This man speaks the truth. Most of the time. I think.
We had our latest Rather Useful Seminar today. Simon told us all about Unity, a game creation framework which you can drive using C#. The great thing about Unity is that it lets you target a variety of platforms and it is cheap to get started. The seminar was great, I’ll put the slides up later.
The Rather Useful Seminar today described how you can use your C# and Visual Studio smarts to create embedded gadgets using the .NET Gadgeteer system.
Most of my demos worked, apart from the ones that didn’t. You can find the slides from the talk here.
I’m really looking forward to the seminar next week. Simon will be telling us all about the Unity framework for game creation.
We did our Rather Useful Seminar today about presentation skills. You can find out more here. Then I went over to a student presented seminar about game development. This was run by the Video Game Society. It was excellent. I had to leave early as I had to go off to a meeting, but what I saw set out very well what we had been talking about earlier. There were some nerves, but one of my rules is that the day I don’t get a bit nervous before I go out before an audience is the day that I retire from this job. If you don’t worry about doing it right, then you might not do it right.
Great work guys, looking forward to the next one. You can find the slides and sample code here.
There will be a seminar on Presentation Skills on Wednesday 7th November at 1:15 pm in Lecture Theatre D (LTD) in the Robert Blackburn Building. Myself and David Grey will try to tell you how you can hone your presentation skills to win over an audience, or interview. I just hope we get the presentation right, otherwise we’ll look very silly.
Una getting star billing
Some time back I rather rashly promised to bring my 3D printer in for a Rather Useful Seminar. Well, today was that day. The weather was horrible. Just the kind of torrential downpour in which you want to carry your high precision printing device. Partly made of wood.
Anyhoo, thanks to help from Adam, a blue Ikea carrier bag (just about a perfect fit) and a big bin liner I managed to get Una the Ultimaker into the lecture theatre and so I started the seminar. As usual I’d prepared a slide deck and so I stated working through the background to 3D printing, talking about the different technologies and how they worked. Then I glanced at the audience. Nobody was looking at me. They were all staring transfixed at Una, who was sitting on the bench doing nothing.
So, that was that. It was straight over to the PC, draw something in Sketchup (a really great, free program), export it to an STL file, slice it with Cura and then get Una printing.
People love watching 3D printers do their stuff. In a world where pretty much everything has been made “Ho Hum” by technology there is something rather magical about a device that makes something appear from nothing. Una behaved herself very well. Once she’d printed the silly design I’d made in Sketchup we went on to print a tiny rocket, and she handled that with aplomb. Then it was back into the bag for the trip home. I’ve just unpacked her and she seems none the worse for the trip out.
I really like this device. It is well thought out and works a treat. And everyone seemed to really enjoy seeing her in action. I’ve put my slides on the Rather Useful Seminars site, but you would probably learn more by just searching YouTube for videos of Ultimakers…
We had our first Rather Useful Seminar today. Loads of people turned up. I would have taken your picture folks, but in the excitement of the moment I forgot. I did remember to give away a prize though, the fabled “white rocket of happiness”.
Next week, same time (1:15) and place (Lecture Theatre D) I’ll be giving away another prize. A free copy of my Kinect book. This is actually quite appropriate, as the session is all about Kinect development. I’ll even sign it if you like.
You can find the entire programme of events for the run of Rather Useful Seminars, along with the slide deck for this week’s presentation, over at www.ratherusefulseminars.com.
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.
Begin to Code with JavaScript is now available for purchase and download. You can find it here
