On Tuesday evening I attended the “Zürich .NET Developers” very first event, with the topic of “Windows 8 development with MVVM Light”, at the Microsoft Zürich building. I had a bit of a misfortune, or perhaps miscalculation getting there, as it started to wet-snow pretty heavily just before I got to the Wallisellen train station, and the 5 minute walk between the station and the MS building was quite sufficient for me to get thoroughly soaked. When I got to the door I was dripping, and the first thing I said to the gentleman who opened the door on me was “is there a bathroom here somewhere?”. =)
But once I managed to get myself dry and comfortable, all was great. Laurent Bugnion gave a rather thorough and pretty interesting presentation about MVVM, as well as a nice demo of some of the cool features available for .NET development, on Windows 8. I might not be a fan of Windows 8 itself… well…. at all, but I’m definitely interested those development goodies.
Oh, and a friend just sent me these…. You can probably spot me in there. =P [Click for high-res.]
Last Tuesday I attended a really cool IoT meetup on the topic of “Internet-connected Art“. The presentations were great, and a number of truly awesome projects were discussed. There’s a list of the projects that were mentioned or talked about in the 2nd part of the evening here in this PDF, for anyone interested in any IoT related topics, I recommend having a look at these projects.
One of the project that somehow [I have no idea how] I had never heard about, and really caught my attention, is called “Delivery for Mr. Assange“. It’s an art project by the Swiss group called Bitnik. They sent a parcel to Mr. Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The parcel contained a camera and a whole load of batteries, so the parcel transmitted images of the whole delivery route, as well as the destination and Mr. Assange himself. Pretty brilliant, you can read all about it here.
Oh, yes, and I went to the “5th Swiss Big Data User Group Meeting” last Monday. I found out about it at the last minute thanks to a good friend, and I went there mostly to hear about “Splunk“, indexing machine generated data et al. I found the presentation rather interesting… So now I’d like to know, is any of you folks actually using Splunk? Let me know if you do…
Yes, [Dennis! =P] I did go to the Webilea event in Basel on Wednesday [and don’t even ask me how I was in Basel on that day…]. I didn’t write about it because I’m not sure what to say, haven’t quite developed an opinion. It’s entirely possible that I was way too distracted and mentally busy on that day…
At any rate, I found the topics interesting and the presenters knowledgeable. The venue was nice and the food was great. 😉 However I also felt that the presenters may not have been terrible well prepared. Also it might have been more interesting [at least to me] if there would have been fewer presentations, but a more in-depth representation of each topic would have been provided. As it was, it felt to much of a “cram” to me.
I could totally use one of these in the kitchen. Although it appears that the robot’s ability to properly cut stuff in equal sizes still requires some improvements, I’m pretty convinced that he still has better developed culinary skills than me. Related article here.
“Lightflow” is an app for Android devices that have multicolour LEDs. I don’t know how it is on devices other than mine, but on my Sony tablet, by default there’s no way to manage which notifications from which apps turn the LED on, or the colours for every notification. Lightflow allows you to do all of the above. You can assign pup-up or LED notifications for a rather long list of supported apps. This is something that I find very very helpful.
Oh, and the support team for this app seems to do a pretty great job too. I requested support for “FreeNote” [about which I wrote here] to be added, and in the next release it was there.
Looking at the Android app market, it seems to me like just about every developer has at some point or the other created their own “Note” app. There are more of them than one would believe… and I can say with confidence that I’ve tried every single one by now. =) I was looking for a rather specific feature: The ability to handwrite / draw and type in the same page, in a well formatted nicely organized manner. And finally I’ve found it. The one note app to rule them all. =D It’s called “FreeNote“, and I get the feeling that it will soon take over preparing breakfast for you too. You can handwrite, type, insert videos, images, to-do lists and just about anything else you can imagine. Everything about this app is customizable and there are so many features and functions that I’m not even sure I’ve used all of them yet. Oh, and by the way the to-do lists come with the possibility of having dates and alarms [that are now supported by Light Flow… I’ll write about that later…]. So if you’re an Android user, do check it out. 😉
Hey, I'm Aasemoon, and this is my blog which has been around since 1998. Childhood toy project that ended up growing up with me.
You can reach me here:
aasemoon.blue
Zorbas is my kitten. You can see some pictures of him below. =)
