I'm not a huge fan of New Year's Resolutions. And resolving to do more to keep fit is probably not a good plan on a day spent watching telly and eating.
Oh well. At least I haven't used the video monitor gag this year.
Happy New Year everyone.
In between other games, I've played a bit of Zookeeper. Above is my finest hour so far. The boss is normally quite rude to me. Below is one of my favourite insults...
Don't you just hate those people who post pictures of their Christmas presents in their blogs..
But this is great. 64 cheese jokes lovingly printed on cheese portion shaped cards and placed in a cheese box for no reason at all. Wonderful.
Happy Christmas to both my readers.
Here's a model for a business. Search ebay for things which appear to be going cheap. Make a stupidly high bid for the cheap item to try and win it at a knock down price. If you win at a low price, pay it. If you win at a high price, delete your username and walk away.
I've had this happen to me before. Up until now the buyers had the "decency" to come up with an excuse for their stupidly high bid before retracting it. This time they just deleted the user.
It occurs to me that eBay should probably keep track of the postcodes used by buyers and check for large numbers of accounts being registered/deleted at a particular location. This would seem to be a good use of all this "artificial intelligence" that we are always hearing about
The way I see it, it's best to delay Christmas shopping until the last possible minute in order to make sure that you have taken the proper amount of time to find out what people really want for their present.
We had a lovely Hardware Meetup at c4di today. We were a bit worried about having one so close to Christmas, but in the end enough folks turned up (hi Rob!) to make it more than worth the effort.
One person that turned up has been making great progress working with his Hull Pixelbot. Each time we get together we solve a few problems, discover a few more and more forwards. Today we were talking about potential dividers. Great run.
As we left I made a strong recommendation to him. Start a diary. He's having lots of great ideas and building things, but having the standard "mad inventor" problem of remembering what he's done, what happened and where he's put the program files. A diary would solve all that.
I suggested that a great Christmas present would be a nice "page a day" diary, which can be used to record ideas and experiments. I keep a diary. If I do something interesting I write down what I did and what happened, along with links to any resources that I used. Mine is electronic, an ever growing Word document, but I sometimes think a paper one would be nice too. There's something much more "real" about a physical artefact that you update. It's also much easier to work on and add diagrams and other stuff as you go along. Proper engineers take pride in their log books that they use to record what they did. These are a fantastically useful resource if someone ever asks "Why did you do it that way?" because you can go back to the day that the design decisions were made and explain exactly what drove the decision.
Writing a diary is also a great way to practice your writing skills, and you might even find that some of your diary entries become blog posts (I've done this before too).
Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed that non-Microsoft applications (particularly Google Chrome and Apple Music) have a habit of unpinning themselves from the Windows 10 Task Bar?
I've had a bunch more ideas for features in the HullOS language that controls the Hull Pixelbot. Which is nice.
But not that nice. Ideas can be dangerous. If you have too many you start to worry about the effort of implementing them, and then move on to feeling guilty about how few of them you've actually made work. Then you start to have ideas for another project that doesn't have quite so much emotional baggage. Until you have more ideas for that project. And so on.
I do this a lot.
One solution that I've found is to keep a diary where I note my ideas, amongst other things. That way I don't worry about losing the ideas and I can tick them off when I implement them.
Well, that was quick. First thing to sell was the watch, followed by the dock, followed by the iPad. And the thing that I thought would sell first, the phone, is still out there.
I guess a lot of people must be upgrading.
It could be yours....
So, last week I bought a new phone. As you do. I didn't mean to. It's just that stock actually arrived in Hull and I've always been weak as far as gadgets are concerned.
That has, of course, triggered a selling frenzy on eBay as I strive to recover at least some of the cost of the new toy. One of the things I'm selling is my previous phone. It turns out that I'm not at all sentimental about my stuff. As soon as a better one comes along, it's out with the old and in with the new. But I am careful about condition. I keep all the boxes and whatnot for maximum resale value. And now my lovely iPhone 6 plus is out there, along with an iPad, an Apple watch and a Surface dock....
Why? WHY?
I'm an Apple user, but an unwilling one. I love the iPhone for the hardware and what it can do, but I'm not very keen on how it does it. My situation reminds me a bit of a poker player who, when told that he is playing in a crooked poker game replies "Yes, but it is the only game in town".
My iPhone doesn't have the graceful UI of my lovely Lumia 1520. And, now that Microsoft have pulled out of the music market, I'm forced to do battle with iTunes rather than the lovely and stylish Groove.
I'm now using Apple music, but I've also made uncompressed copies of all my physical CDs and added them to my iTunes library. What I want is for iTunes to use the high quality copies where I have them, and "fill in the blanks" with streamed versions from the cloud.
