Well, that was fun. Turns out that trains work. We had to get up rather early, but at least we made it to the airport. Then onto the plane and away. The journey was smooth, and on time. Thanks to the magic of time zones we managed to land around the same time as we took off.
I thought we were being so clever. with our planning for the journey to the MVP summit. Booking a hotel close to the airport and ravelling a day early seemed like a good way to handle "The Beat from the East meets Storm Emma". What could go wrong?
Everything.
There are only a few roads between Hull and Manchester airport. And this afternoon they were either broken or impossible too get to. I chose to use Waze as my navigation weapon of choice. It's supposed to be able to detect road closures and automatically route you around them in advance.
What it is not supposed to do is send you off the motorway and then back on at the same junction, put you into a half-hour queue to get onto a road that turned out to be shut, and send you down roads so scary that you turn back trembling.
Rubbish.
Once we'd, rather sensibly in my opinion, not driven down the road marked as closed, Waze proceeded to try and take us back the same way. Idiot code. You;d think that a satnav would be able to reason that if I've not used the road, there's probably a good reason for this. At very least it should ask a question "Is the road you just tried to use blocked?" and then use the answer to get us where we want to be.
Actually, I think the whole sorry affair threw up my rather worrying reliance on technology. In the "Good Old Days"(tm) I would spend a few minutes with the map before heading out. That way I'd know if a particular direction is a good idea or not. Nowadays I just wait for the navigation to catch up.
Oh well. At the moment we are in Leeds buying train tickets for the last leg of the journey.
We had another superb Hardware group meetup at c4di tonight. Two new members, plus a host of others braved the horrid snow to come and talk tech. I was telling everyone of my problems with my soldering iron, which had come un-soldered (see above) leading to some nice "Catch-22" issues (in the end I bought another iron and mended my "proper" one).
Plans are afoot for another soldering evening, and a "build your own LoRa node" event too. Turns out that it's all happening..
I'm busy getting my ducks in a row for the MVP Summit next week.
Not sure why I'm taking a row of duck there though..
Snow looks great on christmas cards and on pictures from other people However, when you have it outside your house for long periods of time it is a bit less fun.
Hopefully it will be gone before our marathon journey to the airport on Friday. We're flying out to the MVP summit on Saturday so, being a cunning chap, I've booked a hotel around a mile from the airport, just in case the roads are bad on Saturday.
There's talk of it being a bit snowy next week. I'm not convinced just at the moment.
As another celebration of my writing prowess,, and because they were 20 pounds off and because,well, I don't have to make excuses to you do I, dear reader, I got a Littlebits Droid inventors kit. I've not built it yet, but I have had a play with the controller board. It's actually very neat.
Best bit for me is that the speaker is inside the robot (unlike the Lego Boost robot which plays the sound from the controlling tablet or phone) and it is packed with authentic Star Wars sound effects. For the price it is actually pretty good value for a Star Wars branded product. Looking forward to making it. I think I'll paint mine white so that it looks like a "proper" one.
Wrote loads of pages today. Here are some jokes to celebrate..
Showing of "Transparent Terry", one of the robot crew
We had a bunch of folks from HEY Children's University come and see us at c4di today. It was great fun. I was showing off how we can put programs into robots to tell them what to do, and that a program is just something that takes in something (a distance from a distance sensor) does something with it (run away if the distance is less than 100 mm).
They were a great audience and I hope that a fair few of them get into software, robots and other stuff that can change the world.
I said I'd put some links on here to resources. You can find out about the Hull Pixelbot (the robot I was showing off) here. You can find resources to build your own Pixelbot here. If you really do want to build a robot, come along to our hardware group meetings (there's one next Thursday). Sign up here.
Paul Foster taking networks.
Well, that was fun. And exhausting. We did two Smart City events in one day. The morning event was all about getting people together to build a network, and the afternoon was all about the tech of LoRa.
Both events had awesome attendance, lots of sensible discussion, and we even managed to fit in a bit of planning. As far as I'm concerned, the outcomes are:
If you want to see my slides, which tell you all about LoRa, you can find them here.
I'm really excited about this. I think it could be the start of something not small. If you didn't make the events, but you want to get involved, feel free to contact me directly (put a comment on this post or message me via Twitter or email me or stand on a corner and shout loudly).
