewards in the following two weeks. During that time I wanted to keep half an eye on the experiment, to make sure the nodes were up and to find out if any of them earned rewards. Keeping an eye on things nknx has a dashboard that shows which nodes are…
NKN runs on its own blockchain, which incentivises people to contribute their bandwidth to the network by rewarding them with NKN tokens. So how hard is it to set up an NKN node and can you make any money from it? Setting up a node Each node on NKN has its own wallet, which receives the mining rewards. To make it easy to set up multiple nodes you can also set up a beneficiary wallet, where all of…
NKN is a project that aims to create a fast, private and secure general-purpose peer-to-peer network. The idea is that if you want to create a new p2p app you can build it on top of NKN and not have to worry about reinventing any of the mechanics of p2p. So far, so good. Decentralisation is fun. NKN is also interesting for another reason though. In the previous post we talked about how blockchains…
Decentralised networks like bitcoin and ethereum make it easy to reward participants for contributing their resources, by sending them tokens. But those resources can vary enormously. People who mine bitcoin or ethereum are rewarded for verifying transactions on the blockchain. Verifying transactions is computationally expensive. So expensive, in fact, that by some estimates bitcoin uses more…
Summary Handplanes are pure joy. Using them is a joy, making them is a joy and they’re a joy to look at. You can make one in an afternoon, using common hand tools and any old bit of wood. People make them out of old skateboards, chopping boards and old planks. I made this one - my first - from an offcut of red cedar I bought on eBay. It has a slight concave on the hull, no rocker and a hand…
Summary A lightweight SUP paddle, made from paulownia and red cedar and coated with bio resin. My first real woodwork project. A fun project, completed with hand tools, in the kitchen, during lockdown. Inspiration The original inspiration was this excellent two-part video from Jord’s woodshop. Jord mentions a template for the paddle blade, which isn’t available on his site any more but…
🦍 This really blows my mind. Kong is physical cryptocurrency: Kong is an ethereum token in the same way Dai is. But Kong (the project) also mint the physical notes in the picture above. Every note is backed by an ethereum smart contract that locks up the corresponding number of Kong tokens. So if you have a five Kong note, there’s a corresponding smart contract that locks five Kong tokens.
In the last post we talked about a platform for earning interest by loaning out ethereum assets like eth and Dai. One of the many interesting and exciting things about ethereum is that smart contracts are composable - i.e. anyone can create new smart contracts that interact with existing ones. One application that uses this approach is Pool Together. The idea of Pool Together will be familiar to…
Compound is a platform for lending and borrowing ethereum assets like ether, Dai and USD Coin. It’s implemented as a set of smart contracts that control the interest rates and the liquidity pool (which is the amount of assets available to be withdrawn at any time) without human interaction! Why would you want to lend or borrow ethereum assets though? Borrowing If you want to bet on the value…
🦊 What is MetaMask If you want to start doing fun stuff with ethereum, without having to run a full ethereum node, then the MetaMask browser extension is a great place to start. The extension does two things we’re interested in. First, it creates a wallet that you can use to store, send and receive eth (as well as store, send and receive tokens, but we’ll get to that later). Second,…
📈 Speculating Now you’ve got some ether, what are you going to do with it? Well, one thing you could do is nothing. You could keep your eth in your wallet and wait to see what happens to the price. If it goes up: congratulations, you’re a cryptocurrency investor! Now you could consider selling your eth and withdrawing the money you made, subject to some fees. If the price goes down:…
A quick disclaimer: the value of ether relative to currencies like the £ and $ fluctuates, so there’s a chance any ether you buy will become worthless. Don’t spend any money on ether (or any other cryptocurrency) you can’t afford to lose. Coinbase The easiest way to get some ethereum to play with is to use Coinbase. You can use their website or app. It’s free to sign up.…
In 2008 Satoshi Nakamoto lobbed an idea hand grenade into the world, shouted “good luck!” and disappeared again forever. That idea was bitcoin and it kickstarted some of the most exciting areas in computing around today. 🧨 One of the many exciting things about bitcoin was the idea that you could trust the contents of a ledger to be true, without any central authority controlling it…
Welcome I’m excited about ethereum. I haven’t been this excited since discovering the internet in the 90’s. The internet then seemed to embody values of radical decentralisation, equality, empowerment and democratisation. Ethereum now feels the same. Composable, censor-resistant, tamper-proof programs that can make commitments are here to stay. I’m documenting my journey of…
I’ve seen a few tweets this week about how sales of Moleskine notebooks are up and it got me thinking about the stories we tell ourselves. I think you can draw a line that starts with writing a journal, then passes through blogging and vlogging and (for now) ends at Instagram stories and other microvlogging platforms. I think the line is about building narratives out of our lives. I’ve been…
Over the last few years I’ve started a lot of hobby projects and I haven’t finished a single one of them. There was the app to do basic Twitter sentiment analysis to tell you what the vibe is where you are, then the glanceable display to show the sea conditions at the local beach. There was the cross-platform mobile app that shows when sewage is discharging at the local beach (by reverse…