Well, we got closure on our pipe situation. Just as I suspected, a tiny hole had opened up in the copper. This was in the process of getting bigger when we noticed it.
The good news is that it could have been worse. The bad news is that we now have a smoking crater where the downstairs toilet used to be. We'll have to wait for it to dry out a bit before we put the floor back in.
What with Winchester and Salisbury just down the road, this would seem an ideal place to have a go at Marrying Mr. Darcy. It's a card game where each player takes the role of a character in the story, all trying to find married bliss. And perhaps a fortune.
You navigate events, trying to build up your character and beauty in a way most appealing to your chosen beau. And then there's a flurry of proposals and counter-proposals, after which you find out who won. You don't have to end up with Darcy to win. I ended up marrying the Colonel, and my added charm and beauty points got me onto the winners podium.
The game has some nice period touches and is great fun to play. I think I could have used a few more chances to scupper my opponents though, but if you like the story I think you'll enjoy the game.
Since we were just down the road from it, we took a trip to Winchester today. Lovely town. Got a great big cathedral in the middle. Yesterday we were in Salisbury, today Winchester. I reckon this is cathedral country.
Anyhoo, it is a lovely place. It is huge, with a fantastic atmosphere. It is also the resting place of Jane Austen and there is a lovely memorial to her.
They also have some fantastic stained glass windows. I had a go at taking pictures of one or two. They are surprisingly tricky to get right. I ended up taking different exposures and then merging them to get something that looks reasonable.
Today was a special day for one of the family. Number one son got his birthday treat, in the form of a driving experience at Thruxton. Thruxton is a lovely little racing circuit in the south of England, near Salisbury. They have a number of experiences you can sign up for, including a chance to drive something like the car you can see above.
Number one son didn't get to drive the Lambo (as we call them) but he did get a twirl in a Porsche and a Formula Renault racing car. He had a great time, and we had just as much fun watching him whizz around the track and trying to take photographs.
We all attended the briefing for the racers and I worked had to absorb all the advice about corner apexes and car balance. I'm sure these'll come in handy for driving the Cube to work.
So, we were all set for a few days away. Bags packed. Cameras charged. Route planned. Then I heard myself asking a question that nobody wants to hear just before a trip away.
"Can you hear running water?"
Number one wife was even less happy to hear me ask than I was. But the thing about questions like this is that you can't really un-ask them. Instead you have to twiddle stop-cocks and faff around until you've determined that yes, there is water running when it isn't supposed to. And now you are half an our late leaving. Not good.
We've been here before a few times. It seems that our house was made with pipe with a penchant for leakiness. So we turned the water off at source, left a key for the plumber and headed off into the distance.
Who knows what we will come back to? But at least it shouldn't be underwater.
I may never get around to writing up our holidays. But I don't see why this should stop me showing you some pictures. I'm quite pleased with this one.
Outlook is kind of clever. It will find phrases in emails and offer to do sensible things with them. If it sees "11:00 next Tuesday" it will offer the option to make an appointment for that date.
Thing is, if you get the email on a Monday a human knows that "next Tuesday" is a week tomorrow, not tomorrow. Since if it was tomorrow the sender would have said "tomorrow" rather than "next Tuesday".
If you see what I mean.
Unfortunately Outlook doesn't. Which is why I had some minor palpitations when something I thought was comfortably distant in the future appeared a lot sooner than I was expecting....
I love Windows 10. Working well for me. Apart from the way that OneDrive has suddenly become all needy on me. Nary a day goes by without one of the files that I've worked with throwing up a cry for help like the one above. Usually I can fix this by just opening and closing the document, but it is a bit annoying to have to do this.
One thing I have noticed is that if you get a "Couldn't contact the server to get the latest version" message (which I seem to get a lot more often than I should) you can go into the files menu and force Word to use either the server or the local version, removing a potential conflict. But then I usually end up saving everything in a different file anyway just to be safe which is a bit annoying.
But then again, OneDrive did save my bacon today when I, ahem, made slightly more dramatic changes to a file than I intended. All I had to do was drop onto the OneDrive site and pull back the previous version, which was very nice.
The 80's band Haircut 100 released a song called "Favourite Shirts". Here's one of mine, which I found while we were doing some tidying. The link doesn't work any more I'm afraid, but you can find out more here: https://www.microsoft.com/net/multiple-platform-support
A singer called "Tallest Man on Earth" is going to catch my eye every time. They were giving away free iTunes tracks from him at Starbucks and I grabbed the card, found him on Groove and downloaded his latest album on my Music Pass. Probably not how Apple would like their marketing to turn out. But the music is good. Catchy tunes well played and sung.
I've been given special access to the script for the up and coming Star Wars movie.
I can therefore exclusively reveal that the first two words that are spoken in the movie "Star Wars - The Force Awakens" are "Good Morning".
Update: Please read the comments section of this post for the latest on this device.
