Alfred's musings

Inspired by my very smart niece, Ilana. I’m no expert on how the brain works, but I do find it fascinating to understand snippets of how I can optimise this fantastic super computer tuned for *real* (as opposed to artificial) intelligence, that we all always carry around with us. TED is jam packed with fantastic presentations about this . Yesterday my niece told me about the early evidence and research in progress of how the brain process facts and data from short term memory to medium term memory to long term memory. From my limited understanding, I’ve translated it to a field I know a bit more of: Just like computers (or the cloud ), the brain also have various kinds of memory, some faster but more scarce, other slower and in greater supply. Data pipelines would process some of the streams of incoming data, and keep relevant info, discarding noise. And eventually data scientists and analysts would process the data to find insights, or train new machine learning mod...

I've just been watching this awesome video... what a marvellous piece of engineering resulting in beautiful music! I want one at home. And as it's NXT based, I wonder if I have any excuse left... except for a shortage of marbles!

I've bought "my son" a Bixler from Hobby King recently. (Don't buy from Hobby King without reading reviews about them... I was forced to pay double for the kit with post purchase shipping and then customs fees.) It's a beautiful and BIG aeroplane. It *just* fits snugly on the back seat of a BMW. Building it was not trivial for someone with zero RC experience, but I got there in the end. I really enjoyed the challenge. And after building it, I could not wait patiently to first do this with someone experienced, so early morning, as the sun rose and the mist was just lifting over the field nearby, I had my first maiden solo flight. You will not be surprised to hear that it was a beautiful and frantic few seconds of flying, before I have an EPO cartwheeling over the field, ending up with the nose of the plane firmly planted in a heap of doggy doo. And the elevator broke off. Doh!  I can see it would be relatively easy to fix, but I am conscious th...

Part one started, for me, about 4 years ago, when I was invited to interview Captain Cyborg (or Prof Kevin Warwick) at Reading University. It was a fascinating day, and I saw and heard about how he connected probes to mice and men to measure and synthesise brain impulses. Today I saw part two of the story: Two guys from Backyard Brains build cheap tools to play with neuroscience (yes, play... also for kids!) and this TED video shows, in 5 minutes, what can be done . If you don't yet have someone in your life that control your every movement, now is your chance!

As I've spent too much time searching for this... I want to quickly capture this for the world (and myself) for future reference. SSH allows you to connect to a remote machine (e.g. a Raspberry Pi that does not have it's own screen or keyboard connected). On the first connection, your operating system will store a signature of the remote machine that you presumably trust, and then on subsequent connections, the signature is checked to ensure you are not subject to a man-in-the-middle attack. If, like me, your Pi is rebuilt or cloned, then you will see a warning, something to the tune of "WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED!" On a Mac you can issue the ssh-keygen -R command, but what do you do on a Chromebox (or Chromebook) in the terminal (or crosh) command? The answer is simple: ssh_forget_host Enjoy.

The title was just crafted for click bait... there are no great secrets in here. But I will share some of the things I consider valuable when presenting to large audiences. Presenting is a personal thing. You have to find your own style that you feel comfortable with and that works for your audience. So, there are no "answers" or silver bullets, but I'll share with you what works for me. First, it's worth sharing my freshest thoughts. I had the privilege to present to a very large audience last week... my biggest audience to date by thousands, and it was live streamed too... so it was a significant stretch for me. Here are some observations from that event: Thousands in the audience is not harder than a hundred I guess it was a bit more stressful, but such a big audience justified more preparation, which reduced the stress for me, so it really was not more painful or difficult just due to the sheer number. Other factors made it a bit more challenging, though....

Thank you to the BMJ for the wonderful opportunity to present the keynote #qfk4 at the International Forum for Quality and Safety in Healthcare #quality2015. It was a real privilege and honour to share the stage with HRH The Royal Princess and other distinguished presenters and experts. The content below is intended to provide links for further reading to support the presentation I delivered yesterday at Excel, London. Part 1: recent changes in technology that opens up new opportunities With the story of Mihir Garimella  and his cheap quadcopter, I highlighted four huge shifts in technology: Smaller cheaper more connected  and smarter (using data and processing power to become more relevant, proactive and our of the way) This change was mostly driven by the growth of mobile phones . As examples, I discussed Google Iris Google Nanoparticle platform  (and especially this ) Google Flu trends (and how you can do this yourself ) and this Jawbone...

