Another achievement unlocked. Today we went for a meal at the Space Needle restaurant. The most expensive meal we've ever had.
Totally worth it.
You go around the needle once every 49 minutes or so. We'd arrived around sunset on a rather nice day, which made for some awesome views.
Apparently Disneyland would fit in here
A major holiday highlight today. We went to see airplanes being made on the Boeing Factory Tour. Most impressive. All the numbers are big. From the size of the plant to the price of the product (at least 200 million dollars). On the factory floor we saw five planes in different stages of construction. That's a billion dollars, right there. And they are making up to forty of these in a month in one plant.
Within the constraints of the business (they've got a lot of planes to make) the tour was excellent. We weren't allowed to take cameras into the factory (shame) but we did get a feel for just what they do there. Highly recommended.
I like going to see movies in the 'states. So today we went to see Dr. Strange. It's a good film, with the characteristic Marvel balance of good bits, scary bits and knowing bits.
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As part compensation for a day spent looking at cars, today number one wife and I went to look at the Yves Saint Laurent exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum.
There is true genius in the way that a few pencil lines can evoke a figure and a style.
The finished product.
After as much haut couture as we (or at least I) could handle, we headed off to take a ferry ride to Bainbridge Island. We had no particular need to go there, but the weather was being very kind to us and, hey, life's in the journey....
Seattle waterfront from the ferry
View of Seattle going out...
View of Seattle coming back....
I've been taking pictures of the pavement. As you do.
My next car?
We're in Seattle. They have a big Auto Show running at the moment. Do I have to draw you a map? And of course I took the camera.
There were a lot of cars. And people.
Plenty'o'engine....
Some cars I can actually afford.....
I've managed to get my hands on a Surface Dial. It's a spiffy new PC control that acts like an, er, dial. You can use it to manipulate value in programs in a very precise and controlled way. The dial works best with the Surface Studio (which I've not been able to get my hands on) but you can use it on any PC which has Bluetooth. It appears as a Human Interface Device and has a really simple API that you can use to make any of your programs dial controlled.
I wanted to use it to control the movement of my Hull Pixelbot and, after only half an hour or so of coding I had it working.
It's not a particularly direct form of control just yet, but that is because of the way I'm sending control messages via the Azure Internet of Things hub, which is not really created for such rapid messaging, but it does work, which is rather nice. I made a "hotel vision" video of the program working. I'm going change the code to make a more direct connection to the robot.
Of course, what I really want is two dials on the PC, one for speed and the other for direction, but just at the moment you can't connect two Surface Dial devices to a single PC.
MVP Robot ready for action.
Day 4, and I don't think I'll be breaking any non-disclosure agreements by telling everyone that I went to a session about Microsoft Azure Internet of Things today. I took a long a Hull Pixelbot that I happened to have brought with me, and showed what my particular style of connected device looked like. Folks seemed quite impressed, which was nice.
Even US power sockets seem to be passing comment on the election result last night.
After two days at the summit you find that your brain starts to get a bit full of stuff. I might have to start forgetting things to make room.
On Sunday evening we went to this bar that had a bunch of pinball machines. Including this one....
Another day of great content.
I really love going to the MVP Summit. Take it from me, there's some very nice stuff coming down the tracks.
The weather in Bellevue is un-seasonably nice. It's much warmer than where we came from. We went for a walk this morning without needing heavy weather gear, which was nice.
I have no idea who is getting the love here. Or even if it was always the same person.
In the evening we had a great time at an MVP event in the Georgetown area of Seattle. There are lots of fascinating bars and whatnot, one of which had an amazing collection of pinball machines.
They even had a Twilight Zone machine, which was awesome, even though I still can't play it.Thanks so much much to the Microsoft folks who did such a great job of setting up the event.
They have the Northern Lights built into their planes
I've not used Icelandic Air before. But I will again. First up, their flights to Seattle are a bit shorter, since they fly further over the poles. And they found me legroom seats, which was very nice, But the most important thing to be aware of if you fly Icelandic is that there are no free meals and only free soft drinks. I don't actually have a problem with this. It does mean that I get the food that I want and that my brain is not strained deciding between "Chicken or Pasta".
