Start a Diary

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We had a lovely Hardware Meetup at c4di today. We were a bit worried about having one so close to Christmas, but in the end enough folks turned up (hi Rob!) to make it more than worth the effort. 

One person that turned up has been making great progress working with his Hull Pixelbot. Each time we get together we solve a few problems, discover a few more and more forwards. Today we were talking about potential dividers. Great run.

As we left I made a strong recommendation to him. Start a diary. He's having lots of great ideas and building things, but having the standard "mad inventor" problem of remembering what he's done, what happened and where he's put the program files. A diary would solve all that.

I suggested that a great Christmas present would be a nice "page a day" diary, which can be used to record ideas and experiments. I keep a diary. If I do something interesting I write down what I did and what happened, along with links to any resources that I used.  Mine is electronic, an ever growing Word document, but I sometimes think a paper one would be nice too. There's something much more "real" about a physical artefact that you update. It's also much easier to work on and add diagrams and other stuff as you go along.  Proper engineers take pride in their log books that they use to record what they did. These are a fantastically useful resource if someone ever asks "Why did you do it that way?" because you can go back to the day that the design decisions were made and explain exactly what drove the decision. 

Writing a diary is also a great way to practice your writing skills, and you might even find that some of your diary entries become blog posts (I've done this before too).

Player Unknown's Battlegrounds

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I'm more of a video game buyer than a video game player. Over the years I've acquired consoles, controllers and a whole bunch of games and some I've played quite a bit. But often I just end up playing Zoo Keeper in front of the telly. 

I'd not heard of Player Unknown's Battlegrounds until number one son mentioned that it's lined up to be the biggest game of the year. So much for my street cred (if street cred is even a thing these days).

The premise is very simple. One hundred people land on an island. The winner is the last one left. There are weapons, vehicles and nicely drawn surroundings that contract during the game so that you are forced together into one part of the island to duke it out in the final minutes. 

We used my PC to play it, and it worked really well. It's also available for Xbox. It's network only (which is not particularly surprising) and a fast network connection is probably a good idea.  

If I played it I'd last as long as it took for someone to find me. After some discussion we reckon that the way to progress is to parachute into heavily populated areas so that you can practice your gunplay. Strongly recommended if you like shooty games. 

Battlestar Galactica Board Game

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Spent a very happy evening playing board games tonight. We started off with a session of Coup, always good for a giggle. Unless you assassinate one of your son's characters, and he then promptly turns round and knocks you out of the game. Oh well. New tactic. Don't attack the player on your immediate left, as it's their turn next and they will instantly go for payback. 

Then we got out the Battlestar Galactica game that I really wanted to play. I bought it ages ago, but never played it properly. Fortunately number one son had, and so we all had great fun finding out how the game works and then finding out how to work each other over during gameplay.

The premise is quite simple. The crew of a spaceship is trying to guide it and a bunch of civilian ships to safety in the face of implacable (and rather numerous cylon foes). The twist is that some of the crew are working for the enemy, and at the start nobody knows who the cylons are. At every turn the crew must deal with a crisis, and work out from the outcomes who can be trusted and who needs to be put into an airlock for a one way trip into space. 

By a combination of skill and miss-reading the rules the good guys managed to make it to safety, which made me a rather hapless member of the winning team. It's a great game, although there is a lot to take in at the start. The events in the game pay good service to the plot of the TV series (that is, the second iteration) but you don't need to have seen the programme to be able to enjoy the board game. 

Next time we play, I hope I'm a cylon though, it looks like fun.

Ideas can be dangerous

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I've had a bunch more ideas for features in the HullOS language that controls the Hull Pixelbot. Which is nice. 

But not that nice. Ideas can be dangerous. If you have too many you start to worry about the effort of implementing them, and then move on to feeling guilty about how few of them you've actually made work. Then you start to have ideas for another project that doesn't have quite so much emotional baggage. Until you have more ideas for that project. And so on. 

I do this a lot. 

One solution that I've found is to keep a diary where I note my ideas, amongst other things. That way I don't worry about losing the ideas and I can tick them off when I implement them. 

Dr. Who Christmas Special Preview

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I know stuff. Things I can't tell you. Things you can only learn by getting tickets to a Dr. Who Christmas Special preview in Hull and then standing in the freezing cold for an hour waiting to get in.

Thanks to Derek for getting the tickets. No thanks to the "fan" who thought it might be a wizard wheeze to sneak a camera into the earlier showing, disrupt everything when caught and delay things for everyone.

The showing was part of a tour of cities, bringing a bit of early Dr. Who themed seasonable joy. They had a Tardis with a snow machine. You could take pictures of yourself next to it, but we didn't bother in case we lost our place in the queue. The security was good natured but very intense. I've been on less well policed flights. We handed in our phones and then had a proper search for any other dodgy devices. 

