Using a Webcam as an Elmo Display

 

For those of you thinking about the fantastic toys, I’m afraid I must disappoint you (although the toys are great). I’m talking about the digital presenter tools which you use during talks to show things to the audience. I’ve used them in the past when doing talks about mobile phone development or to show small devices like the Micro Framework ones.

I did a talk today about the .NET Micro Framework and instead of using an Elmo I used a webcam. I tried using them ages ago but the quality of the pictures was so bad that I ended up using a camcorder instead. But this time I had one of the new Microsoft webcams, the LifeCam Cinema.  This boasts a proper 720P resolution and an auto focus lens made of real glass. And it works a treat. The quality of the pictures was excellent and it comes with a neat program that just shows you the camera view that you can use on screen. It also has some nice adjustments that you can use to pull down the brightness so that display screens look good.

This is a completely un-retouched picture of the Zune HD homescreen. There are some more shots on Flickr.

All I need now is little portable tripod and I have my own Elmo, which is much easier to use than switching video signals over.

XNA at St Bede’s College

A good audience. (If you want to see a larger version of this picture, or to see the other  one I took, click on the images to get to my Flickr pages.)

I did  a talk at a college today. Not done one for a while so I was a little rusty. Fortunately I had a great audience and ended up really enjoying the visit. Thanks to the college for inviting us and to Dr Keith Porteous for giving such a good talk before mine.  I’ve put all the resources on the blog if you want to take a look:

• Presentation
• Hide the Gamepad XNA Game
• Bread and Cheese Complete XNA Game
• BedeCheese XNA GAme

You can find more links to XNA resources, along with my XNA ScreenCasts here: http://verysillygames.com/

Hull Girl Geek Dinners

The Girl Geek Dinners at Hull are going from strength to strength. We started them a while back and their next event is scheduled for next week on Thursday 11th March at Hive in our department. Girl Geek students from the university can even register at a discount. For the event details and a programme for the evening you can go here:

http://hullgirlgeekdinners11032010-rss.eventbrite.com/

Donate Somebody Else’s Money with Bing

Microsoft are doing this deal at the moment for where for every 10 searches you make using Bing they will donate 5 pence to Sport Relief. This means that you are doing good and raising money for charity just by searching the web. Which you would do anyway. Works for me, even though I had to download and install a little app to count the searches.

Amazing Sunset

Drove home into an amazing sunset tonight. Of course this isn’t a picture of it..

Letting the Smoke Out

An engineer friend of mine has this theory that electric things are really powered by smoke. He bases this on the simple observation that if you let the smoke out of anything electrical it promptly stops working. I did this today with our shredder.

I have a deep seated fear of Identity theft (along with a puzzlement that anyone would really want to pretend to be me).

Anyhoo, to deal with this I have a policy of never throwing anything away that might divulge identity type information. This is kind of futile I suppose, in that pretty much anything you want to know about me is out there on the interweb, but it keeps me amused. And shredding.

To keep things shredded we used to use this little shredder and I was happily shredding bank statements and the like when it suddenly stopped. And the smoke came out. And now it doesn’t work.

I was wondering if I could just use a two bins technique instead. Rather than shred things I could just have two bins. Anything secret is torn into small pieces, some of which go into one bin, and the rest into the other. Then I empty one of the bins every other week. This means that to steal my identity you would have to go through two lots of rubbish. Or perhaps I should just stop worrying…

Jetlag Levels

Jetlag Level 0: Normal amount of incompetence.

Jetlag Level 1: Forgetting things, but remembering you have forgotten them.

Jetlag Level 2: Forgetting things and not noticing.  Or caring.

Jetlag Level 3: Inability to do two things (such as walk and talk) at the same time.

Jetlag Level 4: Inability to one thing at the same time.

Jetlag Level 5: Staring at the PUSH sign on a door and not understanding its relevance to the problem that the door won’t pull open.

Jetlag Level 6: Can only recognise and use the simplest of things. Namely, a bed.

Missing Sunday

Not sure what happened to today. Bits of it seem to be missing.

Flying Home

Nothing like an 18 hour journey. Nothing. When we got to Amsterdam we found that the weather had laid on some special fog just for us.

With a two and a half hour stopover I had plenty of time to take pictures.

This is all we saw of the sun all day..

Hull Reunion

I met up with Phil, Andrew, Andy and James today for lunch. They are graduates from Hull (and three of them are also old hands at the Imagine Cup). They all now work for Microsoft on various development teams around the company. It was nice to see them, even though they made fun of my haircut. Or lack of it…

Packing for Seattle

It is that time of year again, when I head off to Seattle for the MVP Summit. I’m really looking forward to this year’s event. It is always nice to meet up with folks I’ve not seen for a while, and talk about technology.

Of course this means that I have to choose which gadgets get to go with me. I’ve left the trouser press at home. Three is a good chance that the hotel room will have one anyway…..

Hull Students: Freeside Needs You

If you are a CS student at Hull you might consider getting involved in Freeside. This is a student run organisation that operates out of our department. Their primary focus is on building systems that can host student services and they have been know to build the odd cluster.

They are also linked to Hull ComSoc and are involved in running game servers used in the department. Jon from FreeSide used some time in my lecture this week to give a short presentation about the group and recruit new members. He made the point that the skills you can get from Freeside will stand you in very good stead for future employment. Apparently big chunks of the server management team at Last.FM are ex Freeside stalwarts.

First Open Day of 2010

Another satisfied customer wins a PSP in our Open Day draw from Mike. With a copy of FiFa you can even play as Hull City….