I've been banging my head against this one: My v2 home grown home automation system is running on a few Raspberry Pi A+, and some of them are running the RaLink R... wifi USB units. Networking seemed flaky. From the Raspberry Pi, everything works as it should, but incoming requests are frequently dropped or terribly slow as described here . The solution for me seems to be to turn off the power saving feature of the USB wifi dongle, and I managed to do it with the advice from here : Add the following line below the wpa_conf line in the /etc/network/interfaces file: wireless-power off For the moment, I think my problems have disappeared like mist before the sun :)

I love a challenge. And I get a great buzz when doing something fairly unique. Please allow me to exercise my bragging right, just for a moment: Many moons ago, one of my photos (evidence, see url ) was adopted my Microsoft as a desktop picture in Windows XP. And yesterday, Google's Santa Tracker did a similar thing, just have a look at Trafalgar Square's Christmas tree. (Or, perhaps you'd like a slightly better version , or some of my other photospheres .) Spot my lovely yellow bike :) Well - let me use this opportunity to wish you all a very, very Happy Christmas! May it be a fantastic time for you and your loved ones, and may you experience a bit of the original magic of the incredible gift we've all been given.

We’re moving to a new office where we’ll all live at hot desks… a first for this Alfred for… oh… forever. I even had my own desk at school, I think. We all love change, right? ;) So - to make this a bit less of a big change for us, I thought of creating a simple app to make it easy to know where my work friends are. Use case: I walk up to my desk, check in quickly and easily, and then when my friends want to find me, they should have a quick way to do that. Solution stack: Below is a very quick and simple implementation of just such a tool, using Google forms, QR codes, a simple App Script and G+. Implementation: Create a simple form with just one question, asking for your desk location. Ensure the form requires authentication from your Google Apps domain. You could just get people to open the URL and select the desk, which would work. But I'm opting to put QR codes on the desks, each pointing to a pre-filled in form. This means a Googler could simp...

At Google, there is a fantastic tool to reward employees for going the extra mile to help... called a peer bonus . It really helps driving the right behaviour.  So - when I recently received one of these, I bought myself a DSO Nano . It's a fantastic little pocket sized oscilloscope that have now been so beneficial in understanding some of the electronics that cross my path. E.g. most recently, I could not get a DS18B20 to talk to my Raspberry Pi A+ (as part of my home automation ), but hooking the DSO to the pins quickly made me realise I had a poor power connection to thermometer. The DSO (Digital storing oscilloscope) should be able to *store*... and it does... but until today I've not been able to get the DSO Nano to write to the Micro SD card. Well, now it does :) How? I'm running BenF Firmware v 3.64  I've got a micro SD card that is 2GB (some struggled with more than 2GB) The instructions is, imho not clear on the steps to capture an image,...

I've had a conversation over lunch for a few colleagues about small businesses where I've been closely involved in, and some of the things small business owners have to deal with. Here are some abbreviated lowlights. Of course the real situation is more complex (and painful!), but I hope this serves as a reminder how remarkable any small business owner is, even if they are just surviving! Staff   In one business, we had a really good engineer, who quickly added a huge amount of business development value over his expected technical role, simply because of who he knew. He introduced us to a patent lawyer who was efficient and quick, he introduced us to a very senior decision maker in the largest customer, he gave us very deep insights into a tender before it was published, he gave us some magic differentiators we did not expect, he even got one of our biggest suppliers from the US to fly over and show us their yet-to-be-launched latest technology. The only hiccup ...

This video has been hitting the headlines about a strong static electric field at Google... and there are many rumours about what it might be. I'll tell you what it is: Even if some long-term Googlers might get jaded and accustomed to this effect to the point where they might not notice it, but I still get it every day I walk into Google... (just like 0xA1F days ago on my first visit while I was still working at Microsoft!). And ask anyone who have been visiting the office... the electric vibe in the office is strong and very much alive. It's not really just a bit of magic in the air: It's a spirit of optimism, energy, fun, surprise, expectation to make the world a better place... all things that I love about working at Google. And if you watch closely at the video... I suspect enough Googlers where on the balcony that the vibe just spilled over the edge onto passers by. If you are sceptical, just swing by for one of Mo's legendary breakfasts... and you'll feel t...

