Moving into the Future

Some time back I tried to move my blog. It didn't end well.  Now I'm trying again. The main reason is that changes to Twitter and Flickr have broken my blog posting workflow and Windows Live Writer (my blogging tool of choice for years) has been badly compromised by the way that high resolution displays in Windows 8.1 show the text as too tiny for my elderly eyes.

This move is not without cost. I'm expecting that some permanent links to resources may break during the move, I'm going to make a pass through the last six months or so of posts and fix them. If you find that a resource is not available then please let me know and I'll re-host the files and update the link. I think that if you access things via robmiles.co.uk you should be able to get everything as before. Then again, if it all goes horribly wrong you won't be able to read this post.....

The good news is that the new site has lots of lovely features that I'm very keen to try out. So please bear with me.

Laser Cutter Purchase Chicken

Ian came around today and we played a kind of “dangerous purchase chicken”, each trying to persuade the other that what we really need in our lives is a laser cutting machine. Turns out you can get these from ebay for a few hundred pounds, which for a device with a 40 watt C02 laser is actually amazing value we reckon.

The one we looked at can cut paper, card, leather and most other non-metallic materials. Including fingers and thumbs I suppose. The vendor page shows a video of the machine happily burning through card, with the lid wide open and presumably all the safety interlocks (which I hope it has) turned off.

It would be nice to be able to precisely cut plastic parts and the device might be a nice complement to Una the 3D printer. But bearing in mind that the thing is water cooled and needs a hole cutting in the wall to install the vent that gets rid of all the nasty smoke,  I think I’ll pass for now.

Donald Fagen and Lego Minifigures

I got a couple of great books for Christmas. It’s really nice when you get things that you like, but didn’t know existed until you pull off the wrapping paper. First up was Donald Fagen, Eminent Hipsters. I’ve been a fan of Steely Dan since forever. They make west coast sounding jazz/rock that number one wife says sounds like “Middle of the Road Music”. Whatever. I think they are great and they are still writing and touring despite being in their mid sixties.

The driving force behind the group, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, studied English Lit. as students and this really comes out in their lyrics and sleeve notes. And now Donald Fagen has published a collection of essays and notes with stories from his childhood, growing up as a jazz geek before the word geek became respectable, and also charting the trials of being a rock star on the road, jetting between five star hotels and sell out concert venues.

You won’t get much insight into the lyrics of the songs they’ve written, and to be honest Mr Fagen sounds like a bit of a grump from time to time. But he really can turn out a splendid phrase or two. A good read if you like well written prose. A truly great read if you follow the band.

When we go up town shopping I usually end up buying everyone a Lego minifigure. As if our house is short of bits of coloured plastic that are hard to dust. Anyhoo, they are fun to put together and always nicely themed.

It turns out that you can get a book about them. Now, I realise that what we have here is really just a brochure/catalogue/marketing thing that is probably a cynical ploy by a steel-hearted multi-national company bent on getting us to buy more bits of coloured plastic from them. But I like the pictures. And I like looking at the images and getting the “I’ve got one of them….” And you do get some more minifigures with the book as well……

Mending Glasses with Heat Shrink Tubing

.. and you get to play with things that look a bit like ray guns….

My glasses fell apart a while back and up until now I’ve been making use of duct tape to hold them together. This works but it is not great from an elegance point of view. So I’ve got hold of some heat shrink tubing and now I’m using that. The repair is much stronger, and unless you know to look, much harder to spot.

Heat shrink tubing is wonderful. It is just strong plastic tubing that you can buy in different diameters. And when you heat it up it, well, er, shrinks, tightly gripping what ever it has been slid over.

It’s best to use a heat gun like the one above, although you can use a hair dryer at a pinch. If you are serious about building your own electronics you should definitely make use of the stuff, particularly when you are soldering wires onto connectors. It provides a strong physical support for the connection and also insulates pins from each other.

Me, I’m now saving for the huge expense of getting another pair of specs.

Christmas Coup

I think she looks quite seasonal. What with those Christmas lights across her nose….

We had a great Christmas. I hope you did too. We rounded off the whole splendid day with a bit of theft, assassination and insurrection. As you do.

We played Coup. It is from the Resistance family of games and contains a similar mix of bluff, lies and downright nastiness. The game lasts only a few minutes each, which is nice because when you get assassinated by your nearest and dearest you can start plotting for the next round….

