Hope and Anchor at Blacktoft

The Hope and Anchor at Blacktoft is a great place to go for a meal by the river. If you are really lucky you might get a sky like this in between courses. And a dirty great boat going past the window (which I failed to rush out and take a picture of).

Just make sure that you set your SatNav up with care. My score so far is “Attempts to find the place: 2. Went straight there: 0”.

It is also a great place to go if you like Laurel and Hardy. Go along and find out what I mean. And have the roast beef Sunday Lunch. Lovely.

This is another view, using the Painterly 2 filter from PhotoMatix.

The Inverse of Service

I’m never sure whether my hobby is photography or “Buying cameras, using them for a bit and then selling them for a loss on ebay”. Either way, while I do take a lot of photos I also do a bit of camera shopping. Today I was in a camera shop asking about a camera I was thinking of investing in. I never say buying, that sounds like I might actually lose money on the deal.

Anyhoo, we find the camera and one of the assistants appears and offers to show me the device in action. Which turns out to have a flat battery. “Typical” says the assistant, although typical of what I’m not sure. No, they don’t have any charged batteries lying around. No, they don’t have any other versions of the camera, just the one on display. No they won’t give a discount if they sell the display camera. The best they can offer is to charge the battery and I can drop back later to take a look.

I wouldn’t mind but this is the third time I have had this kind of experience. Shop 1 the camera battery was flat. Shop 2 the battery wasn’t flat but they didn’t have an SD card that I could use to store pictures that I’d taken to test the camera. And now I get this.These are just random shops I’ve walked into around the country. They were not all in the same chain either.

The camera I was looking at wasn’t cheap. And I was fairly serious about buying it. If I was selling in this position I’d make sure that every camera was fully charged first thing in the morning. I’d have a pocket full of the relevant batteries and SD cards that fitted. I’d even go as far as having a bunch of sample prints that I’d taken to show any potential customer what each camera could do. I’d have a sensible policy on selling display models, even a modest discount might have sealed the deal.

The one way that these kinds of shops can compete with online shopping is on service. It is rather upsetting to find that they are not really trying on this score either.

Simon Says “Broken Sword”

Today Simon came to see me and told me to write a blog post about Revolution Software and their new project. Revolution has a long and distinguished history, some of which involves Hull, although they are now based just down the road in York. One of my many claims to fame is that a future member of the Revolution staff was with me in my brand new Vauxhall Astra when I crashed it. Things could have been really bad for that company (and me I suppose) if I’d managed to get six inches further out of the junction before that van hit us…..

Anyoo, motor mishaps aside, Revolution has produced some excellent “point and click” adventures in its time, including such seminal titles as “Lure of the Temptress”, “Beneath a Steel Sky” and of course the “Broken Sword” series. The rise of tablet devices has given their products a new lease of life, with a whole generation of new gamers who have the perfect platform for exploring their beautifully drawn environments and taut plotlines.

Revolution are presently seeking funding for their game and you can get a piece of the action by backing their Kickstarter project to raise the cash to produce the game. For a game of this quality the target funding seems quite modest, and they are well on the way to raising it. Simon says that if you don’t get involved he will be very disappointed and wear a frown for the rest of the week.

The Imagine Cup Refreshed

Everything gets refreshed from time to time. Superman, Spiderman (twice) etc etc. And now the Imagine Cup. It has been going for ten years and has been incredibly successful, in fact last year’s finals were the best I’ve ever seen. Of course Microsoft could have kept everything the same and planned on the competition staying at the top. But that is not how things work. The best time to refresh is when you are on the crest of the wave, because that is how you go on to even better things.

And so that’s what Microsoft has done. All the elements that make the competition great are still there. You can still get involved to make the world a better place by engaging with the World Citizenship competition. But there are also some new options. The Innovation award lets you take that little idea you had and make it into something amazing. The Games competition lets you show off your ideas for new types of gameplay. And the prizes are even bigger, with $50,000 up for the winning teams in each competition.

I’ve seen first hand the effect of the Imagine Cup on the students that take part. It has changed their lives. Get in on the ground floor at http://www.imaginecup.com/

Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3

Number one daughter reckons that Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 on the PS Vita is good fun. And it is. I bought a copy second hand (or “pre-owned”, which sounds much better) and the first thing it said when I started it was that because the game had been used before I would not be able to get any achievements on my Playstation Network account. Now, since the only reason I do anything is to get achievements (no – really) this was rather irritating.

