Found a screw that fits the Motion. So now I'm kind of happy. And I got some nice things for Valentines day from number one wife.
I bought her, amongst other things, some chocolates, an exercise ball and a book called How to Kill your Husband.
I'm an idiot. No, really. Hard to believe, but it's true. Here's the proof.
I've been using my Motion LS800 tablet PC for a while and I really like it. It is tiny, works well and is on the way to becoming my traveling companion of choice. But it could really use more memory if I want to run Vista comfortably on it. And I do.
It is supposed to be a bit hard to take to pieces and upgrade, but to someone who had a lot of Meccano as a kid this sounded like a challenge. So I ordered a memory stick from Ebuyer and yesterday it arrived.
Getting the back off the device was OK, there were some nasty plastic catches but nothing I can't handle. A tip though, if you are thinking of upgrading a Motion Tablet, grow your thumbnails a little bit so you can slide them under the edge of the back and then use them to pop back the little tabs without scratching the case. I'm kind of due for a manicure at the moment, and that helped a lot. Anyhoo, I got the back off and pulled out the old memory chip. Then I get the new chip out of the package and I hit a snag. These memory devices have a little slot which aligns with a tag in the memory socket. Except on the new chip the slot didn't. It was around half a millimeter in the wrong direction.
And this is where the idiot bit comes in. A smart person would have just gone "Oh dear, have to send it back and get a replacement". But an idiot goes "I'll just grab a nailfile and open up the slot a bit so that it fits". So I did. And after a tiny bit of adjustment I had it fitting perfectly. But of course it didn't work. So now I have an expensive damaged component (which I probably damaged) that doesn't work. A situation broadly similar to taking a bundle of fivers and flushing them down the toilet. In my defence, it had been a long day at work and I wasn't mentally at my best at the time I did all this. But I still think I'm an idiot.
I'm not sure if the slot was in the wrong place because it is a different type of memory (even though I took special care to make sure that it was the right type) or because the thing was badly made. I've sent the whole thing back to Ebuyer (with a note inside explaining what an idiot I've been and throwing myself on their good nature).
And to cap it all, after I'd put original memory back in and put the Motion back together I find I've lost one of the screws that holds the back on.
Idiot.
If you have a laptop and a TV licence I can recommend this. I just plugged one into a USB port on my Vista running tablet, gave it a pat on the head and told it to go off and find its drivers on the network and it just worked. I didn't bother putting the supplied CD-ROM in the machine, although it might be useful if you have not got a Media Centre PC or Vista with Media Centre, as it contains the TV viewing, recording and transcoding software.
The supplied aerial is a bit of a non starter in Hull, which is not very well served for digital TV, but plugging the device into the home aerial worked a treat, finding all the major channels.
They say that it will even pick up high definition broadcasts, but you have to be living in London to make use of that service. Anyhoo, for the price it is extremely good value. If you spend a few more quid you can get one with a remote control.
Got too much time on your hands? Enjoying things a bit more than you think you should? Want to torpedo your social life and turn yourself into a zombie?
Try writing a book.
I'm writing about a subject I find interesting, with a wonderful bunch of folks, on a comfy chair with a nice big screen and I'm using a bendy keyboard. Snag is, I've been doing it for 9 hours today and I'm starting to notice there are things I really should be doing as well. Like have a life.
The good news is that Chapter 7 is nearly done now. And we did go out for lunch today (WokSoEver in Cottingham, all you can eat including sushi for a really good price), so there is some kind of work/life balance here - although I could do to have it shift a little the other way.....
Well, I've done it. I said I wouldn't, but I've done it anyway. This morning advanced orders for the Playstation 3 opened up and so I wandered into Game and slapped down my fifty quid deposit. (coincidentally, last night I found I was going to be paid for some of my work on "the book" and that is what made it possible - funny eh?).
The PS/3 might end up being owned by the department, depending on how much bother they have getting hold of one for launch day. Actually, things were a lot quieter than they might have been. I didn't get up extra early to go and put my name down, and I still ended up number six in the list. I'm not sure if this launch is going to be the complete sell out that some people are hyping it up to be.....
Anyhoo, it looks as if the Sony magnet has sucked me in again. And now I'm kind of looking forward to March 23rd. If only to see what happens on ebay.....
Enough. I'm tired of being cold. We haven't had any snow yet. Just cold. It's all part of my economy drive, where I turn off all the heating until just before we get back from work. The result is that the house is freezing for the first few hours of the evening. Then the heating goes off for the night and we get cold again. Fortunately British Gas (or "evil profiteers" as they should more properly known) have decided that their prices (raised around 50% last year) are indefensible and will be shaving some small numbers off the cost of heating for me, so I can have around an extra 15 minutes of warmth a night.
