Spring Three Thing Game Registration Now Open
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It's that time of year again. Three Thing Game Spring 2016 registrations are now open. The event runs from 15-16 of April. Usual rules, usual fun, different things.
Windows 10 Leaky Memory Fix
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For some time my Surface Pro 3 has been grinding when it really shouldn't. And a check of the Task Manager showed that a process called "System and Compressed Memory" was taking up an inordinate amount of processor time. Long story short, I found that this fix worked for me. If your Surface Pro or Surface Book is slowing down you might find it useful to take a look. I've no idea what the fix does (and nothing anywhere tells me) but it has made my machine much more responsive.
Beach Huts
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For some reason this picture reminds me of the game of Monopoly.
Ho Hum Gadget Show Live
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These speakers are intriguing, but I think they have got left and right the wrong way round.
I must admit that the Gadget Show Live this year was a bit disappointing. It isn't actually the highlight of my year, but I like to think that it is one of them. On a par with Fish Pie at the Magpie in Whitby. But after this show it has dropped a bit in the rankings, down to perhaps home-cooked sausage and baked potato level.
Previous shows have had large scale exhibitors such as Sony, Microsoft, Dyson and the like showing off their latest technology. This one had a lot of much smaller stands, but nothing that really stood out. There were some 3D printers, a chance to queue for a long time to drive a Tesla very slowly a short distance and a huge number of slightly different drones. And some hoverboards. But nothing that really impressed.
There was some fun to be had and after all, at my age a trip out is a trip out, but I will be checking the list of exhibitors very carefully before I sign up for the next one.
They did have some BBC Microbits there though
Nuget source settings cleared after Visual Studio upgrade
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The title says it all really. I got all excited about the new release of Visual Studio and so I upgraded my copy of Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition immediately. The upgrade has some nice new features (and I want to use it to write Xbox One programs) but it did do one thing that confused me for a little while. It clears the source setting for Nuget.
The result is that all your Nuget fetches fail. However, it is easy to put back again by going to Tools>Nuget Package Manager>Package Manager Settings and setting the checkbox as shown above.
Xbox One Dev Mode is Here
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It's been a long time coming, but we can now develop programs for the Xbox One. I've been looking forward to this for a while.
You can find out more about it here.
I'm going to have to take the Xbox One out of the living room into my programming lair upstairs so I can do this, but I think it will be worth it.
HTC Vive Hands-On
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When we found out that there were doing live demonstrations of the HTC Vive just down the road from us in Leeds it was only a matter of time before we headed over there. We'd heard tales of how busy the event was, and of queues over the weekend so we got up bright and early and shot down the motorway to get there as close to opening time as we could.
It was very quiet, which was great. Both number one son and myself had a good go at all the demos. My favourite was the Google painting program which was amazing. On the way down in the car we had discussed all the ways that the experience could be horrible. Poor tracking, slow updates, dodgy display, etc etc.
There was none of that. It just worked. Even over glasses. I could just about make out the individual dots in the display, which surprised me, but once I started moving around in a fully realised 3D environment I completely forgot about that.
It wasn't until after we'd finished that we remembered that there was a complete absence of any queasiness from either of us. The thing just works. The environments that we were in were a bit "cartoony", which is probably because the detail is dialled down a bit to keep the refresh rate up, but they were real. And the sensation of walking around in another world was very well realised.
The experience was quite unlike the Hololens that I tried last year. That device can overlay virtual elements onto your view of the environment. The Vive just makes a completely new one. Both systems have their place, and both work really well.
Number one son ordered a Vive there and then. Me, I've got to buy a PC first as this kit requires some fairly hairy hardware to drive it. But I'm very tempted.
Audio Loops
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- We bought the record
- We bought the cassette
- We bought the CD
- We bought the MP3
- We bought the high definition audio file
- We bought the record again
Go See 10 Cloverfield Lane
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We went out to see a movie today. We weren't sure what to go and see. Nobody was convinced about "Batman vs Superman". When you know all about the film (and I mean all about the film) from the title there doesn't seem much point in sitting in the dark for several hours.
Number one son suggested 10 Cloverfield Lane. Good call. Proper scary, story that keeps you guessing, and plenty to talk about when you leave the cinema. Well worth the trip.