It was almost as if they wanted to penalise those folks who didn’t pay full price for a new version, in the same way that second hand cars don’t have as many gears as those brought brand new. No, wait, that’s wrong….

Anyhoo, if you find yourself in the same position it seems that there is a way that you can sort this out. Put the cartridge into your Vita and wait for the UMVC3 icon to appear. Then hold your finger on the icon until all the icons start to wobble and have those three dots above them. This is the Vita way of letting you move games and applications around the screens. If you touch the three dots above the UMVC3 icon you will see the menu above. Just select Delete and confirm it to remove the information about this game from your system. Then pop the game cartridge out and back in again for a clean install. Note that this removes all your progress in the game, and so it works best if it is the first thing that you do before you start playing it.

The game itself is hilarious. If you’ve ever wanted to fight as Phoenix Wright (actually he is a bit of a wimp – but his secretary packs quite a punch) then this is a great way to do it.

Now available in white

I found this Roundom Vase design on Thinginverse. It is a fairly good workout of the Ultimaker printer. Up until now I’ve been printing in pink, as it is the only colour plastic I had in stock. However, today when we got back from our trip away there was a parcel from Faberdashery with some different colours in it, including a reel of “Artic White”.

Changing printing colours is quite easy. You heat up the print head, pull the old coloured plastic out of the printer and then push in the new one that you want to use.  Then just extrude plastic until all the old colour has gone. push the old plastic out until the colour changes, and then print something in the new colour. Actually, the base of the white vase above has some pink streaks in it where a last blob of the old colour made its way out of the system, but for now I’m printing white, which is nice.

I’m pleased with the results, but the surface is not quite perfect, as you can see if you examine the above pictures carefully. For me the interesting thing is that the imperfections, which you would think would be down to things like random noise and vibration, are pretty much always in the same place on both vases. Very strange.

I’ve almost, but not quite, reached the point where I can fire up the machine with the expectation of getting a useable print out of it each time I use it. The most important thing is to make sure that the first layer sticks to the printing surface. To do this I use the “Rob Miles Patent Pending A4 paper trick”. This goes like this:

• Turn the printer on and heat up the print head. This is so that you don’t get bits of solidified plastic upsetting the position.
• Put a piece of A4 printer paper on the print surface.
• Send the printer to its home position where the Z value (up and down) is set to zero.
• Turn the printer off so that it doesn’t spend too much time with the print head heated up.
• The print head should now be really close to the print surface. Adjust the surface height until the paper will just slide between the head and the print surface. Move the print head to the four corners of the print surface and adjust the height at each of those.
• Remove the paper, turn the printer on, heat up the head again and start printing.

If you have the urge to tinker then a printer like this is a great outlet. I wouldn’t say it is totally reliable, but it is fun.

Hooked on Table Tennis

I used to be quite good at Table Tennis. Today I found that I’m not as good as I used to be. But it is still great fun. I’m going to take some bats and balls to work and see if I can track down a table. Anyone out there on the Hull campus fancy a game?

Isle of Man Pictures

Not much to say today, but we did get some nice pictures

Exploring the Isle of Man

Got some holiday coming up? Fancy somewhere really nice? Go to the Isle of Man.

Never been there before, but I’ve been missing out. It has scenery that will give Yorkshire a good run for its money (which is saying something) and a fantastic coastline. It gives you the feel of being abroad (different money) without the hassle of being abroad (english money works fine too). We got to spend some time today exploring the island. The Isle of Man is a bit too near UK to be guaranteed good weather, but we found a good bit and headed for it. As you can see above, I’ve been playing with High Dynamic Range photography. This gives the pictures a bit more impact. Sometimes this means they look a bit more like they did when you took them. Other times it means that you can go for artistic effects like these.

I’m using Photomatix Pro to combine three images taken at different exposures. The program has a bunch of pre-set configurations which can be tweaked to get some very nice effects. And the good news is that the forecast is even better for tomorrow.

C# Yellow Book 2012 Now Available

The latest version of the C# Yellow Book is now available for free download. You can get it here, or you can press the spiffy new short cut on this page.

