Last week on Saturday night we watched “The Fifth Element” one of my all time favourite films. This week someone else was in charge of viewing choices and we watched Frozen II. Without wishing to give much away the plots are virtually the same, although with a bit less shooting in Frozen 2. Very strange.
I’m doing a tiny bit of node.js in the Begin to Code with JavaScript book. It might seem a strange thing put into what is supposed to be a beginners text, but it is such a large part of how the language is used that I think I really should say something. I want to make it clear that JavaScript lets you write both server and client.
Went out onto Beverley Westwood today for a walk. They have cows on there so I took another picture of one. I used my other cow picture in a poster for a departmental event a few years ago, so I could do with a spare.
Our post delivery person is great. But sometimes a bit eccentric. Today they delivered a package while I was in to someone who was out. All I got after spending an afternoon excitedly waiting for my camera strap to arrive (I really should get out more) was a note that said “Number 5 living room window”. Now I don’t number the windows on my house. And our living room isn’t so big as to have 5 windows anyway.
Eventually I worked out that this had something to do with the living room window at house number 5. So I went over and had a look. The window was slightly open and there, on the floor inside was my parcel. Which counted as a win in delivery terms. Although if I’d had a priceless Ming vase in my room underneath the window (which is perhaps not very likely in my neighbourhood I suppose) I’d have been a bit concerned.
The good news is that the camera strap is excellent.
I’ve been a member of Flickr for years. I’ve just paid my Pro subscription for what I think will be the last time. It’s starting to cost around the same per year as Microsoft Office 365 which, to my mind, offers much more for the cash - including photo storage…
There are lots of things I need to learn how to do. Play the piano properly, explain how this works in JavaScript without using the word this too much, juggle. But today I really want to learn how to land. I don’t think you can call yourself a compleat pilot until you can put the plane onto the ground rather than into it.
Further to my post on Wednesday, and with a 10% discount coupon from Ebay I have bought myself a camera strap.
I love it when people try new things, especially in difficult circumstances. I was in the local Cooplands bakery getting some sandwiches for lunch and I noticed that they were selling baking kits. I’m not a huge fan of baking itself but I am a huge fan of the things that people make when they do it. So I bought a kit. It’s very nicely presented with nicely printed recipes and beautifully packaged ingredients. You even get some utensils, including the cutter for the gingerbread man and a tray to bake things in.
We’ve done the gingerbread men and the brownies so far, with pizza to come. They were delicious. If you’ve never baked and fancy having a go these are a really nice one-stop shop for all the bits. I hope that they keep making them.
I’m having a tiny break from writing. Today we took a trip to Castle Howard which is one of my favourite places in the world. Before we set off we went onto their web site, dutifully filled out the form, booked our slot and got the QR code that would allow us and a few other people to go in.
When we arrived the place was mad busy. I’ve never seen so many people there. I’m far from convinced that everyone there had done as much forward planning as we had. The good news was that the grounds are so vast that they swallowed up all the visitors and we had a delightful amble round. The weather was kind enough to only threaten to rain a couple of times.
Went for a walk today and took this picture. Which was rather nice.
A long time a ago Andy, a very wise friend of mine, explained why so many computer people were also into photography. “You see” he said. “All computers do pretty much the same thing. Once you’ve bought a computer it is hard to convince yourself to buy another one, since it will do the same stuff as the one you already have. But photography is different. There are no end of lenses, tripods, filters, case, straps flashes and whatnot that you can hanker after”. He was right too. But I think I’ve found something even worse than photography. It’s called music.
For me the crucial difference is that I can do photography (a bit) but I can’t really do music. So I tend to hanker after new music kit just to avoid facing the awkward truth that I can’t actually play any of it.
Anyhoo, enough of my neurosis for now. I’ve just got myself an Akai MidiMix MIDI control surface that I can use to twiddle the settings in my synthesizers. It turns out that you can get an awfully large number of knobs and sliders (and even a few lights) for what seems a pretty reasonable outlay. And I’m going to investigate what else I can control using MIDI messages. Which should keep me off the piano keyboard for a while….
I’ve mentioned this site before, but I'm going to mention it again because the games are so good. We spent a very happy evening playing a variety of different things on our phones, pcs and tablets. They all worked a treat.
