Achievement Unlocked – Red Lumia 1520

One of my New Year Resolutions will probably be to not buy as many gadgets. But the new year starts tomorrow... Which is just as well, as today I took delivery of a totally shiny red Lumia 1520 phone. I’m going to have to sell a few bits and bobs to pay for it but on first impressions it is worth it.

I got the phone off eBay, not something for the faint of heart, but the price was good and I really, really, wanted a red one. It is an O2 model which has been unlocked for all networks, and with one caveat (see later) it works fine with my EE sim.

When Windows Phone first came out the phone I really wanted was an HTC HD7. This had a huge (4.3 inch) screen and oodles of internal memory. Unfortunately, thanks to the antics of a couple of enterprising students, who managed to pop up town and bag the only two launch devices in Hull, I was denied this device and settled for a Samsung that served me very well. Then I moved into Nokia territory and I’ve been there ever since.

The Lumia 1520 makes the HD7 look tiny. It has a huge 6 inch screen that is quite frankly the awesomest I’ve ever seen. However, it is nice and slim and I find it quite pocketable, although until I get a case for it (coming soon) I of course won’t be putting it in any pockets.

It has a socket for an SD card I’ve managed to put 64G of music and videos (including the whole first seasons of “Freaks and Geeks” and “Veronica Mars”) on there. The battery seems to go on for ever and so I can now properly contemplate watching (and enjoying) proper programs on the device. It’s been a long time since I could put all my music and some films on my phone, and I love it. It always struck me as silly that the flagship Nokia devices were the ones that didn’t tend to have sockets for memory cards.

There are a few niggles. The principle one is with the touch interface, which has a habit of interpreting slide actions as taps every now and then. (if you get this you could try turning off the “double tap to wake up” touch option – which seemed to improve things for me). Apparently this is a known issue and Nokia are working on it.

I had to get new nano-sim to replace the micro-sim that I was using before. This cost me ten pounds at the EE store, but they did throw in a sim adapter which means that I can use the new nano-sim in older devices. There are instructions on the interwebs for converting a micro-sim into the nano size, but these scared me a bit as they involve sanding down the card to make it thinner. And of course if I got that bit wrong I could have wrecked the sim and probably got it stuck in the new phone.

Each time the phone is powered on it presents me with an Access Point choice screen which I don’t really need, but this is probably to do with the fact that I’m using an unlocked phone on the “wrong” network.

If it worked with a Bluetooth keyboard (which at the moment fails to pair) it would be completely awesome as a portable productivity device. I really hope that becomes available at some point in the future.

As of now I love the device. Having the extra column of tiles on the start screen means that I can get to pretty much any of my applications without scrolling. I’ve not found the size a problem yet, although I’ve not carried it around too much as I’m still waiting on that case…..

Nintendo are going to be just fine

Some people are worried about Nintendo. With sales of the Wii U a bit flat and Sony and Microsoft releasing consoles that appear technically more advanced you might be forgiven for worrying about the future of the home of Mario.

I’m not that concerned though. Because Nintendo are still producing great games. Over the holiday I had a chance to play Super Mario 3D World and it is lovely. And today we had a bunch of folks round and spent a happy time playing with Nintendoland. 

For attention to detail and sheer fun appeal the Nintendo brand is pretty hard to beat and I reckon this should see them in good stead for the future.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

There are two kinds of trilogies. There are the ones where the first film is a smashing success and they have to build it out a bit, like Back to the Future, Indiana Jones or, ahem, Star Wars. Then there are films that are naturally structured that way, for example Lord of the Rings (and probably the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo when they get round to it). 

The Hobbit would have made a really successful single film. It is a rather thin book and there is plenty to sustain a hundred action packed minutes. But one film means one ticket sale. So it is now a trilogy. The first film did a good job of setting up the characters. The job of the second film is to get them into a horrible mess and the third film will hopefully tie everything together. The good news is that “The Desolation of Smaug” does a good job as the second film.

It is a bit on the long side, but manages to pack in plenty of action, character development and even a bit of romance.  And it leaves things balanced on a cliff-hanger that will have us all go back and buy the third ticket to find how it ends.

Everyone gets into their role with gusto, although Gandalf the Grey seems a bit tired this time out, which is not surprising I suppose as he is quite literally old before his time in this outing of the franchise.

