Lumia 1020 at Movie Buffs Fair

I’ve managed to get my hot little hands on a Lumia 1020. It arrived on Thursday, but owing to van driving commitments I’ve only just managed to pick it up.

I love it.

Now, remember that you are reading the words of a Microsoft MVP and Nokia Phone Champ, so you might expect me to like it a lot. But I really, really, do. People have been muttering that the Windows Phone operating system isn’t developing as fast as they might like, but I think that what has been happening is that everyone has been busy behind the scenes making it into a really “proper” phone contender.

For example, the installation of my new phone simply meant telling it which old phone backup that I wanted to use (it is going to replace my Lovely Lumia 920) and then letting the phone get on with it. Contacts, applications, SMS, call history, all magically appeared over time. The only things that caused the tiniest amount of grief were my own applications that I’d put on the phone because I’m a developer, and the ones from Windows Phone Application Studio, which couldn’t be restored because the new phone didn’t have the certificate. I can always put these back on later.

I told number one son about this and he just said “Hmm. Just like my iPhone does”. And yes, that’s precisely the point. Microsoft and Nokia have realised that for the phone to be a contender it has to be at least as good as the other offerings, and on the basis of my experience setting up my new device, it is getting darned close.

I took the phone to Hull Movie Buffs Collectors Fair, which was very, very busy with huge queues to get the signature of “Darth Vader”, or David Prowse as the man in the suit was called. There were loads of people in costumes. Above you can see the Ghost Busters striking a pose. This picture is interesting because it is actually a crop from the high resolution shot at the top of this post. If that doesn’t bear out the claims about digital zooming, I don’t what what does. I had my camera with me too, but in the end I didn’t bother with it.

It’s kind of intimidating when they all turn and face you at the same time. Although the Stormtrooper on the left did rather spoil the effect by then asking me how tall I am.

These guys were guarding the way out….

Anyhoo, I had a great look round and bought a 1966 vintage Thunderbirds board game that I’m looking forward to having a go with.

There’s another Collectors Fair on 30th November. I’ll be there and I won’t be bothering to take my camera.

Surface Decals Arrived

The skins that I ordered from Decal Girl arrived earlier this week. Each one has on it a link to a download for a background that exactly matches the “hole” in the screen border. This means you can get effects like the one above. I really like this, although if I use the same background for my desktop it makes things confusing, as I try to drag things into side of the device.

If you want to make your devices nicely unique and protect their surface a little (note the play on words there) then I reckon they are well worth a look. The picture, since you asked, is of a rock pool at the seaside on the Isle of Man. I liked the shape of the cracks and the blue sky above.

Pluggable USB 3 Docking Station

Can you spot the difference between this one and the other one. Turns out that I can’t.

My home version of “one usb to rule them all” arrived today. I used my own money to buy this one (just got paid) and I was feeling rather smug, in that I had got it for thirty quid less than the university had paid. Clever me.

Or not. Turns out this is not exactly the same. It only has one video out port, rather than the two that the office device has. The documentation mentions two ports, but that is because there is an adapter in the box, which allows the single port to be used with two different kinds of monitor.

Oh well. It’s not as if I have two monitors at home, or the desk space to stand them on. And I’ve noticed that the DisplayLink software, while quite splendid in that it just works, does steal around 5% of the processor. Which means that two monitors would take a much bigger chunk.

Everything else works just fine though, and it really is nice just to have one plug to worry about. If you regularly connect your laptop to your desktop I reckon this is still a really good bet.

Satnav Humour

Our car SatNav has a mode where it will give directions over another audio signal, automatically turning down the music/radio or whatever when it wants to tell you want to do. Today we were using it while listening to some comedy on the radio, which worked really well. It was great to hear the machine say “At the roundabout, take the first exit” and then get a huge laugh and a round of applause from the audience.

Startech Docking Station–One plug to bind them all

It’s been a few years since I went mostly mobile. I have a big desktop machine at home, but I only use it when I want to do some space heating, or move some dust around the room. The rest of the time I plug my laptop into network, keyboard, mouse, display, external hard disk and power supply each time I arrive home. It’s a bit of a pain to be honest. Whet I really want is a box which lets me do the connecting thing, but with one cable.