Great Christmas Eve

What can you write abut a day where you just sit around and have a nice time? Nothing much. And I really like that.

Shower of no power

Here’s a Christmas Riddle for you: “When is a shower not a shower?” The answer, at least in our house, is “At 7:35 am this morning” when number one wife turned the dial and nothing happened.

Truly, there is no better way of starting the week before Christmas, with guests arriving who will presumably be expecting bathing facilities, than by standing in the bath wearing your pyjamas and dismantling a shower unit. The hope was that it was just blocked. The fear (which was actually more of a certainty if I’m honest) was that something inside (probably the outlet valve) was bust.

Turned out that my fears were justified. However, thanks to the power of the internet, a bunch of calling round and the services of a very obliging plumber, we had the replacement in and working by the end of the day. All it meant was that I was a bit poorer,

Chilli Con Carne Flambé

Invented a new recipe for tea today. Quite simple really.

Chop a large onion and fry with a small amount of oil. Add some mince and fry that. Then add some garlic, tomato purée, a tin of tomatoes and then (and this is the important bit) leave simmering on the hob for around 45 minutes without stirring while you attempt to interface an RF24L01 Single Chip 2.4GHz Transceiver to an Arduino. Go downstairs and scrape the black bits off the bottom of the pan. Add kidney beans and serve with rice and fervently crossed fingers.

At least it all got eaten.

A Trip to the Dentist

Today it was time for a check-up of the tooth variety. I’ve long since progressed beyond having “good teeth”. Now I settle for “good teeth for my age”. Apparently, if I was 90 years old I’d have “excellent teeth for my age”. Something to look forward to I think.

Mini-Open Day

We had our first Open Day of the new admissions round today. Just a quiet affair with a few select guests. I was able to show off one of my latest toys (which will get its official debut tomorrow at C4DI) and make sure that I can still remember the introduction presentation. That went fine, although I did make the potentially career damaging mistake of completely forgetting the name of our new head of department. Who was there at the time.

This is our new Head of Department, Ken Hawick, handing over goods to the winner of our Open Day prize draw. There are no prizes at all for guessing what is in the box.

Thanks to those who turned up, hope you had a good journey back.

World of Blur

I woke up today with a head full of plans, schemes and great things to do. Then my glasses fell in half as I put them on.

Great.

Of course I was equal to this, eventually. Having turned the house upside down (not literally, that would be really hard to do – especially without my glasses on) and found some less than invisible tape to mend them with, I managed to get back into gear. The metal fitting in the frame has just broken in half. Serves me right for keeping them longer than two years I suppose. The hunt is now on for my older, but rather less broken, ones that I can use while I get these fixed.

I was wondering whether, from a style point of view, I should put tape around the other side for the sake of balance?

Philadelphia Freedom

Flew back today from “The Best MVP Summit Ever”™. My flight was via Philadelphia, where they had a rather nice sunset (see above). I took the picture with my Lumia 1020 (actually I took 5 and then merged them together to get the rather pleasing result).  I think I’ll print out a really large version of this.

Another surreal favourite moment, hearing Elton John’s “Philadelphia Freedom” being played through the public address system while I was there. Awesome.

Flying with Bad User Interfaces

So today I was lucky enough to get to fly out to Seattle for the MVP Summit. That’s twice in one year. Lovely. We took off and before long I was playing with the in-flight entertainment. As you do. The picture quality and sound were excellent. The range of movies and TV shows as wide. But the user interface was horrible.

Take the screen above. The user interface is touch driven, so you are reaching out with your fat fingers on the end of your wobbly arm to hit one of the two buttons, which do fairly critical things. Get the wrong button and you will be upset. So why are the buttons so close together, so small, and why is the text on them so hard to read?

And then there’s this:

This is how you pick the films. The screen is pretty enough but it is filled up with useless information. The titles of the films themselves are impossible to discern on the artwork and the scroll targets are tiny tiny.  If they had thought about it they could have put the name of every film, in text, on one screen and saved us the hassle of grinding through the pages.

Add to this a very unresponsive and inaccurate input and you have a recipe for an unhappy user. And the annoying thing for me is that the service, once you started watching, was very good indeed. It was just that someone really didn’t think how the user interface was supposed to work.

Triella WI ask the hard questions

One tough audience. No really.

Some time back I was invited to give a talk about computers at Triella Women’s Institute. So today I went off to strut my stuff. It was great  fun. I talked a bunch of what I thought was computer common sense and then I stopped and asked for questions.