If you enjoyed any of the earlier films you will love this one. It has all you would expect, including helicopter shots of earnest warriors of difference sizes striding over hill tops and running through caverns and over stone bridges with no handrails.

Laser Cutter Purchase Chicken

Ian came around today and we played a kind of “dangerous purchase chicken”, each trying to persuade the other that what we really need in our lives is a laser cutting machine. Turns out you can get these from ebay for a few hundred pounds, which for a device with a 40 watt C02 laser is actually amazing value we reckon.

The one we looked at can cut paper, card, leather and most other non-metallic materials. Including fingers and thumbs I suppose. The vendor page shows a video of the machine happily burning through card, with the lid wide open and presumably all the safety interlocks (which I hope it has) turned off.

It would be nice to be able to precisely cut plastic parts and the device might be a nice complement to Una the 3D printer. But bearing in mind that the thing is water cooled and needs a hole cutting in the wall to install the vent that gets rid of all the nasty smoke,  I think I’ll pass for now.

Donald Fagen and Lego Minifigures

I got a couple of great books for Christmas. It’s really nice when you get things that you like, but didn’t know existed until you pull off the wrapping paper. First up was Donald Fagen, Eminent Hipsters. I’ve been a fan of Steely Dan since forever. They make west coast sounding jazz/rock that number one wife says sounds like “Middle of the Road Music”. Whatever. I think they are great and they are still writing and touring despite being in their mid sixties.

The driving force behind the group, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, studied English Lit. as students and this really comes out in their lyrics and sleeve notes. And now Donald Fagen has published a collection of essays and notes with stories from his childhood, growing up as a jazz geek before the word geek became respectable, and also charting the trials of being a rock star on the road, jetting between five star hotels and sell out concert venues.

You won’t get much insight into the lyrics of the songs they’ve written, and to be honest Mr Fagen sounds like a bit of a grump from time to time. But he really can turn out a splendid phrase or two. A good read if you like well written prose. A truly great read if you follow the band.

When we go up town shopping I usually end up buying everyone a Lego minifigure. As if our house is short of bits of coloured plastic that are hard to dust. Anyhoo, they are fun to put together and always nicely themed.

It turns out that you can get a book about them. Now, I realise that what we have here is really just a brochure/catalogue/marketing thing that is probably a cynical ploy by a steel-hearted multi-national company bent on getting us to buy more bits of coloured plastic from them. But I like the pictures. And I like looking at the images and getting the “I’ve got one of them….” And you do get some more minifigures with the book as well……

Mending Glasses with Heat Shrink Tubing

.. and you get to play with things that look a bit like ray guns….

My glasses fell apart a while back and up until now I’ve been making use of duct tape to hold them together. This works but it is not great from an elegance point of view. So I’ve got hold of some heat shrink tubing and now I’m using that. The repair is much stronger, and unless you know to look, much harder to spot.

Heat shrink tubing is wonderful. It is just strong plastic tubing that you can buy in different diameters. And when you heat it up it, well, er, shrinks, tightly gripping what ever it has been slid over.

It’s best to use a heat gun like the one above, although you can use a hair dryer at a pinch. If you are serious about building your own electronics you should definitely make use of the stuff, particularly when you are soldering wires onto connectors. It provides a strong physical support for the connection and also insulates pins from each other.

Me, I’m now saving for the huge expense of getting another pair of specs.

Christmas Coup

I think she looks quite seasonal. What with those Christmas lights across her nose….

We had a great Christmas. I hope you did too. We rounded off the whole splendid day with a bit of theft, assassination and insurrection. As you do.

We played Coup. It is from the Resistance family of games and contains a similar mix of bluff, lies and downright nastiness. The game lasts only a few minutes each, which is nice because when you get assassinated by your nearest and dearest you can start plotting for the next round….

Great Christmas Eve

What can you write abut a day where you just sit around and have a nice time? Nothing much. And I really like that.

Shower of no power

Here’s a Christmas Riddle for you: “When is a shower not a shower?” The answer, at least in our house, is “At 7:35 am this morning” when number one wife turned the dial and nothing happened.

Truly, there is no better way of starting the week before Christmas, with guests arriving who will presumably be expecting bathing facilities, than by standing in the bath wearing your pyjamas and dismantling a shower unit. The hope was that it was just blocked. The fear (which was actually more of a certainty if I’m honest) was that something inside (probably the outlet valve) was bust.

