Segway in Dalby Forest

Does that sky look ominous to you? I've done a bit of image processing it must be admitted, but things were a bit grey when we arrived at Dalby Forest at 11:00 in the morning.

Number one daughter had arranged a Segway expedition around the forest as a birthday treat for me (my favourite kind of birthday treat) and this was the day. We arrived in good time and managed a walk around in the dry before a packed lunch and then heading for our steeds.

But I did get a certificate...

I've never ridden a Seqway before. And now I want to buy one. They are ace. My abiding memory of the hour is whizzing through the trees in driving rain, the water running down both sides of the huge grin on my face. Such fun. 

I had all these cunning plans to take video of the event and whatnot, but I was beaten by the twin perils of flat batteries and having too much fun to want to bother recording anything just at that moment. 

Playing with TinyDuino

One of the things I love about the Arduino platform is the huge number of different form factors that are available. This has got to be the smallest I've seen so far. It is TinyDuino.

The picture above shows some of the boards and a Starburst to give an idea of scale. The devices are, clockwise from the Starburst, processor, Bluetooth BLE, Accelerometer and programmer. The boards stack on top of each other using the tiny connectors.

When you want to program your device you put the programmer board into the stack and plug it into a USB port in your PC. It appears as an Arduino Pro-Mini clocked at 8Mhz (use the 3.3 volt option). It has all the pins of a standard Arduino uno and you can stack a tiny prototyping board onto the end of the stack if you want to directly access the signals. Once you've programmed your processor you can remove the programmer board to make your device even tinier.

There's a lovely little 16 LED array you can put on the end of the stack, and also a circular row of leds you can program up for a super-tiny cylon effect. There are also wifi, Bluetooth and even motor control boards you can add. The BLE device is a bit longer than the other ones, but you can still create really tiny devices with this platform. One version of the processor board has a clip for a lithium battery so you can easily create self-powered devices. 

They work a treat and I strongly recommend them. However I would mention one word of warning. The manufacturer has recently changed their website and so all their documentation for the devices has moved around and is now very hard to find. If you need any help with the platform you are mostly on your own.  Having said that though, most of the boards are based on very standard technology and so once you install the appropriate Arduino libraries they will work just fine.

I've been trying to get the Bluetooth BLE device to work with Windows 8.1 and not having a lot of success so far. I think this is down to my not understanding the way Bluetooth BLE works. The idea is to make a "ring of power" that I can wear so that I can send commands to my devices just by waving my hands. We shall see....

Lego Mini

Oooh. Tempting. Sooo tempting.....

Three Thing Game@School Video

Rob Miles, lecturer at the University of Hull, describes the University's 'Three Thing Game @ School' competition which was held on 15 July 2014. The event involved around sixty school pupils wrestling with Python programming and writing games.

On Tuesday Rachel came round with her posh video camera (and tripod) and took a lovely video of the Three Thine Game@School event, which you can watch if you like. Note how I'm heavily channeling my nerd-power, with a pen in my top pocket...

Three Thing Game@School

Yesterday I went out between the degree ceremonies and bought 16 rubber snakes. The chap in the joke shop thought I'd gone mad. I pretty much cleaned him out of snake stock. He's going to have to reorder them, and the last time he got them was several years ago.  He's thinks they may have gone up in price.....

I had this idea that as part of the welcome pack for our Python based game development event I'd put a snake in each envelope. Python - snake, do you get it?

It seemed to work OK and the teams really took to their mascots. Head over to the Three Thing Game wrap-up if you want to see the best possible way to pose with your snake and read the full report of the event.

It was such fun. If anyone has any doubts about the future, and whether we are going to be OK they really should have have been there. From the way the kids worked I reckon that we are in safe hands and things are going to turn out just fine. 

Degree Day

This is the first ceremony

I helped to run a couple of degree ceremonies today in City Hall in the middle of town. I've not done any summer ceremonies for a while, as I've usually been off doing Imagine Cup things when they take place. But they are great fun. And I really wanted to try my new fish eye lens, to see if I could get a picture of everyone in the audience. I reckon it pretty much worked, as you can see above.

Sheridan look v. pleased, as well she might be.

For the first ceremony we had Sheridan Smith as an honorary graduand, and she was great. 

The second ceremony was very dear to my heart, since lot of the graduands were students who I had taught during their time at the university. It is really, really, great to see them all dressed up and ready for the big wide world.

I'm strongly of the opinion that it is the students that make a university. And we seem to get the best at Hull

Class of 2014

If you want to get hold of larger copies of the images, simply click through to their Flickr pages.

York Chocolate Story - A Delicious Place to Go

We went to York Chocolate Story today. It's an exhibition in York that tells the story of chocolate. So its name really makes sense. Its also very good. We had a genial guide who talked us through the history of chocolate makers in the region.

