We didn't build this tiny Stonehenge, but we rather wish we had
This is the last day of this part of our holiday. Tomorrow we head back to Hull and real life. We stayed in Swansea at an amazing guest house and had a really good time. We were revisiting places that we last went to over 20 years ago and seeing what, if anything, had changed.
Quite a few things were different, but the lovely scenery is still there and the weather was very kind to us.
Peter Capaldi doing the signing thing...
..we interrupt this holiday sequence with a Dr. Who report. You may not have noticed this, but there is a new Dr. Who coming. He is being played by the actor Peter Capaldi who is just about a contemporary of mine. I made the mistake of mentioning to number one son that I was only slightly older than Dr. Who. He replied with "What, 300 years?" which didn't put him in my good books.
Anyhoo. Today we stopped off in Cardiff on our holiday travels. On the way through the town to the castle we noticed a bunch of folks waiting by barriers. Some of them were wearing rather familiar clothes. Turned out that the world premier of the first new Dr Who episode was taking place later in the morning and the stars of the show were going to be walking through the town.
So we thought we'd stick around and see what we could see. Number one son stationed himself close to the barrier, whereas I wandered around seeing what photographs I could get.
Jenna Coleman explaining stuff
I got some quite good pictures, number one son ended up with better ones, plus he managed to snag Jenna Coleman's autograph, which was nice.
Turns out daleks don't do autographs
Neither do Cybermen..
All the other stars of the show were there too and the weather was lovely. Sometimes you just can't beat being in the right place at the right time..
Quipomatic 5000 narrative: "He was thinly disguised as a toothpick."
On holiday this week. Which means that there will be nothing but pictures and some humour from the "Quipotronic 5000" which will be generating the written content for the rest of the week. Just as a taster (*click*)
"The dish was getting very concerned about the way her father kept introducing her to spoons."
If you have just got an Intel Galileo you might find this book interesting. It tells you how to get started with the device and gives a good overview of the Arduino technology on which the Galileo is based.
To be honest, if you are experienced with the Arduino you will probably already know the majority of the content, but I reckon that there is enough Galileo specific content to make it worth the relatively modest asking price. It's also kind of useful to have all the content in one place. Each feature of the Galileo is well explained and there is also some useful background on the Intel aspects of the device.
Note that this book is written for a Galileo configured as an Arduino based platform and does not cover the use of the device as part of the Microsoft Internet of Things initiative.
I was going to design a little case for my Galileo. But it seems someone has beaten me to it. I'm fairly happy with how it turned out, although the lettering could be a bit clearer.
So I've built my Lego Mini. Took a lot less time than I expected, and it doesn't look quite like the one on the box.
A while back I was offered a chance to write a guest blog post for the 'Building Apps for Windows' blog. After a bit of thought I decided to write about the business of taking a Windows Phone application and converting it into a Universal app. I used my Wedding Light application as the example and it was great fun to write. I even managed to lever some cheese into the text...
Thanks to Larry and Kraig for turning it into something that makes a lot more sense. You can find it here.
Just posted a tiny video I made of Dancing Robots for Darryl. Enjoy.
The word on the street is that phones that are running the Windows Phone 8.1 Developer Preview will get an upgrade to Windows Phone 8.1 later next week. But I'm an impatient sort and I don't always believe the word on the street anyway. Except perhaps when it says "Give Way".
So I downloaded the Nokia Software Recovery tool and indulged in a little time travel, taking my Lovely Lumia 1520 back to an age when Windows Phone 8 roamed the earth. This process was actually rather painless. It was a lot quicker than I thought it would be and apart from one scary moment when I thought it was asking for a pin code (it isn't) the whole thing went swimmingly. A tip: it downloads a file that is around 1.5G, so it is best to do this when you are connected to a nice fast network.
At this point I had a brand new, shiny, Windows 8 phone. I told it all about me, but because I'd taken a backup (System>backup>apps+settings>back up now) just before I ran the recovery tool I was able to get all my apps restored OK along with my text messages and whatnot.
I got all excited when I went to the update menu and saw that there was one waiting for me, but it was just the Hors d'oeuvre for the main course, which downloaded next. But eventually I got to the happy ending you can see on the right.
If you are a Lumia owner you can find out if the update is available for your device by going here.
The "proper" 8.1 has a few neat advances on the Developer Preview. For starters there are little arrows that show you when your network connections are active.
Then there is the thing that mutters to you if you use a weaker power supply to charge the phone.
I've just about got my start screen back to how I like it (another tip, take a bunch of screenshots so that you can remember exactly what it looks like) and next week I'll sign up to get onto the next Developer Preview. The story continues.....
This is not exactly why I got it, but it is nice to know that it works...
I have a bit of a thing about sound quality. When I was younger (and had much better ears) I was very into High Fidelity sound and would spend many happy hours fiddling with big vinyl disks, turntables, cartridges, amplifiers and speakers to get the best possible sound.
I've continued being a bit snobbish about recorded sound. Most audio devices around today actually sound extremely respectable, including of course my Lovely Lumia 1520. But I can always convince myself that there are better things out there.