I've turned on all the computers in the room to try and heat things up a bit. It is coming to something when you are reduced to warming your hands on a Tablet PC. I've given all the machines something hard to do, to try and get the heat output up....
In the old days, when I had a bunch of marking to do I would go off to the union shop and spend ages choosing a suitable red pen. I'd try each of those on sale at least once and then carefully weigh up the heft of the pen, the quality of the ink colour, the feel of the writing action and so on. I could usually pass quite a while doing these activities, not actually doing anything towards getting the marking done, but feeling good about the fact I was in fact making progress. When of course I wasn't.
Spool forward a few years and I can't do this any more. Some of the stuff doesn't use a pen at all, everything happens on the computer. But I still need my displacement activities. Fortunately the computer, if it is nothing else, is a wonderful source of potential displacement.
I've been marking stuff submitted via Class Server. This has the option for the marker to create six pre-formed text items which can be inserted into the student comments. Thing is, six is nothing. I've got loads more than that. Loads. It really hurts to type the same kind of thing over and over, but I need more than six. More like sixty. So, I built PasteMaster to do this for me. It took me around an hour to build, which is probably longer than I spent choosing pens, but I think it is worth it.
You can type the comments into the text fields and then when you press the button they are inserted into the block at the bottom. You can edit the text at the bottom and add new bits, and everything you add is also placed in the paste buffer, so you can drop the whole report into any windows app. It remembers the comments from last time you ran it, and there are 6 pages of 12 comments that are colour coded and you can flip between. I managed to set up a page of comments about each of the deliverables I was asking for, so that I could pull out pre-formed bits where appropriate and save myself quite a bit of typing.
(I was going to add a "randomise" button which would pull a comment out of a textbox on each frame and make a random response, but I thought this might be dangerous....)
Anyhoo, it works a treat and saved me a fair bit of typing. Of course, I could have used Notepad, but I think it would have been a bit harder to do and I would not have had the fun of making Pastemaster work.
If you fill out forms with pre-formed responses, or you do the kind of marking that I do, you might like a copy. If so, let me know....
I've no idea. But something out there must be making a big one, the number of combs and socks that have gone missing from my house....
Paul heard me on the radio this morning. Apparently I sounded OK. I never, ever listen to me. To my ears I sound awful. I once tried to record some pod-cast type things but in the end I had to give up because I had to listen to myself when I did the editing and it just wasn't worth it.
Every now and then I get asked to comment on something technical by the local radio stations. They say I have the perfect face for radio.
Anyhoo, today a chap came to talk to me about safety on the Internet, Tomorrow is European Internet Safety Day (what, you didn't know?) and they wanted some quotes about the dangers lurking out there on the wire.
My opinion on this is quite simple. Just about everything in life can be used for good and bad things. Even fluffy cushions can be used to bad purpose (as they are in just about every other "Midsummer Murders" episode). The Internet, mobile phones and social web sites are just the same in this respect. The key is to be aware of what they can be used for, then you can get involved and help.
The oldest trick in the book (and particularly if you have kids) is to put the family computer downstairs in the living room rather than hidden in one of the bedrooms. Then you can see what is going on, and maybe have a go yourself. In these days of WIFI and multiple systems in houses this may be more tricky, but there is now technology you can use to limit the use of the computer and the places that kids can visit. Windows Vista (to name one system at random) has technology for both controlling access to web sites and limiting login times.
With regard to social networking, why not have a go yourself. Apparently there is presently a huge growth in middle aged use of things like MySpace and there is nothing to stop you having a go apart from fear itself. And as for mobile phones, be aware that they can be used for bullying and sending nasty messages.
Apparently when postcards were invented they created a whole new way in which people could get in touch with each other. Rather than having to visit the house to correspond, a lady could scribble a message on a card and then drop it into the nearest postbox. This brought about a revolution in courting behaviour. This took a lot of control (and awareness of what was going on) away from the parents, and was probably the cause of much debate and concern at the time.
Something similar is happening/has happened with mobile communications. I'm sure that when postcards came out there were people sending nasty ones, and you had to learn to deal with this. I guess the same is true with the Internet and mobile phones etc.
Do people who write smoke signals work under a "nom de plume"?
