Shockingly Funny

I got this link via Ginny this afternoon, and I’ve been chuckling ever since. The guy has masterful comic timing and the whole thing is just wonderful.

Sticking to the Surface

I don’t care that my most popular photo of late is a grey image that I made in Photoshop for a laugh, I’m still going to keep posting proper ones…

Well, I’ve had my Surface RT for quite a few weeks now and so I thought I’d write down what I think of it so far.

General usefulness: Very high. It has replaced my iPad as my browsing weapon of choice, principally because web sites seem to work better for me. Especially those which have nasty pull down menus that you can’t access via a touch screen. Because I have the touch cover plugged in I can just open them with no problem. I like being able to plug a memory key directly into the device and pull the files straight off it. And the Office/Skydrive/Printer combination (i.e. I can get documents off my Skydrive, edit them and then print them) is a wonderful thing. Great for presentations too, I’ve got the VGA output and that works a treat.

Battery Life: OK but not as great as the iPad. Having said that, it has never let me down. I just have to remember to charge it.

Fun to Own: Getting better. There aren’t as many apps as other platforms, but because the browser is more capable you can do more things on the web, for example BBC iPlayer. Since they added solid implementations of Solitaire and Mah Jong to the store it has got a lot better for me personally. There is now a really good image editor (Fhotoroom) and I don’t feel the lack of much. I’ve got tons of applications on the iPad that I’ve never actually used after the day I downloaded them.

Annoyances: The Mail client is very weak and deeply annoying to use. I really miss Outllook. I was upset to find that there is no Silverlight support. There seem to be more updates that I expected, and the application updater seems to get stuck every now and then. Having said that, every time I turn on my iPad I find that at least four or five applications need updates there too.

Surprises: I was gobsmaked to find that I can actually create and deploy applications on the Surface RT using Visual Studio. Nothing anywhere tells you that this is possible, I was convinced that the only way I could get code onto the device was to put an application in the Windows Store and then buy it. If you want to do this you can find out more here. The really nice thing is that once you have remote debugged an application it remains on the Surface RT for later use from the Start menu. When you install the remote debugging client on the Surface you have to give your developer id but after that it all just works, barring a bit of fun and games configuring remote debugging.

Conclusion: I’m pleased I bought a Surface RT. Having said that though, I’d love to get my hands on a Surface Pro, that could well be my dream computer.

Back to Work

An actual picture of the view outside my window first thing this morning.

How does the weather know when it is time to go back to work? It’s not that I don’t like my job, and it does get me out of the house, but today the weather seemed determined to make the process of getting up and out of the house as unpleasant as possible.

Or perhaps it is just that I got up an hour earlier than I’ve been doing for the last week or so.

Anyhoo, nice to be back at work really, and thanks to the folks at Brno University of Technology whose card has been languishing in my post at the office since well before Christmas.

Update on 2013-01-03 09:29 by Rob

My Grey picture has actually had more views than many of my other pictures on Flickr. Not sure what this says about my photography...

Bright New Year in Hull

Today was another of those strange occasions where it actually gets lighter in the house when you open the curtains. So we went for a walk around Hull Marina, which is looking very spry in the New Year sunshine.

This is a slightly processed image of the inside of the lock gates.

This is Princess Quay looking good.

..and this is where we had lunch.

Here’s hoping for another 364 days of sunshine in 2013.

Gloom is all about Fun

Another game we spent some time playing over the holidays was Gloom. This is a card game where you make bad things happen to bad people and get points for it. You take control of a thoroughly disreputable bunch and inflict pain, torment and ultimately death on them for fun and profit. You can also make nice things happen to your opponents, should you feel that way disposed.

The winner is the one who manages to make the most unhappy bunch of corpses in the cemetery. It probably doesn’t sound very nice, but it is great fun to play. Then after this we all got together to wish each other a Happy New Year.

And a very Happy New Year to all my readers.

Hornsea Mere

Today started off in a very strange manner. There was no water falling from the sky, and a strange golden disk had appeared above us shining brightly from a great height. It turned out that there was also a fifty mile an hour horizontal freezing wind, but we didn’t notice that until we arrived in Hornsea and tried to open the car doors.

