The Alfa Romeo 158/159 shares its names with our fortnightly week note. The World Chess Federation (FIDE), currently has 158 member nations. 158 Kronois is a ~35km asteroid in the astroid belt. 159 on the other hand is CLIX in Roman Numerals. Strangly there is a disambiguation page on Wikipedia for CLIX. 160 is the number of characters accepted in an SMS.
These last three weeks have been full of interesting meetings and internal announcements. None of which we can share – yet.
Vísar has been busy sending more emails to increase the response rate for the parent survey. We then started three more surveys in March, a kindergarten parents survey, staff survey and another high-school survey. It is amazing the edge-case you find when you are dealing with a larger sample set. From random 403 errors due to CSFR preventions, which we’re not sure how that happens, to bad bug reports which could be coming from various domains, not to mention people with malware installed and confusing it with our services. We’re mostly on standby putting out fires and prepping for the reporting of the results.
LIFX bulb
We picked-up a new LIFX Wifi light blub recently. It is an interesting device to say the least. There is no official API out yet, but there are several libraries which allow you to connect to the bulb and issue commands. We had a go sending some random color codes as well as making a visual clock, one that would flash every 15 minutes. We are thinking of this bulb in a similar way you might a speaker. You can plug it in and issue commands, but instead of audio it is visual output. It will be interesting over the next few weeks as we find use-cases, but also as an official API is released with connectivity over the Internet.
Bric-à-brac
IKEA RGB Billboard
We’ve written before about 2× encoding on paper. This is an excellent example of a 3× encoding.
Interesting Car UI
With the recent launch of Apple’s CarPlay, it is interesting to see alternative ideas and interaction methods for a car UI.
3000 Years Old 8-Bit Music Instrument
This is an amazing musical instrument called the Sheng, which is used to play the music of Mario Brothers.