Tada! I've got my Raspberry Pi measuring and storing temperature data in Google Cloud SQL. And I'm pretty excited that it was possible (even simple) for a simple soul like myself. For context: I've been working on automating my home with home-grown technology, mostly Arduino (or Atmega328) based, but got more and more frustrated with the pain to connect these different Arduinos to get it anything close to "smart". So, I recently turned my attention to Raspberry Pi: The cost and complexity of Arduino + networking (of any sort) quickly exceeded the price of a Pi. In moving to Pi, I decided to also build my stuff around OpenHab because it gives me the abstraction I'm looking for to deal with the many different things I want to control. It also gives, for free, Android and Web UIs to help control things. But the action above does not leverage OpenHab yet. BTW - My electricity bill is extortionately high (because of poor home insulation and design), so...

I bought myself a beautiful quadcopter. The Hubsan 4x . Well, I say "myself", but that is one of the perks of being a dad. I could buy it as a present to my son, and "we" can enjoy it together, right? But of course, before letting him loose on it, I'd need to understand how it works, right? So, last night I took it out of the box, and had a quick flight inside, then outside our home. First impressions are filled with awe. It's super quick and responsive, so flying it requires a very high degree of concentration (compared to for example flying the RC helicopter ). After calibrating the copter and seeing how quick it could fly way over the tree tops, I thought a better place to experiment would be a big open space. And so I took it to our local sport field after a good charge. 3 minutes into the first flight, I could hardly see a speck high above the field. Wanting to carefully bring it down, I started to realise that I've got a problem brewing. ...

I'm privileged to have all the toys. (It's been said that I'd be happy working, even if it'd just be paid in gadgets... but I suspect the bank manager would disagree.) Over the last 24 hours, I've used my Nexus 5 phone & Nexus 10 tablet, Google Glass, a Pixel and Macbook. (And, there are a few more gadgets at home, just ask my wife!) I've come into the rhythm of using my Pixel at work, exclusively, now for many years. It's beautiful. And at home, I frequently use the Macbook pro, primarily as I need a BIG screen and code sometimes. My train journeys therefore see me using my phone or Nexus 10 a lot, but recently I rediscovered my old Samsung Chromebook 550c with 3G . And... it's currently the best way to do a lot of productive work on the train. It's got fantastic battery life, it's small, light weight, durable and the 3G connection is just incredibly reliable and stable. So (at least until I put Glass on my face again) the Sa...

24 hours over the weekend, I've been wrestled with installing Windows 7 on a new machine for my wife. (Her business has "gone cloud" also with their business management system, but the system requires IE (exclusively) for formatting the thermal printer receipts. Doh! If only they used Cloud Printing...) The install was slightly complicated by the fact that the desktop machine is not super fast (but decent), it came with Linux, and it did not have an optical drive. Also, after the first install, I updated the BIOS to try and solve a driver problem, which eventually caused a blue screen of death, and I had to start all over again. Not fun. But, even when ignoring all of these issues, the process of installing Windows was so painful (even for someone who has done this a lot of times), that I decided to extract and publish some metrics around this. Just for context: these stats all came from the Windows Event log it excludes the first failed attempt to install it I...

I'm developing a passion for helping kids discover and develop their skill (and first, love) for technology, and as I can't find excellent resources online about this (I'm sure these exist, but I can't find it yet! Let me know if you do know of some...), I decided to start to capture some of my thinking around this. Caveats: I'm a Google employee, and biased towards our technology. I truly think it's great, and will shamelessly promote it. (But, other than being a shareholder and employee, I'm not compensated on any of the things I'm talking about here.) Also - I have no First up: What should be taught? Programming. I think the most critical thing to teach kids, is how to use technology creatively (rather than just consuming via technology). More music making, than music listening. More poetry writing than just reading. And for the science/maths orientated kids, how to *create* computers, how to code. One key and interesting hurdle is that tec...

It can't be any surprise to any of my friends that I love the point where electronics and the physical world collide. And robotics is part of this. Hence my Arduino controlled heating at home , my banana clicker , my HTTP light bulbs ,  CAT6 Christmas lights  and cyborg stories . So, you can't imagine how excited I am to see some public rumours (I don't have more Google Internal information *yet*) on what Andy Rubin is up to now. Automation. So - as a tribute to Andy and an early "Merry CHRISTmas" to you all, here's another Biehler invention... just for fun, inspired by a singing dog in a shop window nearby. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVVr-anPES0 For those interested (really?) in the tech behind it... it's deadly simple. Now I can formally claimed that I've shared some of my (not so) dirty laundry on YouTube :) If only I can get that robot to sort out the socks, find the missing ones and put them away...