Lots of names that were huge in chocolate and sweets were based around York. (My claim to fame is that for many years the laser marking machine that put datestamps on Kit-Kats was powered by software what I wrote).

Anyhoo, if you are looking for a well put together little tour and you fancy making your own chocolate bar, or you've got kids, I can strongly recommend it.

Free Zinio Magazines for Lumia Owners

Most of the flat surfaces in our house are covered with magazines. Every now and then we have a clear-out, and every now and then I want to read an article that I've chucked in the bin. So, apart from the fact that they are the absolutely best way to read anything, magazines aren't working as well for me as they could.

This weekend I wanted to read a camera review from a copy of the Amateur Photographer magazine  that I hadn't bought when it came out a while back. So I took a look at getting an online copy. Of course I could get it from the Apple store, but that would tie me to Apple products, and I don't use my iPad enough to have it charged and ready to go at any given time. 

So I ended up downloading Zinio onto my Lovely Lumia 1520 and then buying the magazine from them. Zinio is available for lots of platforms, which means I should be able to read it on any device, including my Surface Pro 3 when it comes. (such excitement)

The app and the purchasing experience were pretty smooth, although I was a bit confused when I was asked to pay in dollars. Turns out that because a while ago I told my Lumia it was american to get Cortana to work in the UK, all the apps think they are in america too. 

This actually works very well because at the moment Zinio are doing three month's free subscription to three magazines for american Lumia owners who join up. In other words, if you have a US Lumia you can get a whole bunch of free magazines, including Popular Mechanics, a really interesting US magazine that doesn't seem to have a UK counterpart. 

The reading experience on the phone is not as good as a proper magazine, but then putting ten magazines in your pocket is tricky too. I'm not sure if I'll go over to reading all my magazines on phone and tablet, but given that this would mean I could read all the old issues really easily, it is quite tempting. 

What I really, really, want though is some way that I could convert my printed paper into an electronic licence. I'd be quite happy to pay a small fee (say fifty pence or so) to be able to access the digital version of a magazine that I'm about to throw out. This could be activated by scanning a barcode in the publication, and it needn't go live until a couple of months after the magazine is published. 

3D Printed Winterfell

I'm not a fan of Game of Thrones. But I do quite like 3D printing. Our 3D printerns found a really superb 3D model of Winterfell, which is apparently a location in the program. They used the departmental Ultimaker 2 to produce a lovely version of it, so I had a go at getting Una, my home made Ultimaker 1 to print the model. And I'm very pleased with the results, which you can see above.

The great thing about this is that it really doesn't look very 3D printed. It just looks like a little model.  Looking at the picture I need to do a bit of tidying up, but the fundamentals are very solid. 

In terms of comparing an Ultimaker 1 with an Ultimaker 2 the most noticeable difference is that the Ultimaker 2 seems to be better at retraction. This is when the printing filament is pulled back into the print head prior to a move. The printers do it so that they don't leave strings of excess printing material between features on model. Una is a tiny bit more messy than the Ultimaker 2. This is probably due to the slightly larger size of the heated head. 

But overall I'm well pleased with this. 

A Cunning Use for Screen Shots

This picture is not particularly relevant to the post, but  Hull Station is just over to the right, and I don't want to show you any of my booking codes....

I'm not sure I'm the only person who does this, but I don't think everyone does, so I thought I'd mention it. You quite often find things on your phone that you want to "bookmark". This happens to me when I need to use that email with the magic sequence of characters that will unlock a rail ticket delivery from the machine in Hull station.  I don't like having to open the email, scroll to the right bit and then enlarge the characters so that I can read them. Particularly if there are a bunch of people waiting behind me. 

So what I do now is open the email, zoom it so that it just fills the screen how I want, and then take a screenshot of the phone display. This is really easy to find later and has exactly the data that I want, with no messing at all. Once I've picked up the ticket I can then erase the picture, ready for the next one. 

Works for me.

Getting a Galileo

I've been a great fan of embedded computers for ages. I love the .NET Micro Framework, Gadgeteer and Arduino. And now there is another device to play with, the Intel Galileo. It looks a bit like an Ardunino and it has pins in all the right places to be an Arduino. But actually it is a rather powerful computer based on the new Intel Quark chip.

You can program it in the same way as you would an Arduino device, but what I'm really interested in doing is harnessing all that full on programming power on the device. I've ordered one, and I'm looking forward to playing with it when it gets here. 

One Final Wrestle....

We had our final wrestling session with the teachers tonight. Next week we are having our Three Thing Game@School event with a whole bunch of folks coming into the department from local schools to try their hands at writing Python games. We've made a template game (see above) for them to get started with and yes, it does involve cheese. And crackers.

You can find the resources and the sample games here. 

What are your skills?

We had a meeting with the folks from the Careers and Appointments part of the university today. We were talking about plans for the future, and building on the Careers and Networking event that we had earlier in the year. There's some interesting things coming down the tracks...