You can't beat an Old Lens
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I've sold all my cameras and lots of my lenses to buy a new camera. It's what I do. But the good news is that I can use old, cheap, lenses on the new device. I picked up a Canon FD 135mm f2.8 lens a while back for a lot less than a "proper" piece of glass would have cost me. I'm really pleased with the results.
Good Weather in Whitby
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The word on the street was that today was the best day of the Bank Holiday weekend. So we headed off bright and early. And it was great.
For the first time in a while we went for a walk around the abbey. I'm quite pleased with how this picture turned out.
Get the Harry Harrison Megapack
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Harry Harrison was one of the greatest science fiction writers you've probably never heard of. He wrote a whole bunch of fantastic stories including the Stainless Steel Rat series and my favourite, "The Technicolor Time Machine" (go find it - you'll thank me later). He was particularly good at the science fiction short story.
If you fancy finding out more about his work there's a really good value pack of his stories available on Amazon. For less than a pound you get a whole bunch of content including two of his Deathworld stories.
Well worth seeking out.
Campus Flowers
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The university puts a lot of effort into making the campus look good. I think it is definitely worth it.
Greenpower Racing at Hull
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There was a bit of racing action in the middle of the campus this lunchtime. I nipped out with a camera to take some snaps. The university has sponsored a bunch of cars as part of the Greenpower project and they were putting one of them through its paces. It looks like a great way of getting folks engaged with engineering, as well as a lot of fun to drive.
Once more unto eBay.....
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... but for how long...
I'm doing some camera shuffling again using eBay. This means taking pictures, packing boxes and posting things. I hope it all ends well. It seems to have got a lot easier to send things abroad now, one of my cameras is heading off to Spain, but I only have to worry about getting it as far as the eBay transit place, which is really nice. I just hope Manu likes it.
Computer Science Course in "Actually Useful Shock Horror"
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James came to see us today, which was rather nice. We got to talking and the subject turned to the gulf between studies and real life, and how to narrow it.
One of the things that we try to do in Hull is to tell people useful stuff that will they can use to get by in life as a developer. A problem that we have is that people think that the only use for the stuff that we are telling them is in exams and assignments to get a good mark. This is a good thing as far as it goes. And of course you should do this. We have to do the grading thing to ensure that the learning outcomes for our courses have been met.
But we really, really want people to carry those skills into the next (and indeed every) thing that they do going forwards. We're trying to start you building skills that will carry you through your professional career. I don't think you can ever say you've learnt something like programming because, if you do it properly, you are continuously learning. And you should never stop.
The good news for me is that we do get a few folks who go out into the big wide world, and come back and say "You know, that stuff you taught us turned out to be quite useful".
Who'd have thought?
Anyhoo, James is very keen to come back and do some Rather Useful Seminars on what you can do as a student to build on what you're taught, which is great. Stay tuned.
Final Mega Saturday Applicant Day
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We had our final Saturday applicant day of the year today. Thanks for coming folks. Some had driven mighty long ways to sample the delights of Hull. I hope we made the trip worth while.
As usual, you can click through the picture above to find the Flickr version where you can see yourself in "slightly larger vision.."
Photomatix Pro and the Mysterious Drive D:
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Tone mapping bananas....
Sometimes I write blog posts to remind myself how to fix problems that I hit. In a couple of years I'll search for this problem and find this post. And then fix the problem again.
It's happened before.
I love Photomatix Pro. I use it to make my pictures a bit more interesting, and to create HDR shots. It works very well. Except that for the last week it's been crashing out when I try to save the image. Turns out to be my external plug-in memory card reader. If that is connected it gives what Photomatix thinks is a drive D: that doesn't actually exist. This does not end well, but if I unplug the reader it all just works. Yay.
Novel Controllers at GDC
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For the past couple of days John has been at GDC showing off our Disruption game with its novel, pluggable, controller. We've had some reports back that things are going well. We won a place in the Alt.Ctrl.GDC novel controllers exhibit. There's a nice write-up of what we did here.
We've re-engineered the controller for the new event. We've gone for a larger box and nice, chunky cables to replace the thin ones that we used last time. It works rather well, which is nice.
By all accounts the event is going well. Looking forward to finding out more about how he got on when he gets back next week.
