Dulux PaintPod Review

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This weekend I had a lot of wall and ceiling to paint. And the local DIY chain had an offer on the Dulux PaintPod. So, of course, I bought one. It has buttons and lights, and motors. How could I resist? The idea is that a little pump in the paint reservoir pushes the paint through a pipe to the handle, where it is transferred onto the paint roller. Then, when you have finished painting, you add some cleaning water, the process goes into reverse and the machine cleans itself and the roller.

And it mostly works. The best bit was when it was pumping the first bit of paint through the clear pipe up to the roller, I loved watching the paint travel down the clear plastic tube. I think this is where the BBC 3 people got the idea for their new logo. Once the paint gets to the handle it is then supposed to be magically transferred onto the roller and then you can paint with it.  This is where it gets a bit sticky. Put too much paint on the roller and you end up wearing it. Put too little on and you are just pushing a roller up and down a wall for no reason. If you are painting onto the same colour (as I was for the ceiling) it seemed to work fine, mainly because there wasn’t much to do. The cleaning process mostly worked too, with the bulk of the paint being removed automatically.

Life got harder when I was painting a different colour. Getting enough paint onto the wall was really tricky, and although I could paint a lot faster without having to pause and refill the roller and tray, I think it took me one more coat than I would have needed by hand. In fact, for the final coat I went back to a hand roller.

I don’t think I’d recommend one if you are planning changing the colour of your room. If you have a lot of one colour you want to refresh it might be a good idea, but I must admit I think I got on better with the old familiar roller and tray.

Chain Reaction….

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Sunday: Go out and look at chairs and sofas. Find exactly what we want at a good price. Buy it.

Monday: Decide that since we are changing the furniture we should really change the decor.

Tuesday: Someone wants our old sofas.

Wednesday: Old sofas now collected, downstairs looks strangely empty (as well it might).

Thursday: Decide since downstairs is clear we can paint the walls and ceiling.

Friday: Buy new fangled painting machine and 15 litres of paint.

I’m really looking forward to the weekend…

Satnav Software is Rubbish

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There are a number of great mysteries out there which may never be solved. The Riddle of the Sphinx, The Mystery of Life, The Appeal of Chris Evans.  There are also others which are a bit closer to home, one of which is Why SatNav software is so universally appalling? 

I’ve used quite a few different solutions and, with one exception, they have been the programs that have come closest to making me hurl the device across the room. One program had the habit of crashing every time you added a favourite location. Another was so hard to use that I never actually figured out what it was I had done to enter a destination address. A third failed to make reliable Bluetooth contact with the GPS device (made by the same company as the software), meaning that you had to indulge in a bout of “Serial Port Roulette” each time you turned it on. That was also the software that would forget all its useful settings and addresses if the battery in the device ever dared to go flat.

Once they got going these programs usually managed to do the navigation part quite well, but it has always annoyed me that they were so badly written, with such poorly thought out user interfaces. I was reminded of this today when I got my wife a satnav program for her iPhone. I thought it would be a useful thing to have, and allow her to navigate even when out of range of cell towers. I even dared to hope that by now the developers would have fixed all the things I hate about such programs.

Not so. The program had an arcane and tricky installation process and followed that up with a user experience that goes completely against the lovely iPhone interface (even managing to implement a stupid alphabetic keyboard with an annoying click you can’t turn off). It ran slowly and lumpily for no good reason and then crashed without warning. As a final parting shot it managed to put our house in the wrong town. I wonder if I can get my money back.

Please someone, anyone, one of the proper software companies, bring out a satnav program that just works properly and is easy to use.  It is not impossible, I do have one satnav system that is wonderful in just about every respect. Unfortunately it comes attached to a rather large dongle in the form of my car, but it does serve as a reminder that it can be done…

Ocean in Motion in Whitby

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We took a day off today to celebrate a birthday in Whitby, in the best possible fashion with a meal at the Magpie cafe. The cafe even got a mention in one of the push food reviews recently, and it seemed they liked the food there as much as we do. Which is nice.

The weather was a bit grey, and tide was definitely in. The boat trips around the bay were specially discounted, and seeing just how much the boats were going up and down, it is not actually an experience I’d pay for.

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Hardy Souls only

Zune HD is out, and it Supports XNA

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Today the new Zune platform is released by Microsoft. Called the Zune HD it looks absolutely wonderful. It has solid state storage, an OLED display and a multi-touch user interface.

And, (and this is the wonderful news) it supports XNA. A set of XNA 3.1 Extensions has also been released which you can use to take your games and run them on this fantastic platform. And the extensions even provide access to the accelerometer and the multi-touch input.

If Microsoft get around to putting a phone in there too they will have their first proper iPhone beater.

The only snag is that for now it is a US only release, but with a bit of luck it will make it to us eventually.