Anyhoo, at one point the conversation turned to internships and interviews, and apparently one of the things that you need to have when you are being quizzed for a post is a good solid answer to the question "What are your skills?".

Mentioning your certificate for swimming a width or your high scores in the cycling proficiency test will probably not cut it at this point, neither will going "Meh" and shrugging, so it is worth thinking about what you would say, and how you would back it up. Lines like "I can write programs" are all very well, but you would probably do better if you put the point into a good solid context. Tell them what you made with that skill. Remember that you are actually being given the chance to say nice things about yourself at this point, so be prepared to do just that.

And remember that things like being able to work well in a team, and talk to customers are skills of a sort, and very sought after by potential employers.

Oh, one tip though. Don't tell them that you can do something that you really can't. Claiming a mastery of Python might sound like a hip and happening thing to do, but you might get hit instantly with a really gnarly question about the language.....

Sunday Hexapod

Spent yesterday afternoon watching Colombo and assembling the legs for a hexapod. As you do. Spent some of today putting the servos on the base, next thing to do is attach a battery pack and see what we can make it do...

Wide Angle Open Day

We had another open day today. Two talks, two great audiences. Thanks for coming folks.

I hope you enjoyed your day with us and had a good journey home. 

The weather was a bit grey at the start, but by the end of the morning we had the sun out and the campus was really coming to life. 

I took the camera with the fat lens and wandered around taking a few photographs.

The flower beds are looking good at the moment.

Mmmmm. Burgers.

C4DI Hardware Hacking

Last night we had our monthly Arduino hardware hacking session at C4DI. Lots of the regulars were there and one person even brought her long-bow along. Which was a highly impressive piece of wood. 

The theme of the evening was Sci-Fi movie effects, using programs to make whooshes beeps and all kinds of space age noises. You can find out what we got up to (and even have a go yourself) by grabbing the lab sheet from here).  Great fun was had.

I brought along my latest purchase, an Arduino powered pen pushing robot that you can pick up from RoboSavvy for the amazing sum of 18 pounds. Peter and I had enormous fun building it, particularly when we (or more accurate I) wired the motors the wrong way round and had the robot printing perfectly - but from right to left). However, with a bit of adjustment we got it out of "arabic mode" and managed to get it printing properly.

Microsoft 3D Model Repair Service

One of our "3D Printerns" (students who are spending 8 weeks in the department over summer working on 3D printing) was using this today. It reminded me that I really ought to tell the world about it.  (like my blog is some kind of public service or whatnot.....)

Anyhoo, one of the problems with making 3D models is that sometimes you get bits of data in there that just don't make sense from a 3D point of view. Elements can intersect in odd ways or you might get tiny holes in meshes. These imperfections can cause all kinds of problems when you try to move from a model to a physical artifact.

Normally you need a person to go through and tidy the model it up, but Microsoft have a free, cloud based, service that will just accept your models and tidy them up for you. It's all free, and very useful. You can find it here.

Finding out my "Hacked to Properly" Ratio

Spent quite a big chunk of this evening discovering that code you write during a GameJam is not actually the most solid of stuff. I've reached the point where I'm piling dirty hacks on top of horrible code to try and get something almost working. Oh well, it looks like the time for a total rewrite is here.

The good news is that I can take all the ideas and stuff over to the new design. The bad news is that I'm going to have to do it. Mind you, at the end I can probably work out my "Hack to Properly" ratio. This is the ratio of time it takes to hack something together vs the time to do a proper job. The code took around a day to write first time. Lets see how long it takes to write the new one.....

MVP Renewed

I'm really pleased that I've just been made an MVP again for another year. And this year there's been a change in that Windows Phone MVPs (which used to include me) have now been merged with the Windows Platform Development group.

So I guess that means I've finally made it onto the big screen......

Make a Photobook

If you've just had a wedding, christening or some other noteworthy event, then you might want to think about making a book about it. It's never been so easy to take pictures these days, most smartphones have pretty good cameras built in, but I rather miss the experience of seeing my work on paper. I can print out pictures if I want (and I do) but I'd never really thought about making a book.

However, last week I uploaded a bunch of shots to photobox, clicked a few buttons (a surprisingly small number) and paid a few quid for what has turned out to be a very nice souvenir of the occasion.

The book arrived today and I really like it. The printing quality is just like a "proper" publication, as is the heft and feel of the item itself. I paid a little bit extra for the "lay flat" spine, which means that we can use it in a proper "coffee table" role. The cost was not excessive. I judge the price of everything in video-games, and we managed to get two books printed and posted to Hull for less than the price of a game. 

If you have done something special, or interesting, then making a book about it is actually very easy. The company we used also has an amazing repertoire of pictures, posters, phone cases, mugs and the like which can be customised with artwork.

If you are a student who is not sure what to get mum for christmas, a personalised book that tells the story of your last semester might be a good plan. Although I'd not advise you to put every picture you take into it.....