Turned out that my fears were justified. However, thanks to the power of the internet, a bunch of calling round and the services of a very obliging plumber, we had the replacement in and working by the end of the day. All it meant was that I was a bit poorer,

Getting Windows Phone App Reviews

One thing that will encourage potential users of your application is good reviews. However, users are not that inclined to give good reviews to programs, even when they got them for free and have used them many times.

Lee Stott did a great little blog post a while back that shows how to add a review facility to your application. It is very sensibly designed, in that it only nags once, after ten uses of the program, so it doesn’t become a pain for the user.

You could also use the same technique to add timed release behaviours to your application, so that it could suggest new things to do over time.

Steve Jobs Biography

Steve Jobs was not a particularly nice person by all accounts. I’ve never had much time for folks who are horrible to other people and then claim they do this  “just because they are that way”. But he did make a lot of things. I’ve been working my way through his biography over the last few weeks and it is fascinating.

For me the best bits are at the beginning, when he and Steve Wozniak rode the personal computer wave and built a huge company from nothing. Towards the end the story turns into a succession of product meetings and multi-million dollar deals but it is a great read nonetheless.

The Magic of Backups

What do you do when you lose your files just before the work is due in? Well, in a perfect world you’d just go and get your backup. In an imperfect one (which is were we found one student today) you find that you don’t have a backup of the files that are needed.

The good (and frankly quite amazing) news is that the Computer Services folks are a lot more careful about backups than some students. Turns out that they back up the workstations and student folders every couple of hours or so. Which meant that the chap in question was able to go down to the helpdesk, tell them his username and they were able to restore the missing files. Just in time for the deadline.

I reckon it is probably best not to factor this facility into your working process. But it is jolly nice to know that it is there.

Chilli Con Carne Flambé

Invented a new recipe for tea today. Quite simple really.

Chop a large onion and fry with a small amount of oil. Add some mince and fry that. Then add some garlic, tomato purée, a tin of tomatoes and then (and this is the important bit) leave simmering on the hob for around 45 minutes without stirring while you attempt to interface an RF24L01 Single Chip 2.4GHz Transceiver to an Arduino. Go downstairs and scrape the black bits off the bottom of the pan. Add kidney beans and serve with rice and fervently crossed fingers.

At least it all got eaten.

A Trip to the Dentist

Today it was time for a check-up of the tooth variety. I’ve long since progressed beyond having “good teeth”. Now I settle for “good teeth for my age”. Apparently, if I was 90 years old I’d have “excellent teeth for my age”. Something to look forward to I think.

Micro-Talks and Mega-Bash. And Werewolves

We tried a few new things this year for the Christmas Bash. Firstly we had some micro-talks (thanks to Microsoft for the prizes – above)  from students and staff about things they are working on. Danny Brown started with a talk about contributing to Open Source software, then we had talks about app development for Vulcan Bombers, augmented reality that puts meaning into the countryside and why you should all sign up for Hull Global Gamejam next year. I did an abridged version of my talk about hardware for C4DI which seemed to go OK. At least, the hardware worked….

Then we played Werewolf. Which I’d never done before. With a group of over 30 villagers. And four werewolves. In Lecture Theatre C. It was hilarious. I was the moderator.

I discovered two things very quickly. First thing: I found out who the werewolves were at the start of the game. Second thing: being a moderator is surprisingly hard work. Especially if you keep mistaking werewolves for vampires and asking people who had just been killed by the werewolves if they were a werewolf or not. As if.

I’d taken what I thought was the sensible decision of simplifying the game for the first run by removing some of the character cards. Turns out this was a really bad move, because it made it much harder for the villagers to discover what was going on and react to the nightly attacks. By the end we were down to one villager and one werewolf, with the inevitable and, for the villagers, unhappy outcome.

But a lot of fun was had along the way, with a break for pizza and mince pies in the middle.

There are at least two werewolves in this picture. Can you spot them? (and yes, they do show up on pictures. You are thinking of vampires, which is what I was doing a lot as well…)

Of course we had the bumper wordsearch. Once Adam reminded me to go and get it One of my abiding memories of the event is watching people put down their controllers for the latest generation games console and pick up pens to have a go searching through the letters. (You can have a go here too if you like.)

We even had a winner who wasn’t Simon. so we asked him to present the prize.

There was much boasting with “Braggart”, although I didn’t quite manage to win.

