Nokia Glance Background Pictures

 

One of the many nice things about having a Nokia phone is that it provides “glance” content. This is stuff that appears on the screen when the phone is locked. The display is not very bright and seems to have a negligible effect on battery life, but it does add a lot of value. Currently the glance content is just the time and the charge status, but hopefully over time it will extend to include missed calls and alarms, and maybe even calendar details.

However, right out of the blue, Nokia have released a beta version of a program that lets you put pictures on your glance screen. The application ships with a few pre-set pictures, including the rather nice tiger above, but you can also process your own and add them to the four that cycle round. If you have a Nokia phone that is running the GDR 2 release (this is being rolled out at the moment) then you really should grab a copy and have a play it really is rather neat. You can get the program here.

3D Printing Fun at C4di

Well, that was fun. Peter, David, Helen, Paul and myself all got together to talk about 3D printing and scanning at C4di. I took along Una, my Ultimaker printer, David, Helen and Paul took along their 3D scanner and MakerBot printer and Peter showed off his “Richmond” printer.

Within no time the place was full of the smell of hot plastic and the sound of machines whirring away. We had a huge audience (in that there were lots of people, not that they were giants) and they seemed to really enjoy finding out about 3D printing. I started things rolling, with a quick zoom through my presentation about how I got into making things and then Peter followed up with a talk about how he came to design and build his own 3D printer from scratch. As you do.

Finally David rounded off with a description of how 3D printing and scanning technology is being used in his business and how it will undoubtedly develop in the future. Helen and Paul were showing off their modelling and scanning skills and the whole thing ended with lots of happy people wandering round, taking a look at the technology and getting to grips with it. Without getting their hands burned.

Thanks to Jon Moss for setting up the session and C4di for hosting it.

Postgrad Party Fun

We had our Postgraduate Welcome party today. Some of the same attractions as lst week’s Undergraduate paty, including the Occulus Rift, which I had a go with and turns out to be great fun.  We had the racing cars. And some of the same quiz questions.

These folks came first and were very pleased with their prize. As they should be.

These are the folks that came second.

And this is the “Malteaser” team who came third. But they did get two boxes…

My favourite question from the quiz was this:

Any ideas?

Goldfrapp –Tales of Us

I used to like buying old style vinyl records. There was something rather nice about going into the record store and coming out with a  twelve inch slab of plastic in a large sleeve. Of course that’s not how we consume our music these days.

I got this album for “free” because I’ve got my phone tied in with the Xbox Music “All you can eat for ten pounds a month” deal. Nothing physical moved anywhere. And I haven’t got a nice album sleeve to look at. But the music is splendid.

I’ve always liked Goldfrapp. No two of their records sound the same. If you like ambient, tuneful, stuff you’ll love it.

Hornsea Mere on Sunday

After lunch the weather was lovely, so we thought it might be nice to go out to Hornsea Mere for a walk and take some photographs. So we did.

New students, if you are looking for a nice place to go with mum and dad when they drop round to see you, then I can recommend it. The coffee shop has had an overhaul and does a really nice line in scones and cream. It is around 25 minutes from Cottingham, you can feed the ducks and then go and have a look at the seaside.

You can even hire a boat and splash about a bit.

Breaking Games

When number one wife (she calls me “husband zero”) got her iPhone a while back one of the first things we got for it was Scrabble. The implementation was slick and it worked a treat. She played a lot.

She doesn’t play as much now. Not because her word powers have diminished, but because the game has “upgraded” itself to the point where it has become a pain to play. Before she can fire up a quick game of digital word wrangling she now has to fight past loads of login screens offering a chance for her to take on players from all over the world. She doesn’t want to do that. She wants to do what she has always done, which is play a quick game of Scrabble against the computer.

I hate it when things upgrade themselves to the point of uselessness. The game also acquired a cheery little sidekick who would tell you after each move the one you should have made and how many points you have lost as a result of not being as clever as it is. This turns out not to be particularly motivating. We managed to turn that off. And avoid all the different new board and tile designs which are now available (and will be for sale soon I have no doubt).