There are a few changes. I’ve fixed all the mistakes that have been sent in (and probably added a few more). The section on Graphical User Interfaces now covers XAML rather than Windows Forms. And the text now mentions “The Wizard of Oz”

Gadgeteer LED Matrix

Earlier this week I was lucky enough to get hold of some LED Matrix modules for Gadgeteer. These give a decent sized array of 64 leds. They are really easy to program, and they use the GHI DaisyLink protocol, which means that they can all be controlled from a single Gadgeteer port. Each device links to the next to make a kind of daisy chain, which is where the name came from I guess. Each of the display modules contains an ARM processor which you can load with your own software (although you’ll have to be a pretty good developer to do that).

One other neat thing is that I managed to power four of them (as you can see above) using a single USB output from my PC. I was worried that having 256 leds powered from a single port might cause problems with the current available but they work fine.

At the moment my program just displays random patterns (like those computers they had in 70’s movies) but I’m going to have a go at displaying scrolling messages and even lo-res pictures. I reckon you could even get a very simple pong game working on a 16x16 display.

Staying with Gadgeteer, if you want to find out all about how my Tweet Printer works, there is a full writeup on the Gadgeteer website (http://www.netmf.com/gadgeteer/) where it is a featured project at the moment. I actually gave the first printer to the Gadgeteer team, I’m presently building a replacement.

USB3 Need for Speed

This car is presently in the entrance to our department. I’ve no idea why it is here, but it looks great and fits the subject. And I want to have a go at driving it….

Along with my Windows 8 installation I’ve also been working on beefing up my main machine a bit. I take a lot of photos. And I mean a lot. And some of them come out. The rest stay on my hard disk as I never throw anything away. And now the disk is full. Maplin (of all places) were selling a Seagate 3Gbyte USB3 disk for a very good price (less than 130 quids) and so I bought one and then hopped onto ebay (only the best will do) and spent another ten quid on a USB3 card, because my PC motherboard is one year old wildly out of date and doesn’t have the new high speed interface.

I popped the card in this evening. Then I took it out again, because I’d forgotten to remove the blanking plate from the PC case. Then I put it back and off we went. Seems to work OK. One tip, if you install a card like this in your PC and it has PC power supply connector on it you really should connect this up. Otherwise devices might try to draw more current than a PCI Express slot can deliver, which will end badly in any one of a number of ways.

Anyhoo, tests indicate that I’m getting around double the speed of my older USB 2 drive on the connection, up to around 58 MB/sec on the larger files. Not quite the 10X increase that USB3 is supposed to offer, but at around half the speed of my internal SATA drive I can live with that. These numbers come from the spiffy performance display that Windows 8 gives you for file copies:

Seeing as they are not raw speed readings, but rather more “real world” in their usefulness, I’m a happy bunny at the moment. The number above is a bit low because I’m moving lots of small files around, which always restricts the throughput.

London Fun and Games

This is my first attempt at taking a panoramic picture of the lovely new Kings Cross station. I’m sure there will be more in the future.

This morning we woke up late after all the excitement . In fact, we were so excited last night that we didn’t notice that the car taking is back to the hotel delivered us at the wrong place. For a while we sat in the bar having drinks and charging them to a room that didn’t exist. After we had been ever so politely reminded of this issue we grabbed a taxi back to “the other hotel called the Hilton that is in Kensington” for bed.

Today was spent having a great lunch and shopping for presents appropriate for a Pearl wedding anniversary. My suggestion, a Pearl handled revolver and one bullet, was not well received (and potentially dangerous) and so earrings and a watch with a vaguely pearlescent case were purchased instead. Oh, and the earrings were not for me.

Rob on Newsnight

I got an interesting phone call on Friday afternoon from Hannah, a researcher on Newsnight. They were doing a piece about the Imagine Cup and she wondered if I would like to come down to London and take part in a discussion about the competition. After subtly checking to see if it was a wind up by saying “You’re not a student are you?” I decided that it was all above board and agreed to hop on the train on Monday, a situation only slightly complicated by the fact that it was my wedding anniversary the following Tuesday (Solution: take number on wife with me).

And so at 10:30 tonight I found myself sitting chatting with Dame Evelyn Glennie, someone who I have long admired. Such a great person. The subject for the discussion was the project from winners of the 2012 Imagine Cup, Team Quadsquad, who had created a glove that converts sign language into speech. You can see the video of their finalist presentation here. We were debating the value of the technology, and how/if it could be fitted into the lives of the hearing and speech impaired.  For me the best thing about the night was that we were there at all, and that student teams had produced a device which provided the basis for discussion and development of the technology, something that the Imagine Cup is all about.

