Appalling User Interfaces - App Suggestions by Siri

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I seem to need to have an Apple phone. My favourite, Windows Phone, doesn't do all the things I want, and I've tried Android and that was fairly appalling too. What can I say? I'm picky.

One trick that the iPhone plays drives me completely nuts. The phone provides "Siri App Suggestions" based on the things that you do most. You can use these favourites to slightly compensate for the horrible way that the iPhone manages large numbers of apps on the device.

The suggestions are based on your use of the phone and are updated each time you visit the screen. But here's the appalling bit. They update and redraw themselves in the fraction of a second between the page appearing and you actually selecting something.

So your finger can head for the Nest icon, but by the time your digit touches the screen the icon underneath can be replaced by a different application. So the wrong thing is selected. Most annoying.

This single piece of stupidity makes the feature completely useless to me. Here's a tip Apple, why not update the sorted list before you display it on the screen?

Forza Horizon 3 is Wonderful

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I liked Forza Horizon 3 so much that I've bought it. At the time I got it they had a discount in the store, so I've got it for both Xbox One and Windows 10 at what I think is quite a reasonable price.

I can now take my Tesla out and go drifting in the Australian outback. Awesome fun. It is the best racing game ever. I've played a few over the years, and I really can't fault Forza in any way. The breadth of vehicles, the quality of the driving experience, the feeling of being part of something. All wonderful.

I don't play games as much as I probably should. No, really. But Forza is probably going to change that. I've got to smash a few more boards and collect my very own Reliant Regal.....

Rogue 1: A Star Wars film

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We went to see Rogue One: A Star Wars story today. 

It's a good film. I really enjoyed it. Bearing in mind that we went in knowing the story in advance (stealing the Death Star films to set up a movie made forty years ago) they did a very good job of making the film fresh and interesting with some great characters. 

If you like Star Wars you'll love it. It you don't care much about Star Wars, this might give you cause to start caring a bit more. 

Reliant Regal in Forza Horizons 3

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Forza Horizons is an awesome franchise. I have great memories of playing Forza Horizons 2 with the Storm Island add-on. Number one son has got Forza Horizons 3 and we were playing it this evening. The game has "Barn Finds", cars that you can unlock by, er,, finding them in barns dotted around the map.

We had a look for barn finds today and found a Reliant Regal three wheeler van in one barn. This was actually my very first car, although I don't remember it being painted in quite such a lush shade of green.

This is the vehicle made famous by the "Only Fools and Horses" sitcom, although people often refer to the one in that show as a "Reliant Robin", which it is not. The Regal is much less sophisticated than that. It has a fibreglass body over a steel chassis, with a 700cc engine sitting nearly in the passenger compartment. Nought to sixty in "You don't want to go there...".

Number one son had an experimental drive and noticed that it is surprisingly easy to tip it over. And slow. And noisy. But the exterior and the interior have both been lovingly recreated.I think this feature is probably worth the price of the game on it's own. If it had a Nissan Cube and a BMW i3 the game would be completely perfect.

Actually, the gameplay and the sheer depth of content make the game an absolutely fantastic buy anyway. I'm tempted to get it in the "dual" version so that I can play it on the PC and on the Xbox One.

Fun with the Pocket Chip

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The Pocket CHIP is a very nice device. Mine arrived a couple of weeks ago and I've been very impressed with the hardware. You can get the device as a free standing board, rather like the Raspberry PI, or in a case with a properly portable form factor, giving you a small touch screen, LiPo battery and a keyboard that is "interesting".

This is the processing power that drives the whole affair. You can buy this on it's own for 9 dollars (amazing) or you can spend a bit more for the cased version above. 

It has 512K RAM and 8G of on-board storage, but you can use the USB port to add more peripherals. It has Bluetooth and WiFi built in too. If you want to add video output there are adaptors for VGA and HDMI. 

The graphics have 3D acceleration (it will run Minecraft and Quake quite successfully) and the PocketChip version ships with Pico-8, a fun little game development environment which you can use to actually build games on the device. It will also run a ton of emulators for most handhelds and some early consoles. 