But as for the forced login, that one I’ve been unable to get rid of. The menu system seems to be designed to make you feel unsociable and isolationist, just because you want a quiet game of Scrabble. Ugh.

Learning from My Mistakes

Today was the first foray into the labs with the new First Year group. A splendid bunch of folks. Last year I blogged about the sneaky thing we did with the sample program. It worked so well that we did it again this year. But of course there is always something more….

At the end of the lab we have a silly test, with one or two sensible questions. It’s there get everyone used to the test environment and it works quite well. One sensible question asks you to identify the problem that broke the program. It’s a multiple choice question with lots of stupid possibilities, along with the answer “The program used a multiply operator instead of divide". Actually the mistake is that it used a multiply operator instead of a plus. It was originally a genuine mistake. But I’ve left it in because it us actually quite useful.

Quite a few people spotted this mistake in the question and came and told us about it. One or two didn’t bother because they assumed the knew what we meant. Please don’t ever do this. If you find what looks like a mistake in something to do with the course, and you just assume you know what has happened you might be heading for trouble. Please, please, please let us know if you see anything that looks wrong in stuff that we give you.

To refer to the post on Wednesday, we do an awful lot of planning. Because it is crucial. But we also know that stuff happens that we don’t think of, which can break our careful plans. So we need to be told if something might not be right so that we can fix it if required.

Oh, and thanks to all the students who turned up and worked hard. Everyone I saw was chugging through the exercises very nicely. The real teaching starts next week. It’s going to be fun..

Busy Thursday

The Thursday of the first week of the year is always a very busy day for me. This year I thought I’d find a way of making it even busier. This is how it panned out.

6:15 Get up and dressed, out of the house by 6:35 and heading for Radio Humberside to do the newspaper reviews. Vastly speed up my departure by forgetting to take my lunch or clean my teeth.

7:00 Arrive at the studio and start reading through the papers and making notes.

7:40 Do my thing. Talk about Moore’s Law and The Silk Road which I found in the papers. Mention that I’m looking forward to meeting the new First Year this morning. (It’s true).

8:05 Back at the office. Work to finish off scanning and packing all the “Tags of Fun”.

8:39 Tags done. Head to the union shop to pick up the prizes for the Welcome Party Quiz. Also buy toothbrush and toothpaste. Make sure they are not on the prize receipts so I don’t end up fiddling my expenses. Need to remember not to give the toothbrush away as a prize. Might send the wrong message to the recipient.

9:00 Back at the office. Now need to sort out the software to make the system work. Just have to add the behaviour to read the tag and authorise the drink purchase. Plug in the tag reader and open up Visual Studio.

9:45 Software working, now need to put everything into the box. Discover that the holes that I had designed into the case are too large, and the bolts don’t grip them. Ah well, there is always duct tape.

9:50 Open new toothbrush prior to cleaning teeth. Find I have bought one with soft bristles by mistake. I usually use a hard one, to match the water in Hull. Also notice that the toothbrush is pink. Oh well.

19:51 Clean teeth using a beaker of water in my office while hiding down the side of the glass office door, so people walking down the corridor don’t see me foaming at the mouth and call for medical assistance.

10:06 Give a quick talk to new the First Years Certificate Level students. Talk about the importance of building a brand while you study. Strongly plug / (wooh). Also mention http://www.threethinggame.com/ and http://www.ratherusefulseminars.com/ (which seem to mysteriously link back to www.robmiles.com). David Parker suggests that I mention http://hullcompsciblogs.com/ too, as that brings together lots of Hull Computer Science blogs, and also contains a link to http://www.robmiles.com/

10:20 Back in the office. Finish of the Welcome Party Quiz questions. Feel slightly guilty about a couple of the questions, but leave them in anyway.

12:00 Start to distribute the “Tags Of Fun” to the supervisors. Everybody is pleased to have them, but slightly confused as to that they are for.

12:15 Go buy lunch. Egg and bacon sandwich. Works for me. Also strawberry flavoured milk.