That’s what the Startech Universal Docking station lets me do.A single high speed USB 3 connection gives me keyboard, screen and all the other gubbins except power. It seems to work too. The video connection uses a technology called DisplayLink and lets me connect two external monitors to my lovely Microsoft Surface. There is some cunning compression involved in sending the video, but it seems to work fine with office productivity and software development, along with watching videos. It also makes arriving somewhere a lot easier. I’ve persuaded the folks at work to get me one for the office, and I think I’ll pretty soon have one for home use.

DecalGirl: A Model of an Internet Business

This is one of my designs for my Surface RT. I just like the colours.

While I was at the Imagine Cup I was admiring the rather nice skin that Ben Riga had on his Surface device. Turns out that it is supplied by Decalgirl. Ben showed me the web site and within no time I was wasting hours trying to find the perfect skins for my devices. Then I found out that you can upload your own artwork and I then lost even more of my life finding suitable pictures and uploading them to their skin design pages. Thanks Ben.

Anyhoo, the skins arrive in a couple of weeks and I’m looking forward to seeing how they have turned out. But for me the reason for mentioning the company is that I reckon that they are just about the perfect web trading operation. Their site has a snazzy design and is quick to use. Within seconds of arriving on the home page for the first time I’m offered the chance to sign up to get a discount on my first order. Then, when I don’t buy anything for a while I get a follow up email with an even better discount. When I left my partially completed order on the system for a few days I got an email reminding me my order is still out there and giving me a chance to finalize it. Then I get regular emails detailing the progress of the order and I’m sure that I’ll get more over time as new designs appear. And all done in a way that leaves me thinking that I’m not being badgered to buy stuff, but helped along with my purchases. Very, very well done.

If you are involved in ecommerce and want to see it done well (and by the by find some awesome skins for your various devices) then they are well worth a look.

GHI Game–O

Sponsoring Kickstarter projects is kind of habit forming (OK, I’ve sponsored two other ones so far). Tonight I signed up for the GHI Electronics Game-O handheld console. This is not because I’m looking for a replacement for my trusty PlayStation Vita, but because I really fancy having a handheld console that I can program using C#.

The device is powered by the .NET Micro Framework and even contains some Gadgeteer ports so that it can be interfaced to all kinds of interesting hardware. I’ve a lot of respect for the makers, GHI Electronics, they’ve made some stunning little .NET Micro Framework and Gadgeteer boards and interfaces over the years (we use a lot of their hardware in our teaching) and I’m really looking forward to having a play with the device.

The project has reached it’s funding goal, but there is still time to get in there and get hold of one of these neat devices.

Learning Computing with Cubelets

I’m always on the lookout for a neat gadget. And at the Gadget Show I found one. What you can see above are Cubelets from ModRobotics. The picture above shows a robot made of little, cooperating cubelets. Each is around an inch on each side, and each is fitted with a set of tiny magnets that allows cubelets to snap to each other and send data back and forth. And each cubelet does something. Above, from left to right you can see a battery cubelet, a distance cubelet and a light cubelet. Black cubelets are sense cubelets, transparent cubes perform some form of action. Coloured cubelets are “thinking” cubelets that do something with the data coming in.

A sense cubelet will send out out the value it “sees” to all the cubelets around it. The distance one sends a signal that gets stronger the closer it is to something. So above you can see the reaction to my camera.

This is a slightly more complicated device. The dark brown cubelet is a “think” one that outputs the larger of the two inputs that are going into it. The red cubelet is an “inverse” one that reverse the sense of the input. So, if something is close to my robot, or the knob is turned to the maximum, the light will grow dimmer.

This one is a bit simpler. The cubelets at each end are drive cubelets. They have little motorised rollers. This robot will run away if I bring my hand too close to the top.

“Programming” with cubelets isn’t really programming at all. They click together and organise themselves so neatly that you just pop them into arrangements to see what they do. They are toy certified for kids from 4 years old, and I reckon that is a place they will really shine. After a bit of fun and games you can get some very complicated behaviours, and start making robots that behave in a way that you want, for example things like line following.

This is my cubelet collection. I’ve no idea what it does, but it definitely does something…

And finally, as if this wasn’t enough, you can actually re-program the thinking cubes in C. The blue cube at the top left hand corner of my collection above is a Bluetooth cube that can talk to your PC.

This is the programming environment that you run inside a browser. It talks to Bluetooth cubelet and allows you to select cubelets in the network and reprogram them.

