Archive — page 14
Posted on 28 December, 2016
I've been working through some of the challenges at FreeCodeCamp this month to improve and expand my web-development skills. An interesting post appeared on their Medium page yesterday:
#100DaysOfCode
The idea is simply (?!) to commit to an hour of code every day for 100 days; missed days are allowed, but should be avoided and you should never miss two consecutive days.
Kind of a shame that I can't count my current run (I started on FreeCodeCamp](https://www.freecodecamp.com/) nearly four weeks ago, and could call this day 25!) but it feels like a good idea to commit myself to this; may be a little hard for the first couple of weeks in January (we have two major deadlines which will entail looong days) but that's kind of the point of making the commitment.
Wish me luck ...
Posted on 18 December, 2016
Quick update on the shutdown of Pebble — there have been a couple of posts on their developer blog which suggest that the watches (and their app store) should keep working at least for the next few months.
As a brief aside, the tone of those posts is a bit odd, given that they're admitting failure and telling developers who they're abandoning — people who have presumably invested time and effort into the platform — how much they're looking forward to their new jobs with Fitbit.
This is somewhat tempered by the fact that a decent proportion of their workforce have been laid off, but still ...
The fond hope evinced by the Pebble team that 'community developers' will step forward and take on the mantle of running the backend seems to be coming true though — a team calling themselves Rebble is doing just that.
... morePosted on 09 December, 2016
Sad news this week (the formal announcement came on Thursday) that Pebble is being bought by Fitbit, and is essentially closing down — they're reimbursing anyone who has an order which hasn't already been fulfilled, which is pretty definitive.
I have many feels about this which I may get round to writing about, but at the moment the over-riding one is just sadness; reading a little about what's been happening behind the scenes it's clear that the company has been struggling for some time — which finally explains why they felt the need to fund the Time 2 on KickStarter — but I keep returning to what a great tool it could have been if, for instance, they'd been able to get greater interest from schools using it as a programming demonstrator.
Pebble had been making decent strides to improve the developer experience throughout the year — including a package-management system (I've not played with it, but think it's running on npm or otherwise based on it) and adding an option to carry out the main app development in a flavour of Javascript rather than Pebble-C — but it was all a little bit too late.
Add to that the fact that they still hadn't really cracked making a 'grown-up' product — I was really looking forward to them developing an improved version of the Time Round, which was actually a decent-looking piece, let down by a small screen and (by comparison to the rest of the range) a ridiculously short battery life; and that the whole smartwatch market doesn't really seem to have taken off yet; and I guess it's not all that surprising that they've failed.
... morePosted on 03 December, 2016
One of my other interests is pens and paper — primarily fountain pens. I'm not a collector per se, but have a slowly-growing assortment of mainly cheap(er) pens.
The real fun of fountain pens is in switching between different inks to see what does and doesn't work for you — an ink can have quite different properties depending on the style/width of nib and the type of paper that it's being used on.
If you're in the UK and using any kind of bottle-refillable fountain pen, I can heartily recommend Diamine inks — these are generally well-made, reliable and safe inks that will behave well in most pens and aren't too hard to clean out of the barrel. Best of all (again, at least in the UK) they're inexpensive — you can pick up a 30ml plastic bottle of nearly every one of their 100+ colours for less than £2.50 and once you've picked out some colours that you like you can can get a larger (glass) 80ml bottle for less than £6. Personally I get mine from Cult Pens, although they're available from other specialist sellers and through Amazon.
If you're elsewhere in the world, you may find that Diamine isn't quite such a good deal (they're made in the UK, so any local stockists have to contend with shipping and duty) but they're still worth seeking out.
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