My new gadgets, courtesy of the Alexa Developer Perks, arrived today.
Category: Gadgets
These are posts about gadgets and any kind of tech.
A few months ago, I discovered that as well as the familiar (to me)
“Alexa, what is the temperature”,
I have been playing with Alexa Skills for some time, and having great fun.
Until recently, all of my skills were private. If you design an Alexa Skill but never publish it, it remains in Dev – it is accessible to all of your own Echo devices, but not to the outside world. This is actually extremely useful, as you can write your own personal skills to do quite specific tasks.
So I took the Echo Dot, a very old phone (running Android KitKat), a SIM from GiffGaff that I ordered Thursday and which arrived yesterday, plus various cables and adapters, and went outside in the sunshine to play with my car.
More techie fun. It’s actually fairly easy to do, it was the idea that was brilliant (is there an emoji for an exploding head?)
Plex media server has a “watch later” function, that can be used for watching *selected* YouTube videos. See a video while browsing, and want to watch it later? Simply open the video page and click a browser bookmark. When you next open Plex, it will be listed under your “watch later” items.
It’s always nice to learn something, even when it is something that you shouldn’t have to learn.
For a while now I have been frustrated how my Kobo only shows series information on some books, but not others. The time it appears to work seems random and unpredictable.
More news of 360° video cameras.
I posted the other day about my excitement over the new Ricoh Theta V 4K/360° camera that has recently been released, and then my disappointment on reading about some of the details. This ultimately led to me cancelling my pre-order for the camera.
It was while I was looking for potential better DNLA clients that I came across Plex. Plex is a server you set up yourself – either on a spare computer, or perhaps a Raspberry Pi, or even (with a paid subscription) on the cloud. From it, you can stream your music and video, with clients available for most platforms. My android phone has a client, my Windows 10 desktop has a client, both my Blu-Ray player and my Amazon Fire Stick will run it.
I started to write something about the home technology I am using to listen to music, then realised it presupposes a lot of stuff that I haven’t shared in detail.
So before I write about where I am going, I’m going to write about where I am.
Oh dear, I seem to have done it again.
I’ve been without a piano for over a year, now. My old Casio Celviano finally gave up the ghost, and ended up in a skip in December 2015.