The whole thing is utterly charming. The programming in C aspect is a bit of a work in progress at the moment, although it does work and ModRobotics are very responsive if you have problems. The system is powered by tiny rechargeable lithium-ion cells in the battery cubelet that seem to last a long time and the cubelets themselves are beautifully made and look like they would stand up to a lot of hammer. The kits are not cheap, but they aren’t bonkers expensive either, and you can always get them “on instalments” by just purchasing a few at a time. Well worth a look if you have any interest in engaging children with computing.

Update on 2013-06-24 19:55 by Rob

The only place I've found in the UK where you can buy them is RoboSavvy:

http://robosavvy.com/store/product_info.php/products_id/3082

However, they are happy to ship worldwide, if you are happy to pay the gouging customs duty and VAT on the parcel....

Secret Agent Watch SDK now out

Well, the Kickstarter for the Secret Agent watch has now ended. They’ve finished up with over a million in backing. Good for them. I got my order in early, so in December I might realise another of my dreams, and have a watch I can actually program in C# and make talk to my phone.

I got quite close five years ago, when I got hold of a Microsoft Spot watch. That ran the .NET Microframework and could run C# programs, just not ones that I could write.

The Secret Agent Watch is different. The team have already released an SDK which you can download for free from their web site. This comes with an emulator so that we can begin making our programs now. With a Bluetooth link to a Windows Phone, the possibilities are very exciting.

Note: If you do download the SDK and install it you might find that the first time you try to create a new project in Visual Studio 2012 it hangs. I found that stopping Visual Studio, restarting it, opening an existing project and then making a new one sorted things out.

Now I’m really looking forward to December.

Logitech Bluetooth Adapter

I’m finding that most of my music listening now starts with my phone. I’ve signed up for the “all you can eat” Xbox Music service and so when new albums come out I can just download them to the phone and listen to them. Very nice. Of course, I also want to play music through the Big Speakers and that is where the little black box you can see above comes in.

It provides an endpoint for anything that puts out Bluetooth audio. You pair the adapter with the thing you want to play music from and it then sends out good quality audio to go into your amplifier. I’m not sure it is totally High Fidelity, but then again as the source of the music is a compressed file I’m not sure what High Fidelity means any more. All I can say is that if sounds fine to my ears. You can get the device for around twenty five quids or so from Amazon, which to me makes it a worthwhile purchase.

Things Come Apart

If you are looking for a really nice coffee table book (Hang on, Do people buy coffee table books any more? Do people have coffee tables?)

Anyhoo. If you are looking for a great book to pass around at your next social gathering, or just own and look at from time to time, then I suggest Things Come Apart by Todd McLellan.

The book shows a collection of consumer items that have been lovingly dismantled and photographed, even down to each nut, bolt, washer and individual component. The standard of photography is amazing and it really brings home just how complex things really are these days. Well worth a look.

Pebble Watch

So I  was looking something up on the http://www.coolcomponents.co.uk/ site. And I noticed that they had some Pebble watches for sale. They must have backed the Kickstarter at an early stage. Anyhoo, I’ve always liked different watches, and so I placed an order. And today it arrived. And very nice it is too. Very light, but not at all flimsy. And supposed to be very waterproof. You can see what’s inside here.

The watch uses a digital paper screen, rather like the ones in e-Readers. This allows it to display high contrast, high resolution (for a watch) black and white images very well indeed. It comes with a bunch of different watch faces which you can choose from. I like the big text one above. There is also a watch face SDK which you can use to make your own faces using a C program.

Obligatory unboxing picture.

I’ve got the watch paired with my Nexus 7. It uses the Bluetooth connection to display emails and appointments and it works a treat. I’ve not got a great feel for battery life yet, but it went through the day without breaking a sweat.

What I really, really, really want to do is make it work with my Windows Phone. I’ve a horrible feeling that this will be rather tricky, even if I pair it with the phone and send data I’ll need to know what the protocol is. This is one of the very rare occasions where I wish I had an Apple or an Android phone, as it works with both of them. Maybe in the future it will be made to work with my lovely Lumia, For now I’m happy with what I get via the Nexus, but a phone connection would be awesome.