We had another open day today. Some of the candidates that turned up had been at our earlier one in November. I fretted a bit about using the same appalling jokes as on their earlier visit, so I took special care to add some new and untried material to my bit. Oh well. Although the ET joke seemed to go down OK. Thank you for coming folks, and I hope you all enjoyed the day.
I also went up town first thing, and took the little camera. The light was very good.
Right in the middle of Queen Victoria Square. What are the chances eh?
View from the car park
Do inoffensive shoes have the sole of tact?
I said to the folk at the XNA talk last night I'd post some followup material. You can find the presentation here and the program files here.
After the talk I had a great chat with some students about the business of computer science. I said I'd make some notes in my blog about the subject, but instead I've added the material to our Where Would You Think community site. You can find my thoughts, plus links to the books that I mentioned, here.
Got a spare quid? Near a newsagent? Nip in and buy a copy of "Windows Vista - The Official Magazine". It is only 99p, so you'll even get change. Then open the magazine to page 86. And there I am. Some time back I got a request for some "picture tips" for the magazine. And a photo of me looking suitably heroic. And they've printed my mugshot and one of the tips. Wowzer. Fame at last. They've even put my blog URL on the page. (if you have read the magazine and followed the link here, well done and feel free to stick around - take a look at Trip Hazard next - new episode coming soon)
I've been using Vista for a while and really rather like it. Every now and then I find something new and wonderful that it does (like the search feature in explorer. I've just found 2194 files of mine that contain the word cheese. Took six seconds to do the search- fantastic).
Since I'm now supposed to be a Vista expert I'll post the odd Vista tip as I find it.
Today I've been on the road, over to Leeds to give a talk about XNA as part of a Black Marble Community event. Thanks for inviting me folks. I'm going to put a bunch of XNA resources up tomorrow, for now I'm off to bed..
So the PS/3 launch date has been announced. And the price. For the privilege of getting the machine five months late we suckers in the UK are having to pay nearly half as much again as people in other, luckier, parts of the world.
I was talking to a chap in one of the Game shops on Friday. He reckons that they will have to open the shop up early and get us to queue first thing in the morning just to reserve the thing. Not to buy it. So that means two early mornings and a whole slab of cash to play slightly better looking racing games than ones I have already. And do you know, for the first time in a long history of early adopting, I might not bother.
I've bought launch versions of both of the previous to Playstations. And the PSP. I have a "Sony reflex" which means that if I'm shopping for electronic goodies the Sony one is usually what I end up with. I really like their stuff. I even got one of their dogs for heaven's sake (and then they stopped making the Aibo - something I've never forgiven them for). But the PS/3 isn't really floating my boat just at the moment. I know that the power is awesome. I know that it will play Blu-Ray movies in HD. I know that Sony are losing a fortune on each box that they sell. And I know that it will be successful (in Japan at any rate).
But at the moment I'm OK for consoles. The XBOX 360 lets me play good quality, high definition, games. The Wii lets me just have fun. And as things stand I'm not sure what the PS/3 would bring to the party, apart from a bigger hole in my bank balance. Once I've bought the console, an extra controller, an HD lead and some movies and games I'm going to be out around 700 quid and I'm not sure that I'm up for that. Plus I know that I'm being ripped off just for living in the wrong country, and it will only get cheaper in the future....
Ho hum. Perhaps I'll change my mind. I'm keeping my name on the list, and I'm going to start a sort of PS/3 sinking fund and sell a few bits on ebay. But at the moment I just don't feel that motivated.
Been mucho busio today(o?). All our new modules start this week, and I've not yet finished marking exams and coursework from last semester. So it was give a bunch of lectures, mark a load of exam scripts and then stagger home to write some more on the Micro Framework book.
Sometimes I wish there were more than one of me, so that I could share the work out amongst us (there have been movies about this kind of idea). I'd be the best looking and smartest version of course.
Some discussion around the place about musical socks. Apparently not everyone knows what they are. How surprising. Perhaps the rest of the world has not reached the heights of culture and refinement that we take for granted at Chateaux Miles.
Musical socks have a small piezo sounder and a little circuit that allows them to play a reedy, square wave, rendition of some out of copyright ditty or other. My socks play the one that goes "Dee dah dah dah, dah dah dah...". When you squeeze one part of the little plastic envelope they are sealed into this wonderful music issues forth. Mine tend to go off when I cross my legs for some reason.
And this is why you should not wear them in bed, no matter how cold your feet get. Being woken up at 2 am by a muffled, eery tune wafting out of the bottom of the duvet is not an experience you'll want. Take it from me.
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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