Widgets, Gadgets, Toys, Design and Technology by Adam Bidwell...

Welcome!

This site is my workbook and the hub of my thinking time outside gainful employment. The ideas and work on display in the toys section are inspired by my research and encounters with other people in the world at large.

Please feel free to comment throughout the site, but if you want to get in touch, then please contact me.

Thanks for visiting,

Adam Bidwell.

Latest Toys:

  • TrailMaker GPS Logger

    23 weeks 5 days ago
    In a previous article, I'd posted details of a web application to keep track of training rides, called TrainingTracker. This works, by recording your GPS co-ordinates while you are out training, then uploading them on your return. The tool can then analyse the GPS data to show you things like route, distance travelled, time taken and so on. As a companion to this analysis, I needed an application that would actually capture the GPS data.
     

  • Flickrpaper

    24 weeks 3 days ago
    Flickr images make for good desktop wallpaper. I spend a lot of time at my computer working, so I prefer something inspiring and a little different to use for my background. The Flickr website is excellent, and they have a perfectly adequate search facility to locate images, but I find myself using it to do the same thing over and over again. So, this toy is an automation of my usual search for wallpaper images.
     

  • XPath Test Tool

    24 weeks 4 days ago
    Ok, so this one is not a "toy", but more of a tool really. It is quite common these days to be building web, desktop or mobile applications that store some kind of data in an XML format, and those in the know will be aware that this eventually means using something called XPath. This is a tool to help perfect your XPath queries, so that your application is selecting no more and no less than the required data from your XML structure.
     

  • Butterflies

    Updated: 27 weeks 3 days ago
    Flocking is the term for the collective motion of a large number of self-propelled entities. This is a classic computer modelling problem and it is used extensively in computer animation and game development, to increase realism in mathematically generated movement. I started this project in December 2006, nearly 25 years since the problem was first modelled on a computer. The main objective of this project was to emulate this behaviour and develop simple algorithms that can be re-used in many other projects.