albitron limited

  Actual footage Say hi, James...  Hey y'all,  It's "been a minute", as the kids say. So, what have I been up to?  Well, I've been continuing my experiments with vibe coding. More specifically, I've been experimenting with Gemini within Android Studio - and its ability to generate apps based on wireframes I provide it.  And, actually, that experiment has been going quite well:  Not looking too shabby! I was doing this kinda piecemeal ("make a screen that looks like this... now, when they click that button, show them another screen that looks like this..."), but it was working pretty well.  So, what went wrong?  I became too demanding:  Yes, that's right... I asked it to change font!  And that's when things started failing: And even Gemini struggled to make their solution build:  But at least it was very apologetic about its errors:  And it solved the issue eventually:  Oh no, my mistake... it didn't solve the issue at all:...

  Show these two characters holding hands and skipping towards the camera through a meadow You asked for it, you've got it! Part 2 of my vibe coding series. Let's recap where we go to last time... Where we left off  We'd basically recreated my old excel graph and got it working pretty well:  Pretty!  ...But I'd listed a bunch of stuff I'd still like to explore: 1. I'd like to press the "yes please" button to the database question and see how that works.  2. I've not got as far as deploying the solution yet - keen to see what happens there.  3. I've not really strayed from the happy path yet - what happens if you upload something weird? How does it handle exceptions? 4. For the sake of ease, I've been choosing the CSV file manually so far. I wonder if it's possible for it to go grab it from the raspberry pi. In my head I believe this is a step too far, but I wonder what replit will do when something is a step too far.  5. I want to learn...

  It's me! In the Colosseum!  Good grief, James, why are you talking to us about Italy?? OK, so I went to Italy over Easter. We wanted a city break and my daughter had just finished doing The Romans at school, so we thought it would be cool to go visit Rome, Naples, Pompeii et al.  I went with fairly low expectations - I've only ever been to Italy once before, when my wife and I visited Pisa and Florence - and I didn't really like it. Beautiful architecture, obviously... but everything was a bit dirty, there were a lot of scammers everywhere trying to get money off you...and it just didn't feel like the nicest place I've been to.  But, it's fair to say, I had a blast in Italy this year....and now I've had a couple of months to reflect, I feel like I definitely learnt things about myself, and a bit about tech.  I wasn't sure whether these were appropriate things to write about on this blog... but I figure "what the hell" - it's my blog, I ca...

Create a cartoon of the person in this photo sharing a coffee and laughing with an anthropomorphised computer Vibe coding is a term coined by AI researcher Andrej Karpathy to describe a coding approach that relies heavily on natural language prompts to instruct AI tools to generate, refine, and debug code. - Google For a while now I've wanted to try vibe coding something from scratch. So, let's do it.  What are we vibing on? Remember my treadmill? I shared this little graph of my progress:  This graph was generated by manually punching data into Excel and creating the chart from there. Then remember I gave the treadmill brains?  The StepCounter 6.0 stores its results internally as CSV files. It would be cool to make a graph of them, as above. My initial plan was just to copy these CSV files into the Excel doc every time I wanted to update the graph... but could we do something better...Could vibe coding help? Let's find out.  How did I pick a tool?  I googled "...

Most of my blog entries are written for fun...to flex my awesome writing skills and to share a few of the silly things I get up to in my spare time.  This one's a bit different... I thought I'd write it for two reasons:  1) There's a chance that a combination of keywords ( DETA 3500 TRANSFORMER, RING DOORBELL ) might work their magic in the almighty algorithm and help someone out there repeat this project in their own home. 2) Should my house burn down imminently, it will be easy for folks to identify the cause ;)  So, doorbells? Yeah... I've had a hardwired Ring doorbell (2nd gen) for a few years now - along with a number of their cameras. And I should say from the outset, I'm not a fan.  They just don't work very well... I remember a few years ago when we were trying to sell our house... on a number of occasions the real estate lady was able to come and go with potential sellers without any of the cameras picking it up at all. And if people can enter and leave...