They say that Apple and maybe even Microsoft are working on watches like this at the moment. I can see why. I had a Spot watch a while back and I loved it (although you couldn’t really use it in the UK). A well connected, micro framework powered, version of the Pebble would be awesome. As it is, if you fancy something geeky but probably even useful, you should take a look.

Gadget Show Live 2013

Went off the the Gadget Show Live today. This is our final trip out of the holidays, and has been much anticipated. We last went in 2010 (scared to find that this was actually three years ago). This time we actually made it to the live show, which was great, family friendly, fun. Including audience controlled video gaming, as shown above. There were lots of things on show (although there were fewer 3D TVs on display this time – funny that…) Anyhoo, I took pictures of the bits and bobs that took my fancy.

These robots are great. Just don’t ask the price.

These are a bit smaller and simpler, but no less interesting. They move around as a swarm. I’m very tempted to write some XNA that does what they do in software, although the hardware ones are a lot more fun.

There were lots of 3D printers around the place. This one looks nice enough, but I prefer Una.

What a pity none of these phone cases will fit my Lumia….

This is a “4K” resolution TV, although I’m not sure the photo does it justice. You can’t quite see the price tag, which was 25,000 pounds…. For that money you could probably buy a house with that view.

Get a Scope

I really am a sucker for mailshots (hmm. Perhaps I shouldn’t put that in the blog). Anyhoo, I got a mailshot from Cool Components advertising the above (or actually the slightly cheaper version 2 which you don’t seem to be able to get any more). So I bought one. It is a tiny digital storage oscilloscope which costs around 80 quids or so. I reckon this is extremely good value. It has an SD card that you can use to store waveforms and the whole thing is powered by a Cortex A3 and open source, so you can even put your own firmware in there if you fancy it. It is powered from a rechargeable battery and will go up to 1 MHz which for me is fine.

If you are not sure what an oscilloscope is, it lets you “see” electrical signals. It draws a plot of the voltage in the signal as it changes over time. The original ones used a cathode ray tube that drew a single dot on the screen. The dot was moved across the screen at a regular rate by a timebase generator and the value of the voltage in the signal was used to control the height of the dot. If the signal was regular then you could take a a peek at the waveform and see what it was doing.  Newer ones are of course digital. The input voltage is converted into numbers which are then used to draw a graph on the screen.

Sometimes, when a circuit just doesn’t work you need to take a look at what is happening. A voltmeter will tell you if there is anything on the wire, but not how it is changing over time. If you have any hardware aspirations I think a little device like this is a pretty good investment, and it only costs around the same as a couple of video games.

Making Boxes with Software

This is the base design I came up with. You can also see one of the Gadgeteer part designs where it will be fitted in the finished product.

I’ve been designing a box for the “Door of Mystery” Gadgeteer device that I built for the Red Nose Day event. But I’m very lazy. I don’t want to have to lay out the various elements by hand and position them individually. I want this to happen automatically. So I’ve wanted to write a program to do this. Peter likes OpenSCAD, so I went there first.  OpenSCAD lets you create 3D images programmatically. It is really easy to use, and you can preview your designs very quickly.

module panel(width, height, x, y)
{
    translate([x,y,0])
    {
         cube(size=[width, height, baseDepth]);
    }
}

I used this tiny snippet of OpenSCAD to place a panel on the drawing surface. I move the axis to the position of the panel and then create a box of the required size. You can perform unions to merge things together and differences to cut one shape from another. In no time at all I was programmatically creating bases for the Gadgeteer devices. And then I hit a brick wall. What I really wanted to do was have the program work out where each device goes in relation to the other ones and lay out the box contents.To do that my program has to keep track of where things have been put. This means that I need some variables.

OpenSCAD does not provide variables as such. It provides constants (such as baseDepth above) but these are evaluated at compile time, and so I can’t use them to keep track of things as the program runs. This is not necessarily a criticism of OpenSCAD, it isn’t really meant to run programs, but it does mean I can’t use it.