12:25 Send out an email to all staff explaining how the “Tags Of Fun” work.

12:50 Get an email from Yiannis suggesting that there might be people at the party who won’t have tags.

12:55 Update software and program thirty “blank” tags.

13:30 Print answer sheets for the quiz. Then write some course bits and bobs.

14:30 Meet new supervisees. Great folks.

15:00 Start preparing for the Welcome Party.

16:15 Party Opens. We have Wii U, 10 seat Xbox 30 from Platform Expos, a guitar game with real guitars from Brian, multiplayer games from FreeSide and an Occulus Rift from Hive. And free drinks and sandwiches.

Multi-player action

Discussions

17:45 Do quiz. Seems OK.

18:30 Announce winners.

These folks came first, and are looking quite cool about it. Or it might just be general depression about the quality of their prize (I spent all the money on RFID tags…)

These folks came second (actually they got the same score as the other team,  but in this situation the team withe fewer members wins out)

These folk made third place. I told them to really work those Jaffa cakes (not a phrase you hear much in polite conversation).

19:30 Clear up and tear down. Very surprised (and pleased) to find that the bar staff really like the “Tagomatic”. Much easier than dealing with paper tickets that have to be handed out and checked. One says “Of course, we’d should expect you do make something like that. You are Computer Science after all.” Feel v. pleased about that.

19:55 Get in car to drive home. Start playing “The Long Way Home” from Breakfast in America. Loudly.

20:05 Roll into drive exactly as “Lord is it Mine” finishes. Spooky.

21:00 Write blog.

The Opposite of Planning

“Plans are Useless. Planning is crucial”. I really like this statement. I reckon it boils down to the fact that even if you plan stuff carefully there is a very good chance that it will all go wrong. But it also says that if you don’t plan, things are even worse.

I reckoned I’d planned carefully enough. I had all the bits on hand to make the tags, I got the software mostly working on time. I was held up with a bug of mine that I blush to think about now, perhaps it will be the basis of a blog post in later days.

Anyhoo, the only thing missing was the little plastic envelopes that I’d ordered a couple of weeks ago to put the tag, and the name of the lucky owner, into. But they were bound to arrive in time, weren’t they?

No. So tonight we got to spend a chunk of time sticking bits of papers onto tags with bits of freezer labels that I’d “liberated” from the kitchen.  I know some of the labels will drop off, but it is the best I can do.

Number one wife gave me some sage advice. “Why didn’t I get some at the weekend, just in case?”. Indeed.

And I just know the little bags will arrive tomorrow.

“Tags of Fun”

Regular readers of this blog (and yes there are some) may remember back in March when I made “The Door of Mystery”. This was an RFID tag powered raffle management system based on the .NET Gadgeteer. It worked very well when we used it for the Red Nose Day Lecture in Rhyme, and the people who bought tags to take part rather liked having them around, and hung on to them.

Which got me thinking. I’d like to be able to do prize draws and things in lectures, with bigger prizes if you’ve been along to more lectures. And I reckoned that these little tags might be a way to do this.

So I’ve invented “Tags of Fun”. We are going to give all the new students a tag each and I’m going to trial the devices at the Welcome Party on Thursday evening. We usually give “Drink Tokens” out, but this time everyone can use their tag with a customised “Door of Mystery” device to see if they can have a drink. The system will let you buy one drink, and then the head of department will have to use their magic “key of power” to reset the keys and allow more drinking.

Just to make things even more interesting, I’m going to link each tag with an owner, so the system knows the name of the tag holder.

Of course, now I have to get the software updated, download the student lists, build the user interface and program around 250 tags.

Before Thursday.

First Day of the First Week

The progress of the cold continues. My nose is now an even brighter red than is usual. I’ve always fancied being the kind of person who could light up a room when they entered it, but I don’t think this is quite what I meant.

The good news is that all our new students have arrived. It is great to see you. I’m looking forward to my first sessions with you on Thursday.

