Recently I had to rewrite a lengthy PHP script to synchronise a batch of products in a database with a Magento store. The key goal was to improve performance (as well as reliability, but that’s a story for another post) so I needed a simple way to measure not just the speed of the script […]

Dave gets this week’s “attention to detail” award, for making a 20cm long patch cable to go between two switches in our server rack, but still putting number tags on both ends of the cable so we won’t get confused about where it goes 🙂 Seriously though, we do encourage this level of quality control […]

We took delivery of a Raspberry Pi today, for which kudos goes to CPC for not only a good price (no postage either) but also fast delivery (we only ordered it yesterday lunchtime). It’s great UK-based suppliers like this one that set the standard for customer service, and while we’re all in favour of getting […]

Work stopped here at SteamDesk for a quick play this morning, when the first batch of SparkFun Arduino Starter Kits arrived this morning. These are here for Rob Miles’ hardware programming Hull Digital Hardware Meetup course that starts on 6th March at C4DI. The lovely folk at HobbyTronics have also said they’ll send us some […]

Last night, at a packed meeting of the Hull Digital Hardware Meetup group at C4DI, we enjoyed talks about using Arduinos and other microcontrollers to make life easier for amateur radio enthusiasts, and saw how they could be used to make fun robots. There’s a real buzz around this, it’s a technology that in the […]