Oh well. Animal Crossing New Leaf has sucked me to its world. Last week I went to visit number one’s town, today I’m saving for the down payment on a house and I’m looking forward to tomorrow night at 7:00 pm when there is the firework display of the year.
Can you spot the difference between this one and the other one. Turns out that I can’t.
My home version of “one usb to rule them all” arrived today. I used my own money to buy this one (just got paid) and I was feeling rather smug, in that I had got it for thirty quid less than the university had paid. Clever me.
Or not. Turns out this is not exactly the same. It only has one video out port, rather than the two that the office device has. The documentation mentions two ports, but that is because there is an adapter in the box, which allows the single port to be used with two different kinds of monitor.
Oh well. It’s not as if I have two monitors at home, or the desk space to stand them on. And I’ve noticed that the DisplayLink software, while quite splendid in that it just works, does steal around 5% of the processor. Which means that two monitors would take a much bigger chunk.
Everything else works just fine though, and it really is nice just to have one plug to worry about. If you regularly connect your laptop to your desktop I reckon this is still a really good bet.
I’ve discovered that one way to make sure that I remember how to do something is to drop it into the blog. That way I can go find it when I forget. This time it is the code that you use to open up the connection settings dialog page in Windows Phone 8.
ConnectionSettingsTask connectionSettingsTask =
new ConnectionSettingsTask();
connectionSettingsTask.ConnectionSettingsType =
ConnectionSettingsType.Bluetooth;
connectionSettingsTask.Show();
This will do the business. You need to include the Tasks namespace:
using Microsoft.Phone.Tasks;
There are options that you can use to open up the WiFi, Cellular and Airplane modes.
Whenever I open the Airplane mode I always want the phone to say
“Surely you can’t be serious?”
”I am serious. And don’t call me Shirley”
As well as the Pacific Rim book (Pacific Rim? Sunday’s Post. You mean you’ve not been to see the movie yet. Shame) I also got a collection of Century 21 comic strips. We used to get TV21 magazine every week, and after dad had finished reading it I was allowed to take a look.
Anhyoo, the Thunderbirds strips were always the best. They were illustrated by Frank Bellamy who was the only one who seemed to be allowed to put his name on the strip. With good cause. I still reckon this was some of the best comic art ever. Don’t believe me? Grab a copy of the book and take a look. There are actually only a couple of Thunderbirds strips in the book, but the other ones are a good bunch too.
And I’ve just found out that there are lots more available too, which could prove expensive…
Slimbridge is one of my favourite places to visit. They have lots of different makes of birds and wildlife and stuff. We went there today and of course I took some photos.
It’s a pity that the camera decided to focus perfectly on the bit behind the butterfly, but I’m still happy with this one.
England in summer. Can’t beat it.
A trip away wouldn’t be a trip away without a silly game or two to play. So I got hold of a copy of Love Letter. The game is beautifully presented in a red carrying pouch, which is just as well as you only get 16 cards for your money. But the game is still super.
Each player takes the role of a potential suitor finding confidantes who will deliver their messages of love to a beautiful princess. During a round you have to find the best person to deliver your message of undying devotion. But you can also knock out other players and swap cards with each other in a way which is great fun. Even if, as for me, most of your cunning moves misfire in a spectacular fashion.
Number one son observes that at the end of the day it is really only about chance and at some points you are really only choosing from one of a number of possible options which all have a similar probability of success. He’s right, but the setting and the way you can knobble people if you get lucky carry the game along to the right side of fun for me. Well worth a look I reckon.
First things first. Pacific Rim is complete rubbish. But it is so complete that it is actually quite wonderful. If you are prepared to make the mental effort to suspend your disbelief somewhere really high (or just leave the critical part of your brain at the door) then you will really, really enjoy it.
If you are able to take on-board “facts” like it requires two melded human brains to control a giant toy robot and that the best way to select pilots for said robots is to to have them try to hit each other with wooden sticks then you will do just fine.
The thing that did it for me was the level of detail and little cultural references that made the daftest parts make sense at the time. The acting is well up to par and everyone gets on with the job in hand with enormous gusto. The computer graphics guys had taken the sensible precaution of making sure that most of the action is either at night, in the rain, underwater or all three at once, so that everything looks properly believable and any necessary bending of the laws of physics is nicely hidden.
If you only go and see one big, daft, movie this summer then it has got to be this one.
I liked it so much I bought the book. Which is very good too.
