Acer Iconia W3 Tiny Windows 8 Tablet

I really should not be allowed up town just after I’ve got paid. Particularly if I then happen across an Acer Iconia W3 for a very tempting 250 quids. I had a careful look online and read a bunch of reviews that said the screen was horrible and it wasn’t up to much. And then I bought one anyway. Two reasons really. I’ve love to have Windows 8 in an 8.1 inch display form factor. And this is actually “full fat” Windows 8, in that it is running on an Intel Atom processor and so it is able to run LightRoom and Windows Live Writer. The one thing the reviews agreed on (even the unhappy ones) was that the battery life was good at well over 8 hours. I like that a lot. And to me the display looks fine.

It comes with a license for Office 2013 Home edition, which I’ve bumped up to the Premium one. I’m not going to be putting Visual Studio on the machine, but then again with only around 11G free (I got the penny pinching 32G version) it might not fit anyway. The thing is, I don’t see this as my primary developer machine. More something I can cart along with me and use to knock out blog posts with pictures.

I’d just about got everything working and then I broke it all by wiping the machine clean and loading up Windows 8.1. This has mostly worked, although at the moment the orientation sensor is lacking a proper driver so I can only use it in landscape mode, which is a pity.

The main reason for all that danger and excitement is that I wanted the much improved SkyDrive integration in Windows 8.1. The small amount of internal storage matters a lot less if I’ve got access to everything in the cloud and then I can mark “work in progress” folders as living on the device. Windows 8.1 does this really well, and there’s no need to install the desktop client thingy. And I can drop another 64G of storage into the micro SD slot if I want to take some movies or music with me.

At the price I reckon it is an absolute steal. The screen is a bit of an acquired taste. It looks wonderful if you can get your head into the correct position, otherwise the contrast dips and all kinds of weird colour schemes appear, although it remains useable. If you consider that you can’t get much of an iPad for that price you start to see just how much properly useful technology you get in a tiny package.

Sweet Fitness

First person to correctly guess what’s in the bag wins a bag of their own..

I’ve been told that a sensible amount of exercise is a brisk thirty minute walk each day. Turns out that Sugar Sugar Sweets is almost exactly fifteen minutes walk from my office. Result.

Thanks to SkyDrive Version History

Should you be stupid/unlucky enough to overwrite a file you have stored on SkyDrive you might like to know that you can bring back previous versions of your files by opening Version History. Open your folder in the browser via https://skydrive.live.com/ and right click the file name.

Select Version History from the menu that appears and then travel back in time to get the file that you want.  This saved my bacon tonight.

Cubelets at the Cafe Scientifique

Today I got to strut my stuff at the Hull branch of the Cafe Sceintifique. This is a really neat idea set up by Mark Lorch from our Chemistry Department.  At the end of each month he hosts a talk of scientific bent in the upstairs room at Nellie’s, a fantastic pub in Beverley.

Note to new (or any) students. One night get a train to Beverley and go for a drink there. The atmosphere is amazing, enhanced by the fact that the place is all lit by gas lights.

This is the programme for the rest of the year (and a bottle of very posh diet cola). Do you think I should tell them I’m not really a doctor?

Anyhoo, I’d given my talk the delightfully vague title of “Computing is fun. No really!”, which I reckoned gave me plenty of wiggle room about what to say. Once I’d agreed to turn up I was told of the house rules. No Powerpoint. In fact, no computer or screen. Just props. Fortunately I’d thought of that. And so I took along my cubelets. These are little cubes of computing that you can fit together to create physical programs and they turned out to be a super way to illustrate what computing is really all about. And they are fun too. If you want to find out more, take a look here.

This is my “slab” of cubelets, all fitted together. I’ve no idea what this arrangement does, but that is part of the fun. And after tonight I want to buy some more.

I did my thirty minute talk and then, once we’d all found another drink, we sat around and talked about things computing, the future, and my memories of going into Dixons and typing:

10 PRINT "Rob Rulez"
20 GOTO 10

- into the computers on display when the assistants weren’t looking. It was a really great night and the audience were splendid. I took a bunch of pictures, you can find all of them here.