Instead iTunes just duplicates loads of albums, showing me the cloud and local versions for no readily apparent reason. And I can't find a way of using iTunes to get the high quality tracks off my computer onto my phone so that I can have portable high-quality music. The user interface is horrible, confusing, counter intuitive and badly documented, with the Apple help referring to options and buttons that no longer exist.
And if I use my iPhone in the car, and try to play anything from Apple music, it tells me I've got lots of music in the cloud and then refuses to play any of it.
I really hate iTunes. I remember once saying that I thought that if the devil wrote software he'd probably have written iTunes. That was a few years ago. I've not changed my opinion. I tell people to reserve emotions like hate for things much more important than items of software, but for iTunes I'm prepared to make an exception.
My printer has run out of grey ink. It's funny, because I don't remember printing many grey pictures. But there you are.
Like most printers, mine has a habit of waking up at odd times of the day and night, squirting a bit of ink out of the print head and then going back to sleep. Perhaps I should look for a grey puddle under the printer.
Anyhoo, it was on to Amazon to find out how much a proper set of cartridges would cost. The amount is eye watering. At least it made me start to cry. So it was on to look for something a little more economical. As in, a whole set of six cartridges for around half the price of just a replacement grey one. They arrive tomorrow. Wish me luck.
Quite pleased to receive an email that wasn't about a Black Friday sale.
It seems I may have been miss-sold payment protection insurance at some time in the past.....
I was very sorry when I heard that Microsoft were suspending their Groove music service and migrating everyone to Spotify. The Groove player is a lovely piece of user interface design that makes everything else look a bit rubbish. And the Groove music catalogue seemed to include quite a few records that I really like.
Take "A Map of the Floating City" from Thomas Dolby for example. Love it. Listened to it a lot on Groove. Not available on Apple Music. Or Spotify. I can't even find anywhere I can buy the digital download. Amazon have the CD. But it's 45 quid.....
It seems that there are a bunch of tracks and artists that I can't play any more because I'm just too far down "the long tail of musical taste". Perhaps I should get my record deck down from the loft......
Last week I wrote about "The Broken Device Dilemma", when something you hardly use breaks. Do you try and fix it, or do you throw it away? Of course, if you're me you try and fix it. It's all about the journey. Right?
Anyhoo, my lovely little Sony audio player failed. The battery refused to accept any charge. It was as if the cable was broken. Of course, being Sony, it's a special cable, not a standard usb one. The good news is that replacements are very cheap, so I got one.
It didn't work.
However, playing with the device left me thinking that the battery was broken. This happens with Lithium Ion batteries. So, it was onto eBay to source a battery. I managed to find one, ordered it and it arrived today. Fitting it was great fun. Number one son found the service manual and I had a happy half hour this evening undoing sticky fixers and soldering the replacement battery in.
It worked. Yay!
The player woke up and played some music at me. Great stuff. But it did seem to get very warm. And then the WiFi stopped working. And then the battery failed. And now it behaves just like it did at the start of this story. Oh well. It looks like something in the player has failed and is taking so much power that that the charging circuit can't keep up. So I think it is properly broken.
Oh well. Now I have to ask myself the question "If a device you hardly use breaks, to you replace it?....."
We don't usually have fireworks on November the fifth. But this year we did. In the old days we used to buy a box of "Standard" fireworks that contained one dud (which varied from year to year) and a taper thing to light the fireworks that you couldn't actually get lit yourself. The family would spend forty five minutes standing in the garden freezing to death while I tried to light the blue touch paper on a succession of cardboard tubes that I'd stuck in the lawn. Sometimes it would rain.
All the fireworks had different names like "Golden fountain", or "Emerald Shower" but when one eventually lit we'd just just get a shower of sparks followed by nothing. Things were slightly enlivened if the Catherine wheel set fire to fence. And we'd force the kids to hold sparklers which would also fail to light.
Anyhoo, today we didn't do any of that. Instead we bought three little boxes that each contained a bunch of fireworks that were wired together using some cunning fuse technology. We just lit one corner which fizzed merrily and then the box generated a ten second display of quite impressive proportions. I even managed to get some pictures.
The whole thing was over in about ten minutes and we retired to the warm indoors and had hotdogs.
Here;s the thing. Something I hardly use has broken. Do I:
I think you know the answer to this question. I've ordered a replacement cable, just in case that is the cause of the problem....
Today finds us at the Jurassic Kingdom Tour in Leeds. Apparently they are going all around the country setting up their dinosaurs in different venues. I bet they look awesome on the back of lorries as they zoom down the motorway. There were lots of dinosaurs of various sizes, most of them moving around a bit and making sounds. Some exhibits were a bit spoilt by plaques stating that "actually this combination of dinosaurs could never happen" but at least they didn't have any cave men fighting with them, which even I know would be quite beyond the pale.
It was great fun and they also had someone selling 21st century donuts. Which was really nice.
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.
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