Anyone can write, just like anyone can cook. As soon as you move from restaurants and ready meals to getting ingredients and mixing them in pans you can start thinking about getting a white uniform and people shouting “Yes chef!” to you across steam filled kitchens. Moving beyond shopping lists and one line Facebook updates means that you can start pondering putting “writer” on your business card and extracting killer quotes from unresponsive interviewees. Or then again, perhaps not, because of course the really important thing is what everyone else calls you.
If you are the only person that thinks you are the next Jamie Oliver then you might have a hard time getting folks to eat your food. And while the internet does provide a potential audience of billions, getting them all to come and read your web site will take more than just your idea of deathless prose. This means that you have to do the hard stuff, like practice and learning how to get better.
I’ve never dared call myself a writer; I’m more someone who throws a bunch of words at a blog post every day to see which ones stick. But today I went along to a Guardian Master class called “Writing with Colour” to find out a bit more about this writing business. There was actually another reason for going as well, the sessions were being given by writers who I’d long admired from afar, and I liked the idea of admiring them from a bit closer up.
There were about 80 or so of us on the course, which took place in the actual Guardian newspaper building in London. The sessions were all great. If you have a low opinion of journalists and editors then you should go along, just to find out how thoughtful and considered these folks are about what they do. I’m pretty sure that not all writers are like this, but these were folks who I’d be happy to listen to all day, which is just as well, because that is what we did.
A few of my thoughts from the sessions:
Read what you have written. Out loud. All the writers took evident pleasure in reading what they had put on the page. This is as confidence thing I reckon and darned good advice. Sometimes you might like what you hear. If you don’t like it, go back and change it until you do.
Be loyal to your work. This can mean a bit of internal wrangling as you seek permission to print that quote from a reluctant interviewee. It might mean you can’t be a totally nice person all the time. And it might mean dropping that wonderful sequence because it doesn’t add anything to the piece.
Always deliver what you were asked for. Someone asked Lucy Mangan what she did if her four o’clock deadline came along and she hadn’t thought of anything to write about. Her reply was brilliant. That. Does. Not. Happen. If you are a proper writer and you are asked to write something that’s what you do. You can wrestle with your inner demons about the content (and you should) after you have pressed the send button, but the important thing is if you are asked for 550 words you should deliver 550, along with a convincing pitch for why you should be allowed another 200 or so.
Always edit, and always cut. The editor is the person who makes things better and tighter, sometimes by cutting out what the writer thought of as the best bits. If we end up losing the traditions of print journalism I reckon the editor is the person we will miss the most. This probably means that writers will have to spend more time editing their own work. So try to do this.
Work at what you write. I was very pleased to find that nobody said that they found writing easy. Everyone said they had to work at it. Interviews take preparation and persistence in writing everything down. Features take research and rewriting. And the work doesn’t stop when the piece is finished, everyone valued re-visiting items and look at why they wrote what they wrote.
Seek out the colour. Work to find that killer fact, or interesting angle, which will give you a hook to hang your words on or will be quoted in the pub by your readers. If you are very lucky the colour will find you, but mostly you find it in the research you did, or the huge pile of notes that you made.
Last week I sent a jaunty tweet to the organisers saying how I was bringing along some crayons, as the subject was “Writing with colour”. I can imagine the sinking feeling in the stomach of the recipient, along the lines of “We’ve got a right one here….” Sorry about that.
Anyhoo, I found the whole affair really stimulating, and if you want to get tips about improving your writing style, and maybe meet a few heroes, then it is well worth the price of admission. And the lunch was good too.
Our car SatNav has a mode where it will give directions over another audio signal, automatically turning down the music/radio or whatever when it wants to tell you want to do. Today we were using it while listening to some comedy on the radio, which worked really well. It was great to hear the machine say “At the roundabout, take the first exit” and then get a huge laugh and a round of applause from the audience.
It’s been a few years since I went mostly mobile. I have a big desktop machine at home, but I only use it when I want to do some space heating, or move some dust around the room. The rest of the time I plug my laptop into network, keyboard, mouse, display, external hard disk and power supply each time I arrive home. It’s a bit of a pain to be honest. Whet I really want is a box which lets me do the connecting thing, but with one cable.
That’s what the Startech Universal Docking station lets me do.A single high speed USB 3 connection gives me keyboard, screen and all the other gubbins except power. It seems to work too. The video connection uses a technology called DisplayLink and lets me connect two external monitors to my lovely Microsoft Surface. There is some cunning compression involved in sending the video, but it seems to work fine with office productivity and software development, along with watching videos. It also makes arriving somewhere a lot easier. I’ve persuaded the folks at work to get me one for the office, and I think I’ll pretty soon have one for home use.