Update on 2013-09-26 15:06 by Rob

I was talking during the evening about curious contraptions that I've now remembered are called "Rube Goldberg machines". This is the best one. Ever.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qybUFnY7Y8w

Some days need a health warning

Here’s a nice picture to cheer me up.

Some days are great. Some days just grate. Today was in the latter category. Nothing too much, just lots of things going wrong when they really shouldn’t. Like me managing to delete a file rather than copy it to a USB key. I didn’t know this was possible, what with the the recycle bin and all, but I managed to achieve this magical feat and flush a couple of hours of careful Powerpointing down the toilet. By the end of the day, as I pulled up at the traffic lights on the way home I realised that one more thing had gone wrong. My phone wasn’t in my pocket where it should be.

So it was time for a frantic U turn back to the office, where of course the phone wasn’t. At this point something nice did happen. I met up with a couple of early first years (we start next Monday) who were taking a look around the place so they know where things are before the madness of Fresher’s Week kicks in. I said hello and welcome, but I must have seemed a bit distracted as I was wondering where my lovely Lumia had got to.

Finally I found it, down the side of the car seat where it had dropped. And the really, really annoying thing is that of course if I’d thought to check the Bluetooth on the car (which was lit up on the dashboard as usual) then I’d never had any of the panic. It just goes to show that if you expect bad things to be happening, you can then go on to make them happen yourself.

Oh well.

Update on 2013-09-25 08:28 by Rob

And then this morning I put on the wrong jacket and then spent a frantic five minutes looking for the wallet that wasn't in the pocket. I hope this is not an ongoing thing....

Another machine to wish for

My Surface Pro is now my computing weapon of choice. Very quick, hugely portable. I’ve taken to using it at work without the keyboard attached, plugged into my docking station. It does confuse folks who come into my office, to find me powering my desktop with what looks like a picture frame, but it works a treat.

The only things I don’t like are the 128G disk space and the 4G memory are a bit on the small side these days. Particularly when I’m running two Windows Phone emulators side by side (although they do both work). And the battery life could be a bit better.

Which is why I’m very pleased that Surface Pro 2 is now on the stocks. With an 8G ram version that has a 256G SSD. Where do I sign?

This does of course mean that towards the end of October there will probably be at least one Surface Pro 128 going on sale, I’m just not sure whether or not to leave the fancy skin on or not when I try to sell it.

Oh, and there are some nice fancy goodies coming along as well, including illuminated keyboards and a really neat docking station. 

Cottingham Food Festival

The weather today was splendid. Nice and warm. Lovely for just about everyone at the first Cottingham Food Festival. Except the unfortunate folks selling hand made chocolates in bright sunshine…

They did it properly, closed the streets and then filled the place with over thirty stalls selling all kinds of yummy stuff. And they had a big tent for the cookery demonstrations. And a bouncy castle. And hook a duck. And a slide. Which I am unfortunately far too old for.

Anyhoo, we had a wander round, bought some chocolates and cupcakes (the peanut butter ones were excellent) then staggered home. I hope they do it again next year.

When in doubt, vacuum the house

Creative Tool?

I’m in the middle of updating the Windows Phone Blue Book to Windows Phone 8. It is going quite well and should be out and about in a few weeks. I’ve reached the point where I have to dream up some ideas for lab exercises for some of the fancy new features in Windows Phone 8.

So I vacuumed the house.

This works very well for me, and I reckon it might work well for you. I find that if I sit down and think to myself “Right Rob, time for you to have some great ideas” then nothing much happens except that I get a headache and an urge to do something else. However, if I do a boring job like wash the car or push the vacuum around for a while the ideas seem to percolate through quite nicely.

After forty five minutes or so I had a cleaner house and a couple of lab ideas. And I even had this idea for a blog post too. Bonus.

New Kinect For Windows SDK Out

As someone who has had a lot of fun playing with the Kinect Sensor over the years it is nice to see that the SDK is still being developed. The latest version, which has some nifty HTML 5 bits and bobs and some fancy chroma key effects, is now available here:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/kinectforwindowsdev/default.aspx

And of course you can still get my Kinect book here….

C4DI Meetup - Building a legacy

Today I went along to another C4DI meetup. This one was presented by Andy Whale, who is director of engineering at Kingston Communications. For those of you unlucky enough not to live in the Hull area, you might not know that we have our own local phone company. This makes it unique in the UK.

