DIY chess clock

I have been playing chess with my son quite a bit lately. It happens from time to time that one of us will take quite some time between moves so we thought it would be nice to play with a clock. Which of course we don´t have and it makes no sense to buy one.

However it is easy to create a simple one so I just made an app exactly for this. I know, there are already many apps doing the same. However I know this one is not tracking me, not trying to sell me anything and not selling my data to third parties.

If you want to give it a try (Android), the app is available in the MIT´s App Inventor gallery

PS: Updated so that each player has different starting times and also to make it more obvious whose time is still running (button shown as red)

PPS (10th Feb): Updated with Pause and Continue buttons as some times we are interrupted while playing. While paused, Light and Dark buttons show in orange and have no effect until you press the Continue button.

Geeky Father's Day

Today is Father´s Day in Spain, so I gave myself a mini present, a new free app. The twist is that I have programmed the app myself using MIT App Inventor. Ok, not really programmed anything, but I put together a few blocks and made sure the logic holds.I started with this tutorial and it delivers what it says.
The main screen has a few buttons and when one of them is pressed a time stamp is created in a database. The set up page makes it possible to give names to each button (names not shown above) and a user name, so you can keep track of several preset items without always having to change the name of the button first. The nice thing is that data persistence is possible for multiple users as timestamp data is not stored locally in the phone but in the cloud, more specifically in a fusion table. This means each user can log whatever is relevant for them, things like times arriving to and leaving from work, starting and finishing homework, time jogging, etc. Names are locally stored for each user in his/her phone.
Surely there are thousands of apps which do this better, but the fun is learning how to do it yourself and exploring what else could be done. There is no point telling our children to think of the phone as a handheld computer if we don´t apply the same principle to ourselves.
The next step would be to use the same layout and the bluetooth connectivity module to link this to a raspberry pi driving a couple of motors. More TK...

Spirit of Berlin

One of the advantages of being there vey early on the first day was that there were no queues, plus I had the luxury of spending some time talking to the soldiers. They told me that this C-17, named the Spirit of Berlin, is stationed in South Carolina, which is a long long way from Berlin.
When I was a kid I went to an open day door at Air Base Torrejón, close to Madrid. I can still remember how huge a similar aircraft looks like when entering through the rear ramp for a child. At the time, I think it was a C-5 Galaxy.

Close look at A400M

When I first moved to Germany, the plan was that I would work on the TP400 project (the turboprop engine designed by a joint venture of european companies powering the A400M). As life has many turns, I ended up doing relatively little on this engine, but even so it was quite special to have a look inside and even sit in the cockpit for a little while. I also spent some time talking to one of the French pilots, which made for an even better experience. Merci beaucoup!

Food for the aero soul

I was yesterday a few hours at ILA and I really enjoyed the time. I arrived very early and managed to see most of what I wanted to see before it got too crowded, i.e. no queues! 

This is one of our engines, a BR710, proudly powering a beatiful Bombardier Global 5000.

More TK...