Got your Zune Pass Yet?

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TZ1

If you’ve got a Windows Phone and you haven’t checked out the Zune pass yet then you are missing out. Zune pass is an “all you can eat” deal which lets you download and store loads of music onto mobile devices and PCs. You pay a monthly fee to keep the music going and you can have as much of it with you as you can fit onto your Windows Phone or Zune. You can chop and change your tunes as much as you like and keep a different range of sounds on each platform. Of course the bad news is that if you stop paying, it stops playing but I think that for around nine quid a month it is actually a pretty good deal.

I really like the way that you can hear a tune you like and then have the whole album on your phone a few minutes later. Windows Phone even has the amazing Shazam application (one of the few programs that I reckon is actually powered by magic) that will put a name to tunes that you play to it, to make the process easier. I’ve been happily downloading content and listening to it. Current favourites is “Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter Plays the Hits”. Country music (and other stuff) done real well.

Win an LG Optimus 7 Windows Phone

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LG Optimus 7

Coming to your pocket soon?

Thanks go to Sheryl for sending me an LG Optimus 7 phone to take a look at. She has also sent one for me to give away, so I proudly announce the “Optimus Quest” competition.

Send me your ideas for Windows Phone Marketplace programs and I’ll give the phone as a prize to the best idea. You can find full details in the Rob Miles Optimus Quest Competition pages.

I’m going to be using an Optimus 7 (not the prize one – that is staying in the box all shiny and new) for the next few days and I’ll let you know what I think of it. First impressions – very nice indeed.

Final Battleships Tutorial Podcasts Available

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Traffic Light

I managed to find a quiet time at work today to record the last two podcasts for the 08101 Battleships tutorial. You can find all the tutorials here:

These are tutorials to support programming coursework set for our First Year programming course. The students have been asked to produce a C# program that will take the part of one player in the game of Battleships.

Snowed in Phone Fun

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Chocolate Deluxe

If you ask for “Hot Chocolate Deluxe” at the Purple Cow you get this. We had to take the sweets home for later.Fantastic.

Spent today snowed in working on some more Windows Phone fun and games. (although we did step out for Sunday Lunch at the Purple Cow in Cottingham – have the gammon with two eggs on top it is ace)

If you are a Windows Phone developer (and you should be) you must get the Windows Phone October update. This gives you some nice extras, including a way of debugging Windows Phone applications that use the media content on the phone. I’m finding this very useful just at the moment. And remember that if you write Visual Basic there is now an Windows Phone Visual Basic SDK just for you.

Cheese Lander has Landed

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CheeseLander

Anyone with a “Cheese Lander” shaped hole in their lives now has somewhere to turn. For the princely sum of 79 British Pence (that’s a couple of normal Mar Bars or one and a bit of the really large ones) you can now own a copy of “The Best Cheese Landing Game in the World”. That I know of. In Hull. Written by me.

Anyhoo, if you want to be able to whip out your Windows Phone at a party and say “Anyone here fancy landing some cheese?” you can find it on Windows Phone Marketplace here.

08101 Battleships Tutorial Podcast

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tyre tracks

Another day of stuck at home. Not that I’ve spent all my time here. I also managed to find time to walk through a snowstorm and then queue for 45 minutes in the Post Office. What joy.

Anyhoo, since it is looking unlikely that I’ll be able to make my tutorial tomorrow I’ve recorded another podcast for those on the 08101 module who are just getting started with the coding.

http://cid-a4ce6a659fd80c02.office.live.com/self.aspx/University%20Videos/08101%20Battleships%20Tutorial%201.wmv

I’ll have another one tomorrow for the next stage.

University Closed

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Hull Centre

Hull city centre. One of the many places I can’t get to today.

The university is closed today. Never known this before in all my years working at the place. We’ve closed early on occasion so that people can get home before the worst of the weather, but even in the floods a few years back the Hull campus stayed open.

But today it is shut. I was all togged up for a brisk walk in the snow to the office but the message came on the radio that there was no point.

My 12:15 lecture (which was going to be all about the magic of creating control behaviours in software) is now postponed and will now take place next week.

Weather permitting.

Gran Turismo 5 is Hard Work

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cube lights

Don’t cars have nice headlights these days..

I hesitate to say that I grew up playing Gran Turismo, because that would imply that I’ve actually grown up. But I do remember first playing it on the PS 1 and my amazement in how it looked and handled. And the cars had reflections. I’ve been through all the versions since then and even invested in a force feedback steering wheel that added a lot to the PS2 version.

So it was with some excitement that I fired up the PS3 version this weekend.  The intro video is very impressive and after watching that I was looking forward to going racing. And then it got really tricky – at least for me. GT 5 has a mode where you can pick a driver and then manage them through a racing season. In fact for me that seems to be the only way I can play some parts of the game. This was somewhat depressing. I didn’t get my steering wheel down from the loft just so that I could watch some other bloke drive round a track.

I took all the licence tests (I’d forgotten how boring these are) and still ended up watching Mr. Fernandez drive around in a car I’d just bought.  And the program kept asking me to sign in to the Playstation network even though I already was signed in. This sign-in kept failing, which was also a bit annoying.

In the end I switched to arcade mode and did some rally driving. The good news is that my old steering wheel works fine with the game. The bad news is that the whole thing seems just too much like hard work. I’m sure that for a dedicated petrol head who can obsess about cam belts and marvel at the accuracy of the car images and their handling models GT 5 is great news, but for me I ended up lobbing a copy of Split Second into the drive and driving in a completely unrealistic way through exploding landscapes. Much more fun.

Unstoppable Movie Review

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Bar lights

The new Windows Phone takes really good pictures. I guess it helps if you hold it straight though.

Tonight we went out to see “Unstoppable”. My first movie where the bad guy is a train. And no, “Starlight Express” does not count here. Neither does “Thomas the Tank Engine”. And anyway, Thomas was a “Really Useful Engine".  But I digress.

Unstoppable is a darned good film. At the start it says “Inspired by true events”.Indeed. Although I’m sure I would have seen something in the papers if what happened in the film did actually happen.

Real life not withstanding it is very well made, well acted and looks terrific. The kind of film that you need a big screen and loud sound for. Don’t let anything stop you seeing it.