I also got this awesome “All Terrain Robot” kit for Christmas. Once you have spent a happy couple of hours building the individual components you can fit them together to make either a six tracked all terrain robot, a forklift truck or my favourite, the beer stealing ‘Gripper bot’ that you see above.
Actually, it can’t move a full can of beer – but it does look awesome. And I even got batteries included.
This
plus this
equals this
Yay!
Yesterday I got a box for all the Gadgeteer bits and bobs that I’ve been lent to pay with. In amongst the cables we have a soil moisture sensor, barometer, a bunch of switches and multi-coloured lights, compass, gyro, GPS sensor, SD card reader, network interface, Joystick, LCD panel, OLED panel, network connector, processor board, video camera, power relays and usb host connector. I’ve already built a little camera (that’s the demo application). Now I just have to think of something else to build.
I didn’t realise it at the time, but getting a new Windows Phone has other benefits as well. In the form of a free Xbox 360 with every brand new Nokia Lumia 800. I think the offer has expired now though. I’d have got the phone anyway, free console or not, but it is rather nice.
I’ve had an Xbox 360 since day of release. I have fond memories of around 30 of us sitting in the dark playing Condemned when I took my shiny new console in having picked it up on the very first day. I have less fond memories of the “Red Ring of Death” and sending the whole thing back for repair fairly shortly after that of course….
Anyhoo; today the postman brought me a brand new Xbox 360. It is the new design one and almost shiny. It doesn’t have a hard disk, but it works a treat using an internal 4G of memory and is much, much quieter than my previous machine. Number one sun put in a copy of Skyrim and fired it up. Very, very good. I find it hard to believe that this is now a “mature” console.
The new machine works so well that it has now taken over from my original device. If anyone out there wants a “one careful owner” console, give me a yell.
Me, I’m off to buy a hard disk to plug into it.
I was up in the loft today getting down our Christmas tree and found a few things that I thought would be fun to photograph.
Remember this?
I think I’ll print a large version of this to stick on the wall.
My first mobile phone next to my present mobile phone.
I think I might have a problem. (actually, I think I might have lots of problems, but I’m not particularly keen to blog about any of those).
Anyhoo, I was taking back some Lego to the toy store because we needed some different prizes for Three Thing Game and I succumbed to the rather nice little truck design. I then spent a happy hour watching Naff Telly (so naff I’ve forgotten the program) and building the vehicle. It is now amongst the other Lego toys collecting dust on a shelf. And Lego keep sending me catalogues, and I keep buying things, and making them.
I wonder if there is an organisation for Lego Addicts. If there is, I hope it is much more than a 12 step program for recovery. I’d hope for at least 150 steps and a nice instruction manual to work through. With pictures.
There is absolutely no reason why I need the above. But that doesn’t stop me wanting one.
I took my iPad to a meeting today. I do love the device to bits (although the battery life seems to have taken a bit of a hit since I upgraded it to the latest operating system) as it is a great way to consume content. Unfortunately I was reminded again of how hard it is to make good use of it to take notes. While some of those around me were confidently tapping text into their netbooks and laptops I was trying to persuade the shift key to do what I wanted and writing “auto-corrected” rubbish. If I had remembered to bring the Bluetooth keyboard to type text in things might have been easier, but as it was I ended up with a few lines of garbled text. Oh well.
This kind of pattern shows why an SSD (Solid State Disk) makes a lot of sense. It is from Windows Performance Monitor. The top trace shows the CPU loading. As you can see the CPU is not doing that much, at best it is around half loaded. The bottom trace shows disk activity, which is pretty much maxed out.
I get this a lot, and I find it really annoying. I used to hate sitting waiting while the hard drive light flickered and my machine slowed down to treacle speed. Modern machines have addressed this issue by not having hard drive lights any more, but this isn’t really a good solution in my opinion.
A good solution is an SSD. It gives a huge improvement in the speed of the disk, particularly for reading files. Solid State Drives are also harder to break by dropping them, and they generally consume less power. I put one in my Alienware laptop and it really made a difference. I think I’m going to put one in my desktop too.
