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Giving My Treadmill a Brain ChatGPT really delivered on this one! "Draw a cartoon of a treadmill walking, with a cartoon brain added to its head" Long-time readers will remember the main issue I have with my desk treadmill from my acclaimed article about it : it’s dumb. Whilst the treadmill came with a companion app, it required me to start and stop the treadmill via this app in order to collect any usage stats. And there was no option to export that data. That was the spark that led to StepCounter 6.0 , a project to give my treadmill a brain. The Plan I'd get one of these little screens, which I could program to record how many steps I'd done: The screen is 0.99" across. Diddy.  It contains a  Raspberry Pi Pico and an accelerometer —all for under £20. I'd write some simple step detection and logging logic. And it would just work, without me needing to start or stop anything.  Requirements Wait until I start walking. Detect steps using acceleromete...

OK...right off the bat..this is a crushing loss for ChatGPT. I just wanted to be in the matrix! I didn't want to be in the matrix AND look like the lovechild of Rick Astley and Simon Cowell. Good luck sleeping after this, folks. A brief preview of the post's purpose Could ChatGPT do a better job of writing for this blog than me?  There's only one way to find out! On fading into irrelevance I'm used to feeling past it.  I've accepted that I'll never be a F1 world champion.  The two hour marathon? I think I'm gonna have to leave it for someone else.  Honestly, as I wallow in middle age, I feel too old to do anything noteworthy. I've now transitioned to living vicariously through my children and hoping that this, in time, will help them to make something of themselves - in the way I never seemed to manage. So feeling past it, with age , isn't new to me. But feeling past it just beca...

I've no idea who the girl going in the other direction is. Disclaimer!  Not a great start, I know...but I'm gonna start off by saying this article isn't as...scientific...as I hoped it would be. And I know my adoring fans flock to my blog posts for their unyielding scientific rigour.  I kinda hoped that I'd be able to track the use of the treadmill...and track my weight...and show a lovely correlation - that using the treadmill a bit made me beautiful and thin...but life got in the way: The sun came out! I got the treadmill early in March... but this was also when spring decided it had sprung...so there was sunshine, optimism, a sense that maybe the world isn't all that bad after all. So, could I claim that the treadmill had single-handedly made me all energetic and happy? Nossir.  We finished a house project! I've been quiet on here for a long while, because we've been doing a house project (a little more on that later)... this project has taken far more ti...

There, I said it.  I prefer working from home...and in this blog post, I'm gonna explain why.  I wonder if the fact I prefer working from home comes as news to anyone.  On the one hand, I've been an advocate for working from home for years, long before the pandemic made it trendy. Speaking of which, I've also worked almost entirely from home since the pandemic - so over five years now. I even wrote a whole blog entry on here about Making Remote Work Work ...So maybe it's obvious that I like it.  On the other hand, I'm often slightly outspoken against remote work. I dislike the stereotypical image of the hipster hunched over the macbook in a coffee shop...it just seems awful for your body and productivity. I also feel very sad when I walk through my estate and see individual people locked up in their individual houses all day working away. It all feels very dystopian and....unhealthy. Additionally, I feel like a lot of arguments online conflate working in an office a...

  Actual footage of me working remotely. I've been perplexed over the last year or so, like many people, about this whole Return To Office (RTO) thing. One of the silver linings of Covid was supposed to be that we'd all learnt that a lot of roles can be done remotely...and now we seem to be backtracking. I've not understood it.

  Being in this heart somewhat exaggerates my already prominant widow's peak... In my critically revered post about my trip to .Net Oxford recently, I mentioned that I'd had inspiration for another blog post. So here we go!  I also mentioned that I value putting different stuff in my head and shaking it up. This is kind of one of those things.  A few hours before .NET Oxford, someone in my team asked me why I thought teams, or projects failed. Obviously, this threw me a bit... I've never been part of a failing team, because every team I've been on has had me...so they were, by definition, awesome.  But, staggering humility aside, I cobbled together an answer around how a lot of issues are rooted in team dynamics.  Fast forward to .NET Oxford and I was introducing myself to someone. "I'm an Engineering Manager" I said. "Oh, are you still hands-on?", they enquired, "or do you just do management and architecture now?" As is often the cas...

  My biggest fans will note this is a different old photo to the one I've been photoshopping into images lately. This photo is from my meetup profile. As I'm talking about meetups, it seemed appropriate. I used to do a lot of meetups pre-pandemic...but I didn't really adjust to them being remote during lockdown (I've always felt that getting out of the house is part of the point!), so kinda got out of the habit. I've made it to a couple of geek nights in the last year or so, but that's been about it.  But, I knew a couple of people that were going to .NET Oxford , so I figured "why not?". Needless to say, it was really interesting! And it triggered in me a kind of muscle memory. Whenever I went to meetups in the olden days, I'd blog about it and share it with my team at work. So I figured I should write a blog post to "share my learnings".  That said, there's no point in me regurgitating content a little worse than the original presen...