We bought Google Home devices a few years ago, and one of the things we use them most for is setting timers for things like cooking and washing. We have a few devices around the house, and for some reason they don’t play nice together. We’d ask for a timer in the kitchen and the living room device would pick up the command instead. The timers aren’t synced across devices, so this gets really annoying. As far as I know, there’s no fix for this. ...

A while ago I needed to start producing short looping video clips for a work project. It’s an app that involves collecting cards with real-life sport moments that we’ve been building. Each card needs a square clip of a moment. 512 pixels square, no audio, a couple of seconds long, sized and compressed to autoplay on a card without anyone noticing the bandwidth. We started as a team of three. We didn’t have an artist. We had lots of these to ship with more coming every week. ...

We’ve always enjoyed seeing birds in our garden and putting out food and water for them. As RSPB members we enjoy going birdwatching at reserves from time to time too. A few months ago I stumbled across BirdNET-Pi and it’s just great. It uses my Raspberry Pi to listen to our back garden through a microphone and identifies every bird call it hears in real time. The results are then served up on a tidy little web dashboard. No cloud, no subscription, 100% local. ...

In the past, whenever I joined a new team or switched analytics platforms, the first week was always the same: figuring out table structures, adjusting to whatever SQL dialect the new data used, and writing throwaway queries just to understand what the data looked like. This was the job. If you were a PM who wanted to have the flexibility and reactivity that comes with pulling your own data, you accepted that a good chunk of your time would be spent on the mechanical side of analysis. Writing queries, debugging joins, building charts, formatting reports. The actual thinking about what the numbers meant often came last, squeezed into whatever time was left. ...

GL.iNet Beryl AX (GL-MT3000) How I got smooth PC VR working with a mini WiFi router connected to my PC via ethernet - for £80. Background I’ve been wanting to try VR for ages and finally picked up a pre-owned Meta Quest 3 to have a go. While it’s genuinely fun as a standalone headset, my main objective was PC VR - I wanted to experience games like iRacing with proper immersion and finally play Half-Life Alyx. Since upgrading my PC last year I’ve been keen to push it to its limits, and VR seemed like the perfect excuse. ...

I came across a brilliant writeup on Hacker News about creating a Kindle smart dashboard with automatically updating weather, bus schedules and calendar information. The concept immediately caught my attention - repurposing an old e-reader into a useful household display seemed like the perfect weekend project. Looking around my house, I realised I had two unused Kindles gathering dust in drawers. These devices have excellent battery life and crisp e-ink displays that are easy on the eyes, making them ideal candidates for an always-on dashboard. Was hoarding all my old tech finally about to pay off? ...

I’ve played many, many seasons of Retro Bowl. It’s one of those rare games that are so simple on the surface but fantastically executed. It’s developed by New Star Games, and if you’ve ever played New Star Soccer you’ll understand why I was immediately interested. NSS is one of the best mobile games ever made, so this team definitely has pedigree. It’s not hard to see the similarities between the two. ...

As large scale online services, mobile games are often improved via analytics collected from users. Today I wanted to introduce several standard KPIs that can be helpful to people who are getting into the business of mobile games for work or simply for their own recreational game dev. I’ll be talking specifically about free to play (also known as F2P/freemium) games that are free to download then monetised via in-app purchases or ads. The F2P model has proven extremely successful at scale over the last decade, where players are motivated to spend money (or watch ads) and receive virtual goods in return. ...