When every other regional telephone company was wound into a nationalised service many years ago, for some strange accounting reason Hull got left out, and it has functioned independently ever since. This means that we had innovations like untimed local calls for years before anyone else, and it also means that Hull phone boxes are painted white in colour. 

Andy was talking of his trajectory from British Telecoms engineer to being the man charged with rolling out Lightstream, one of the most ambitious networking projects in the world. There is a lot of talk today about putting the awesome speed of fibre optic based networking into people’s houses, but it turns out that there are two ways to do this.  One is to run an optical fibre to a box in each street and then use wire for the last part. The other is to actually put optical fibre into the house. The first is comparatively easy. The second is much more challenging. It is also the best way and how Lightstream is being deployed.

Once you have a continuous stream of glass fibre from the exchange to the house you can unleash completely staggering amounts of bandwidth, should you ever need to. The glass fibre itself will last pretty much for ever and is not prone to degrading over time. The devices that put signals onto the fibre are improving every year so the whole thing is future proof.

Of course, the snag is that the effort to get the glass out there is considerable. Andy spoke of the difficulties in getting connections through ancient conduits and under and over roads. He also made the point that a successful engineer must also work with a certain amount of cunning and faith in themselves and their people to get the happy ending that everyone wants. KC has rolled out several thousand installations of fibre, developed new techniques, patented new technologies and changed the lives of lots computer users.

The legacy that Andy is building will keep on changing lives for as long as we keep on thinking of new ways to use the highly reliable, expandable performance of the network infrastructure that is being put in place. I feel proud of being in a city where this is happening.

Before Andy left British Telecom he was assailed with warnings of how this kind of widespread optical fibre deployment was impossible and probably unnecessary. And now it is here, he is making it work and people are loving it. One person at the meeting made the point that if they could bring bandwidth like this to his premises, he would move his business to Hull to take advantage of it. The question on everyone’s lips (mine included) was “When can I get Lightstream to my house?”.

Andy brought along some props, including old style cabling. This is how it used to be.

This is where it is going. Still coloured connections, but with thousands, perhaps millions of times the capacity.

The government is pumping money into banks to try and get the economy going. This would seem to be changing the lives of a few bankers, making them slightly richer. Also some house prices in Surrey are going up a bit. It makes me really cross to think that projects like this are not being funded and rolled out everywhere in the UK. This is life changing technology which will be used well into the future and bring about things we can’t even imagine just now.

Andy and his team have shown that it can be done. Thanks to him for great talk that really brought out how engineers can directly change lives.

Registered for the MVP Global Summit

I’m really excited about this. Really. I’ve just got my registration through for the the MVP Global Summit. At the end of November I’ll be heading out to Bellevue for a week to meet up with a bunch of folks for a whole heap of tech talk about things Microsoft Phone.

Grand Theft Auto V

What a nice bunch of people

Grand Theft Auto V was launched today. Rather than queue up at the store at midnight to see the game I took a slightly easier route. Simon set up his copy in our games lab and we had a go over lunchtime. Sometimes I prefer watching other people play games to actually playing them myself, and this was one of those occasions. After a while there was a bunch of us watching Simon as he crashed into buses and managed to land his car on top of another one. Great fun.

What impressed me most was the city of Los Santos. They always say that in GTA games the city is the star, and in GTA V this really is the case. The environment is huge and looks properly alive. When Simon hit the bus head on we could see the driver inside waving his arms and banging his steering wheel in frustration. All that must have been motion captured, encoded and then triggered at the right time.

When you walk round a corner and kick a garbage can down the road you know that someone will have drawn the textures, built the model and given it physics so that it “just works”. If you accidentally punch someone to the ground (it can happen) medics will turn up and try help him. And all this on an old, white, Xbox 360 that must have been one of the first ones they made. Amazing.

Of course there are limitations. You can only enter some of the beautifully drawn buildings, and we did see a tiny amount of “pop-up”of the skyline at one point. But you can’t take away anything from the sheer scale and detail that they have achieved. You can see where over 100 million pounds went.