They even have a fake university web site, which is well worth a look.
We went to see Monsters University tonight. A prequel to Monsters Inc,, one of my favourite films ever, it tells the story of how Mike and Sculley got together and started their child scaring career. It’s a good romp, but for me it didn’t have anything like the emotional depth of the first film. There are some great moments and the animation is astonishingly good, but since there was no way it could have the character “Boo” I guess it was always going to be a step down from the original.
Having said all that the short film they showed before the main feature, The Blue Umbrella, was an absolute master class in how to fill a little film with emotion. When you get to this level the fact that the pictures were made using computers seems completely incidental. They just used the tools to make something quite wonderful, and almost worth the price of admission by itself. I really hope it makes it onto the Blue Ray release.
Last week I found out that my age entitles me to a discount on my haircut. The last time this happened was when I was eight years old. I hope I didn’t upset the hairdresser though. Having asked for my age and informed me of the money I could save she probably expected me to be pleased, rather than baffled. In the end I left a rather large tip, exactly equal to the discount that I could have had. Anyone who has met me will know that I’m not one for spending much on hair styling, so this won’t really free up a lot of funds, but it still feels odd to be offered a saving just because I am now “officially old”.
And today it was my birthday. And the great thing about it was that I got given toys, among them some “Despicable Me” models and a copy of “Animal Crossing New Leaf”. I remember the first time I played Animal Crossing on the Gamecube. After playing it for two weeks I eventually had to force myself to stop because it was just taking up too much time. I fared a little better with the Nintendo DS versions, at least I could carry them around with me and play now and then. And now we have the latest version. This one is different because you not only get to take part in the community, you also get to run it when, for reasons that are not really adequately explained, you are elected Mayor as soon as you arrive in your new town.
As part of enrolment you have to tell your assistant when you were born. And she gets ever so excited if you arrive on your birthday, take it from me. I’ve not really spent that much time in the town of “Cheesy” yet, but it looks like the usual fun and games just getting along with all the folks who live in the neighbourhood, doing stuff and making friends.
If you like the previous versions of the game you’ll love this one. If you’ve not played the game before, but are hankering for somewhere to go that is just plain nicer than anywhere else, full of folks who are quirky but not nasty and lots of things to do, then it might well be for you.
This is one of my designs for my Surface RT. I just like the colours.
While I was at the Imagine Cup I was admiring the rather nice skin that Ben Riga had on his Surface device. Turns out that it is supplied by Decalgirl. Ben showed me the web site and within no time I was wasting hours trying to find the perfect skins for my devices. Then I found out that you can upload your own artwork and I then lost even more of my life finding suitable pictures and uploading them to their skin design pages. Thanks Ben.
Anyhoo, the skins arrive in a couple of weeks and I’m looking forward to seeing how they have turned out. But for me the reason for mentioning the company is that I reckon that they are just about the perfect web trading operation. Their site has a snazzy design and is quick to use. Within seconds of arriving on the home page for the first time I’m offered the chance to sign up to get a discount on my first order. Then, when I don’t buy anything for a while I get a follow up email with an even better discount. When I left my partially completed order on the system for a few days I got an email reminding me my order is still out there and giving me a chance to finalize it. Then I get regular emails detailing the progress of the order and I’m sure that I’ll get more over time as new designs appear. And all done in a way that leaves me thinking that I’m not being badgered to buy stuff, but helped along with my purchases. Very, very well done.
If you are involved in ecommerce and want to see it done well (and by the by find some awesome skins for your various devices) then they are well worth a look.
Hacked presentations, an augmented reality remote controlled quadcopter game. Amazing.
This afternoon we had the judging and the presentations at Hacked.. After working tirelessly through the night on my solution nipping back to the hotel for a shower and a few hour’s sleep I had to get everything working for the 12 o’clock deadline. Of course I’d made one of the standard project mistakes, I’d tried to add lots of extra features without getting the core behaviours working, and so it was time for a few hours of frantic fiddling to get something working that could be shown off. At the very last minute things came together and I was in a position to put on a reasonable show.
There were lots (and I mean lots) of presentations. That we finished before midnight is a testament to the skills of the presenters and the backstage staff who kept everything ticking along rapidly. Each team had precisely ninety seconds to present, which was fortunate for me because I had precisely ninety seconds of content. The good news is that everything worked. The great news is that I managed to win “People’s Choice” award. This is voted for by those taking part at the contest and I was very, very pleased to win it.