I can't tell you much about the show, except to observe that I think the job of a Dr. Who Christmas Special is to stretch plausibility, space and time as far as it possibly can without breaking it and lob in a few good jokes plus a seasonal message. This one did a very good job of all those things. And it means I can give out a knowing air when we sit down in front of it on Christmas day. 

Auction Packed

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It could be yours....

So, last week I bought a new phone. As you do. I didn't mean to. It's just that stock actually arrived in Hull and I've always been weak as far as gadgets are concerned. 

That has, of course, triggered a selling frenzy on eBay as I strive to recover at least some of the cost of the new toy. One of the things I'm selling is my previous phone. It turns out that I'm not at all sentimental about my stuff. As soon as a better one comes along, it's out with the old and in with the new. But I am careful about condition. I keep all the boxes and whatnot for maximum resale value. And now my lovely iPhone 6 plus is out there, along with an iPad, an Apple watch and a Surface dock....

Black Marble Christmas Event

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Black Marble have some lovely ideas. One of them is to use the venues (and some of the speakers) from their technical conferences to run parallel events for local sixth form students. I've been helping out with sessions for a while now, and today I got to go over to Leeds and strut my stuff for a couple of hours. 

I was talking about something dear to my heart, the importance of self promotion, of keeping an eye on what you do with a view to making sure that you build and curate "the brand that is you". Two great audiences. If just a few people who were there walk out of the presentation and start blogging, or have a go at public speaking, I'll be a very happy chap.

Session 1 audience

Session 2 audience  

itunes madness

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Why? WHY?

I'm an Apple user, but an unwilling one. I love the iPhone for the hardware and what it can do, but I'm not very keen on how it does it. My situation reminds me a bit of a poker player who, when told that he is playing in a crooked poker game replies "Yes, but it is the only game in town". 

My iPhone doesn't have the graceful UI of my lovely Lumia 1520. And, now that Microsoft have pulled out of the music market, I'm forced to do battle with iTunes rather than the lovely and stylish Groove. 

I'm now using Apple music, but I've also made uncompressed copies of all my physical CDs and added them to my iTunes library. What I want is for iTunes to use the high quality copies where I have them, and "fill in the blanks" with streamed versions from the cloud. 

Instead iTunes just duplicates loads of albums, showing me the cloud and local versions for no readily apparent reason. And I can't find a way of using iTunes to get the high quality tracks off my computer onto my phone so that I can have portable high-quality music. The user interface is horrible, confusing, counter intuitive and badly documented, with the Apple help referring to options and buttons that no longer exist. 

And if I use my iPhone in the car, and try to play anything from Apple music, it tells me I've got lots of music in the cloud and then refuses to play any of it.

I really hate iTunes. I remember once saying that I thought that if the devil wrote software he'd probably have written iTunes. That was a few years ago. I've not changed my opinion. I tell people to reserve emotions like hate for things much more important than items of software, but for iTunes I'm prepared to make an exception. 

HullOS in the Hull Pixelbot

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I've spent a day having some "quality time" with the Hull Pixelbot scripting language. Which is now called HullOS.

The idea is that the computer in the robot (which can be a lowly Arduino Uno) is entirely responsible for converting the plain text of the program into actions. The behaviour will be rather reminiscent of the early 8 bit computers like the BBC Micro and Sinclair Spectrum, which had built in BASIC. They had tiny processors a bit like the one in the Arduino, but they had a lot more RAM than I've got. However, I've just about managed it. A typical program will look a bit like this:

do
    if %dist<10
        yellow
        move -10
    else
        green
    endif
forever

This HullOS program would make a "cowardly robot". The program repeatedly reads the distance sensor. If the robot is less than 10 cm from something it turns the pixel yellow and moves backwards. Otherwise it turns the pixel green. 

There are a few things to sort out, but I'm rather pleased with how it is going. And I've still got around 500 bytes of memory left....

 

Shortlisted Superhero Science

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Well, this is rather exciting. The Secret Science of Superheroes book (which I wrote a chapter of) has been chosen by @PhysicsWorld as one of their 10 books of the Year. And it keeps getting good reviews too. It's not too late to get a copy in time for Christmas. The perfect gift. Buy it for someone you love. Perhaps even yourself.... Find out more here. Buy it from Amazon here. 

Floe and Dancing Robots in Hull

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Saturday night found us in Hull, drinking hot chocolate at Nibble  prior to taking in some culture. First up was a look at Floe. Laser projected artwork on the side of The Deep. We saw some of this earlier in the year at the Made in Hull event. But this was even more awesomer. The laser projection system provided really rich and sharp colours, and the whole thing was amazing. 