We had a bunch of people up to see us today. Thank you very much for coming folks, we hope you found the visit worth your journey. This is the time of year when we start to get busy, we have a bunch of open days over the next few weeks.

Tag those T-Shirts

I spent some time this morning working on the logo for the 2010 Where Would You Think T-Shirts. We give these away to guests who attend our Admissions Open Days in the department and they have a slightly different design each year.

The release of the design is of course an event eagerly awaited by the fashion press, and it is rumoured that Chanel, Christian Dior and Yves Saint-Laurent actually hold back releasing their spring collections until they see what we have come up with.

The byword this year is “Tag chic”. You can point your cameraphone at the design and the magic of Microsoft Tag will take you to our admissions community site.

Microsoft Inspiration Tour with Andy Sithers

One of the people in this picture is a Microsoft employee. See if you can spot him. Clue: He has his eyes shut….

..and in case the other side of the room were feeling left out…

Andy Sithers from Microsoft came to see us today. We  all went for a meal in Staff House, had a quick meeting with the Imagine Cup teams to discuss their entries (looking good people) and then he gave a presentation as part of the Inspiration Tour. Great fun.  He dished out some hoodies and T shirts as prizes and then left me with some which I’m going to give the team that comes up with the best looking game idea to enter into the Game Design Challenge for the Imagine Cup.  One of the hoodies that was left is XL, i.e. my size. Better get those ideas in before the end of the month folks, or I’ll have something new to wear…

Angry Rob

I got very angry tonight. Banging the table angry. Not like me at all. Really. I was recording another in the XNA Screencast series (you can find the previous ones here). Normally I do the whole thing in one continuous take. That’s not to say that everything always goes right, it is just that I try and keep going whatever happens.

Anyhoo, this time I made a rather serious blunder, and was forced to stop and re-record a section which I then had to tidy up. Big mistake. The program I was using to prepare the screencast has an interesting foible on my machine. When editing things the mark points are never where you think they are. Whenever I cut out a phrase the program actually removed out another part of the soundtrack so editing just got more and more frustrating as I tried to compensate by cutting the “wrong” parts in the hope I would get what I wanted. I didn’t. In the end number one wife came in to find me thumping my desk with annoyance and told me I was being stupid, which I was.

Eventually I figured out that by cunning use of the undo command I could refine my edits to the point where I actually got what I wanted. And it only took me an extra hour or so. I’ve now resolved not to bash the desk any more. It doesn’t achieve much. And it hurts.

Windows 7 Tablet Madness

I think I’m on a quest to find the smallest and slowest computers around and then put Windows 7 on them. Latest contender is my venerable old Fujitsu Stylistic Tablet PC. One of the first tablet PCs ever, this boasts a mighty 800MHz processor and 512MBytes of ram.  I had this idea that, in the absence of the iPad any time soon, it might be a useful handheld device that I could use to sit around and read Safari books on.

And it mostly works. I had a bit of fun when I installed the “proper” graphics drivers. For some reason it didn’t register the installation properly, and so I ended up with a machine with three or four graphics devices, which didn’t end well. And every now and then the display would go black because these drivers didn’t support the correct version of Direct X. I solved these problems by using the original Microsoft drivers, which means I can’t rotate the screen, but it works fine in landscape.

..and it works!

All the hardware apart from the tablet buttons works properly, even the WIFI card works perfectly. Performance could be better, but browsing is just peachy and I’m even thinking about putting Office on there so I can look at documents. I might even upgrade the RAM to a massive 768MBytes to get even more speed. I guess the lesson here is that you really can bring dead machines back to life with the magic of Windows 7.

Hull Graduation Congregation

I did the warmup for today’s graduation day for students from our faculty. Thanks for being a great Congregation. It was a really good occasion and we had a lovely speech from our honorary graduate. I’m sorry that some of the pictures I took from the stage came out a bit more blurred than I would have liked, but you should be able to recognise yourself. There are much larger versions in Flickr. Click on the images to find your way to the pictures on there.

…to the right..

Left of stage

Right of stage.

Such Excitement

 

I think it was a great man that once said “Happy is the man who has a robot in the post”.

Or perhaps it’s just me.

Lion King in London

Went to London today to see the Lion King show. This meant getting up at 5:45, but as you all know I’m prepared to suffer for art, and so this wasn’t a problem.

We had lunch at the Masala Zone restaurant in Covent Garden. Masala Zone is a small chain of Indian Restaurants in London, each of which is decorated in a characteristic way, the one we went to has loads of puppets hanging from the ceiling, depicting the guests arriving at a particularly posh wedding.

The food was great. Really tasty, and very nicely priced.

If you want a place to eat in London that won’t break the bank, but will deliver a really good dining experience, then I strongly recommend it.

Then it was on to the theatre.

I’m not that big on musicals. I reckon that if the story is going to be interrupted by a song it had better be a darned good one.  However, the songs, sets, costumes and style of the whole performance worked for me.

I think I rather annoyed number one daughter when I said (somewhat tongue in cheek) “It’s good, but it’s no Avatar”. Actually it is far better than the movie. Avatar is highly polished, with incredible attention having been focused on getting everything to look as real as possible. Lion King takes the approach that since it is impossible to get the whole of the jungle into a theatre we will concentrate on giving you the impression of what it is is like there.  And it works a treat.

Avatar is like watching a really good computer game being played by an expert technician. Lion King is like having a beautiful story told by a bunch of people right in front of you.  If you want to see how far you can get with imagination and just plain cleverness, then go and see the show. Great stuff.