In the unlikely event of you being allowed out of your house in the near future, and the even more unlikely event of the weather being nice enough to make it worth going anywhere, you could do a lot worse than go down to Burnby Hall in Pocklington near York. They’ve taken great care to make sure the place is Covid safe and the food in the restaurant is lovely.
These are the notes for my chat about current affairs for Radio Humberside this morning. I thought I’d do a Tech Roundup and make the notes into a blog post…..
Amazon are launching a tiny home security drone that can fly round your house to check that you haven’t left the gas on. It comes in its own cute recharging stand and you can teach it the way round your house. I can think of a few problems.
You’ll have to leave all the doors open so that it can make its rounds.
You’ll have to be OK with a mega corporation being able to look around your home. Although Amazon say that they are not going to keep the recordings I can forsee a time when you get emails with titles like “Replace that ugly woodchip in your living room…..”
Who on earth is going to need it in a time when we aren’t really allowed to leave the house?
This is a brave time to be launching new games consoles but both Microsoft and Sony are in the midst of doing just that at the moment. Perhaps the calculation is that if nobody can go anywhere they are going to put a premium on having the best home entertainment possible. But they seem to be going about it in the most confusing manner possible. Sony “stealth sold” their new machine by putting making it available a while before they said it would be and Microsoft have chosen a name for their machine that is so close to that of their previous console (Xbox Series X vs Xbox One X that quite a few people seem to have bought the old machine by mistake.
The good news is that the new consoles offer graphics and sound which are astonishingly realistic and also have so much power that they will make creating truly immersive experiences much easier and cheaper for developers. It is also interesting to see how they are moving into a subscription model, Microsoft will give you a shiny new console and access to all their games for around thirty pounds a month, which sounds like a pretty good deal to me. Although I’m still spending too much time with Animal Crossing on my Nintendo Switch to get the best out of these new devices.
Microsoft has done something that I think only a company with its vision and resources could. It has made a program that is genuinely revolutionary. They’ve built a Flight Simulator which is as big as the world. They’ve taken map data and aerial photographs for the whole of the globe and put it on their servers. Then they’ve added Artificial Intelligence that infers the shape of buildings from the overhead photographs and built servers that can stream this data into your computer as you fly around the planet. You can stick a pin anywhere in the world map and take off from there. The program includes pretty much every airfield on earth to land on.
The realism is astonishing. You get fantastic fluffy clouds and even rainbows. It’s a social game too. You can meet up with friends and take a spin around London, or New York, or Mont Blanc, or Chernobyl. It’s all there. Some of it is quite as you might expect though because the AI doesn’t always create the right buildings. Buckingham Palace is an office block. And at the moment Hull is missing a proper Humber Bridge (see above). You’ll also need quite a pricey PC and a fast network connection to get the best out of it. But it is going to totally change the way we regard video games. If indeed it is a game at all. There is so much detail that you some folks reckon that you almost learn to fly from the program. And I’ve been surprised how much fun it is to go flying with a bunch of friends.
One piece of great news for Hull residents is the fact that we have some of the best networking in the world, which makes heavily connected games like this really sing. In the future more and more experiences are going to be supplied over fast network connections and the KC LightStream service works a treat for this.
The game Among Us has been out for a while. But recently it has been riding high on the Twitch game servers. 1.5 million simultaneous players, Developers Innersloth have been working on a sequel but they’ve now stopped because the original game is so popular that they want to spend time developing that instead. I’ve had a go at playing it, and it is well worth a look for anyone into social mayhem.
If you’ve ever fancied having a sewage pump as a ringtone you can now live that dream. The BBC has released that, and lots of other sounds, for anyone to use. I wrote about this earlier here.
Last week I got an email telling me it was time to replace the batteries in my bathroom scales. Today I replaced them. I was tempted to not replace them just to see what happened next, but in the end I didn’t dare…
I’ve installed the NHS Covid App on my phone and it seems to work. Actually, it doesn’t seem to do much. After asking me for my home postcode (or at least the first few characters of it) the program seems to have lost interest in me. I think this is definitely a good thing. I was expecting to have to enter a username, think of a password that didn’t (or did) include non-alphanumeric characters and then enter my National Insurance number. None of that. Just a very simple interface with the things that you need to know.
If they’ve done the Bluetooth BLE stuff right it should have minimal effect on battery life. Looks like a good job to me. If you are lucky enough to have a phone that can support the app you really should install it and use it.
A pity that it is six months after we need it though.
Last week on Saturday night we watched “The Fifth Element” one of my all time favourite films. This week someone else was in charge of viewing choices and we watched Frozen II. Without wishing to give much away the plots are virtually the same, although with a bit less shooting in Frozen 2. Very strange.
Went out onto Beverley Westwood today for a walk. They have cows on there so I took another picture of one. I used my other cow picture in a poster for a departmental event a few years ago, so I could do with a spare.
Our post delivery person is great. But sometimes a bit eccentric. Today they delivered a package while I was in to someone who was out. All I got after spending an afternoon excitedly waiting for my camera strap to arrive (I really should get out more) was a note that said “Number 5 living room window”. Now I don’t number the windows on my house. And our living room isn’t so big as to have 5 windows anyway.
Eventually I worked out that this had something to do with the living room window at house number 5. So I went over and had a look. The window was slightly open and there, on the floor inside was my parcel. Which counted as a win in delivery terms. Although if I’d had a priceless Ming vase in my room underneath the window (which is perhaps not very likely in my neighbourhood I suppose) I’d have been a bit concerned.
The good news is that the camera strap is excellent.