I reckon the best way to do this is to put all the system files on the SSD and then use an magnetic disk for all the documents. That way I still have space for all my oodles of files.
Bought a gadget yesterday. Fancy that. And not a small thing either. A Brother MFC-J6510 printer/scanner/copier/corns cut while you wait. I’ve had “all in one” printers before but this one is a bit special because it is A3. I’ve fancied printing out large pictures for a while and this one looked a pretty good deal. Very heavy. Number one son and I were visibly wilting as we got it back to the car. Seems to work well though. Print quality is good on large paper, although I’ll have to get some proper Brother paper to get the best out of it. If was shipped with tiny ink cartridges, which means that after six or so pages I’ve got warning lights coming on, and thanks to the “Magic of Photoshop Elements” I manage to waste a page of expensive paper when it failed to print what the preview showed it would.
However, I’m very pleased with it. I was particularly impressed when I found that it is also an A3 scanner, so I can get some really big pictures and stuff into the computer easily.
If you are in the market for big printing it well worth a look. But take a friend to help carry it out of the shop…
What happens when a game of Katamari gets out of hand….
I’ve discovered a tip that makes the Nintendo 3DS portable game console much more fun to use. It makes the games look better and prevents that annoying headache that I used to get after around 10 minutes of gameplay.
I just have to turn the 3D slider all the way to the bottom.
I dread to think how much of my life I’ve spend waiting for bits of iron oxide to arrive. By that I mean watching progress bars crawl across the screen while sectors on the disk are rearranged. My first experience with magnetic media was using cassette tapes to store programs. Things have moved on a bit since then, with huge capacity disks available for tiny prices, but I still get the feeling there should be a faster way to get at data. Particularly when the processor on my computer seems to be doing nothing but the hard disk is rattling like a bag of, er, rattlesnakes.
What brought the problem home to me was turning on a machine I hadn’t used for a while. Live Mesh, Dropbox, Windows Update and the search indexer all went nuts and for a while I had absolutely no performance at all, as files were shuffled about and modified. So, last week I ordered up a solid state drive for the laptop, just to see what difference it makes.
Answer: a lot.
I’ve had to do a complete reinstall of Windows 7 (with over 150 updates – yay!) along with all my applications and files. But the machine goes like lightning now. I’m seeing processor usage in the 90% region where previously it wouldn’t get above 20-30%. Everything opens up very quickly and runs well. Interestingly, I’m not seeing a massive speedup of the transfer rate on the disk, but something is really making things go quicker. I think it must be the access times on the disk that have dropped.
If you want a fairly low cost way to give a big performance boost I’d recommend looking at SSD devices. I’ve only bought a 120G on, but that is plenty for all my applications and the stuff that I’m working on. I’m now very tempted to replace the system disk on my desktop PC with an SSD device.
For your information, I went for a OCZ Agility 3 SSD. This supports SATA III, although I don’t think my laptop does. Easy to fit, it was a direct replacement for the original device.
Health Warning: Although wear (failure of storage elements by repeated reads and erases) on solid state disks is less of a problem than it used to be, the word on the street is that when an SSD fails it loses everything, all at once. With a hard disk you often get funny rattles as the heads retry, or parts of files becoming unusable while others are fine. With an SSD, when it goes, everything goes at once. For that reason I’d advice that you are very careful about backups and make sure that if the disk does fail at any given instant you don’t lose all your work.
While I was in the USA I picked up a gadget. Such a surprise. I went into Barnes & Noble, a US bookshop chain, and bought a Nook Color. This kind of a colour screened answer to Amazon’s Kindle, a portable e-reader for looking at books and magazines downloaded via WiFi. It has a nice screen and I figured it would work as a portable reading device, and maybe even iPad replacement.