Then we went down to the Hull Minster courtyard to take a look at an art installation made from a bunch of industrial robots. This was awesome. The robots move with a special kind of grace. Each is fitted with a tracking spotlight and a speaker and as they move the sound and lights shift around the space, sometimes illuminating the buildings and at other times drawing spotlights on the ground. 

Fantastic. I'm really going to miss these events. 

Build a Robot in a Day with RB

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We did another "Build a robot in a day" course today. It was for a bunch of folks from Reckitt Benckiser. We call it "Build a robot in a day" because that's what you do. But it's not really about robots. It's about learning how embedded devices are created and programmed. 

It was great fun. Everybody managed to build their robot and get it moving around and reacting to its environment. We were using the latest iteration of the Hull Pixelbot chassis, which was lovingly laser-crafted by the wonderful crew at Inno-Plaz. It still needs a few 3D printed parts, but these take around an hour to print, rather than eight. It also looks rather spiffy, as you can see above. 

Everybody proudly took home their robot at the end of the day, I really hope that they keep playing with the robot and making it do new things. 

Rob at Substance

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One of the rules that I live by is "if you're going to make a fool of yourself, it's best to do it wearing a sharp suit and a pair of illuminated goggles". Actually it's a rule that I've just made up for today. But it definitely fits the bill. 

I was part of a presentation from 2042 that c4di put on as part of the Substance element of the Hull City of Culture celebrations. I figured that, since 25 years ago people were still wearing suits, they'll probably still be wearing them in 25 years time. And the goggles? Well, let's just say I had a pair of neopixel rings free and an Arduino Pro-mini lying around. And this article from Adafruit to follow.

The brief was to deliver a technical session from the future. We were allowed to make things up (this seemed the easiest way to do it). I made up an operating system, called HULLOS, that runs on the entire city of Hull. I had four minutes to fill, so I went through four versions of the operating system in the years that lead up to 2042.

There was the Base Version, the VR version, the Freedom version and finally the Sentient Version. I provided an appropriate amount of hyperbole, with newly liberated artificially intelligent robot refuse collectors discovering a shared passion for "Strictly Cart Dancing" and an air of arrogant omniscience, "If you're the smartest person in the room it means that I've not arrived yet", which is quite unlike me. I even took a 360 degree picture from the stage in the middle. 

Talking Hullos at Substance. @c4di - Spherical Image - RICOH THETA

Such fun. Special thanks to David and Dileepa for creating a narrative around the wonderful contributions from all the other presentations. 

Windows 10 WiFi Problems Solved

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I'm bringing some old machines back into commission in case I need some spare devices for our "Build a robot in a day" course on Friday. Of course I'm updating them to the latest version of Windows 10, Fall Update Creators edition. My experience has been that, unlike previous versions of Windows on low powered machines, successive versions of Windows 10 have better performance than the previous ones on resource constrained devices.  

Anyhoo, the update on my lovely Packard Bell Butterfly tablet went OK. But afterwards the WiFi didn't work. So, not OK then.

The good news is that I've seen this problem before. And fixed it. This time I'm blogging about it so that I'll remember for the next machine I find that has this problem

  1. Right click Start and open Device Manager
  2. Open the network adapters element and find your WiFi adaptor in the list.
  3.  Right click on the entry in the list and select Properties from the menu that appears..
  4. Select the Power Management tab.
  5. Make sure that the "Allow the Computer to turn off the device to save power" checkbox is clear.

Close the properties dialog and reboot the machine. You should find that WiFi now works. Or at least, I did.

Cheap Inject Refills - wish me luck

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My printer has run out of grey ink. It's funny, because I don't remember printing many grey pictures. But there you are.

Like most printers, mine has a habit of waking up at odd times of the day and night, squirting a bit of ink out of the print head and then going back to sleep. Perhaps I should look for a grey puddle under the printer. 

Anyhoo, it was on to Amazon to find out how much a proper set of cartridges would cost. The amount is eye watering. At least it made me start to cry. So it was on to look for something a little more economical. As in, a whole set of six cartridges for around half the price of just a replacement grey one. They arrive tomorrow. Wish me luck.

Man of Substance

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I've actually got a tiny part in the City of Culture celebrations. Four minutes to be precise. It's as part of the Substance Future Forum, a whole bunch of events over the next few days. 

 I'm one of the speakers in "HULLOS V2042GM – YOUR CITY EVOLVED, CONNECTED, ACCELERATED AND ACCEPTED – 1 @ THE DOCK, 3.15PM – 4PM on Thursday 7th December" We've got a whole bunch of ideas about where this city is headed, and we're going to tell you all about them. 

I'll be speaking from the year 2042, so you might have to listen carefully. This session is just one of a whole bunch of events on Thursday. . You can sign up here for the whole day. And you get a free breakfast too.