It's one of those existential questions on a par with "How do you throw away an old dustbin?". My blog has been a bit broken over the last few days and I'm not sure how to write about it.
Having given this some consideration I think the answer to the question "How do you blog about a broken blog?" is that you do it afterwards.....
Another big exam today. Another two or so hours walking back and forth looking stern. I suppose it's quite good exercise though...
We had our big First Year exam this morning. Around 250 students took the exam at the same time. Thanks to Septa, Amadou, Kevin, Nicholas, Xinhui and David for helping to run the affair.
Before the exam I carefully wrote a briefing document and made sure that everyone knew the username and password to unlock the test. Bearing in mind the Yellow Book theme this year I thought a username of "bananas" and a password of "custard" would work well.
Thing is, that's not what I typed in the briefing document. I missed the s off bananas, and so people were tying to start the exam with a single banana. Which didn't work. Fortunately I'd also put my phone number in the briefing document, so as soon as the exam started my phone lit up with folks ringing through from the exam locations around camps. We sorted out the problem in double quick time and everyone was able to get on and answer the 50 questions.
Amazing, even with the odd spelling mistake..
James thinks I should get one of these. It is a kind of "everything meter". The idea is that you can just connect an electronic device and it will tell you what kind of device it is. It can detect and measure resistors, capacitors, coils, diodes and a few different types of transistor. For around fourteen pounds I reckon it is a bit of a steal. Very tempting. If you've not already got yourself a multimeter I reckon one of these would be at least as useful.
Home hints for the handyman: What to do if your central heating breaks.
Go out somewhere nice and warm for lunch. Stay there as long as possible.
It worked for us.
Pretty much all of these parts are worn out in our boiler
What is it with gas boilers? You buy one and then, twenty years later, you have to buy one again. The plumber who was kind enough to turn out today took one look at the bits of bent metal stuck on the wall of our garage and, after a sharp intake of breath (always an expensive sound in my experience) told us that it was pretty much worn out. We could replace the bit that might be broken and then find that it either works for a while or something else, that can't be replaced, is also broken. It looks like it might be new boiler time. This could put on hold any camera upgrades for a while.
Came back to a cold home tonight. No heating. At the moment the only difference between our house and a fridge is that with a fridge a light comes on when you open the door.
I've not tried viewing any of these holograms yet, but I'm definitely going to have a try. Find out more here.
Game Developers Conference, or GDC, is probably the biggest gathering of game developers in the world. I've been lucky enough to go a couple of times and it is a fantastic conference.
One of the attractions of the conference is the side-exhibitions that they organise. One is called alt.ctrl.gdc and it is a showcase for wacky game controllers and games with novel gameplay.
It just so happens that a couple of years ago I was part of the Spooky Elephant - Beard Bandit team taking part in Global GameJam and we created a novel game with wacky game controllers. As you do.
I've not got particularly fond memories of the actual competition to be honest. I was the single point of failure who's dodgy hardware design caused the project to falter. However, we did win an award for Most Ambitious Failure.
But we are not ones to give up. Simon and Jon continued to work on the software and I did some modifications to the hardware, ending up with a working configurable joystick and a game to go with it.
The great news is that last year Simon submitted the game and the joystick to the GDC organisers and the game has been selected for showcasing at GDC 2016. This of course means that someone from Hull has the chore of going to San Francisco and showing it off, but Jon has manfully stepped up to the mark and will be taking the hardware and the game to show off. You can find out a bit more about the game here.
Don't forget there are a couple of things coming up soon....
Global Gamejam and Platform Expo: The next Global GameJam is at the end of this month. Sign up at the registration site. This is a great way to get experience coding and is also part of the Platform Expo running in Hull.
FameLab: Famelab is a chance to get noticed, and also a chance to practice speaking in front of an audience. The pitches are very short - what could go wrong in Five Minutes? Find out more here.
For Hull students we've had a meeting today (I do love meetings) to sort out the Seminar plans for the next semester. There's some interesting things coming down the tracks....
Back to work today. The sky first thing was especially dark, just to celebrate....