Which brings us to the Sony Web Enabled Multimedia Walkman, or if you prefer, the NWZ-F886. This is best regarded as an Android phone without the phone bit, but with really good quality audio hardware and the ability to play uncompressed audio file at lots of bit rates.
I've been after an Android device for a while. I want to use it to remote control my camera (see above) and also as the target for Xamarin apps that I fancy having a go with. So I've invested in one.
The sound quality is really, really good. The Sony comes with a pair of noise cancelling earbuds that work really well. I dragged some of my MP3 files onto it and they sound great. Then I used dbPowerAmp to rip some of my CDs into lossless FLAC files. These are audio files that are a lot bigger than compressed ones, but have all the data still present. The difference is definitely there. They sounded truly amazing. The next step is to download some high definition master tracks from somewhere like HDtracks and I'll have something that is far, far, better than my ability to hear it.
The only pitfalls in my quests for the ultimate in audio are the cost of the files themselves, the fact that hardly any are available in the UK due to licencing issues and the limitation that the Sony device only has a comparatively paltry 32G of internal storage. Having said that, I once made the awful mistake of putting all my purchased audio onto one of my devices. This made random play a minefield containing some horrible stuff that I should have been ashamed of owning. By carefully curating the limited space I should be able to guarantee a great experience every time I press play.
The device itself is small and sleek. It runs Android apps well enough and has the usual Sony high standard of construction. Unfortunately it also has the usual Sony insanity of a completely bespoke USB cable that I am bound to lose sooner or later. At the moment I'm solving that problem by leaving the cable in the player at all times, but this makes it a bit less portable.
The trajectory that is making your phone the centre of everything means that things like portable music players are going to end up as fringe devices I guess, but this is a really, really good one. If you are serious about carrying high quality sound around with you it is well worth a look.
We thought it might be fun to make a video that gives you a tour of the department and shows you what we get up to. So we did. Camomile is the tour leader and does a wonderful job of showing you round the place. Kudos to Rachel for putting the whole thing together and making it look so good.
Warning: This report does not contain any flash photography, but there may be a cameo appearance from yours truly.
I'm a dream target as far as advertisers are concerned. I like new shiny things and have got pretty good at rationalising my impulses to purchase gadgets. I don't buy a new game console, I "invest" in it. I reckon that if you do the maths you would probably discover that my shiny Xbox One purchase actually makes about as much commercial sense as buying shares in a bank. So I reckon I can call it an investment.
Anyhoo, I watched "The Men Who Made Us Spend" last night with more than a smidgen of interest. It told the story of how advertisers have turned us all into eternal children who can be provoked into impulse buying simply by showing us stuff in films and on TV. The presenter told the story of how the makers of the Star Wars films were the ones that first discovered this magical effect but I'm not too sure about that. I remember Thunderbirds.
I, along with thousands of other schoolkids of the 1960s, were glued to to the antics of International Rescue, with their squad of numbered machines that made them very easy to order in toy shops. Which just happened to be full of them at the time. They even managed to corner the girls market too, with Lady Penelope. I also remember my dad showing a keen interest in the program, and often reading my TV21 magazine before I did. And we were bonding over Men from Uncle movies and James Bond cars as well.
"The Men Who Made Us Spend" made some very good points, but I think if they had gone a bit further back in time they would have discovered that this kind of thing has been going on since the point in human existence when we had a bit of spare cash jingling in our pockets. The scale has changed and the toys have changed but this stuff is all powered by human nature. And that hasn't changed for thousands of years.
The whole series is well worth seeing. I watched the episode while building a Lego Mini. Go figure.
I've been playing with the Galileo and written my first little program. It doesn't do much, but it does let you send commands to the Unix part of the system from the USB debugging connection.
The program just assembles a command message and sends it to the system. It appends a redirect so that the result of the command is sent back to the debug serial port.
To send commands to your Galileo just open the Serial Monitor from the Tools menu and type the command in the send window. Put a * on the end to mark the end of the command and press enter to send it.
It is not particularly elegant, but it is my first program and it does work. If you want to send a * to the command line you have to change the code. But I'm sure you can do that.
You can download the sketch from here.
A Galileo with a very distant relative
There is a wonderful exchange in the film "Ten Things I Hate About You"* where one of the characters poses the question "You can be overwhelmed. And underwhelmed. But can you ever be just 'whelmed'?". I think you can be. And I've just found the thing that does it. I've been playing with an Intel Galileo board. And I must admit that I'm totally whelmed by it.
It looks like an Arduino that has been eating all the pies. It has all the connections that an Arduino has, but they are subtly less useful (more of that in a minute). It is based on the Intel Quark architecture which is a complete system on a chip. The Quark is the tiny thing right in the middle of the Galileo device. The Quark chip provides serious amounts of processing grunt, and it is coupled to 512 megabytes of memory. It runs a flavour of Linux and you can put bigger versions of that operating system, plus a lot of data, on the micro-sd card.
