Who, me?

I got my new Kindle from Amazon today .  Of course, the first thing I did was search for myself in the Kindle store. Imagine my surprise when I found that I’d put three books on there and was charging over seven pounds each for them (that’s more than they are asking for Tony Blair’s memoirs – so they got that bit right). Either I’ve uploaded them and set the price in my sleep, or there is something strange going on here. I’ve asked Amazon to find out what is going on.

As for the Kindle  itself. It is a perfectly formed device that is going to spell the death knell for a lot of paper books. I got a Sony E-Reader some time back and quite liked it, but loading books was  a pain and the display was useless for anything interactive.

The Kindle fixes both these problems. You can even use it to browse to my blog and the pictures look strangely wonderful in grey scale. As a paperback replacement it is fantastic. It is ultra-portable (at the moment I’m using an A5 envelope as a case) and the screen is really easy to read. The integration with Amazon is impressive to the point of scary. I got the one with the built in 3G phone and stuff just arrives as though by magic. It also has WiFi which works fine at home but not on the university campus. This is because the Kindle doesn’t support the WPA2 Enterprise security that we use at Hull.

It is a bit glib to say that the Kindle will do for books what the ipod did for music. But I don’t think that it is far from the truth.

One reason for getting the Kindle was to experiment with page layouts that work best on the small screen. I’ll be putting properly a formatted version of the Yellow Book on the Kindle store soon.

But the ones there are the moment are not from me.

If you use Live Writer to write your blog posts (and you should) you probably use the Twitter Notify plugin to send your follows a tweet when you make a new post.  Today Twitter changed their authentication to use the Oauth protocol (which makes the authentication process much more secure). Unfortunately it also breaks programs that used the old authentication method, including the previous version of Twitter Notify. However, an updated version is now available from here.

Just found this on Amazon. You’d better hurry, they’ve only got one left….

Today was a Bank Holiday. Which means that we get the day off. We went to Whitby. The weather forecast was a good one, although the day did have a rather cloudy start. I took the big camera and a collection of lenses which was amply sufficient to really annoy number one wife as I kept changing them over every ten minutes.

I think this will do for the desktop.

I’ve been trying to get a decent picture of these beach huts for ages.

This is the walkway out to the harbour entrance. I quite like the colours.

Click on the images for bigger versions on Flickr.

Went off this afternoon to a Classic Car show in Hull East Park. The park is a fantastic place. Beautifully landscaped gardens, wide open spaces and, today only, a lot of very shiny cars.

A nice shade of purple

I used to drive a Mini. But it was never as shiny as this.

Now, that’s what I call an engine.

The ring light does give your pictures a strange set of shadows I quite like.

A ring flash is a flash gun that fits around the lens of your camera. It is noted for taking photographs that contain no shadows (since the light source is around the lens) and being very expensive.

A ring light on the other hand is a ring of LED lights which fit around the lens and is much cheaper than a flash. It is a steady light, which means you can use it for movies as well as stills. The major disadvantage is that it is not as bright as a flash. As far as I’m concerned this is not a huge problem, since I really want to use the light for close ups.

If you want something for your SLR that will give your pictures a bit of extra pop, and is great for portraits (no shadows means no wrinkles) then I’d recommend that you take a look.

Nice view from the new flat though. Very suburban.

Drove down to London today to do some heavy lifting for number one daughter, who is moving flat. On the way down I did something that turned out to be very dangerous.

I ignored the SatNav.

She said A1. I went M1. At the time I thought nothing of it, and she didn’t say anything. But I’m sure that she started plotting….

Next route she sent us on involved a lot more “off the beaten track” than earlier ones. Twice we got sent towards roads that had six foot six wide gaps on them which the van couldn’t get through.  After a couple of hilarious (I’m being ironic here) U-turns backwards into traffic we started ignoring any suggested routes that didn’t send us towards dual carriageways.  And I’m sure we got sent through the same set of traffic lights at least three times.

Then, on my final route home there were loads of right hand turns onto busy roads with no gaps in the traffic, a long drive along twisty roads and finally, against my better judgement, I ended up on the A1 after all.

So, never ignore the SatNav.

I think I may be getting too far into this Nissan cube thing

I really like my Cube. I went out last night to a Hull Digital Developer group meetup. There ware two good talks, one by John Polling from “The League of Extraordinary Developers” (great name) about SASS and Compass and CSS and another by James Greenwood from Strawberry about HTML5.  Both speakers knew their stuff and the content was interesting (although I’m not really a web developer type person myself).  But I must admit that my thoughts kept going back to my little tin box outside and the drive home in it…Next time I’ll be more focused. 

Oh, and don’t forget if you are from Hull that you need to register for Hull Digital real soon. Looks to be a good one.

I got some very useful comments on my post about how to make XNA games use the full screen of the Windows Phone. The thing that I didn’t make clear was that in an XNA game you will lose screen space even if the bar is not displaying anything. The best way to view the effect of this is to go into the settings of the phone (or emulator) and change the Background to light (Phone>Settings>theme).  Above shows what you get. The status bar is drawn white and the game screen area is scaled down by that lovely hardware in the phone itself. As you can see, your game is losing out on screen space.

If you want to make full use of all the screen you just need to add this line into the constructor for your game:

graphics.IsFullScreen = true;

Much better.