Red Nose Day Reprise at DDD North on Saturday

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I’m doing a session at DDD North this Saturday, 3rd of December. I thought it might be fun (and charitable) to reprise the Red Nose Day talk I did this year and try to raise a bit of cash for the cause. The lovely folks at DDD North agreed, and so I’ve switched my session to “How the Web Works”. It’s at 2:30 pm on Saturday 3rd December on the University of Hull Campus. You can find out more about DDD North and register here. You can donate here.

I’ve really missed going to Red Nose Day sessions. Let’s hope the audience feel the same way on Saturday.

HALF-PRICE OFFER

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I’ve got a special offer for anyone too busy to come along to my Lecture in Rhyme this Friday. You can remove any guilt you might feel about letting me down on this special occasion by simply sponsoring the event for just twice as much money as you would normally give.

This means that anyone turning up on Friday at 7:00 PM GMT is getting their presentation at half price. And you get a chance to win prizes, play silly games and laugh at both of my jokes. What’s not to love?

Red Nose Design Ideas from PowerPoint

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I’m working on the slides for the Red Nose Day lecture in rhyme. Sponsor me. Then come back and read the rest of this post.

Ah, there you are. Thanks very much. I’m using the latest version of PowerPoint. It has this “Design Ideas” feature that takes your slide, does something “AI” with it and then suggest a layout. The original design is below, and is perhaps a bit boring.

OK, forget perhaps. It is a bit boring. PowerPoint Design Ideas suggest this instead:

This is a lot less boring. I love the way that it has found suitable icons for all the points and then laid it out for me. I’m not sure that I’ll use it in this case, but it has suggested lots of other options too which I can incorporate into the presentation. It also found a wonderful piece of animated art for the start of the presentation. Which you’ll have to come along on Friday the 18th of March to see.

Up until recently I thought that a tool like PowerPoint had probably got about as useful as it could get. It’s nice to see that there are still ways it can be improved.

Red Nose Day How the web works agenda released

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I’ve spent the day sharpening my pencils (no idea why) choosing font types, rearranging my desktop shortcuts, emptying my wastebasket, and tidying my desk very slightly. Then I finally got around to writing the agenda slide for my Red Nose Day presentation in rhyme. I hope you like it. It took a long time to write……

You can sponsor me here. And the best part is that if you sponsor me you don’t have to remember to watch the session at 7:00 pm on Friday 18th March (link here)

Red Nose Day 2022 Lecture in Rhyme is go!

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If you’d told me thirty years ago that I would still be doing Red Nose Day lectures in Rhyme in 2022 I’d have said “Who are you?” and “Why can’t you tell me anything useful like ‘Buy Google Shares’?”

But that’s by the by. I’m doing it again, sooner than I expected. For now, just make a place holder in your diary and get ready to flex your wallet a bit. This time I’m going to tell you some Genuinely Useful stuff about how the web works. You don’t need to know how to program, or anything much about computers. But by the end you’ll know a bit about how the web works, have played a silly game and heard more cheese puns that you really want to.

Keep coming back to here and I’ll update you with progress, including the all-important link where you can donate your socks off.

Non-Fun Gibbon Tokens are now a thing!

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NFT.jpg

Non-Fun gibbon Tokens now a thing.

They are a horrible pun (on non-fungible tokens) made 3D real.

Thanks to the efforts of Geoff and Derek who supplied the line art plus the InkScape and OpenSCAD tools you can now have the ultimate in slightly unique art.

Prints a treat. They are quite big in the STL files, but shrink then down to 30% size in Cura and you get something which is printable and retains detail - but check with the preview mode first to make sure that none of the lines in the design have been missed.

If you like them (and why wouldn’t you) lob a donation my way for Comic Relief here.

Creampie Canon Fail

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Showing bravery in the face of whipped cream….

Showing bravery in the face of whipped cream….

Well, the lecture was a great success. Except for the “Creampie Canon”. Which kind of failed. It was mostly my fault. In the excitement I forgot to attach the trigger so that the firing mechanism didn’t work. In the second attempt the actual mechanism fell to bits.

At this point I was determined not to allow my shoddy workmanship to let me off the hook, pie in the face wise. So I did what I thought was the right thing, which was to fire the canon at myself.

That worked fine. Although I also got whipped cream over the keyboard and a few other devices that are now going to need cleaning. If you want to be part of the event by giving me some money donations are still open. You can donate here:

The Pie Face Canon

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canon.png

As part of my Red Nose Day presentation I’m making a remote controlled “pie face canon”. The pie flinging mechanism is a canon from a pie face game that you load up with whipped cream and then fire. I want to people to be able to control it from the internets and maybe even hit me in the face with it. No idea why. Perhaps it is the technical challenge.

And technical challenge it is. The biggest problem is that when the mechanism is cocked the back tension from the spring loaded piston is considerable, so you have to pull quite hard on the trigger to fire it. And Lego Technic is not very good at pulling hard on things. What happens instead is that the mechanism comes apart. Which is fun to watch but ultimately not that useful.

In typical idiot fashion I solved all the easy problems first. I can move the canon up and down and left and right by remote control. But I can’t fire it yet. A proper engineer (which might be me next time - who knows?) would have solved the mission critical part first and then added the gold plating later. At the moment it works sometimes..