Android gets an ecosystem of accessories
Yesterday, Google announced the “Android Open Accessory Toolkit” and this announce got me really excited.
iPhone already supports accessories, but as you will discover very fast if you actually try to hook up an accessory to an iPhone the official way : it’s a pretty damn close ecosystem they’re offering here. You need some special hardware, pay licenses to apple, and the communication with the device is very limited. Thus although it has been around for over a year now, few devices have actually emerged around the iPhone.
Contrary to Apple, Google has taken an open approach to this question using low-cost and easy-to-use components such as the Arduino platform as core of their Development kit. I’ve been toying with Arduino to build a quadcopter and the platform is really amazing by both its power and simplicity to hook up with the external world thus making it the platform of choice for quick prototyping. Doing accessories for Android was already feasible but with this SDK the bar has been lowered a lot for would-be developers / hackers to come up with incredible stuff!
This moves is definitely smart, and I can’t wait to see the first projects taking advantage of this capability.
Diveboard: Track, Share and Explore Scuba Diving#
Diveboard's logbook
I’ve been really silent lately, and it’s not that I’m slacking – far from that ! Actually I’ve ben busier than ever, maybe even busier than at the first days of Wavestorm.
Over the past few month I’ve been busy defining and building Diveboard.
Some of you know I’m a big fan of scuba diving. Jean-Charles, my associate a Wavestorm introduced me to it in 2005 and since then I got really hooked to it. As a computer geek, I love metrics and I’ve always been very frustrated not to be able to easily share my dive profiles and experiences with my friends online. I basically wanted something like a Runkeeper for scuba diving, but with some more features enabling dives to find new spots and dive into fellow divers’ experiences.
There was nothing like that to be found (or old web1.0 unappealing websites) – so we built one !
We opened Diveboard last week following the “launch early” adage and it’s already taking up pretty fast ! (we just passed 1000 fans on our Facebook page, the site has already far more traffic than this blog and we made up some pretty cool connections with the industry.
There are still a lot to do before we can actually launch the site (and by launching I mean communicate broadly) yet everyone is welcome to start using it – and we value your feedback !
Encoding : 0 – Alex : 1
Mysql2::Error: Illegal mix of collations (latin1_swedish_ci,IMPLICIT) and (utf8_general_ci,COERCIBLE) for operation '=': SELECT COUNT(*) FROM `fishes` WHERE (taxonomy_id = 13540333 AND scientific_name = 'Abyssocottus korotneffi' AND name = 'малоглазая широколобка' )
If you get this kind of error message, calm down it’s “normal” and there’s a solution
Since Rails 3 although 100% UTF8 still uses by default the mysql gem which is NOT UTF8, you head to a big headache… the solution is simple enough though:
1) use the “mysql2″ gem
2) execute the migration script below
My Running Blog (FR)
- Décrassage de 8km après une soirée un peu arrosée… Et... January 24, 2012
- Chouette course, rapide au début (4:30/km) sur 4km puis un peu... January 21, 2012
- Les 5km réglementaires prescrits à petit trot … (comment... November 29, 2011
- 1500€ plus tard... November 29, 2011
- Petite reprise en douceur 6km, accélération progressive,... September 27, 2011
