I'm no expert in the dynamics of flight, but I'm fairly certain that the props are supposed to turn.

Last week my AR Drone took a nose dive into the curb of a pavement, before pirouetting through the air to land on its feet. It's not uncommon for the drone to bounce around a little if it crashes with an odd angle, the flexible props usually bounce it harmlessly off walls, etc.

As the drone sat there I thought how lucky I was that it finished on its feet, and that I didn't need to go flipping it over again. I presses the Take Off button and watched as three of the four props turned, realising there was a problem I stabbed for the Emergency cut off button, but not before it flipped itself over and onto its back.

Read more…

This weekend I had my first success getting the Sony LiveView to do anything other than switch on and show "00:00". Ever since I bought the LiveView in early 2012, I've been checking in on the progress of various groups that have been trying to hack it.

The LiveView was an appealing gadget to tinker with. Nearing it's retirement many sites were selling it cheap, for example I picked mine up for just £12 from play.com.

With a little help from a python script written by Andrew de Quincey, I managed to get the watch running. I was able to control the LED, feedback button presses, and send message and menu data. I still haven't managed to get images to send, but it's only a matter of time.

Read more…

So I finally bought a new Mac. My old Macbook Pro was an Early 2008 model and has gotten fairly old (well 5 years old to be precise). It's still a solid laptop, but with a dodgy power conector, useless battery, unreliable optical drive, and an entire line of dead pixels down the screen it was not worth repairing.

I wanted something more portable than my previous system. At 15" and 2.6kg it wasn't the biggest, but it was certainly no Macbook Air. I was torn between the small form factor of an Air or the power of a Retina Macbook Pro.

After tinkering with configuration options on the Apple site, it was clear the 13" Retina was the laptop for me, and I couldn't have been more right! It's a lovely machine, and here's why.

Read more…