ByteSize #0 - The first one

Sometimes you see something interesting and you want to write a blog post about it but it seems like such a small snippet of information that it doesn’t quite seem worth it. Of course there’s twitter, an ideal platform for short and snappy updates, but sometimes 140 characters just isn’t enough.

This is my attempt at something in-between and a little bit of fun! Things that I’ve found interesting this month that I don’t want to write an entire blog post about but that deserve more than a quick tweet. And of course, there are the things that are perhaps a little off topic too.

IPv4 ranges for documentation – I’ve written my fair share of technical documents in my career so far and I’m sure I’ll write plenty more. What I never knew before was that there are dedicated ranges available for use specifically within technical documentation. RFC5737 has the details but 192.0.2.0/24 (TEST-NET-1), 198.51.100.0/24 (TEST-NET-2), and 203.0.113.0/24 (TEST-NET-3) seem to be the ones to use.

Teaching kids to program – Online IT training company Pluralsight have created some FREE basic training course targeted at kids to get them started with programming. Courses include one that teaches programming fundamentals, one that goes a little deeper with Visual Studio and C# and also one that covers basic HTML.

Robot Turtles – In a similar vein, Robot Turtles started out life as a Kickstarter project that I backed and that exceeded its funding target by a huge margin. You can now buy it from Amazon and Target I believe. It’s a board game that teaches children the fundamentals of programming.

Chairless chair – If I said nothing more about it you would be forgiven for thinking WTF. The Chairless chair is the brain-child of Swiss startup noonee. In a nutshell, it’s an exoskeletal device that allows you to walk (and maybe run) freely but can lock into place when you sit. Could be useful in the datacenter but I don’t spent enough time in those these days to make it worth it!

VMware Vision Stencils – Blogger Maish Saidel-Keesing has released version 4 of his stencils for Visio that now include some for NSX.

Usurping the BT HomeHub – An interesting series of 6 posts that replaces some of the built-in functionality of the BT HomeHub (such as DHCP, DNS etc) with some home-brew options hosted on a Raspberry Pi.

GoPro Dog Harness – Ever wanted to see life from your dog’s perspective? Well, that’s my wife’s Christmas present sorted. I hope she doesn’t read this!

Glympse – My favourite app of the year so far. First shown to me by Joe Baguely. It enables you to share your location from your smartphone to selected people. Handy for my family to see my progress when I’m on my way home.