The whole thing was over in a trice and then we were ushered back out of the studio where I managed to arrange a blurry photograph. We then headed out into the night, Dame Evelyn to go back home and us to celebrate by having a drink in the wrong hotel. Great fun. I think the show will appear on iPlayer at some point in the future. I think the machine at home has recorded it. At least I hope so…

Update on 2012-08-22 11:48 by Rob

Thanks for the link Phil:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/b01m7zjs/?t=27m46s

Control the Horizontal and the Vertical

I got an email today from a student looking for an interpolation technique to create smooth curves from a series of points. The reason he was after this was that he was making a game. His problem was that the technique looked a bit complicated and hard to implement on the target platform.

My advice in these situations is always “don’t sweat the complexity”. The simplest way to do this kind of thing is as a series of straight line segments. These are easy and quick to implement and should let you get something working really quickly. If the gameplay works OK, just stick with that technique and work with it. Remember that the player enjoying the game doesn’t know that you originally wanted to add curves. Only put the curves in if your game needs it.

If it turns out that lines would not be appropriate for your game theme, just change the game to one where lines do make sense. Remember that games are like “The Twilight Zone”. You control the horizontal and the vertical. The player is entering your universe, so you can define it as you like. Straight lines or curves, it’s all up to you. But start simple.

The Correctifier

 

We found the source of the pinball problem from last night. An extra we had bought had been supplied with incorrect wiring, sending power to one of the opto leds the wrong way. It seemed to survive this mistreatment though, and we just had to add my “Correctifier” (patent pending) which swaps the wires to make them the right way round.

This is the kind of wiring that we are working with, behind the flashing lights…..

Pinball Hacking

The best, in fact the only, good investment I have ever made was in my Twilight Zone Pinball machine. I got it ages ago from Richard, when he went over to the USA. It is huge, noisy and doesn’t always work very well. A perfect fit with me.

Tonight we spent some time playing with the machine in the best possible way. We took it to pieces and added some parts that I got in Australia while over there for the Imagine Cup. I’m always blown away by the sheer mechanical complexity of these things. Anyhoo, we managed to replace one faulty part (the clock you can see above now has four working lights) and break another. So I guess you could say we broke even on the day.

Hello from Windows 8

Windows 8 proved very easy to install. I believe in starting from a clean slate (sorry) so I backed up my entire machine last night and this morning at 8:30 I started the upgrade by booting from a CD, deleting all the partitions from the disk and starting from scratch. I had the machine working under Windows 8 well before 9:00. Looks very good so far. One thing to be aware of (although this might just be me). We have an eduroam WiFi network at Hull which is authenticated using a self signed certificate. When you connect to it you sometimes get a message saying that the certificate is not as secure as it might be, and do you really want to do this. You just have to say OK to continue to connect.

When I first installed Windows 8 this didn’t work. The machine just refused to connect to the university WiFi. It knew that the password was correct, but it didn’t give me the option to ignore the certificate. However, once I’d connected via the wired network, and logged onto the machine with my Windows Live account it worked perfectly. It might be the case (although I’m really just guessing here) that Windows 8 insists on having a “proper” login before it will enable the option to ignore certificate errors like this. I’d love to know if you have hit this problem too, so put a comment on the end of this post if you get problems.

As for me, I’ve installed Windows Essentials and got Live Writer working (hence this post). Next it is on to Visual Studio 2012 and the other stuff.

Bye Bye Live Mesh

Microsoft have released the latest version of Windows Essentials. When you start to install it you get the dialog above. The title “One Last Thing” is interesting, it is a kind of “By the by, we are about to take something away that could break your way of working” statement. I’m pressing Cancel just at the moment.

The writing has been on the wall for Live Mesh for a while. Pretty much ever since SkyDrive started doing the same kind of thing, i.e. let you transparently share files around your computers and back them up in the cloud. I’ve been a fan of this ability for ages. If you take any (or indeed all) of my machines and throw them in the river I won’t necessarily thank you, but I can take such vandalism in my stride because I use Live Mesh to sync all my work. Getting a new machine is quite relaxing for me as I just have to introduce it to Live Mesh and all my data appears as though by magic. The only restriction here is that Live Mesh limits you to 4G of file space in the cloud, but since we are talking about working data here (all the other important stuff is back home spread over a bunch of disks) 4G is fine.