Well, the preparations are nearly complete. I've even printed out the name badges. Tomorrow we'll be talking Smart Cities and networking. By way of a taster, I've put the first slide of my presentation above. Should be exciting.
The Expanse is a great big lump of space opera that must have cost a fortune to produce. (I tried to work in an "The Expense" gag here, but I couldn't make it work. Oh well.)
The spaceships are some of the best I've ever seen on TV and the narrative is rattling along at a furious pace. Set all around the solar system, a few hundred years into the future, it has earthers, martians and belters (folks from the asteroid belt) at the brink of interplanetary war.
There's political chicanery, space battles and some rather unsavoury extra-terrestrial stuff oozing around the place. Some bits of the plot seem to get a massive build-up and then disappear, but there's more than enough going on to keep you occupied now that Star Trek Discovery has finished its run.
I actually had to use my oscilloscope last week. First time in ages. I'd quite forgotten how useful it is to be able see signals on wires. I'm thinking of running a "What is an oscilloscope and why is it a good idea?" session at the c4di hardware club.
I found this old lens in the loft, attached to an old camera. Seems to work a treat.
If I could travel faster than light. Could I use the old lens to take a picture of itself?
Looks like a couple of most excellent talks at Hull Devs at the of this month. Steve Trapps is talking about agile development and James Mann is coming over from Black Marble to talk about making bots. Should be a great evening. You can get your tickets here.
Actually we didn't have any monsters turn up. But we did have a lot of people. Hayden was running a soldering masterclass. I was talking about Hull Pixelbots to a whole bunch of students who turned up to find out what we're about. Brian showed off a work in progress which simulates Hull Pixelbot movements in a nifty Python program. And we did some work with one of our youngest attendees, who's trying to make a remote controlled missile launcher (but only a small one).
We were playing with these super-cheap wireless devices. Connect a transmitter to an output pin on an Arduino, wiggle the pin up and down, and the receiver will wiggle an output up and down at the same time. So you can send messages wirelessly from one Arduino to another.
In the past I've not had much success with these, but we tried the RadioHead library and it seems to work rather well, We're going to look into adding a carefully crafted antenna to try and improve the range. And have a look at other wireless options too.
It was great fun. If you fancy coming along, the next one is on the 1st of March starting at 6:00 in c4di.
You've got to be pretty sure of yourself to allow someone to write a farce about what you're doing. Or brave. Or something. But the Hull City of Culture team did it. "The Culture" is a behind the scenes look at just what goes on in the offices behind those fancy slogans and artistic happenings. There are some lovely nods to the buzzwords and whatnot that come with organising something like Hull City of Culture, but all credit to the team for letting it all happen. And hats off to Martin Green, the head honcho of City of Culture, who actually turned up to take part in the performance that we saw.
"The Culture" is a proper farce. Double meanings, mistaken identity, hiding in cupboards, bawdy bits, the lot. It also has a genuine, beating heart at the centre. The cast do a great job of bringing the play to life. Their energy never flagged from start to end. And it wasn't until right at the end, when I wondered where some of the actors had got to for the curtain call, that I worked out just how many roles each cast member played.
I'm not sure if you'll be able to get tickets to see it before it finishes its run, but if you can, I think you'll have a really good time.
So, what with it being the start of Lent, it's time to give something up. So I've decided to give up eating after 7:00 pm. For someone like me this is actually quite an issue, what with biscuits, cheese, liquorice all sorts and chocolate being consumed in apparently vast quantities in front of the telly of an evening.
...when I try to edit a program that is running (something which I do rather a lot these days - I think it's because I'm getting old) I get this "helpful" message.
It would be even more helpful if the dialog contained another button I could press to stop the application and return me to the code that I'm trying to edit.
Update
It turns out that this has already been requested on UserVoice. If you go here you can upvote it. Please do. I'd love to see the feature.
On 21st of February we'll be Kickstarting Hull's Smart City at the c4di. You're invited. You're especially invited if you're a developer wanting to get into city wide networking, a student looking for a new field to get your teeth into or someone who wants to do some good with technology.
We'll be describing our plans for building a community to work with the latest low powered networking technology and use it to build solutions for local people. It's going to be great fun.
The event is free, we'll have lots of expertise and maybe even biscuits. You can sign up 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.
Begin to Code with JavaScript is now available for purchase and download. You can find it here
