Alfred's musings

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...