Interesting Question

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I was helping someone fill in a form about me recently and they asked the “Where do you work?” question.

“University of Hull”

“..and how long have you been there?” was the next thing they wanted to know.

“Thirty one years” was my reply (and it’s true – scarily enough)

When they said “Oh, do you like it there then?” I wasn’t quite sure what to say next. If I said I hated the place this would mark me down as rather a slow learner.

Clipper Race at Hull

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The Round the World Clipper Race does exactly what it says on the tin. Ten yachts from various countries are setting sail around the world. The different thing about this race though is that the crews are made up of ordinary folk who have signed up, got trained and will join their boats for various stages on the round the world trip.

It starts from Hull tomorrow, but today the boats were in Hull Marina so we went for a look. I took the little camera for some snaps. I had a go at making a panorama shot of the side of the marina.

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It seemed to come out OK.

The atmosphere was great and the weather amazing.

Carcassonne

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While we have been on holiday we have been playing some new games. Number one son got a copy of Carcassonne. We have had some fun with it (and I’m not just saying this because I managed to win a couple of times). The game revolves around a landscape that is built up by players adding tiles and different types of settler to claim as much of the land as they can. It has just the right balance of skill and luck. When I win I can claim skill, but when I lose I can claim that the cards were against me. The games don’t take a long time to play, (which is something else I quite like about them) but they are quite absorbing.

If you like board games it is well worth a look.

Warwick Castle

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Warwick Castle is ace.  Having great weather probably helped, but the place was pretty cool too.

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View from the top

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Castle and Mill

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Ballista power.

The two big round things on each side take a person each, who walk inside them to lift up a four ton weight that is used to propel the payload a heck of a distance. If someone rocks up outside your castle with one of these you should really let them in, because in the end they are coming in whether you like it or not…

Lego and Robots

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We went off to LegoLand today. I really do know how to have fun me. We went on all the rides that make you wet and guess what? We got very wet. I love the models though.

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Not Really Real

I had a rush of blood to the head, and I got a copy of the new Mindstorms 2.0 kit which is awesome and lets you make a walking robot. I’ve starting playing with the software that comes with it, and I think I’ll have a go with the Microsoft Robotics Studio next. Great fun.

Free XNA Curriculum Materials Now Live

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If you have been wondering about what all the “Today I have Been Mostly Writing” posts last month were all about you can find out as the courseware is now available on Microsoft Faculty Connection:

This is a complete programming course which is designed to be taught over 10 weeks at a rate of 6 sessions a week (although you can pull individual sections out and use them if you wish).  There is a course matrix that sets out how to sequence this.

The course teaches programming from first principles, using XNA games as the basis of all the sample code.  There are extensive tutor notes on the slide decks and a sequence of step-through labs for students to follow. There are even revision tests for each section.  It is based on the chapters in my textbook, which is the first link in the above list.

You can download the material without signing in, by selecting the “Skip this Step” option on the download page.

If you are going to use the material in any way I’d love to hear how you got on.

Hull Digital

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I’m really pleased to find out that there is now a Digital Community in Hull:

http://hulldigital.co.uk/

They are organising a live event in October which has some interesting speakers:

http://www.hdlive09.co.uk/

I’ve persuaded my boss to pay for a ticket, and I’m really looking forward to it. I’m pleased to find that they do student pricing for the event (which seems to me quite reasonable) and with a bit of luck we can involve some of our students in their events in the future.

One of the most important things about computing is that the field is constantly changing and professional development is something you really need to work at if you want to keep your skills up to date.  Hull Digital looks like it will be a neat way of doing this.

Van Driving Man

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Spent lots of today driving a big van. It was time to move number one daughter to her new pad in London, and so it was up with the lark and off in the big tin box on wheels that I’d hired for the day.

I like van driving. Everything in a van cab has been carefully designed to do a job. There was even a little clip in the dashboard into which you could put your delivery notes and a big area under the windscreen for your copy of “The Sun” and empty MacDonald's boxes. They also have monster (and completely un-burstable) engines and sound systems. And other people get out of your way. I’ve even figured out how to reverse them. Great stuff.

Help your Eyes with Windows 7

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One of the problems with ultra high resolution screens is that they often display text in ultra low sizes. My little Toshiba tablet is a case in point. It has a lovely display with loads of dots that I can't read. If you have a similar problem you might be interested in a Windows 7 feature that is rather nice. In the screen resolution dialogue box there is an option to "Make text and other items larger or smaller". If you select this you can enlarge most of the hard to read things on the screen by 125 and 150 percent.

It doesn't work for everything, programs that insist on rendering their own dialog boxes for no good reason (step forward Adobe Photoshop Elements) will still be hard to read, but it beats the alternative, which was to set the resolution to a value that didn't really fit the display and then have everything slightly blurry.