So I went back to my old friend FreeCAD. I first used this ages ago, when I made the case for my Tweet Printer. FreeCAD can be controlled by Python programs and I’ve always fancied learning a bit of Python, so of I went. The designer has a Python console into which you can paste and run lumps of code. You can also add libraries and user interfaces on top, but I was happy to cut and paste for now. All the actions you take in the designer are exposed as Python calls via the console, which makes it quite easy to figure out how to do things. You just do it in the designer and then look at what comes out on the console. There is also an API reference which tells you how the commands work.

def makeBoard(self,x,y):
    b = Part.makeBox(self.width,self.height, 5, Base.Vector(x,y,0))
    return b

This method is a member of my “Filler” class which places the filler (which has a width and a height) at a particular place on the design. Note that the filler is 5mm thick in the above code. The program can take the object that is returned and fuse or cut it with other shapes as you build up the finished design. By the end of all my fiddling I’ve got a class hierarchy of Gadgeteer device specifications and a layout engine that will place them in a box of a particular size.

def MakeTop():
    doc=FreeCAD.newDocument()
    f1 = Filler("Filler", 5,25)
    f2 = Filler("Filler", 6.5,25)
    f3 = Filler("Filler", 6.5,20)
    rfid = RFIDReader("rfid", "landscape")
    camera = Camera("camera", "landscape")
    display = DisplayT35("display", "portrait")    
    topComponents = [rfid,f1,camera,f2,display,f3]
    test = Layout(91,121,topComponents)
    board = test.layout()
    Part.show(board)
    Gui.SendMsgToActiveView("ViewFit")
    Gui.activeDocument().activeView().viewAxometric()

The MakeTop method creates the top of the box which contains an RFID reader, a touch display and a camera. These are laid out in an area with a dimension of 91x121 mm. Each component can be either “landscape” or “portrait” orientation and you can create filler elements to push things around in their row. The design method is given a list of components and an output area. The finished design looks like this:

These elements cut extra holes for themselves so that they show through the front of the box. The layout method also creates the sides and puts fixing holes in them, so that I can join the top and the bottom together. If I want different size of panel thicknesses I just change the static members that control these values and run the method again. If I want to make a different design I just create a new method which contains the devices that want.

The system is not completely automatic, what I end up doing is fiddling with the output from the method and then changing the orientation and adding fillers until I get what I want. The good news though is that it provides a really quick way of making Gadgeteer boxes. I’m going to have a go at printing the designs later in the week.

I find it fascinating that I’m now writing programs where the output is a physical artefact. We do live in interesting times.

Red Nose Day Lecture now online

I’ve lovingly rendered the entire lecture, along with slides, into a 28 minute or so action packed video which is packed with action. You can find it above. Thanks again to everyone who came along. To Simon and Peter for taking the videos and Amanda for collecting money. I’d also like to thank the lovely folks at Gadgeteer (particularly Scarlet and Clare) for sending me such a wonderful prize. If you want to do something with Gadgeteer (and you really should) you can find out more about the platform here:

http://www.netmf.com/gadgeteer/

Oh, and there have been some mutterings about the fact that I did manage to raise a thousand pounds but did not perform the lecture wearing a tutu. Turns out that I passed the target last night (Saturday) and the lecture was on the day before (Friday). So this means that there was (and is) no need for any kind of tutu sporting.

And anyway, I think the audience had a lucky escape. The ever-helpful Simon Grey prepared an artist’s impression of what I would look like:

..although I don’t think my arms are quite as muscular as the ones above.

“Door of Mystery” Version 2.0

This is the upgraded “Door of Mystery”. It now takes you picture when you authenticate your tag and stores the photo on an internal SD card. Who knows what it will do tomorrow?

By the way, there is still time to sponsor me. Remember, if you reach 1,000 pounds I’ll wear a tutu when I give the lecture…

http://my.rednoseday.com/sponsor/robmiles

NFC Tag Fun with Windows Phone 8

Near Field Communications is fun. And sometimes even useful. The idea is that you bring your phone close to an NFC tag which contains an antenna and a tiny chip which can store data. The phone reads the data and does something. You can program an NFC tag to trigger one of a variety of different actions, from opening a web page, running a program to sending an email.

The Nokia NFC Writer program makes it very easy to program tags. I’ve got a tag in the car that starts the phone playing music. I could also use a tag to configure the phone and even send tweets, as James has done.

There are lots of styles and designs of tags out there. I got the Task Launcher Pack from rapidnfc.com above which provides a lot of fun for around 12 pounds. You can get custom printed tags and people like Moo are even planning business cards with tags in.

There is an API that you can use to allow your Windows Phone program to read and write tag information which has all kinds of possible applications. You can find out more from MSDN here and from Nokia here.