Hornsea Mere is one of my favourite places to visit. There is a cafe which serves tea and buns. I wasn’t expecting that to be open though, but I did entertain hopes that we could at least get in and take a walk around.

It was open. I’ve never seen the water so high. All the jetties for the boats were completely submerged and the wind was whipping the water into quite a serious swell. There were lots of birds there who seemed pleased to see us particularly when they found we’d brought some bread to dish out. They were completely fearless. They were not just happy to take the food from your hand, they’d try to take your hand as well.

Afterwards we took a walk along the sea front, and lost some pennies in an arcade.

The beach was very quiet, although there were a few hardy souls taking to the sand.

Last Night on Earth

Got a whole bunch of family round for Christmas. And a bunch of board games to try out. Tonight we fired up Last Night on Earth. This is a zombie game with heroic players battling hordes of incoming zombies. Great fun. I particularly like the characterisations of each of the heroic players, which are drawn in true B-Movie style.

It is a really good game, even though we all got devoured by the walking dead…

The Perils of Simple Jobs

One of my many theories about life is that sometimes the universe must have its fun whenever you try to achieve something. I was reminded of this when I tried to fix a broken bulb in the electric fire which was causing a rather lopsided fake fireplace display. Since I reckoned this was an easy win, I thought I’d sort it out. At this point I can imagine the universe pulling up its chair (if it sits on anything), getting out the popcorn and opening a beer. Rob is starting on a job around the house. Always good for a laugh.

I should have known I was in for trouble when I discovered that we actually had some spare bulbs of the right type, but nevertheless I ploughed on and took the fire to pieces. The broken bulb was easy to find, and even easier to remove. But that was mainly because the light fitting fell to bits. The penny pinchers who made my fire had saved a few pence by not using metal bulb sockets, instead using cheaper plastic ones. These work fine for the warranty period, but not that much beyond it. There must have been a meeting somewhere where they decided that they could save around 20 pence per unit by making them prone to fall apart like this.

So, at 4:55 in the afternoon I’ve got a sudden need for light fittings. So it is out into the rain to the only shop around that stands a chance of selling them. Which of course closed around two minutes before I got there. Wah.

The following morning, after an evening staring at an empty fireplace, I manage to make it to my favourite hardware store, Toolstation, where I pick up a bunch of light sockets for 43 pence each (an amazing price when you consider how much they are in other DIY stores).

So, problem solved, right? I’ve even bought a spare set of sockets which I’ll put in the back of the fire in case this ever happens again. All I have to do is take out the broken parts and refit the replacements. Except that, of course, the new sockets have a different connection arrangement that means the wires are now too short. So now I have to spend ages trying to feed in extra cable because the penny pinching people who made my fire (see above) had used just enough to fit and nothing more. I wonder if that was decided at a different meeting or the same one?

Anyhoo, after approximately ten times the effort I thought it would take, I now have a fully illuminated fire. And the universe has had a good laugh.

You get what you pay for

Some years ago we were helping dad move house. Having loaded up we headed onto the road. As we rounded our first corner we heard a horrible sliding noise from the contents of the van followed by an enormous crash. Tim, who was riding shotgun next to me, said “Ah well. You get the help you pay for”. Of course none of us were professional house movers, we were just helping dad out. And it turned out that the enormous crash was caused by a box of cutlery, so no harm was done. But the remark has stuck with me.

I was reminded of it when the terms and conditions for Instragram were changed recently, and people suddenly found that things they thought they owned (i.e. the pictures they had taken) were now ripe for exploitation by the company that was storing them. Instagram decided that they could use any of the pictures held on their servers for profit and advertising. There has been something of a backlash against this, and as a result some back tracking on the part of the company, but I think it has opened up a useful debate. Perhaps, as a result of it, paying for things will come back into fashion.

I’ve always been deeply suspicious of free services. For a start they can vanish or change at any moment, taking with them stuff that might be important to you. And of course, as the saying goes, if you are not paying for the service, you are the product. Facebook sells its ability to target you with custom ads. Google surrounds your Gmail inbox with links to “related services”. And if you ever search for anything (for example my quest for an oven) you will find yourself haunted by matching adverts in every web page you visit for a while.