I’ve forgotten what the first question was, but I won’t forget the second one in a hurry. “Why did Blackberry go bust?”. Hmmm. Tricky. And not quite what I was expecting. Anyhoo, I thought I’d better have a crack at the answer. Blackberry have managed to go from Hero to Zero in a few short years. There was a time when everyone who was anyone had a Blackberry phone. Now just about nobody does. Personally I reckon they took their eye off the ball for too long and assumed that people would always want what they made because they always had.

Blackberry aren’t the only ones who have taken a pounding from the new wave of touch screen devices spearheaded by Apple but they were the ones that were last with a proper response. And they are now paying the price. And it didn’t help that their service broke more times than it ever, ever, should have.

Next up was a question along the lines of “Why is Windows 8 so horrible?”. Hmm. Tricky again. Actually Windows 8 is not that bad. It is just irritatingly different when you first start with it. My top tip is to use the Windows key to start a search for your chosen program. I just press Windows, type “WO” and then hit enter. And up comes Word. Much easier and quicker than any mouse powered start menu. Of course I didn’t help my case by being horribly inept when I was trying to show this off, because the keyboard to my tablet was safely stored in my bag….

Then we talked about all sorts, from Smart TVs, to password policies, to the perils of dodgy power cables. Great fun, and thanks for inviting me.

You can find the slides here.

More Big Lego Brick Storage Boxes

Today I bought some more Giant Lego Bricks today to store things in. I’m going to fit them together with the ones I bought last week. Number one son was not convinced. “You’ll have problems getting things out of the boxes at the bottom” he said.

“That’s where you’re wrong” I replied. “I’m not going to put anything in the bottom boxes”.

That told him. I think.

Great Big Lego Bricks

Just bought a bunch of these to put things in. They are great big Lego bricks, around 25cm x 50cm which you can put things in. And they fit together just like normal sized ones. So you can build a fort with them.

From the look of the reviews on Amazon they are very popular. Particularly with five year olds. But I like them too.

John Mayer at the O2–thanks to Hacked

In July this year I took part in Hacked at the O2 in London. It was an absolutely brilliant hackathon, made all the better by the fact that I managed to win one of the competitions. My Difficultifier got People’s Choice Award, which was completely wonderful. What made it even better was finding out that part of the prize was four tickets to any show at the O2 Dome over the next year. Splendid.

I mentioned this to Number One daughter. “John Mayer’s playing the dome in October” she said. Done.

So, thanks to those wonderful O2 people, particularly Cristiano Betta and Kevin Prince, today we were sitting in seats up close to the stage, having just come from the O2 Lounge where we had been preparing for the performance with a couple of cocktails. As you do (or as had been laid on for us)

This is Gabrielle Aplin, who did a sterling job providing support and had an absolutely cracking backing band.

.. and this is the man himself, with some good advice for us all. He started early and gave us a two hour demonstration of why he is just so darned good. If you’ve not heard of John Mayer, then seek him out. Blues, rock, country, playing the guitar behind your back.  The works.  Just really, really good.

A Trip to London

This is the fancy new roof over the courtyard of the British Museum. We’re here because we are having a couple of days in London and fancied seeing all the good stuff that our enterprising ancestors plundered from ancient civilisations far and wide.

I think that this is a very early prototype for the very first Simpsons episode. But I may be wrong.

We were looking at the mosaics and noting that the resolution was reasonable, but the frame rate seemed a bit slow. Great fun and probably even cultural.

All the Fun of Hull Fair 2013

Hull Fair is in town. We didn’t manage to make it last year, what with one thing and another and horrible weather. Today though we thought we’d go for it. I took the big camera and cunningly concealed it underneath my jacket, so that I looked like any other heavily pregnant middle aged tall bloke.

We just went on the big wheel to take pictures and then on Hook a Duck to win a teddy. Then we bought some nougat and headed off for a pie at Fudge just down the road.

Indeed.

3,000 Followers on Twitter. Sometimes.

I’m pleased (and a bit surprised) to find that I now have over 3,000 followers on Twitter. I’ve been close to the magic number for a while now, but it seems that there have been a bit of un-following going on where I’m concerned (or perhaps some Twitter spam-bots have been shut down). All I can say is that this has caused my numbers to bounce around the magic figure for a few days, but now I really can say that I’ve made it past the magic number.

I wonder if I should tweet about it?