Falling Ill

I seem to be falling ill. It is a bit like someone is inflating a balloon full of concrete inside my head. Although of course I have no way of knowing how that really feels.

Acer Iconia W3 Tiny Windows 8 Tablet

I really should not be allowed up town just after I’ve got paid. Particularly if I then happen across an Acer Iconia W3 for a very tempting 250 quids. I had a careful look online and read a bunch of reviews that said the screen was horrible and it wasn’t up to much. And then I bought one anyway. Two reasons really. I’ve love to have Windows 8 in an 8.1 inch display form factor. And this is actually “full fat” Windows 8, in that it is running on an Intel Atom processor and so it is able to run LightRoom and Windows Live Writer. The one thing the reviews agreed on (even the unhappy ones) was that the battery life was good at well over 8 hours. I like that a lot. And to me the display looks fine.

It comes with a license for Office 2013 Home edition, which I’ve bumped up to the Premium one. I’m not going to be putting Visual Studio on the machine, but then again with only around 11G free (I got the penny pinching 32G version) it might not fit anyway. The thing is, I don’t see this as my primary developer machine. More something I can cart along with me and use to knock out blog posts with pictures.

I’d just about got everything working and then I broke it all by wiping the machine clean and loading up Windows 8.1. This has mostly worked, although at the moment the orientation sensor is lacking a proper driver so I can only use it in landscape mode, which is a pity.

The main reason for all that danger and excitement is that I wanted the much improved SkyDrive integration in Windows 8.1. The small amount of internal storage matters a lot less if I’ve got access to everything in the cloud and then I can mark “work in progress” folders as living on the device. Windows 8.1 does this really well, and there’s no need to install the desktop client thingy. And I can drop another 64G of storage into the micro SD slot if I want to take some movies or music with me.

At the price I reckon it is an absolute steal. The screen is a bit of an acquired taste. It looks wonderful if you can get your head into the correct position, otherwise the contrast dips and all kinds of weird colour schemes appear, although it remains useable. If you consider that you can’t get much of an iPad for that price you start to see just how much properly useful technology you get in a tiny package.

Sweet Fitness

First person to correctly guess what’s in the bag wins a bag of their own..

I’ve been told that a sensible amount of exercise is a brisk thirty minute walk each day. Turns out that Sugar Sugar Sweets is almost exactly fifteen minutes walk from my office. Result.

Thanks to SkyDrive Version History

Should you be stupid/unlucky enough to overwrite a file you have stored on SkyDrive you might like to know that you can bring back previous versions of your files by opening Version History. Open your folder in the browser via https://skydrive.live.com/ and right click the file name.

Select Version History from the menu that appears and then travel back in time to get the file that you want.  This saved my bacon tonight.

Cubelets at the Cafe Scientifique

Today I got to strut my stuff at the Hull branch of the Cafe Sceintifique. This is a really neat idea set up by Mark Lorch from our Chemistry Department.  At the end of each month he hosts a talk of scientific bent in the upstairs room at Nellie’s, a fantastic pub in Beverley.

Note to new (or any) students. One night get a train to Beverley and go for a drink there. The atmosphere is amazing, enhanced by the fact that the place is all lit by gas lights.

This is the programme for the rest of the year (and a bottle of very posh diet cola). Do you think I should tell them I’m not really a doctor?

Anyhoo, I’d given my talk the delightfully vague title of “Computing is fun. No really!”, which I reckoned gave me plenty of wiggle room about what to say. Once I’d agreed to turn up I was told of the house rules. No Powerpoint. In fact, no computer or screen. Just props. Fortunately I’d thought of that. And so I took along my cubelets. These are little cubes of computing that you can fit together to create physical programs and they turned out to be a super way to illustrate what computing is really all about. And they are fun too. If you want to find out more, take a look here.

This is my “slab” of cubelets, all fitted together. I’ve no idea what this arrangement does, but that is part of the fun. And after tonight I want to buy some more.

