Status-Q

When you're setting up your fingerprints for Touch ID, take the time after registering each one to go in and give it a name. Then if you find one finger becoming unreliable, you know which one to delete and reprogram.

I think this is wonderful. Today I got to play with Gareth Bailey's Space Invaders game - a quick hack, he claims, which he put together yesterday.

This uses an oscilloscope as an X-Y plotter to draw the graphics, harking back to the earliest days of computer displays. But historically, displays like this would usually have been driven by a mainframe, where as Gareth's is driven by a Raspberry Pi.

And where do you get a couple of nice analog outputs from a Raspberry Pi? Why, from the left and right channels of the audio, of course....

Apologies for the quality of the video, but I thought this was worth capturing despite the challenging environment!

Sean Riley creates the Computerphile YouTube channel, which has clocked up nearly a million subscribers, and produces some great stuff, especially for the geeks among us.

I had fun talking to him about the early days of the Trojan Room Coffee Pot.

What better way to carry a bicycle than in another bicycle?

A few months ago, I enthused about the electric cargo bike that I had tried out at a local shop. Being without a car for a little while, I started looking at them with more interest, and I discovered that the awfully nice people at Outspoken could actually rent me one for a few days. But they're on the far side of Cambridge, so I cycled out there on my Brompton and came back with it in the front. It all worked beautifully, but I couldn't help thinking about The Royal Society for Putting Things on Top of Other Things...

Someone who wasn't quite so sure about the whole idea was my spaniel Tilly, but once she settled down, it was a great way to transport her to one of her favourite walking spots, about 3 or 4 miles away, against a strong headwind, and bring her back afterwards.

(The rattling noise is the little bench seat for children, which I'd folded back for this trip.)

Since I last wrote about electric unicycles, I've commuted in to work a couple more times, and have used it to zoom around the West Cambridge campus in search of decent coffee.

I still only get to play on it for about 15 mins per week, but it's good fun!

The Amazon Echo devices have a microphone-muting button on top of them.

I've just realised the true value of this.

It's so you can stop them getting confused when you're watching YouTube videos of other people demonstrating their Amazon Echo devices...

I was delighted to see, this morning, that my local supermarket, Waitrose, has effectively abolished the transaction limit on Apple Pay & Android Pay. It's now £10,000, and even with my fondness for some of their products, it's hard to imagine hitting that limit even on Ben & Jerry's Chocolate Fudge Brownie ice cream. So today, I paid for our weekly shop with my Apple Watch.

In fact, I pay for most things with my watch, now, when I'm out and about. (I could also use my phone, but that would be like the old-fashioned systems where you had to take something out of your pocket to make a payment.) Since I only really buy clothes about once a year, and I buy almost everything else on Amazon, there are remarkably few occasions when I need to use a physical card any more. (Cash, of course, is long gone: coins are mostly something I keep in the car as a kind of parking-meter token.) I even have an electric car, so I don't need to buy petrol.

The only places, therefore, where I still regularly used a card + PIN instead of the more modern electronic payment systems (which have hitherto been limited to £30) were when eating out, and when grocery shopping. The latter went away this morning.

If the pubs and restaurants of Great Britain get their act together soon, my wallet will soon be completely redundant, and I will be delighted.

Just because we don't have children, that shouldn't stop us playing with toys, right? In fact, one of the benefits of our decision not to have children is that we arguably get to play with more toys. Yesterday, anyway, I tried one of these:

It's an electrically-assisted cargo bike, which you could use for transporting the kids to and from school, if that's your thing. But we were more interested in transporting groceries or spaniels around, while still avoiding parking & congestion issues, and making use of cycle paths and pedestrian bridges. The electric motor allows you to do so with no more effort than cycling a normal bike, regardless of hills, wind or weather.

It's a splendid vehicle. Tilly was nervous at first, but seemed to enjoy sitting in it once we were zooming along a straight road at 15mph, with our ears flapping in the breeze, and we got lots of cheery comments from those we passed. Will have to come up with a good excuse to get one...

If you're curious, it's a Bakfiets Classic Short with Shimano Steps Electric Assist, model NN7STEPS, and it's available, for example, from here. Not cheap in bicycle terms, but not bad when compared to a car, especially when you think of all the maintenance and tax savings...

At last! Today, I finally managed to leave the ranks of those who have never commuted to work on an electric unicycle.

Not sure I'll make a habit of this mode of transport, especially since, as John points out, it is technically illegal here, but it's a thing one should have done at some point in one's life, I'm sure you'll agree.

In my research group in the computer lab at Cambridge University, we have a few fun toys. This is one of them: an electric unicycle; there are a few different makes of these now, this one is a Ninebot One.

I'm not very good at it yet, but it's great fun to learn - this is after I've been having quick goes on it occasionally for the last year or so.

It's more fun outside. They'll go to nearly 20 miles per hour. Haven't been that brave yet...