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Can you work out what's in these two packages? Neither can I.
I've been raising funds for the purchase of a Playstation VR (of which more later). Part of this involved selling some computers that I deemed surplus to requirements. So I took lots of pictures and, being a clever person, I boxed the computers before advertising them. Good plan.
Then I sent the wrong box to one of my customers. Less good plan.
It just goes to show that my capacity for stupidity is expanding all the time. As I taped them up I reflected on whether or not I should label each box so that I would know what is in it. I thought there'd be no way I could make a mistake, which of course is the reason why I did.
Fortunately my customers are being understanding and it should all be sorted soon.
Lots of first rate tech-talk at the c4di hardware meetup tonight. And two new HullPixelbots got built and started wandering around. If you want to come along you can find out our next meetings here.
Click through for the full 360 degree experiences....
Like they used to say in "The A-Team", I love it when a plan comes together. In this case the plan was to get on a train, travel to London, do a session at the TechDays Online part of Future Decoded and then get the train back in time for tea.
The plan worked. The journey there was smooth and on-time. All the demos that I did worked perfectly, in spite (or perhaps because of) the fact that I was using my phone as an internet hotspot for the robots. And we finished in time, which is very important.
Thanks to Martin for MC'ing the session and providing a voice of reason. And thanks to Claire for inviting me. The videos will eventually be online here. If you want more details you can find the presentation slide deck here.
Went to Castle Howard. Took a picture of a tree. Came home. Appeared on TV for 15 seconds talking about internet security. As you do.
Then spent the evening writing the session for Future Decoded tomorrow. I've also packed the robots.....
You know how it is. You have built a robot army that you're going to use to take over the world, but first you have to get them all under your control. And if you are using tcp/ip (the world domination network of choice) then you have to give them all an ip address and then put those addresses into your world domination program.
mDNS makes this much easier. It's how Apple's Bonjour network discovery works. A device running mDNS is discoverable on a local network. You can find all the hosts and their ip addresses, along with the services they are providing and the ports. Windows 10 provides a Watcher service that you can use to discover all the machines on a local network, but it is a bit of a pain to use.
So I've written a tiny mDNSManager class that you can use to create and manage a watcher object which will start a search for devices, tell you when it finds one and also present a list of all the devices it has found so far. It's very easy to use.
You can find the source code for both the manager and a simple demonstration application on GitHub here.
If you want to just use the manager in your programs you can install it from NuGet:
Install-Package RobMiles.mDNSManager
It works on any Windows 10 device, including the Raspberry Pi, and it makes it much easier to connect to a large number of devices. There are mDNS samples available in the example applications for the ESP8266 devices in the Arduino IDE.
I'm using this to allow me to create a Universal Application that will control a bunch of HullPixelbot devices without needing to know their ip addresses in advance.
I had a great time at TechDays in Amsterdam last month. I did a couple of sessions and the videos of them have now been released. They were great sessions to deliver, I hope you find them useful.
Thanks to number one son for the picture
Nothing like a bit of father/son bonding over a soldering iron (in my case not a very good iron).
Number one son drove up to see us this weekend and on the journey discovered that the remote lock for his car tailgate didn't work any more. A quick search of the interwebs suggested that the cause might be a broken wire. Indeed. And it turns out that the rear wiper on our car had broken for what was probably the same reason.
So, what with it being a nice day and all, we went outside and peeled back a couple of rubber boots. As it were. Turns out we were both right. In my case doubly so as two wires had snapped. So we passed the soldering iron back and forth rather like a pipe of peace as we made good the damage.
I find it really surprising that the wire can fail like this, and that car manufacturers are happy for it to happen. After all, we haven't actually spent days on end opening and closing the tailgates of our cars, these have broken after fairly light use. Oh well, as long as they last through the warranty, I guess that is what counts here....
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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