If something is important to me I’ll pay for it. I put my pictures on Flickr and have done for ages. It costs me around 24 dollars a year to do this, but I can now complain to the site if they ever get lost, and Flickr don’t have to sell my photographs to stay in business.

Maybe in the long term the price of service provision will drop to the point where companies will be able to provide the service for a small fee, rather than have to hawk around personal data for profit. Flickr are obviously keen to cash in on this, and have just launched an offer of three months free hosting to try and tempt people away from “free” sites.

Farewell Gerry Anderson

Very sad to hear today of the death of Gerry Anderson, creator of Thunderbirds. I was lucky enough to have Supercar, Fireball XL5, Stingray, Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet as the background to my childhood and I thought they were all wonderful. But I really loved Thunderbirds most of all. It had the longest episodes, the best stories and the biggest gadgets. We used to watch it in black and white on the telly that took ages to warm up. I vividly remember getting a copy of the TV 21 kids magazine and finding out that Thunderbird 2 was green.

Gerry Anderson managed to create a future that we all wanted to live in. So what if there was a gigantic lemon squeezer on the hanger of Thunderbird 1, people moved a bit strangely, and there were never more than about five of them in a room, that was what a whole generation of kids (including me) wanted to grow up into. If you want to find out more about this wonderful world you can start at the Haynes manual for the programme and go on from there.

I’m going to put on a choice episode, perhaps “Path of Destruction” and drink a toast to one of the most visionary TV producers there has ever been.

Christmas Fun

Had a great Christmas. Hope you did too.

Got a nice big Lego kit. Something tells me I should be a bit too old for things like Lego. But I ignore it.

Got great socks too. Coming soon to a First Year lecture near you….

Cottingham church at 5:00 on Christmas Day

Thanks Santa.

I think you should know that number one son now has no hair on his right hand after lighting this…..

Christmas Wrapping

I took this picture with my Lumia 920, fiddled with it a bit and then posted it onto Flickr, all from the phone. Not bad eh?

I spent a reasonable sized chunk of today wrapping presents. I’m rubbish at this. Firebox used to have this “crap-wrap” service where they’d wrap something badly for you, to save you working at being awful. I could give them tips. My Auntie Julie once spent a while working in a store in York wrapping presents for customers. She got really good at it. You could always spot her presents because of the neat edges and perfect corners.

I notice that some wrapping paper you can buy has a grid printed on the back so that you can cut things squarely. Of course the stuff I got didn’t have that. However, after spending the morning sticking tape to myself and cutting things the wrong size I have learnt one thing from the whole experience:

“Always start wrapping the biggest thing first. Then, when it turns out that you have cut the paper too small for it, you can use the resulting piece to wrap the next one down in size”.

Head Tracking and Helicopters

Hand tampered hat with tracking LEDS

Number one son is here over Christmas, which is great. He’s brought his “proper PC” with a hairy graphics card and a helicopter game which is great fun to watch him play. Particularly the bit where he spends five minutes doing pre-flight checks, starting the engines, aligning the controls, lifting off and then instantly crashing sideways into the tarmac.

He’s been experimenting with head tracking, where you put a camera on the monitor which tracks three leds that are attached to the headgear of your choice (in our case a Visual Studio baseball cap). It works very well. Particularly the bit where you put a piece of exposed film in front of the camera to filter out the visible light and only allow the infra-red leds to show through.  (Thanks to Simon for the LEDs by the way).

After a bit of careful configuration we now have a system which allows the player to look around the cockpit of the helicopter. It’s not completely real of course, since when you move your head the view itself stays in the same place, but it is good enough to be useful apparently. Great fun.

Wii U Nintendo Land Coin Drop

The Wii U is growing on me quite a bit. Mostly with NintendoLand. I’ve worked my way around all the mini-games now and they are all fun. The Donkey Kong themed game, where you have to tip the controller to roll a little wagon (containing your head on a spring) over a fiendish obstacle course, is great fun if a bit frustrating. And I’m spending a lot of time on the throwaway mini-game which involves dropping coins (which you win for completing games) into a playfield where they bounce down to targets (the blue bits at the bottom of the screen).  This is determinedly eight bit, even down to the sound and cheesy graphics, but is still tricky and horribly addictive.

New Doorbell

I don’t have any pictures of doorbells, but I do have a picture of a teapot.

