Alfred's musings

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...

I've recently made my son a lego camera. It's just an OLD camera lens, and a lego caddy that could be adjusted to carry the lens backwards and forwards (focus), and a piece of paper as a "display" or target. And then some more lego to enclose it so that we don't have too much stray light. What struck me with this thing, was again the importance of light. More light, better photos. And the same goes for Hangouts. When you do a Hangout (and I'm sure the same will apply to Skype or Facetime or whatever you choose...), make sure there is light pointing *to* you. The standard mistake is to simply sit with your back to the window. Don't. That means your face is in the shadow, the camera get fooled by a lot of light (from around your face), and it's just dark.. Like this... The picture above was taken while sitting on the red sofa in Google CSG, London. Instead, I moved to the blue seat, and now the light comes in from the window to light up ...

And then, of course, there are other ways to get Google Glass, if you wanted some, but did not yet manage to get yours... and you are not happy with the #Lego version ... Just print your own. A Googler colleague just asked me: "Do they work?"  And the answer, I guess, depends on what you want to achieve, what you hoped they would deliver... (Now that I've done both, I think the Lego version is much more flexible, agile, smooth and colourful... now #ifonlyihadglass for real...)