I must admit that all I've done with it so far is upgrade the firmware to the latest version. This is something that you really must do when you receive a device. It doubles the amount of onboard storage to 8G and it also enables the 3D acceleration.  

Rather annoyingly, the only way I could do this was to remove the CHIP processor from Pocket CHIP case, connect the FEL line to ground using a wire link and then run the upgrade software within the Chrome browser. Having said that, this did mean that I got to take a look at the guts of the device. 

Its inevitable that this will be compared with the Raspberry Pi. They both run pretty much the same OS and their power is of the same order of magnitude, although I think the Pi is a tad faster. However, the CHIP has charms of its own. There's no need for a separate memory card and the price is very attractive. Don't worry about buying from the UK, I got my Pocket CHIP shipped here with no problems. The price of the device itself is so low that it is unlikely you'll pay import duty.  Well worth getting into I reckon..

I'l looking forward to playing more with this neat device over the holidays. I'm hoping I get used to the built in keyboard...

HullPixelbots at AzureCraft

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HullPixelbots on parade

Well, that was fun. It was the first proper outing for my robot army. We were all at AzureCraft in London. It was an absolutely great event, kids getting together to make things in MInecraft. And learn to program along the way.

I'd set up my Robot Arena in one of the board rooms at the fantastic venue. Over the day groups of kids and parents came to take up the challenge of controlling their robots and getting them to line up in the arena with no collisions. Harder than it looked, but everyone who came along was up for the task. Quite a few folks came back for another go, which was nice. 

Great fun. Thanks to the folks at the UK Azure User Group for setting up the event and inviting me along. 

A tense moment as the pixels line up...

Buy more than you need

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I'm kind of cross with myself. I've broken one of my own rules. I needed bits for 8 robots. So I bought 8 sets of bits. Stupid stupid stupid. You should always buy a few spares in case of failures. It's not that they are expensive. And you can always use the spares on other projects.

Of course a few were duff, which meant that I couldn't make all my robots. Of course (cunning bear move) the faulty parts were the ones I used last. Fortunately have have friends with similar interests (thanks Ian and Robin) so I was able to grab some spares, which is how come I'm sitting on the train with 7 working robots (I couldn't fit 8 in the case...)

The Robots are coming to c4di

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Sam drives some robots..

I took my working pixelbots down to c4di and gave a talk tonight about how they worked. Before the talk I set out a small part of my robot arena and we all had a bit of fun steering them around using my chatbot client. 

Thanks to everyone who came along. Some very useful conversations. I left with some good ideas for improving the system. I'll be putting the presentation and the code up soon. Keep watching the blog for details. 

Bear Wrestling and Hardware Development

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I think that building devices is a bit like wrestling a bear (not that I've ever actually done any bear wresting). It's an ongoing struggle and then, just when you think you might be winning (always a dangerous thing to do) the bear pulls out a killer move and knocks you flat on the floor. 

I've just suffered from this. Nasty bear.

I've been building HullPixelbot devices for c4di and AzureCraft and connecting them to my home wifi for testing. It's been going well (a dangerous sign). I'm controlling them quite successfully and thinking that I might actually end up with a working system. And then today everything slowed right down. Commands that previously took no time at all to deploy suddenly took ages, which is a problem because all the robots need to move at the same time. 

Of course I thought my software was broken and spent a couple of frantic hours trying to speed it up. But the performance was still rubbish. 

Then, at 3:00 am this morning the answer came to me. At the same time as deploying the final version of the code I'd switched to my portable WiFi router, rather than the home network. All the problems started then. Turns out that not all WiFi was created equal. Some is much slower than others.

At 3:30 am I was resigned to going off and buying a new router in the hope it might be faster. At 4:00 am I realised that I actually had a router I'd bought a while back for another project. Only problem is that it was running the Chinese version of the router firmware. 

So at 8:00 am this morning I was trying decipher Chinese menu screens and load a new version of the firmware into the router. I've finally managed to get it working and performance is back to reasonable again. One up on the bear. 

However, the most important thing about the "bear wrestling model of hardware development" is that you mustn't start to think that the bear hates you. He doesn't. He's just there to wrestle, because that is what bears like to do. You need to work on the basis that at some point the bear will step back, bow gracefully and say "I'm going to let you win this one".