It seems that, where doorbells are concerned when you have replaced all the batteries and it still doesn’t work properly it is time to buy a new one. The old one has served us well. The switch in the bell push broke and so I unsoldered it and swapped it for the configuration switch to eke another three years of life out of it. I was particularly proud of this soldering job because I did it without actually using any solder. At the time I could find my soldering iron but not the solder to go with it. Then I went through a patch where I had loads of solder, but the iron had vanished. Now I’ve got both readily to hand, but I don’t need either of them just right now.

Anyhoo, I got the new one from Homebase. It wasn’t particularly expensive but it has a whole ton of different melodies and the sounds lack the square wave sound of the previous one. We’ve found a suitably tacky sound to reward visitors with and so, if anyone comes to see us there is now a slightly higher chance of the door being answered.

Hull Global Game Jam Lives

If you liked Three Thing Game, you’ll love Global Game Jam. It is the same, only the fun goes on much longer. Twice as long. It also lets you meet up with gaming experts and specialists in media and content creation, as well as programmer types.

For Hull students it is pretty much perfectly timed, at the end of the inter-semester week, far away from any coursework deadlines. You must, must, must take part.

Find out more and sign up at the web site: http://globalgamejamhull.com/

Successful 3D Printing

I’ve been playing with my Ultimaker 3D printer for a while now and I’ve reached the point where it is almost, but not quite, an appliance. By that I mean that I can walk up to the printer with a desire to print something and produce what I want. Most of the time. Here are Rob’s top tips for printing.

Raw Materials

Get the latest software:  The best software for Ultimaker is Cura. It was specially written for the device and it works a treat. It is updated regularly and gets even better each time. The latest version, which starts a print off by “dive bombing” the print surface, works really, really well.

Use the right plastic: I only use stuff from the Ultimaker shop or Faberdashery. These places do a range of colours and I’ve found the consistency and quality of what they produce to be very high. The Ultimaker forums are full of people who have had problems with systems when they started to use some cheap stuff they got from an auction site or wherever. Once you get dodgy bits into your print head it is very hard to clean it out. There are two kinds of plastic you can use in your printer, PLA or ABS. I must admit I’m a confirmed PLA chap. This stuff melts at a lower temperature and I’ve found it much easier to work with. It sticks to the print bed really well and doesn’t shrink as much during printing, which reduces the amount of warping that you get.

The Ultimaker people recommend that you print something using the higher temperature ABS to “seal” the print head and block any holes with high melting point plastic so that if you perform later prints with PLA there will be no seepage. I tried this and what happened to me is that I managed to completely block the print head with some high melting point plastic which meant I had to use the “fit a new one” cleaning technique. The new print head design, which you must have, is not prone to leaks in my experience, as long as you make sure that you tighten the head up when it is hot.

Setting Up

Spend a while getting the height of the print bed just right: It is only important to get the print bed alignment right if you actually want to print anything. If you get the height wrong you will either see nothing printed (because the print head is pressed hard against the print bed and no plastic is coming out) or print balls of wool (because the print head is too far away and the stream of fibre just goes out into the air). One trick that worked for me was replacing the bolts and springs that support the print bed. I put in some much longer bolts and some springs that I stole from ball point pens. These give a much longer range of travel for the print bed and make the bed less likely to move. Then I used “Rob’s Patent Bed Levelling Technique”, which goes like this:

1. Adjust the screws to make the print bed as low as possible.
2. Move the print head into the middle of the printing area.
3. Manually turn the Z axis screw until the print bed is a few millimetres away from the print head.
4. Adjust the Z limit switch so that it triggers at this point. Test this by turning the Z screw by hand to make sure that it trigers. Do this before you use the software to send the print head home.
5. If you have got this right you should have a situation where when you send the print head home it ends up a few mm above the print surface. Now you can level the bed off using the adjustment screws.
6. The four screw positions for the adjustment bolts form a square. It is very important that you adjust the height of the print head on the lines of this square and nowhere else. Otherwise, when you adjust the height at one screw you will affect the height at another, which will drive you nuts. The idea is that if you get the height right on these lines it will be right for the entire surface, because your print surface is flat. 
7. Adjust the bolts so that you can slide a single piece of paper between the print head and the print surface. Do the final adjustments when the print head is hot. I always do a sanity check before every print where I send the print head home and then slide my magic paper to make sure that the clearance is still OK. This ensures that if the bed has got pushed down while I was removing the previous piece from the surface I discover this and pop the bed back into place. Once you get the height right you will never have to adjust the bolts again.

