romilly-cocking.bsky.social

Some friends here follow my RAREblog. Old content will stay in the old location, but all new posts and notes will be on rareblog.substack.com My current geeky project (not quite finished) is to plot how the current varies with voltage when you drive an LED. Video below:

After years of blogging about Digital Maker stuff on blogger, I'm switching to substack: substack.com/@romillyc/no...

recent polling is just a total repudiation of the idea that full spectrum opposition to trump across every area was/is a bad idea

I just became a member of the European Movement, the only organisation with the courage to reverse the calamity of Brexit. Join me and thousands of others at @euromove here >>> www.europeanmovement.co.uk/membership

Join me today at 7pm GMT as we celebrate the 20th Birthday of the @arduino with a look at the best Arduino-based robot: youtube.com/live/Ylc84kA... #arduino #robotics #micropython

Today I asked Claude to create a FORTH VM. It wrote a lightweight implementation of the language for the Raspberry Pi Pico in Python, along with documentation, in about a minute. The project is on GitHub, and there's a short demo video. github.com/romilly/pico... youtu.be/fXhMrK3_kTY

Happy Pi day! If you have a @RaspberryPi and want some inspiration be sure to checkout www.kevsrobots.com/ideas/raspbe... #PiDay #PiDay2025

Is X down atm? Asking for a friend :)

It's our birthday! 🎂 The Royal Institution was founded on this day in 1799 for "the teaching by courses of Philosophical Lectures and Experiments, the application of Science to the Common Purposes of Life". In this 1985 video, George Porter shows us Faraday's lab, which you can still visit today

I'm feeling happily surprised this morning. At 7 AM, over breakfast, my wife and I discussed our plans for the day. I told her what my main goal was. Using windsurf, an AI coding agent, I finished the job by 9 AM.

@neuranne.bsky.social where did the data for your 'find your purpose' graph come from? I have similar phrases I'd love to search for.

I hope it passes!!

A great start to the day: my kindle copy of @neuranne.bsky.social's book Tiny Experiments has arrived. It's amazing, and the surprises start early. Anne-Laure le Cunff has made the front page accessible, by describing the front cover in text. First impressions: *****

Happy birthday to all the Pirates at @pimoroni.com :-)

I've been using Codeium's cascade AI coding agent a lot recently. It's pretty good, so long as you keep it on a tight leash, but it's often meh at debugging. Its "Ah, now I see the problem" is the equivalent of Baldrick's "I've got as cunning plan, my lord"

I'm now running an LLM using ollama on a Raspberry_Pi 5 with 16 GB ram and 256 GB nvme SSD. Alibaba's qwen2.5 runs acceptably well: see session screenshot below. The Pi is a key component in my current stealth project :)

Johns Hopkins is running a 2-day executive course on the modern space economy, led by folks from JHU Applied Physics Lab. Looks very interesting >> lifelonglearning.jhu.edu/jhu-course-s... 🚀🧪🔭

I released LLM 0.22 this evening. Release notes are below, or you can read an extended version with extra background and commentary in the annotated release notes on my blog: simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/17/...

Tomorrow at 2pm ET / 7pm GMT we have a pre-recorded episode of Tom's Hardware: The Pi Cast. This week I've got some new Pineboards Modulo Compute Module 5 and 4 carrier boards to talk about. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNQA-IP-m0Q

I've just used Claude AI to build a really useful tool which can summarise an arbitrary document as an editable mind map. Sample output below. Here's a friend link to the story: medium.com/@romillyc/bu...

This is a #RaspberryPi and CamJam event at the William Gates Building in Cambridge on Saturday, 1st March. Come along - it's always a lovely time with like-minded people!

Some good news re H5N1… A single dose of broadly nAb protects macaques from H5N1 flu. All the pre-treated animals survived, incurring very limited signs of disease vs controls developed severe or fatal illness. Protection from severe disease would last wks. shorturl.at/jfOo0 #BlueSky #MedSky #IDSky

ARRAY 2025 (co-located with @sigplan-pldi.bsky.social) CFP is open! pldi25.sigplan.org/home/ARRAY-2...

Many years ago a friend gave me an Arduino Experimenter's Kit from @oomlout.bsky.social. It got me started on a voyage of discovery that has shaped and enriched my retirement. Thanks oomlout!