Tram 28

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We're in Lisbon for a few days. Lovely place. I came year a few years ago to do some Microsoft Technical conferences and loved the place, even though most of my views of the city was through the windows of the taxi on the way to and from the airport. 

We've got a little apartment and the place is lovely. Today we took Tram 28 for a tour around the place. This is a forth minute tram ride from the centre of the city around most of the tourist areas. It was lovely. Then we wandered back across the city to the apartment where I spent a happy time working on the pdfs for chapter 8 of Begin to Code Python. 

Then it was out for tea. We seem to be near a street with a whole bunch of really nice cafes, restaurants and shops. But, from what we've seen so far, this is actually typical of downtown Lisbon.  

iPhone X - it will be interesting

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The Kinect's Eye view of a sofa....

A few years ago I spent a lot of time playing with the Microsoft KInect. I even wrote a book about it. The Kinect contains a special “depth camera” where pixels don’t give you light intensity, they give you distance. The depth camera works by viewing an array of dots which are projected onto the scene in front of the sensor. Software works out the distance between the dots that the camera sees. The further apart that the dots appear, the further away that part of the scene is. 

As far as I know Apple have put a Kinect sensor on top of the iPhone X which works in the same way. The depth information returned by the camera is a big chunk of how the phone recognises its owner.  

I really hope it works.  

The Kinect worked great for middle  distance readings, but if you got too close all the little dots smudged together into one big dot and the camera stopped working. It would struggle a bit in very bright conditions and I never tried to use it to recognise my face when I was wearing glasses.  

I’m always tempted to get the very latest in technology. I think it stems from my much younger days, when I used to enjoy owning my own copy of the current number one music single, but I think I’ll sit this one out until I’ve seen it work. With glasses.  

Overcooked

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Let’s say this at once. Overcooked is great fun. You and a bunch of friends control cooks franticallly grabbing ingredients, following recipes, washing up, putting out fires and trying to keep the customers satisfied. I’ve not laughed quite so much playing a game as I did when we were all blundering round the kitchen, getting too many mushrooms (cries of STOP GETTING MUSHROOMS) and setting fire to things (cries of FETCH THE FIRE EXTINGUISHER).  

You start off in a fairly conventional kitchen, but before long you’re on the deck of a pirate ship or, worse yet, on the back of two speeding trucks. There’s a back story of sorts, and you work through a map of different locations in your little van, trying to rack up enough points to unlock the next level. As a multi-player game this really, really shines.  The Nintendo Switch is a great platform for this kind of mayhem, you can rock up with the console and a bunch of joycons and have totally crackers, shouty, fun. Very strongly recommended.

One Day Maybe

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One Day Maybe is incredible. Very hard to describe, but I'm jolly glad I went. It is part tech demo, part history and part interpretive dance (in a good way). The performers (and there are lots of them) work very hard to build a piece of art that muses on the sacrifices made to build a better future, and whether or not that future really merits them. It leaves you thinking about the bravery of people prepared to stand up against oppression, the way that the oppressors frequently get away with their crimes and the darker aspects of the future we are all hurtling towards. 

Great stuff.

Death Squared

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The people who wrote Death Squared must have played quite a bit of Portal. (If you’ve not played Portal, where have you been? It’s a series of fiendish puzzles which are overseen by a nasty computer with a great line in one liners).

Death Squared uses a similar scenario (you have to perform a series of tests for some reason) but the actual tests themselves involve each player getting their coloured cube from the start position to the end position. Each level involves a lot of experimentation, and it works really well the more people you have. Two player is rather good, three player for us was hampered by the need for one player to control two cubes. The puzzles are nicely progressive and really encourage the players to work together. Nowhere near as frantic or silly as Overcooked (of which more later), but fun for thinkers who want some cooperative action. 

Perspex Pixelbots at c4di

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This is lovely. I've been pondering how to make Hull Pixelbots quickly (printing one takes around 8 hours or so) and then someone walks into the Hardware Meetup with a perspex pixelbot. 

Then Karl walks in with a laser cut chassis. He'd taken my stl files and converted them into flat components. Then he'd taken the designs to his work and got some prototypes cut out of perspex. The next step is to find out how much it will cost to get a bunch made. 

Snake Pass

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Snake Pass is a charming little game in which you have to steer Noodle the snake around a range of different locations, picking up points and and climbing around things. The biggest problem I have with the game is that the snake is a bit hard to control. Snake steering is not too tricky, but it can be hard to climb things. You’re supposed to be able to contract the snake to grip things, but I seem to lack the skills to grab things and climb up them. I found it a bit frustrating when I couldn’t reach high things and even more frustrating when I fell off the game world and plummeted to my doom.

Perhaps I should spend an evening practising climbing fence posts, but that sounds a bit too much like work to me. The environments are sumptuous and the snake is charming though. I'm going to have to put in some proper practice methinks. . 

Shephy

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Shephy is cheep. There. I’ve said the nice thing about it. It’s based on a card game, and for me it should have stayed as one. I’ve tried to like it but failed several times, and now I just don’t care. The aim of the game is to play different kinds of sheep card to assemble an impossibly large number of sheep on the screen. Every turn cruel fate gives you a bunch of horrible cards which take you further from your goal. The instructions on the cards are a bit hard to read, and its hard to remember what they all do.  

This might be a case of me getting upset with a game that I just don’t have the mental horsepower to play, but I challenge anyone to have a go and enjoy it. Best avoided. Would make a good Christmas present for someone you don’t like much. 

The Bridge

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The Bridge is a physics based game with a nice artwork style and a bunch of puzzles that are really brain bending but very satisfying when you figure out how to solve them. I bought it on the Nintendo Switch but it is available on lots of other platforms too.  

You have to navigate a nicely animated professorial type around a series of locations. You can rotate the world around your hero and make gravity your friend to avoid nasty adversaries and find keys. It works really well as a hand-held game, but the monochrome artwork looks very nice on the large screen too. 

For the price it represents good value. I’ve reached the point where I want to step back from the game for a while so that I don’t finish it too soon. 

Waking up Digby

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We've been trying to wake up Digby my Aibo from ages back. The Sony Aibo was a very ambitious project by Sony to make a robotic pet. I got one a while back just as the product was winding down. I've not played with Digby (as we call him) for a while, but once we'd given them a good charge, one of the Lithium Ion batteries got him going. 

Unfortunately there's something amiss with his head. When he moves to certain positions it seems to think that the joint is stuck and he falls down. Next step is a bit of micro surgery looking for noisy potentiometers and broken flexible circuit boards. 

But we'll get him sorted. 

Chair balancing for beginners

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One of the other neat things they have at States of Play is a bunch of balancing chairs. When I first saw them I had thoughts of steel pegs in the floor, or strings from the roof. 

Not so. The chairs really do balance like this. They have weights and a flat part to balance on. I had a go at balancing and it really is quite tricky. Which is code for "No, I couldn't do it..."