Make sure that the plastic is flowing before a print: At the start of a print you can turn the print feed drive to push fibre out of the head. Do this. Make sure that you are getting a nice stream of plastic out of the head just before you print. As soon as the head is hot you should hand feed some plastic and then set the print going. Any hiccups in the plastic feed at the start of the print process will probably stop the first layer from sticking to the print bed, which will end badly. Some people use “retraction”, where the software pulls the fibre back during printing to remove spurious bits from the print and make it tidier. I’ve never used this, the idea of sucking hot plastic into a cold part of the print head just scares me. And I’ve been perfectly happy with the results of ordinary printing.

Printing

Keep an eye on the print process: My experience has been that if I leave the machine for too long, bad things happen. And anyway, it’s fun to watch.

Make sure the fibre is feeding well: I’ve had a few situations where the roll of material on the back of the printer has “gummed up”, stopping the feed of plastic into the printer. Make sure there is plenty of slack. Actually, I now don’t use the roll on the back at all. Lots of fibre is supplied loose, and so I just lay it on the floor underneath the desk where the printer is standing and then just turn the roll round as the fibre is used. I did experiment with a turntable that would feed fibre from a roll laid on top of it, but that didn’t work very well so now I manually rotate the roll every quarter of an hour or so. This means that I have a reason to keep an eye on the printer, which is nice.

Après Print

Never leave the print head hot: If the head is hot, it should be printing. When I started using the printer I thought that giving the printer a few minutes to properly warm up would make printing better. It really, really does not. What happens instead is that the heat travels up the print fibre which melts and then solidifies when you start printing, forming a plug which takes ages to fix.

Release the Fibre Feed when you leave the printer: I’ve no idea whether this solves a problem or not, but it works for me. Whenever I know I’m leaving the printer for a while (more than a day or so) I release the fibre drive at the back of the printer. My theory is that taking the tension off the drive bolt and associated parts will make them last longer. I’ve no idea if this works or not, but I’ve not had any problems feeding fibre into the machine, and I want to to stay that way.

Keep the print head clean: This is particularly important if you change the colour of your prints a lot. I have a “sacrificial rag” that I use to wipe down the print nozzle just after a print, when it is still hot. This stops a print from picking up stray bits of plastic of a different colour. Do this carefully, so you don’t burn your hands.

Enjoy your Printer

Look for things to print: I bought the printer as a way of making cases for gadgets. I’ve done that, but I’ve also had a lot of fun finding things on thingiverse and just printing them. Especially the rocket.

Try different colours: Faberdashery do lots of colours, and even luminous fibre. They also do a “variety pack” of different colours which is great fun.

Show it off: The printer is quite portable, I use a big blue Ikea bag to carry it around. I’ve not found that it loses calibration when it is moved, which is nice.

Yahtzee Bowling

Simon does not look in any way scary in this picture.

We had our christmas party today, which was great fun. Afterwards some of us extended the fun even further, and went and did some bowling. It turned out that I was actually playing the “Yahtzee” form of the game, where you have to get one of every score, and plenty of zeros. Oh well…

Global GameJam Hull Venue

Great things are destined to happen here….

Today we took a look at the site for the our Hull Global Gamejam event. We are holding it at the Hull Studio School right in the centre of Hull. If you are serious about game development, or just fancy having a “Weekend of Fun”™ then keep the weekend of the 26th and 27th of January free next year.

The venue has this entrance foyer with really funky chairs.

We will have a registration site and a whole bunch of details about the event coming up soon.

It is going to be such fun.

Face Lens for Windows Phone

I’ve been playing with some of the Lens programs that you can get for Windows Phone 8. These application sit on the front of the camera application (a bit like a lens does I suppose) and do things with the image. The Face Lens program puts things onto the faces that it sees. The application is free, but you can buy extra bits and bobs to add to images. Above you can see what it does to the face of a well known local newsreader. Quite fun.