Thanks to a combination of poor time management on my part and digging up an absolutely crucial road at rush our on the part of Hull Council I wasn't able to get to the MeetUp at C4DI tonight. But when I did get home I thought I'd fire up the iBox nano printer that arrived last week.
The printer was a Kickstarter project. I've had pretty good success with Kickstarter. I've only had one Kickstarter project come seriously unstuck - I'm looking at you Agent watch. The iBox project promised a light powered high resolution printer for less than 300 dollars and was too tempting to pass up. So I backed it a while ago (I think it was November) and then waited.
The device was a bit late arriving, but I don't mind too much about that. Lots of people get very upset when these projects have delays, but I'm happy to give them time to get it right. As long as something turns up at the end. I'm still looking at you Agent watch....
The iBox is powered by a Raspberry Pi and uses a WiFi adapter to connect to your network. You set up prints on your PC via a web interface that works really well. There are a few buttons on the machine and some lights to tell you what it is doing.
So I carefully filled the vat with resin, rubbed the build plate with some sandpaper to make it nice and rough so that the print would adhere to it, lowered the plate into the resin and set it off.
My first print failed. All I got was a little lump of goo on the bottom of the vat. Oh well. I've got quite good at consistent printing with Una my Ultimaker, but I remember how much fiddling it took to get to where I am now.
It turns out that, just as with Una, the key to successful printing is the print height. When Una squirts molten filament at the build plate it is crucial that the very first layer is just the right height for the filament to stick to the plate and provide the starting point for the print. With my iBox printer, which doesn't have a name yet by the way, the crucial thing is the distance of the build plate from the bottom of the glass dish, or vat, which holds the liquid resin.
The idea is that the build plate is a tiny distance from a sheet of teflon tape stuck on the bottom of the vat. The UV light makes some of the liquid resin in this gap turn solid. Then the printer pulls the build plate upwards, taking this layer of solid resin with it. Only on my first print the solid bit stuck to the bottom of the vat instead, hence the mis-shapen lump that was produced. So I re-adjusted the build plate and tried again.
The printer does look great while it prints, like some kind of illuminated mini-tower block. It is completely silent and runs off a standard Raspberry Pi power supply. I'd be quite happy to leave it printing to itself, although you do need to come back and top up the vat with resin if you are printing something tall.
This time it worked fine, and I got a tiny iBox logo stuck to the build plate. The output is pleasingly solid, although they say you should leave it in the sun or under a UV light to completely cure the resin.
So I thought I'd go for broke and tried to print a tiny bunny. This was a disaster I'm afraid, with another lump of goo forming in the wrong place. However, I'm pleased to have made something.
I'm not sure if I'm going to be OK with this liquid resin stuff. Everywhere you see dire warnings about the danger of the liquid touching your skin. I've got some disposable gloves on order but I spent big chunks of the evening fretting about the resin escaping and simultaneously burning a path to the centre of the earth (it's supposed to be corrosive) and poisoning me.
I guess I might get used to it. It's totally different technology from printing with Una providing a new set of problems to deal with. I feel like a heart surgeon who is not very good at it and has switched to brain surgery in the hope that might be easier. I'm impressed with the iBox machine though. It really does work as advertised. I can now think about producing tiny components. If I can get over the fear of the resin.
If you are after a good, cheap 3D printer I think I'd still advise you to go for a conventional, filament powered, one like Una. There are some quite nice devices out there in kit form. Take a look at the nFire device on Kickstarter too. But if you fancy pushing the frontiers a bit and you want small, higher quality, prints then iBox is worth a look.
I've been playing with Windows 10 on Raspberry Pi for a while. It works really well. It is now my weapon of choice for proper embedded applications.
The Arduino is lovely for tiny apps, but if you find yourself adding SD card interfaces and network adapters and displays you might as well move up to the Pi and get the benefit of C#, Visual Studio and a properating system like Windows 10.
Up until now I've been tied to a network cable as the previous versions of the Windows 10 Raspberry Pi platform didn't support WiFi. But the latest one does. You have to use the "official" Raspberry Pi WiFi interface, but as this is one of the cheapest (at six pounds) I don't see this as a problem.
I've added one to my Pi and it works fine. The only problem I've found is that at the moment it doesn't support WiFi connections using the "organisation" authentication that we have at work on the campus network. However, it works fine at home my my domestic network. If you are writing Windows 10 applications for Raspberry Pi you should get one of these for each of your systems. They also raise the lovely prospect of properly powerful connected applications.
So some time back I got an HP Sprout. I'd seen one at the Gadget Show and after that it was just a matter of time... The Sprout is a properly innovative machine. It uses a video projector and a system of mirrors to project a workspace onto a touch sensitive mat in front of the computer. The overhead assembly that holds the projector mirror also holds a couple of lights, a reasonably high resolution camera and an Intel RealSense 3D camera.
The idea is that it provides a great space to work with 2D images which can be scanned and manipulated on the touch mat, but I was also intrigued with the promise of quality 3D scanning using the RealSense camera.