Flip the board over and you can find a PCI Express socket which could take all kinds of high speed devices. You can also connect the Galileo to a wired network and it will work a treat, and you can run Python and lots of other stuff. And you can plug Arduino shields into the board and directly interface to hardware. That cat-flap that sends you an email each time the cat goes in or out is well within your grasp.
So far, so neat. But it is expensive, at over fifty pounds it is around five times the price of a single Arduino clone. And the Arduino hardware ports are limited. While they are electrically the same as the ones on your trusty Uno they can't be updated at more than 230 or so Hz. This rules out driving things like NeoPixels from the Galileo. It supports USB hosting, but you have to have an extra connector, and you need a really funky cable if you want to do serial communication with it.
If you really want to have Arduino compatibility and some unix power round the back you should probably get a Yun device. This is cheaper, smaller, lower power and you get WiFi thrown in. If you want to do proper unix with a bit of interfacing then the Raspberry Pi might be more up your street. And you can plug a monitor directly into that.
The Galileo is not a bad device. It is just not anything other than whelming at the moment. That could change though, remember that Quark computer on a chip. It really is tiny. If Intel release a slew of properly small and properly cheap Quark based platforms, then the Galileo would be a fantastic place to prototype the next generation of "internet of things" gizmos.
Update: The review above is all about the Galileo that I paid money for, arrived in a box last week, and I've just had a play with. It is not about the Galileo that Microsoft have been giving away as part of their Internet of Things effort. I signed up for that, but nothing has come through yet. Thanks to leonellive for pointing that out.
As far as I can tell the IOT device is the same, but it comes with an SD card containing a different operating system that is Windows based and you can write programs using Visual Studio. Now that might be a lot more than just whelming. (Does anyone know where I can get an SD card image?).
* If you've not seen the film, or you have and you want to relive the magic, head over to this fantastic essay all about it from Bim.
Some time a go I was a little bit unwell, and every since then I've been quite careful about keeping active. I went on this very useful post-procedure programme to improve my fitness where they measured my heart rate and blood pressure before and after exercise and I now do the same kind of thing at home.
At regular intervals I do a bunch of exercises which are based on the programme I used to do at the hospital. Before and after each one I measure my heart rate and at the start I measure blood pressure. I've now got a whole bunch of bits of paper holding numbers which are actually pretty similar and I really like it that way. If I do my routine and the numbers start to look odd, that's when I will go and see someone about it. I'm probably being a bit obsessive about the process, but I view this as a healthy kind of obsessive...
Turns out that the university is involved in a project that would make my routine a lot easier. It's on Kickstarter, and I've backed it. The device they are proposing will capture all the readings that I take using my various different devices, plus a few more. It will also allow the data to be transferred into a PC so I can look at proper graphs rather than scribbled numbers.
I really hope they get funding, I'd love to have an Eimo in my life.
These guys were making the music. Now, I'm no expert, but those record players look a bit small to me.....
Went to the C4DI Summer Party this evening. Fantastic venue. Lovely weather. Great company. And Free Food.
What more can you ask for?
Met up with some Hull graduates who seem to have "accidentally formed a software development company" by being in the right place (C4DI) at the right time. (a few weeks ago). Fantastic work guys, and I'll see about getting you in to do a "Rather Useful Seminar" in the future. (nobody ever really escapes Hull University......)
Also spent some time chatting about 3D printing, future embedded stuff at C4DI, teaching and all kinds of other bits and bobs.
Of course I took some pictures. I think I may have over-processed them a bit, but hey, it's my blog....
It's my birthday today. I had my treat over the weekend and am now saving up for a Segway (just about doable) and a twenty acre estate that I can use it in (pretty much impossible). So I'm here in the office, eating chocolates and writing C#. Which counts as a pretty good situation in my book.
Anyhoo, I've been playing with a present I bought myself last week. It is a Texas Instruments SensorTag. You can pick these up for a very reasonable sixteen pounds or so and they are enormous fun (if you like connecting devices to sensors). It talks Bluetooth BLE and I've fancied having a go at this for a while.
Turns out to be easy to get it to connect to a Windows 8.1 device. Just remember that for Windows you have to pair the tag over Bluetooth. It just works with iOS and Android - I hope that they remove the need for pairing with Windows at some point.
If you fancy having a go I've written a very simple universal app and put it on GitHub. You can use this to connect to the accelerometer in a SensorTag and get events fired in your program when a new reading is produced.
I used a superb post from Dan Ardelean to get started, and just built a little wrapper class around methods that he described. Great fun.
There are many mysteries in my life. Is there a god? Are we alone in the universe? What does the phrase "lifetime guarantee" actually mean? I would love to know the truth behind any or all of these.
But right now I'd settle for a solid answer to the question "How do you put things into a mono spaced font when you are authoring a Kindle ebook?"
One of my programming rules is that "just because you can do something, doesn't mean that you should". Take this piece of magic for example:
This is a lump of XAML, the code that you use to design the user interface for a Windows application. It tells the computer what the display will look like and defines display objects which link to the underlying code that provides the behaviours.
Except that it turns out that you can actually put code into your XAML, along with the display markup.
You should never do this. But I guess that knowing about it is cool. Find out more 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