The gameplay itself is pretty nasty of course. It starts with a botched bank job where just about everyone, including one of the main protagonists, gets shot. And apparently as the story develops you get to kill, maim and torture. Just like the people do in any mainstream TV drama. For me the best innovation is that if you fail a mission three times you can skip on to the next one. So that I really could treat the game as a rather long action movie that I can visit afterwards.

Much has been made of the ability to switch between the three main characters during missions. I haven’t played the game properly so I can’t really comment on that aspect, but it does look interesting.

Every time that another Grand Theft Auto is released people start going on about how this is the one that will make games finally mainstream, that will cause gaming to cross over and takes its place as one of the major entertainment media. I’ve news for you folks. It’s already happened. I’ve been playing computer games for well over thirty years. Pretty much everyone I know of my age does the same. Lots of devices, from bank cash dispensers to car dashboards, have interfaces that have drawn inspiration from the way that games look and feel. Computer games are now part of modern culture. And don’t worry, they are not all as nasty as GTA V, any more than all modern TV is just like Breaking Bad.

I’m really looking forward to seeing what the new generation of consoles can do. I’m sure I’ll be in the queue to get hold of the new devices. Or persuading Simon to bring his along so that I can watch him play.

Update on 2013-09-20 10:55 by Rob

So, on the way back from C4DI I bought a copy of the game. Then, having loaded it and played through the intro I headed out in my car, parked up underneath a bridge and spent a while listening to "The Doobie Brothers" and other classic rock tracks on the radio while the sun went down. They even had some Alan Parsons Project stuff. Amazing.

Great to be Back

Actually, it is pretty great to be back in the department. In spite of what my calculator says.

We have shiny new students arriving in a couple of weeks and loads of things to plan and do. We also have new toys to play with and people to meet. I’m really looking forward to it all.

Back to Hull on a shoe string

This is exactly how much holiday money we had left when we got to the airport to fly home.

Jolly Boating Weather

If you are feeling a bit annoyed about my endless parade of photographs of good weather and happy times, please bear in mind that I’m writing this back home on Monday evening and it is cold, dark and raining… But on Saturday it was none of those things, so we went on a little boat trip.

This is the view back up the lake to where we were staying. Torbole is on the right hand side. I bet that bit of rock made a great noise when it fell down.

Nice church

Part of a nice castle

Wind surfers making the most of the excellent conditions.

Lakeside Fun

The bridge has these padlocks all along the railings. Perhaps they symbolise undying love between two people. Perhaps they are from tiny bikes that have been expertly stolen.

Lakeside excavations

Lunchtime macro photography

This is a far better picture than photos taken with a mobile phone have any right to be.

Mountains and Waterfalls

Mountains

Waterfalls

Verona Day

One of the great things about being on holiday is that you don’t have to worry precisely what day it is. As far as we’re concerned, today was “Verona Day”. In other words, we got on a bus and went there.

They have a proper Roman Amphitheatre. Apparently “One Direction” have played in this very place, so we are obviously in an area with a lot of history.

According to local folklore, this is the actual spot where a bunch of nineteenth century marketing men got together and decided that they should get themselves a piece of balcony based “Romeo and Juliet” action.

The evenings here are rather pretty.

Holiday Hill Climbing

 

Today we took a walk along to Riva del Garda, a town just a couple of kilometres from Torbole. Very nice place. Great museum (I like museums) and a castle thingy half way up the hill at the side of the town. The guide book said it was a 20 minute stroll from the centre of the town. Which it is. For Superman.

For us mortals, arriving a somewhat exhausted forty minutes or so after setting off, it was well worth the trip though. I made the picture above from four shots taken with the Lumia 1020.

I also took a few panoramas while I was there.

Speaking Italian Like a Local

The good news is that I can speak Italian like a local. The bad news is that it is a local of East Yorkshire, UK. I’m trying to pick up words where I can, it seems the height of bad manners to expect everyone to learn English just because they might one day want to speak to me.

It is not going too well. I usually have this unnerving habit of speaking French whenever I go abroad. It’s the only foreign language that I know more than a bit of and it sometimes works in France. In Italy it is more of a hindrance though, serving to massively confuse the person I’m speaking to and massively annoy any French people in the room at the time. Oh well, but I did manage to order the right kinds of coffee today, which must count as some kind of progress.