The machine arrived beautifully packaged in a huge box and why not, it is quite a huge assembly. It has a nice big 23 inch touch display with a fairly beefy processor and big hard drive lurking behind it. Once I got it going I was impressed by the machine itself but the 3D scanning didn't really live up to the demos that I'd seen, which was rather sad. You could scan in 3D but only from one point of view and the scans had little ridges on them which pointed to illumination issues.
But that was then, and this is now. An upgrade of the system was released last month. The whole HP Sprout workspace has been replace with a much more spiffy one and you can create proper 3D results from a scanning process that involves multiple rescans in different positions. And the ridges have vanished.
It took me around half an hour to take the little wooden pig you can see above and derive a really nice 3D model from it. I made a little stand out of a piece of perspex and some Blu Tac so that I could present the pig in different orientations and I made four passes of the model, each of which comprised 8 individual scans. The results are really good. The scanning has even detected the grain in the wood and some quite subtle markings.
You can buy a little turntable which can be used to automate the scanning a bit. I'm tempted by this, but bearing in mind that you'd have to reposition the subject on the turntable for each rotation, I think I'll stick with the manual process for now. The process works best with objects with a fairly matt finish. Nothing shiny or furry. I'm currently prowling the house looking for objects that I can scan.
I've put Windows 10 on it and it works great (although I've had one or two stability issues with the Sprout Workspace it seems to be settling down now). I'm going to have a go at scanning some more objects and printing them out. I'm also keen to use the scanner to produce textures that can be overlaid on objects that I print, I reckon it will be really good at that. There's also an SDK that you can use to create your own applications, but at the moment I don't think it provides access to the 3D camera, which is a bit of a shame. There's also a Sprout Marketplace for apps that use the unique features of the machine, but these are a bit underwhelming at the moment to be honest.
The Sprout might be the future of computing. I'm not sure about the fancy scanning bits just yet. I end up using it as a powerful PC quite a bit of the time. But it does come into its own when you are scanning objects or documents. I found it very useful when I had fifty assessment sheets from some lab demos that needed to be converted into PDF. Using the Sprout workspace made this really easy. If I had young children I think they'd love using the scrap-book and collage features. And it has a connected aspect that I've not really explored because I don't now anybody else with the device....
You've got to give HP respect for trying to move us on from he mouse and keyboard interface. The projected workspace works really well and it very easy to manipulate 2D and 3D objects using it. If you are going to buy a fairly expensive computer anyway (say you are in the market for a Mac PC) then I'd take a proper look at Sprout, particularly if you have kids and a 3D printer....
Every year I make a new version of the C# Yellow Book. And recently I've been putting something yellow on the cover. This year I thought I'd go for banana, what with it being custard last year. I took some pictures of a single banana, but these didn't end up looking to good to be honest. So I've gone for a bunch.
The text has been tidied up a bit and I've added links to the code examples that you can now get to go with the text. It will be going to print for our new First Year in a couple of days, and then I'll update the PDF on csharpcourse.com.
If you do visit the campus you should take a look in the new Art Gallery attached to the library. As well as some lovely paintings they also have displays of all the Larkin Toads that were displayed around the city a few years ago and recently brought back together for a reunion. You can also meet up with one of the original toads that you can just see peeking out of the right hand side of this picture.
We're holding a couple of special open days this weekend for admissions candidates. We used the lobby of the spiffy new library to set up and show off our new 3D stuff, which includes a chance to walk round our new student accommodation that hasn't been built yet.
I went fully suited up, and was even complemented on my sharp attire. Mike was doing tours and I was manning the fort with some summer interns who did a great job of showing off the tech.
I'm rubbish at throwing things away. We are in the middle of some domestic renovation that has forced us to confront the huge amount of stuff that we've accumulated over the years. I've found things I haven't touched for years, and I'm still loth to chuck them out.
However, I have found a way to ease the pain of passing in this situation.. I'm taking pictures of the stuff before it goes in the bin. Then I make them into collages, like the one above. The perfect end to this would be to print the collage out and throw it away I suppose....
The C4DI (Centre for Digital innovation) in Hull is looking for an intern to join their team and help business make the most of technology.
This would really suit a Computer Science person who want to branch out and maybe even start their own company along the way. It can happen.
You can find out more about the position here.
I've been racking my brains to try to work out why the new C4DI headquarters looks familiar. I've finally found the answer.
These are the living quarters for Stingray personnel from the iconic sixties TV series. This team of fearless aquanauts used a super submarine to fight evil underwater. Suddenly it all makes sense. The new C4DI HQ is right next to the docks......
Alex from C4DI has recently launched his NFire 3D printer on Kickstarter. It's a good looking beast, as you can see. The ideas is that you can easily swap out components and print larger pieces or add a second extruder. The price is very competitive (particularly if you managed to snag one of the early bird offers) and it uses a very nice hot end (the bit that actually extrudes the filament.
Worth a look if you are in the market for a low cost and extensible device.
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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