It turns out that going flying is a social thing. We meet up on a Monday, someone suggests a flight plan and off we go, trying to keep each other in sight. Tonight’s flight was going well until someone remembered that there was a TV program on in 8 minutes that they rather wanted to see. This was a cue for everyone to drop 10,000 feet and head for the nearest airfield. It was all rather exciting. I’m even planning on getting a proper joystick because although it is possible to fly a plane from an XBOX gamepad I’m pretty sure that the professionals don’t do it that way.
Over the last few weeks we’ve spent quite a few of our regular game nights playing Scythe on-line. I seem to have a love-hate relationship which Scythe. The love is directly proportional to how well the last game went. At the moment I regard not coming last as a badge of honour, and I’m working my way up from there.
My Little Scythe is stepping stone (or gateway drug if you prefer) to the “proper” game. When we played it today I spotted a lot of the gameplay elements in a much simplified form. And you don’t have battles. You have pie fights. One of the things about full fat Scythe that I find a bit annoying is that some features of the game just seem to be there to make the gameplay more complicated. There are (to me) needless interactions between game elements and lots of different ducks that you have to get precisely in a row to be able to make progress. Perhaps what I’m really saying is that I don’t have the mental horsepower and concentration to play the game properly.
My Little Scythe is much simpler and I liked it a lot. But then again, I did manage to win.
Here’s a question: If you’d written a book and then you found that there was a Chinese translation of the book out there, would you try to get a copy?
In my case, it turns out that the answer is yes. I’ve just ordered a copy of the above.
There’s also a Polish version. It seems that having an inflated ego can get expensive….
I’m writing about this in JavaScript. This is quite hard. Especially because to describe this you end up using the word this to mean this not this. And I can’t find another word that means this that I can use to replace the this that doesn’t mean this.
Oh well.
I’ve just uploaded Chapter 10 of Begin to Code with JavaScript. It tells you all about building a cool class hierarchy in JavaScript. You can find it, along with all the other chapters, here. You won’t be able to hear it for a while though I’m afraid. It turns out that writing deadlines are more important than reading deadlines.
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. This is a nice keyboard with a good long key travel. Need to work on the wrist support perhaps, but it is a step forwards from the previous one if it remembers what it is doing and stays powered up all the time. The stand isn’t much of a help for my wrists but the angle is very good. The keyboard layout is a dead ringer for the Microsoft one that it replaces apart from the function keys and arrows which tend to be all over the place anyway.
I’ve pulled off the Apple keycaps it had on when it arrived and replaced them with Windows ones that are supplied with the keyboard (along with a key puller). I had a nasty moment when one of my favourite keyboard shortcuts (WIN+SHIFT+S) failed to start up the screen capture but I fixed this by flicking the keyboard configuration switch underneath the keyboard to the Windows position.
I’m surprised that I’m deserting Microsoft comfort keyboards in this way, but this is a very good price and I’ve decided that Bluetooth is just not a good technology for a keyboard that you want to leave switched on all day. Plus the Bluetooth interface on my desktop is flakey. I can make this keyboard into a Bluetooth one if I fancy, but at the moment I’m using the supplied dongle and it works very well. I’ve always been a big fan of split keyboards and this is a nice option. It doesn’t have the premium feel of the Microsoft keyboards but it seems sturdy enough. Let’s hope it keeps going.
I’ve mentioned netgames.io before. Its a tiny web site that lets you play multiplayer games. They’ve added another game to the site, Enigma. Opposing teams have to give clues to code words and pass messages without them being intercepted. You need at least four or five players and a means of having private chats (we used Discord) but the gameplay is brain bending fun. I was quite pleased to be on the winning team.
If you look very carefully at this picture you can see the two other planes I’m, ahem, flying in formation with….. It was a lovely evening. The plan was to take off from Elvington airfield and then land at Humberside airport. And we did. Mostly. My goodness, flying properly is hard. Something simple like keeping a constant speed and height seems to involve constant control fiddling.
After our Yorkshire flight we went down to London City Airport and then flew over to Filton near Bristol. London looked magnificent in the evening sunshine. I managed a very bouncy touchdown and then crashed into a tree taxiing for a group picture. But it was all great fun and something we will definitely do again.
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