Unfortunately you can’t buy the Nook in the UK, and if you do bring one this side of the pond you will be unable to use it as intended because all the content is region locked and you need a US credit card to make purchases. But I didn’t want to use it as a Nook. I’d read that if you put a micro-SD card into the device and turned it on, it would automatically boot from that card, allowing the use of other operating systems. I’d also learnt that there were a number of versions of Android out there which would turn this device into quite a handy tablet. So, that was the plan.
Armed with an SD card and a USB reader I set to work. The install process is quite straightforward. If you don’t mind the performance hit of running everything from the SD card it is as simple as just plugging in the card and turning the machine on. However, I went for the option of replacing the entire Nook operating system with the Cyanogen version of Android. After a few false starts and a bit of head scratching I managed to get a stable device built on the 7.1 Release Candidate. The device works with Android Marketplace so I quickly had quite a few applications running, including a free copy of Angry Birds and even the Amazon Kindle reader, which is actually rather ironic.
The device whizzes along quite happily, the only problem I’ve found is that it chugs quite a bit when watching TV from BBC iPLayer (although lower quality versions viewed via the BBC web site look OK). Battery life is very good and the whole thing is properly useful. I’m not completely convinced about Android itself, some of the operations are a bit fiddly and not intuitive to me, and I have a whole bunch of camera and phone functionality that is irrelevant on this device. However, I don’t regret the purchase.
If you are in the market for a well made tablet with good battery life and a nice screen, and you don’t mind getting your hands dirty, then the Nook will fit the bill nicely. I don’t feel to bad about “de-Barnes and Nobelising” it, I reckon they probably make a bit of profit on the hardware anyway.
Ages ago I found out about the Hypnocube. And recently I’ve actually managed to buy a version. If you are wondering what they are, they are made from a cube of 4x4x4 multi-coloured leds soldered to steel wires as you can see above. There are a number of projects for making them and now you can even buy them from Firebox in the UK, although they are a bit more expensive than the price I paid. They go through a very impressive animation session that runs for around 90 minutes or so.
What I want now is an 8x8x8 one…..
I’ve always been interested in photography. When I was young I used to read books full of theory about ASA film speeds, f-stops and depth of field calculations. One book said that there was no chance that a camera would ever be able to focus itself. I really wish I’d kept that one.
Anyhoo, I’ve just found out about Lytro. This is a new way of taking pictures they are calling “Light Field Photography”. Rather than using a lens to capture a single, hopefully well focused, image on a sensor, what Lytro are doing is capturing the entire “Light Field” from a scene. The blurb (and this highly detailed thesis) say that the camera captures not just the light, but the direction it is coming from. This means that by using cunning computation they can then built up an image which is focused after it has been taken. The photographer can make decisions about which parts of the picture they want to have sharp after the shot has been taken. They have some astonishing demos on their web site where you can click on different parts of the picture to focus at that point.
I’ve had a read of the thesis and I think what they are doing is putting a bunch of tiny “micro-lenses” in front of the sensor so that different parts of the sensor are focused at different distances. This means that you lose resolution (since the same spot in the image is being focused at different points) but by selecting the output from particular sensors you can build an image focused at any point, or indeed build up an picture that is sharp at all points. This requires a fairly ferocious amount of processing power, but does give you a lot of flexibility after the picture is taken.
I’m not completely convinced by their pitch. Modern cameras with small sensors have a large depth of field (most of the image tends to be in focus anyway) and they also have very efficient auto-focusing software. However, I’ve clicked the box that says “Let me know when the cameras are for sale” and we will just have to see how it all turns out.
My car (see above) has a very good in music system. Very loud. Like lots of modern cars it has a USB socket into which you can plug a memory stick. I’ve been experimenting with the devices to see which work. I bought this amazingly tiny 16G one but it didn’t work. For some reason the car rejected it. However, if I take a 16G SD card and put it in a tiny reader this works a treat. So, if you want to drive around with several day’s worth of music in your car, you might want to try this. The other benefit is that SD cards tend to be somewhat cheaper than USB keys of the equivalent size.