It’s unfortunate that Live Mesh is going. The SkyDrive replacement works the same way, although it only synchronises via the cloud apparently. With Live Mesh two machines would directly exchange files if they found themselves on the same network. Live Mesh also provides a Remote Desktop feature which SkyDrive doesn’t. There have been a few complaints on the interwebs about the demise of Live Mesh. I think this is really a bit unfair. After all, it’s not as if it was a service that anyone has paid for. If someone gave you an apple pie every day for a while and then stopped it would be rather unfair to complain. Particularly if they then offered you a rhubarb crumble instead. If you want a premium service you can go for DropBox, which is excellent but not as cheap as I would like.

As for me, I’m presently copying my files from my Live Mesh folders into SkyDrive shared ones and I’ll press OK as soon as I’ve got all the files in place.

Update on 2012-08-16 07:48 by Rob

There is actually one feature of Live Mesh that I will really miss though, and that is the way that you can only synchronise certain folders with particular machines. On my "disk space challenged Samsung Slate" I only synchronise the files that I really need to have available on that machine, saving precious storage space.

When I switch to Skydrive I'll have to sync my entire Skydrive folder, camera roll and all, which will lose me a few GBytes. On the other hand, Skydrive gives me more space, so I guess we are back to apple pie vx rhubarb crumble again....

IR Blasting

I’m working on content for next semester at the moment. One of the modules that I deliver is a second year course called 08249 Electronics and Interfacing. In this module we get to fiddle around with robots and stuff. Last year we created a controller and a slave robot. To send commands between the two devices we were using wires link the two together.

Next time I want to use infrared instead. This has proved quite an interesting challenge. Infrared is “light you can’t see”. The wavelengths of infrared signals are outside the range of the human eye, although some cameras can see them (as you can see above), where the LED appears to be lit but to the human eye it is off. I’ve actually taken pictures in the dark using an infrared sensitive camera (most mobile phone cameras pick up IR) and “painting” with a TV remote control…

However, f you want to use infrared signals to transfer data you can’t just shine an infrared light at a receiver. This is because sunlight contains lots of infrared. The receiver would not be able to distinguish the remote data from sunshine. So remote controls use modulation to make their signal stand out from the background. Modulate means change up and down. Rather than shining continuously a TV remote flashes the control signal on and off 38.000 times a second. The receiver detects signals which are changing at that rate and ignores any others, so that it can filter out background noise. This is a bit like a sailor who can tell a flashing lighthouse lamp from the light of the moon.

If you buy an infrared receiver device it will have this demodulation behaviour built in to the hardware, which is very useful. Unfortunately you don’t get this when you buy a transmitter. An infrared LED (a light that shines with infrared light) just works as a continuous light source, and so you can’t use it directly. Fortunately the .NET Micro Framework has a number of tricks that you can use to make a modulation signal. So I connected an infrared e-block to a GHI FEZ device and got started. And I found it doesn’t seem to work very well.

The reason (as I found by using my phone camera) is that the infrared led doesn’t shine very brightly. When I took a look at the circuit I found that the IR led is connected directly to the output from the microcontroller. The microcontroller can’t produce much power, and so the light was very dim. This is the same as what would happen if you connected a big speaker to the headphone output of your phone. Because the headphone output can’t deliver much power, the sound produced would not be very loud. They’ve probably designed the circuit this way so that it is fine for short range communications, but can’t produce signals that could travel a long way and affect other devices.

I don’t care about that, I just want more power. So I took a look at the visible LED e-block. This has a transistor to amplify the signal from the FEZ controller and provide more power. I decided that it would be worth swapping the visible LED for an infrared one. So I did this. Actually this part is quite funny. I very carefully took the LEDs off the two E Blocks using a solder sucker and lots of patience, and then, equally carefully, I soldered the infrared led back onto its original board. Idiot. Fortunately I managed to unsolder it again and, as you can see above, it does work and I can send an infrared signal a reasonable distance (although I’d like to send it further).

Next step is to create some kind of message protocol to send commands to a robot. Infrared commands are not very reliable (that’s why your TV remote repeats them continuously when you hold the button down) but I reckon we should be able to send enough to tell the robot what to do. Great fun.

Update on 2012-08-15 15:06 by Rob

Ha. Sorted. I can now send pulses of different lengths to the robot and make it move and stop. Later we can start using pulse position modulation and maybe even serial data.