At least 1 hour of exercise a day for 100 days

Exercise, Road cycling

This used to be called “My dull blog” and store dull details of training so I knew what I had done.  I have set my self the challenge of 100h of exercise in 100 days. Anything will do, a walk, a ride, a row, a swim.  Just something to keep myself moving.

I started with a bike ride today. Glorious weather, good company. 1h 18m at 24kph. Some way from where I was just four months ago, but it is a start.

So I aim to spend 6% of my waking hours until 29th December doing some sort of exercise. I wonder how long I will last.

Rosé II Done

General

2015-04-17 16.27.29

My first wine since the cycle accident is complete.  I left it to clarify for way longer than the instructions said, so it is already quite drinkable, and is somewhat lighter than the previous version and only 10.5% alcohol by my calculation.

The colour is remarkably similar, though I initially thought it had oxidised somewhat.

2014-07-16 14.56.44
July 2014
2015-04-17 16.27.40
April 2015

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beer next.

HotKeys

Geekiness,

I have lost the SELECT+START hotkey on the controller that allows you to exit the emulator.

I found the config file for the XBox 360 controller:

sudo nano /opt/retropie/emulators/retroarch/configs/XBoxGamepad\ (userspacedriver\).cfg

And added the following to it:

input_enable_hotkey_btn = "8"
input_exit_emulator_btn = "9"

This made no difference other than the ESC not working either, and having to three finger salute to get control back.  Frustration so far.

I found I could get those lines to work in the /opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch.cfg but it disabled the ESC,  I want to have my cake and eat it.

LATER: It looks like the select is now a toggle for the hotkeys, because when I press it ESC on the keyboard or SELECT on the gamepad work to leave the game.  Now to work out how to make the keyboard live for hotkeys and SELECT the toggle…

RetroPie notes

Geekiness

New Raspberry Pi 2 to play with.

RetroPie with emulationstation

  • emulators don’t appear until a rom is loaded
  • roms go in ~/RetroPie/roms/the right emulator folder
  • xbox 360 usb controller can be set up through the retropie_setup.sh in the Setup option
  • Then set it up for RetroArch in the same menu but this appears to knock out  SELECT+START from allowing you to exit the emulator
  • This video shows how to stop the annnoying light from flashing on the controller
  • Change the tiny text in the console through /boot/config.txt and uncomment the frablah blah lines
  • Micro Machines on Megadrive.  What a blast.

Getting to grips with android development

Geekiness

Action Bar

After fooling around with the excellent app inventor, I thought I should branch out in to real android apps.  I downloaded Android Studio and looked at the first tutorials.

Getting the Action Bar working in the second tutorial drove me nuts.  These are the rather hidden, not to say missing things from that tutorial.

  1. The openSearch() and openSettings() functions are missing and you are expected to add them.  I googled this and found a nice placeholder for a function thusly: 
        private void openSearch() {
        Toast.makeText(this, "Search button pressed", Toast.LENGTH_SHORT).show();
    }
  2. The icons have to be added manually.  You follow the hint and download the Action Bar Icon Pack.  Then you find the icon you want and copy all the drawable-xxxxx subfolders for that icon in to the project on the same level as the drawable folder in the project structure.  Android Studio automagically includes the right image in the right place.
  3. Finally, the icons will not appear if the main java class extends android.support.v7.app.ActionBarActivity.  It only needs to extend Activity (this is my guess, I can’t find it anywhere, but it works), but you do need the minimum API (set in the build.gradle to be 11…

Madness, but I got there.  This is all impossibly Greek to me still, but I did get it to work, so that is progress.

Things to remember:

  • the funcion in the java code is connected to the button xml through the android:onclick parameter!   Very neat.