I’ve been a member of Flickr for years. I’ve just paid my Pro subscription for what I think will be the last time. It’s starting to cost around the same per year as Microsoft Office 365 which, to my mind, offers much more for the cash - including photo storage…
I love it when people try new things, especially in difficult circumstances. I was in the local Cooplands bakery getting some sandwiches for lunch and I noticed that they were selling baking kits. I’m not a huge fan of baking itself but I am a huge fan of the things that people make when they do it. So I bought a kit. It’s very nicely presented with nicely printed recipes and beautifully packaged ingredients. You even get some utensils, including the cutter for the gingerbread man and a tray to bake things in.
We’ve done the gingerbread men and the brownies so far, with pizza to come. They were delicious. If you’ve never baked and fancy having a go these are a really nice one-stop shop for all the bits. I hope that they keep making them.
I’m having a tiny break from writing. Today we took a trip to Castle Howard which is one of my favourite places in the world. Before we set off we went onto their web site, dutifully filled out the form, booked our slot and got the QR code that would allow us and a few other people to go in.
When we arrived the place was mad busy. I’ve never seen so many people there. I’m far from convinced that everyone there had done as much forward planning as we had. The good news was that the grounds are so vast that they swallowed up all the visitors and we had a delightful amble round. The weather was kind enough to only threaten to rain a couple of times.
We didn’t need a new toaster when I woke up this morning. But, after I’d reset the earth trip for the second time we decided that it probably was time to get one.
I’ve a suspicion that all the toasters in the world are made in a single large factory somewhere and then have different shaped and coloured skins added in the factory next door. Although having said that there seems to be a huge range of opinions about the various different types when you start reading Amazon reviews. And it turns out that you have to work quite hard to find a toaster that will toast a large piece of bread all the way to the top. The contender above was a good price and doesn’t seem to have too many one star opinions attached to it. It should arrive fairly soon. Then I can stop eating bread and jam.
Many years ago I took my kids to the university to “show them what daddy does for a living”. This turned out to be sit in front of screen pressing keys with the odd bit of shouting at people, which is pretty much all I did at home, so I’m not sure they learnt much. But I learnt a few things from them. Number one daughter picked up a mouse and pressed a button on it. The screen in front of her immediately sprang into action. Brian, who was watching, was very impressed. It seemed that nobody had ever thought to press that button before.
I was reminded of this when showing number one granddaughter my venerable Twilight Zone pinball machine. She leaned one of the buttons and promptly dropped the machine into “In the Zone” mode which triggers all the options and releases all six balls onto the playfield at once. This is something I’ve not been able to do in the many years I’ve owned the machine.
I’m not sure what to show her next time she visits.
This nasty little virus has a lot to answer for. Including the death of a British tradition, the “polite cough”. In times gone by if a British person wanted to attract someone’s attention - perhaps it might be a waiter, or a a person who has cut in front of you in a queue, or someone who has parked their car on your foot - you would issue a polite cough to open up the sequence of apologies that would inevitably follow: “I’m so sorry that I left my foot lying around on the ground where you could drive over it” - etc etc.
Nowadays a polite cough has every chance of having you wrestled to the ground by a couple of burly folks in hazmat suits. Oh well. At least we’ve still got the “disapproving look” left.
Very pleased with myself. I’ve taken on City Hall and won in a tumultuous 50 minute battle. Admittedly it was East Riding Council, and I was just trying to order something via their web site. But it felt like a battle.
And I did have to give them 10 pounds to sign up to get the service (and I’m not really sure why). So perhaps we’ll call it a draw.
What a man I am. I spent the morning writing and the afternoon demolishing a summerhouse. Who knows what I’ll do this evening…
Blimey. That was something of a storm last night. I was watching the progress on the amazing LightningMaps.org and wondering how close to our house the dots would get…..
What do you do when faced with a dripping tap? Answer, in my case, is try to fix it. No matter that it wasn’t my tap, the urge to show off my plumbing skills was too hard to resist. So, after a rummage around under the sink I found the isolator for the tap in question and, after a bit of swinging on a spanner managed to pull out the leaky bit.
At this point I was feeling somewhat smug. All we had to do was find a replacement and drop it into the tap. And then someone pointed out that all the water in the house was off.
Oops. Perhaps the isolation valve that I’d turned off did a bit more than I thought. So I put everything back together and turned the isolator back on again. And the water was still off.
Now I was more than a bit worried. My attempt to demonstrate my skills was showing something else entirely Then we discovered that, owing to a supply fault, the water was off in the entire area.
We drove off to the DIY superstore marvelling at the way circumstances collide. How a dripping tap had coincided with a water outage, both events calculated by fate to make me look like an idiot. Then the DIY superstore showed that it was a lot less than super by not having any of the replacement parts in stock. So we took our masks off and headed back.
To find that the water pressure was back to normal and the tap had stopped dripping. At least I’ve learned something, which is that some designs of tap fitting need high water pressure to force them shut. We’ve ordered some spare parts in case the problem comes back again. And I’ve discovered (but not learned just yet) that sometimes fools really do rush in where angels fear to tread…..
Some people are making a very silly fuss about being forced to wear face masks in order to reduce the chances of them dying. Perhaps it is because they don’t have access to masks as cool as the one above, made for me by number one wife.
Apparently loading web pages, finding errors in them and then emailing their owners is now a business model. I got an email from Tracy this week telling me that she had found 83 errors on my blog pages. Oh well.
While I was playing with the tape recorder yesterday I found an inlay I made for one of my tapes. Hand typed on a Silver Reed portable typewriter with no undo whatsoever. The numbers on the left and the readings on the tape counter for the start of each track.
You’re right. I needed to get out more…..
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