Anyone who won a prize got to spend some time in the VIP box at Indigo while waiting to have their picture taken. Very posh. Then I had to zoom off to catch my train back to Hull and real life.
Hacked was wonderful. It must have cost a small fortune. The venue was amazing, the food was great (and free) and the organisers worked really hard to make sure that the delegates (who had not paid to attend) had a splendid time. When they hit a problem at the event (for example some issues with the WiFi) they escalated their response until everybody was sorted out.
I really, really, hope that there is another one, and I really really hope that I can go along. I’ve put some details on the project on my Difficultifier page.
Today we started hacking. The venue is great. Loads of folks with different skills, free food and drink, great venue and, apart from some WiFi niggles, a wonderful place to write code and build gadgets.
We set up base camp, got some hardware out and started hacking.
I’m kind of ashamed to admit it, but I didn’t work overnight. After around midnight I tend to fall apart. I’d make a lousy vampire.
Anyhoo, made some good progress and I’ve nearly figured out what I’m going to do.
I’ve spend a big chunk of the last couple of days agonising over what to take to Hacked, and what to build when I get there. In the end I’ve just bought loads of toys and bits and bobs. I’ve got a sort of idea what to build, but I’ve no idea how it is going to turn out.
Which is all part of the fun.
At Doncaster I spotted this mysterious door near the platform. Any idea what a “Fully Loaded Brute” is?
Sponsoring Kickstarter projects is kind of habit forming (OK, I’ve sponsored two other ones so far). Tonight I signed up for the GHI Electronics Game-O handheld console. This is not because I’m looking for a replacement for my trusty PlayStation Vita, but because I really fancy having a handheld console that I can program using C#.
The device is powered by the .NET Micro Framework and even contains some Gadgeteer ports so that it can be interfaced to all kinds of interesting hardware. I’ve a lot of respect for the makers, GHI Electronics, they’ve made some stunning little .NET Micro Framework and Gadgeteer boards and interfaces over the years (we use a lot of their hardware in our teaching) and I’m really looking forward to having a play with the device.
The project has reached it’s funding goal, but there is still time to get in there and get hold of one of these neat devices.
Some time back I wrote a blog post about the most important thing in a project. To save you the trouble of reading it again, I concluded that the biggest risk that any project can run is that you might not be able to make it work.
I’ve been thinking about presentations in a similar light having seen a bunch over the last week at the Imagine Cup. So, what’s the most important thing in a presentation. Is it the script? The demos? Running to time? The jokes?
Actually I reckon it’s none of these things. The most important thing in any presentation is the audience. If you don’t build your presentation with them in mind then it will not go as well as it should.
Thinking about the audience begins at the start, when you worry about whether or not what you are going to say will make sense, has the appropriate level and the like. I reckon that the thing an audience likes the best is a story, so presentations that have some kind of narrative flow are going to go well.
During the presentation you should be watching the audience to make sure that what you say is going down well, and don’t be too afraid to change tack. Asking questions to confirm that you are going in the right direction is a good idea too. It builds your confidence and establishes a rapport.
If you are now thinking “Great, now I have to worry about watching the audience as well as everything else…” then I’m sorry about that, but I think it s something to keep in mind. For me the worst presentations are where the presenter just talks at the audience. You should try and make the presentation a conversation as much as you can. With very large numbers this can seem a bit daunting, but remember that an audience of 10,000 people is actually made up of 10,000 individual people.. If you think in terms of talking to just one of them, then that will help you manage this.
For me the best presentations I saw last week were those that engaged the audience from the start. So see if you can do the same when you stand up and start talking.
Well, more of an evening really. It was a Seed works outing and David was kind enough to invite me along too. We went to the Taman Ria Tropicana which was a bit hard for me to find (although Darren managed it easily enough) but the food was excellent. Really good. On the way out I took a picture of the place across the road. David wondered why.
That’s why.
Next weekend we are off to Hacked. I’ve managed to get hold of a couple of tickets so myself and number one son will be taking our places with lots of other developers who want to make something silly/awesome/fun. I’ll be taking my lovely Lumia 920 along and targeting the Windows Phone platform, along with a bunch of gadgets and other things that we can use if mood takes us.
I’m really looking forward to this. The plan is to try and last through Saturday night. But I’ve booked a room in a nearby hotel just in case…..
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.