In Newcastle today to do some external examining. It seems strange to have just finished marking our student work and then go off and look at a whole bunch of exam scripts and reports, but actually it is very interesting to see how other institutions deal with all the same things that we see in Hull. It is nice to go somewhere and just talk shop for a while too. And there was a really good sky over the city which I could see from my hotel window.
The exam board is tomorrow morning. Last year I used my iPad to assemble my thoughts for the meeting. This brought home to me that the iPad is great for consuming content but can be a bit of a pain when you try to create with it. This time I’ve brought along a tiny Windows 7 notebook with a twisty screen, it is a Packard Bell (actually Acer) Easynote Butterfly Touch. I got it a while back. It doesn’t have massive performance, although things picked up a bit when I upped the memory to 4G and it will quite happily run Visual Studio 2010 and the Windows Phone emulator which is quite fun with the multi-touch screen. However, the best thing about this shiny device (which I don’t think you can get any more I’m afraid) is that the battery life really is good for 9 or so hours. In fact, if you turn the brightness down you can get close to the lifespan of an iPad. I’m really looking forward to trying to get Windows 8 running on it…
Anyhoo, it has behaved itself very well up to now. I’ve been using it to type in the reports. Tomorrow I’m going to flip it into tablet mode and use it to read the notes in the meeting.
This is what my Mole Wrench looks like when I can find it.
One of the reasons I had such fun trying to repair the toilet last week was that I had lost my precious Mole Wrench and wasn’t able to use it to hold things still. My Uncle George used to say that the fastest way to find a missing golf ball was to get out a replacement. On that basis I’ve just bought another one. Surprisingly inexpensive. If you not got one of these they are jolly useful. You can even use them as a mini-workbench where they can hold things so that you can work on them.
The Wikipedia site for Mole Wrench has this amazing link to Popular Science from 1935. A fantastic read.
This is not my shed, this is the showroom model. Mine looks similar, but with somewhat more tatty tools.
I’m spending a few days not on the computer. I’m either marking exam scripts or doing manly DIY type activities. Yesterday I failed to mend one thing (although I did also replace some broken pipe somewhere else, ending the day with a win on points).
Today I built a little baby shed which we are going to use to store all the gardening implements that I never use. I then bolted it to the floor and the wall. It has been a bit breezy lately and so I really don’t want it to fly away. If you have need for a tiny shed that is easy to make you could do worse. You can get it from B&Q here. It even has 13 reviews, 11 positive. I suppose it will shortly have its own Facebook page.
I really like my iPad 2. I bought it because I am always a sucker for the sales assistant saying “It’s the last one we have in stock”. And because I’d seen one. It is a very well realised device.The funky magnetic cover, whilst amazingly expensive (even by the standards of Amazon Kindle cases) does a very good job of providing a stand and protection, and the way you can turn the device off just by covering it is very neat.
I’m not keen on the way that you have to use iTunes to set it up and get things onto it, but I’m just about prepared to put up with this, even to the point of keeping a Mac lying around just to look after the iPads in our household. I reckon the secret of iTunes success is to run it on a Mac. My experiences with iTunes on the PC have never been good, and woe betide you if you ever try to remove iTunes from a PC. Actually, I do know how to do this, the first step is to reformat the PC and re-install Windows.
But I digress. If you do have an iPad there are a couple of programs that I’ve found very useful. The first is PDF Reader Pro which does a very good of rendering PDF files, which you can transfer to the iPad using the dread iTunes. Some time ago I bought Absolutely Mad, which is DVD filled with 50 years worth of Mad Magazine, all as scanned PDFs. The iPad is wonderful for reading this, so now I can carry around a few years worth of Mad for reading. I’ve just noticed that you can get National Lampoon on the same kind of thing, which is nice.
The second useful program is AVPlayerHD, which lets me carry around a few episodes of Veronica Mars wherever I go without having to fill up memory with large video files. This has very good presentation and lots of options you can use to make even highly compressed stuff look as presentable as possible.
Just discovered that you can get Star Trek, the complete comic book collection, in PDF on DVD rom from Amazon.com for 17 dollars. Very tempting...
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
A proper developer conference in Hull. Find out more here.
