I'm not a huge fan of New Year's Resolutions. And resolving to do more to keep fit is probably not a good plan on a day spent watching telly and eating.
Oh well. At least I haven't used the video monitor gag this year.
Happy New Year everyone.
New Year Sieve.
Note: I may have used this gag before. I don't care. I still like it. And it's my blog.
In between other games, I've played a bit of Zookeeper. Above is my finest hour so far. The boss is normally quite rude to me. Below is one of my favourite insults...
Another game I've been playing with over the break is Mario and Rabbids on the Nintendo Switch. It's a fun little game that was on offer at a temptingly low price over the Christmas break. I like it because it's turn based. You give your characters their instructions and then watch the action unfold as they get into position and shoot at the enemy. Then the enemy takes their move, and your carefully laid out plans collapse before your eyes. Although that might be just me.
I really like the way that there's no limit on how long you can spend thinking about what to do next. I'm rubbish at most "shooty" type games because I have a habit of standing and thinking, never a good plan when there are snipers about. But with this game I can spend as long as I like choosing who to send into battle, which of the wonderful weapons to give them and what to make them do when they get there. There seems to be a huge depth to the action too, with stuff laid around the levels that really encourages you to go back and play them again once you've levelled up a bit.
If you've got a Nintendo Switch you really should get this game I reckon.
Number one son has brought his Playstation 4 Pro along for the Christmas break. And he's bought Dark Souls III
I'm finding it great fun to watch him play it. There's a lot of death involved. Quite a bit of it involves the player. It seems that you learn the right thing to do in every battle by doing the wrong thing first and finding out that it kills you. The graphics are impressive, if a bit murky, and the animations and actions of the different forms of the evil hordes that you need to kill are very well realised. The voice acting of the characters is well done, and the story is suitably preposterous. Worth a look if you've got the patience of the un-dead.
Lovers of games involving strategic play, intense plot and mental strength should look away now. Lovers of idiotic fun though, that's a different matter....
We didn't playtest this at all is daft. It's the kind of game you can win by being the shortest player. Or lose by being eaten by a dragon. Or not touching your nose the right number of times. The games are short, furious and fun. I can't imagine spending an entire evening playing this game, but for a bunch of mad fun before you start playing Coup I reckon it would be hard to beat.
Don't you just hate those people who post pictures of their Christmas presents in their blogs..
But this is great. 64 cheese jokes lovingly printed on cheese portion shaped cards and placed in a cheese box for no reason at all. Wonderful.
Happy Christmas to both my readers.
Here's a model for a business. Search ebay for things which appear to be going cheap. Make a stupidly high bid for the cheap item to try and win it at a knock down price. If you win at a low price, pay it. If you win at a high price, delete your username and walk away.
I've had this happen to me before. Up until now the buyers had the "decency" to come up with an excuse for their stupidly high bid before retracting it. This time they just deleted the user.
It occurs to me that eBay should probably keep track of the postcodes used by buyers and check for large numbers of accounts being registered/deleted at a particular location. This would seem to be a good use of all this "artificial intelligence" that we are always hearing about
The way I see it, it's best to delay Christmas shopping until the last possible minute in order to make sure that you have taken the proper amount of time to find out what people really want for their present.
Went to see Star Wars - the Last Jedi - tonight. I reckon you only need to know two things about this film:
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).
Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed that non-Microsoft applications (particularly Google Chrome and Apple Music) have a habit of unpinning themselves from the Windows 10 Task Bar?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, that was quick. First thing to sell was the watch, followed by the dock, followed by the iPad. And the thing that I thought would sell first, the phone, is still out there.
I guess a lot of people must be upgrading.
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 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
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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