Folks really seemed to appreciate the paper based stuff. I think next semester we will supplement the Team Fortress games afternoons with Werewolf sessions and board games.

Intelligence, Robots and Big Data

What do Wal-Mart, Google and Lady Gaga all have in common? They are all fans of Big Data.

I didn’t know that until today, when Prof. Ping Jiang, who has just joined the department, gave his inaugural lecture. Prof. Jiang was talking about properly large amounts of content. Google create around 25 Petabytes of data every day (that’s a  1 with fifteen zeroes after it). Wal-Mart are registering over 1 million customer transactions an hour. And Lady Gaga (or more probably her manager Troy Carter) are getting input from 31 million Twitter followers and 51 million Facebook fans when they consider what to do next.

Big Data holds useful nuggets of information and lets you do do lots of powerful things. But the problem with big data is that it is, well, er, big. And we are not talking about sheer size here, we also need to consider the rate at which we are adding to the data, and the speed that we want to get useful things from the raw numbers.

It seems that the best way to decide when you are dealing with big data is when conventional techniques break down. If it would take your network of servers several hundred years to deliver the result of one query on your data set, then you are dealing with big data. And the only way to really deal with this is to divide and conquer by spreading the processing around as much as you can, and doing the maximum amount of work you can when you first get the data in.

Prof. Jaing took as an example the problem of machine vision, in the context of robots that can navigate around autonomously. This is a complex problem, with huge amounts of data coming in from the robot’s visual sensors alone. An intelligent robot would need to be very intelligent indeed just to be able to find its way from one office to another.

But if you spread the vision sensors around the building, getting them to perform all the motion and object tacking, you can reduce the intelligence that you need in the robot itself and lose a lot of complexity. Your robot can move a lot more confidently, as the systems controlling it can “see” much further ahead and react to changes in the environment. You are dealing with the big data coming into your system by processing the raw information as it arrives and converting it into a useful form that could be shared by all the devices navigating in an area.

It’s early days, but it did look to me like this did hold the prospect of actually having useful robots working with us.

Fascinating stuff.

Robotics Talk on Monday 16th

Don’t forget that on Monday 16th at 6:00 Prof. Ping Jiang is giving his inaugural lecture in the Middleton Hall at the University. It is on the subject of robotics and intelligence. Looks like fun, there might even be some robots in attendance…

Shelf Portrait

I’m not sure that I’ve actually got the hang of this whole “shelfie” thing.

Morning Light

You get some lovely colours during the sunrise at this time of year..

I took these with the Lumia 1020 phone. I’m needing to get my camera out less and less these days.

Fiddling with Hardware at C4DI

Jon Moss gets things started.

We had a great evening at the C4DI tonight. It was another of the “You Really Should Be” events and just to make it even more interesting I was giving one of the presentations. But first we had Jon Moss, making the point that “You Really Should Be speaking at events”. He made a great case for talking in public, not least because it is fun once you get going. He also made the very good point that the aim of a presentation is to get your audience to do something and what this is should be set out and reinforced at the beginning and the end of your presentation, when the audience is most engaged.

My Audience. Thanks for the applause.

Then it was my turn. My topic was “You Really Should be Fiddling with Hardware”, and I’d brought along some hardware that I’d fiddled with, including coloured lights that can be controlled over Bluetooth from my Windows Phone. Everything worked, eventually, and folks clapped at the end, which is always nice. You can find the slides from the presentation here.

Next up was John Polling who reckoned “You really should be working on a side project”. By side project John means something which takes you into new areas and helps you develop your skills. I like the sound of this. I’ve always found that the technical things that I’m not really supposed to be doing are the ones that I find the most interesting at any given time. By formalising this and giving an outlet for folks who want to make something different you can get happier developers and some surprisingly useful outcomes.

Finally we had Steve Fewster. who rounded things off with “You really should be - developing apps for the ‘Global Cloud Accounting’ community”. I’m not that familiar with accounting, but I do know about the cloud and how lots of business process is now moving into it. Steve, who is in the business of providing tools and services that add value for cloud users, took the line that “There’s gold in them thar hills”. In other words, the market is just getting going for people who want to bolt their ideas onto cloud based accounting systems. The system makers are keen to encourage an app infrastructure and so they make it easy to create apps and there is lots of scope for neat ideas to become the next big thing.

All in all, a very thought provoking and enjoyable evening. Thanks to C4DI for putting it together.