If you have an NFC capable phone (the Nokia 820 and 920 are) then you should have a go. Great fun.

Nokia NFC: It looks like some folks are having a problem finding this program via the link above. It works fine in the UK, I'm not sure what regions of the world have access to it. If the link doesn't work try searching your Marketplace for "nfc".

Stuck in Time

Some time back I was given this clock, which I’ve had in my office for a while. Unfortunately I’ve found it impossible to use on a regular basis. Can you tell why?

Anyhoo, before it makes me too late (or early) for everything I’ve replaced it with this one, that I got in the Daiso shop in Seattle for a dollar fifty.

Much better.

Actually Simon suggested the perfect solution to my clock problem. He reckons I should put the old clock on the wall behind me, and then view it via a mirror. I am so going to try that.

Surface Tensions

So I got myself a Surface Pro. Took until Thursday morning last week, and a high speed white knuckle walk over to the Microsoft Store in Bellevue first thing to pick one up after I called and found out they had some stock (of course I couldn’t reserve it). In the end I took my 128G device, paid the lady and left. And I really like it. But that is not to say there haven’t been issues.

First up there is the finish. The Pro looked really nice when I first got it. Shiny and lovely. Unfortunately, unlike the granite like paint job on the Surface RT, my Pro looks as if it has been covered with icing rather than paint. I’ve already chipped lumps off the kick stand simply by brushing the device against the zip on my backpack. For someone as fussy as I am about my gadgets this is a major blow. I’m keeping it in a little “Surface bag” and babying it as much as I can, but I’m also anxiously checking it every five minutes for any more bits of paint that have dropped off. For a premium device which is sold at least in part on its toughness this is a bit of a let down to be honest. Not that it in any way affects how well it works of course, it is just that I like my new stuff to stay new looking. It helps with the subsequent sale on eBay.

Second there is the screen resolution. Now actually this is wonderful. The sharpness and colour depth are amazing. And there are loads of pixels. Too many in fact. If you look at the screen in “normal” 100% scale everything is teeny tiny. Microsoft have addressed this problem by setting the scaling for the display to 140%, and this makes all the icons and most programs look fine on the tablet. Of course things like Adobe products, which for no reason at all have their own display management, look stupidly teeny tiny, but that’s not the worst problem. You get that when you plug the Surface into an external monitor for a lecture and find that you are now viewing 1024x768 at 140% magnification. I thought I’d gone mad. Nothing fitted on the screen and everything was too large. Once I figured it out I then had the unpleasant realisation that I have to change the resolution and then sign out and back in again to fix it. Every time I do a presentation. If the system was smarter it would either realise that scaling up on a 1024x768 screen was perhaps a bit stupid, or perhaps it could allow me to scale different displays different amounts, so I could scale the tablet at 140% and the external screen at 100%. But it doesn’t do either of these sensible things. One answer, I suppose, is to just set the desktop to some lower resolution, but that kind of defeats the point of that gorgeous display. Everything works fine under the Windows 8 Metro display of course, but that is not something I use much.

Finally there are the Windows updates. This is not really the fault of the Surface itself, it is a more general malaise. Twice during the update process the system got stuck because it needed a reset to install updates and it didn’t get one. Twice I had the update process break and had to go in and delete all the cached update files and restart. Initially I thought I’d leave the machine to sort itself out, and was rewarded with the message that “This machine will reboot in the next two days” to finish installing updates. Of course, with an update reboot pending I couldn’t install any other software in that period and so I had to wade in and waste valuable chunks of my life watching progress bars. Wah. I know that updates are important and necessary, but there must be a better way than making the customer lose the best part of two days of faffing around before the machine can be made properly useful and stable. This is not just a Microsoft problem either, I dread turning my MacBook on because of the inevitable torrent of upgrades I’ll get (and don’t get my started about the 30 or so updates that are pending on my iPad applications). Perhaps the shops could apply updates to machines before sale. Perhaps updates could be applied behind the scenes. Perhaps somebody could figure out how to get updates out to machines without upsetting the user. We’ve had PCs for thirty years or so and we as still fixing them the same way. And it is awful.

And now the good news. The Surface Pro is ace. Goes like the wind. Runs everything I throw at it. Good for at least four hours of whatever I want to do on battery power. Weighs not a lot. And probably the only machine I really need.