I did my thirty minute talk and then, once we’d all found another drink, we sat around and talked about things computing, the future, and my memories of going into Dixons and typing:

10 PRINT "Rob Rulez"
20 GOTO 10

- into the computers on display when the assistants weren’t looking. It was a really great night and the audience were splendid. I took a bunch of pictures, you can find all of them here.

Update on 2013-09-26 15:06 by Rob

I was talking during the evening about curious contraptions that I've now remembered are called "Rube Goldberg machines". This is the best one. Ever.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qybUFnY7Y8w

Some days need a health warning

Here’s a nice picture to cheer me up.

Some days are great. Some days just grate. Today was in the latter category. Nothing too much, just lots of things going wrong when they really shouldn’t. Like me managing to delete a file rather than copy it to a USB key. I didn’t know this was possible, what with the the recycle bin and all, but I managed to achieve this magical feat and flush a couple of hours of careful Powerpointing down the toilet. By the end of the day, as I pulled up at the traffic lights on the way home I realised that one more thing had gone wrong. My phone wasn’t in my pocket where it should be.

So it was time for a frantic U turn back to the office, where of course the phone wasn’t. At this point something nice did happen. I met up with a couple of early first years (we start next Monday) who were taking a look around the place so they know where things are before the madness of Fresher’s Week kicks in. I said hello and welcome, but I must have seemed a bit distracted as I was wondering where my lovely Lumia had got to.

Finally I found it, down the side of the car seat where it had dropped. And the really, really annoying thing is that of course if I’d thought to check the Bluetooth on the car (which was lit up on the dashboard as usual) then I’d never had any of the panic. It just goes to show that if you expect bad things to be happening, you can then go on to make them happen yourself.

Oh well.

Update on 2013-09-25 08:28 by Rob

And then this morning I put on the wrong jacket and then spent a frantic five minutes looking for the wallet that wasn't in the pocket. I hope this is not an ongoing thing....

Another machine to wish for

My Surface Pro is now my computing weapon of choice. Very quick, hugely portable. I’ve taken to using it at work without the keyboard attached, plugged into my docking station. It does confuse folks who come into my office, to find me powering my desktop with what looks like a picture frame, but it works a treat.

The only things I don’t like are the 128G disk space and the 4G memory are a bit on the small side these days. Particularly when I’m running two Windows Phone emulators side by side (although they do both work). And the battery life could be a bit better.

Which is why I’m very pleased that Surface Pro 2 is now on the stocks. With an 8G ram version that has a 256G SSD. Where do I sign?

This does of course mean that towards the end of October there will probably be at least one Surface Pro 128 going on sale, I’m just not sure whether or not to leave the fancy skin on or not when I try to sell it.

Oh, and there are some nice fancy goodies coming along as well, including illuminated keyboards and a really neat docking station. 

Cottingham Food Festival

The weather today was splendid. Nice and warm. Lovely for just about everyone at the first Cottingham Food Festival. Except the unfortunate folks selling hand made chocolates in bright sunshine…

They did it properly, closed the streets and then filled the place with over thirty stalls selling all kinds of yummy stuff. And they had a big tent for the cookery demonstrations. And a bouncy castle. And hook a duck. And a slide. Which I am unfortunately far too old for.

Anyhoo, we had a wander round, bought some chocolates and cupcakes (the peanut butter ones were excellent) then staggered home. I hope they do it again next year.

When in doubt, vacuum the house

Creative Tool?

I’m in the middle of updating the Windows Phone Blue Book to Windows Phone 8. It is going quite well and should be out and about in a few weeks. I’ve reached the point where I have to dream up some ideas for lab exercises for some of the fancy new features in Windows Phone 8.

So I vacuumed the house.

This works very well for me, and I reckon it might work well for you. I find that if I sit down and think to myself “Right Rob, time for you to have some great ideas” then nothing much happens except that I get a headache and an urge to do something else. However, if I do a boring job like wash the car or push the vacuum around for a while the ideas seem to percolate through quite nicely.

After forty five minutes or so I had a cleaner house and a couple of lab ideas. And I even had this idea for a blog post too. Bonus.