I'm quite impressed by my Robot Drawing arm, but the pen mounting could be better. The problem is that the pen is held in place by a single bolt which doesn't stop it from wobbling when the arm changes direction. One of the great things about having a 3D printer is that I can solve these problems by designing and making a better one. You can see the design for mark 1 above. It has a thicker ring which will grip the pen over more of its length. I've got a plan to fit "rings" on the pens so that I can easily swap them in and out without having to worry about alignment. I'm also going to experiment with tiny magnets to see if I can use them to hold things in place. Such fun.
To be brutally honest, I don't think it's been a vintage year for Christmas telly. But there have been one or two things worth seeing. If you want to add a bit more flexibility to your TV viewing experience I can recommend get-iplayer. I first found out about this nifty command-line powered program in a Raspberry Pi magazine. You can use the program to download and transcode BBC TV programs from iPlayer on your Pi, but there are also versions for Windows 10 and and Mac.
It works really well, once you've got your head around the command line interface.
Update: You can get a free copy of that Raspberry Pi magazine here.
What with today having really quite nice weather we went out for a walk. I took number one son to show him the new C4DI headquarters down at the waterfront. I think it is a stunning looking building, and a great visual compliment for "The Deep" which is just across the river. I'd like to think of this as a metaphor for all the great things which are happening in Hull just at the moment, with a burgeoning local software scene and some fascinating trajectories for developers who want to live and work in lovely Hull.
Oh, and I'd like to wish all my readers a happy and prosperous New Year. I hope you have a happy, healthy, fun-filled and prosperous 2016.
For reasons I can't quite explain, I fancied making a large, red, network-enabled "Panic Button". The idea is that if anything bad happens on the internets the button will flash red and I can then press the button to restore peace and harmony to cyberspace. Or something.
I'm going to pop a Photon device in there and then hook it up to If This Then That so that I can get it to signal simple messages. I've designed the box (curved corners and bevelled edges) and printed one out in yellow. I'm going to add some black tape to make it look properly panicky.
Number one son reckoned I should have a go at printing the screw jack above, so I did. The intriguing thing about this design is that the entire object is printed as one, standing on its edge. There are some fairly prodigious unsupported elements in the design (you can see how the bar at the bottom left of the picture has some bowing at the bottom as it sagged during print) but to my amazement it printed mostly OK.
The only major problem was that I broke the knob off the screw thread in the middle when I was trying to "un-stick" it from the elements around it. However, the designers have thought of this and provided the design file for just this component so you can re-print it.
The jack does work; you can raise and lower it using the screw. I've not got a use for the jack as such (although it makes a fine support for the robot printing arm when I'm not using that). If you've got a few hours to spare and fancy a challenge I'd advise you to have a go. Great fun and amazing to think that such a complicated device was made as one thing.
I don't know what you think Christmas is the season for, but I reckon it is 3D printing. Plenty of time at home to keep an eye on the printer, and maybe even useful things to print. This is a tape dispenser that I thought might be useful for wrapping presents.
It works quite well, as long as you remember that the nut that holds on the roll of tape is screwed on with a left hand thread. If you forget this, as I did, you'll actually destroy your first print by trying really, really hard to "loosen" the nut. I got it to work but then I discovered this little gadget from Sellotape.
You attach it to the knuckles of your left hand and you can just get tape as you wrap. It worked really well for me (I have slender and artistic hands - of course) although some of the reviews are less complimentary. Worth a look though I reckon.
By this I don't mean that the scones at the Folly Lake Cafe are rock. Just that they are very nice.
Went to see the new Star Wars movie today. Instant opinion? If you like Star Wars you'll love the new movie.
A fear of giving away spoilers means that I can't really say just how many elements of the original film have been crammed into the new one. But it really is pretty much all of them. But not in a bad way. And we can't really complain about this. James Bond films have been recycling the same plots for much longer than Star Wars.
...message delivered...
I've finally got my message printed. The kit I'm using is the mDrawbot. You get the parts and instructions for four different drawing machines. The one I was playing with yesterday was a drawing turtle. Today I've switched to a robot drawing arm, which works a lot more reliably. There is also an "eggbot" for drawing on eggs and a dangling string based one that lets you draw huge pictures on an easel.
The kit is part of the MakeBlock family which are based on sturdy aluminium parts which you bolt together. It reminds me of Meccano of old, but with much stronger elements that you could use as the basis of proper devices. You can even get a laser attachment for the plotter that you can use in place of a pen to perform laser engraving and cut thin paper.
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
