Change of Venue for Global Gamejam Hull

Hull Global Gamejam is moving.. Just down the road. Last week, due to circumstances beyond anyone's control, the venue we used very successfully last year, Hull Studio School, suddenly became unavailable to us. 

But thanks to sterling work from Sarah at Hull College we now have a new location. And it looks to me like it is going to be even better. We are now at the Horncastle Building, which is just about across the road from the Studio School. It boasts a great open area, some dance studios we are going to fill with developers and a great place for serving pizza. It is the home of Hull College of Creative Arts.

We had a meeting today to set things up and the outlook is pretty darned good. If you've not signed up for the jam you should toddle over here and get your name down.  The perfect way to brighten your winter...

Hardware Group at C4DI

Tonight we had our first meeting of the new C4DI hardware group. There seem to be lots of peple who are keen on getting to grips with hardware and embedded systems, with interest in Raspberry Pi, Arduino and Gadgeteer to name a few. I took along some toys, as had other folks. Above you can see the insides of my Tagomatic device, along with some pinball machine related shenanigans which includes using an Arduino to capture messages inside the pinball table circuitry and some coils of electro-luminescent wire. That lights up and looks really cool. 

Stay tuned for details of future events, this looks like it is going to be great fun, and it's not too late to sign up over at the meetup page for C4DI.

American Hustle. Go See.

Nothing shifty about this lot, oh no.

I don't often go to "grown up" films. The next film I want to see is the "Lego Movie". Nuff said. But tonight I went to see a proper, grown up film. It even has swear words and raunchy scenes, although there is nothing particularly graphic and nobody dies in a gruesome way.

American Hustle is what I would call a "proper" grown up film. The characters are complicated and incredibly well acted. There are no people who are completely good, and only a few who are completely bad. The plot is well told and compelling and by the end you really care what happens to everyone.

The story, of con artists who end up having to corrupt a good man in order to stay out of jail, is not particularly American I reckon. It is almost Shakespearean in the way it unfolds, but there is a lot of hustle. 

The film is up for lots of awards, and rightly so. Go see.

Cleaning with Notepad

One of my many (and increasing by the day) New Year's Resolutions is to blog things that I find useful. This is a simple enough trick which I use rather a lot, but you might not know it. 

If you move data around from one program to another using the clipboard you often find things attached to the data that you don't want. Sometimes text can have HTML wrapped round it, or perhaps there is some formatting that you want to get rid of. I use Notepad to do this. Drop the text into Notepad and then copy it back out again. Notepad is only good for text, and so it will normally get rid of any unwanted data. It is even easier if you use the keyboard shortcuts:

Click in your Notepad window, CTRL+A to select all the existing text in the Notepad window, CTR+V to paste over it  the text you want to "clean", CTRL+A to select the cleaned and then CTRL+C to copy it. 

There are probably much neater ways of doing this, but it works and you can find Notepad on most any machine. 

Sign up for Global Gamejam Hull. Now.

If you liked Three Thing Game you will love, love, love, Global GameJam Hull.  You get more time, bigger teams, a chance to work with game creators from other disciplines and institutions. You get to participate in a world wide event. And, of course, you get pizza.  

We held the first one in Hull  last year and it was an amazing success. It takes place at Hull Studio School in the city centre. You can work for the entire 48 hours or you can sneak home for some sleep. Or you can bring a bed and camp out. We don't mind. We just want you to have fun making games. The Spooky Elephant Collective will e there taking part. along with game developers from around the region. 

The fun starts on Friday 24th of January, when the worldwide theme for the Global Gamejam is announced. Then you have around 48 hours to make your own interpretation of the theme, ready for judging on Sunday 26th. 

If you are serious about writing games you should be there too. Registration costs a fiver and you can do it here. Frankly, you'd be bonkers not to...

Farewell to Thor

For the last couple of weeks we've been looking after Thor, number one daughter's hamster. Last night for some reason he sat out in the top of his cage. It was as if he was posing for goodbye pictures, so we took some. 

We took him home today and he was awake for most of the journey, looking out of the cage and wondering why the outside was moving past so quickly.

Denying Fate with Chocolate

...if only I could...

Last Thursday I went to the vending machine to buy some crisps. It wouldn't sell them to me. In spite of using the right money and proper coins, options D6 and D5 refused to deliver the goods. But I managed to get a bar of chocolate, which was strange. It was almost as if fate was sending me towards chocolate in place of fried potato. 

When I unwrapped the bar I found that the wrapper had a winning code printed on the inside. All I had to do was go on the website and claim my prize. 

I've just remembered that I threw the wrapper away without doing that bit, which was rather stupid. It is as if I was destined to win a huge prize which would change my life, but have unconsciously turned away from that path.

Sometimes being fate must be hard work....

You Need to Get App Folders for your Windows Phone

It's quite simple really. If you've got a Windows 8 Phone you need to get App Folders. It lets you organize your applications into, er, folders, making them much easier to navigate. I've got tons of apps on my phone and scrolling through the list gets quite tedious. Of course, I can pin the important ones to the start screen, but then that gets kind of large too.

App Folders lets you create a folder that contains a subset of your apps. You can then pin this to the start screen, giving you quick access to those apps.  You can see it in action above, where I've put all my photo processing apps in one place.

When I tap the folder on the start screen I get instant access to all the apps in it. You can create as many folders as you like, and really get yourself organised. You can find the program (it's free by the way) here.

Retro Fun at C4DI

Tonight it was time for some Retro Fun at C4DI. Nothing on the agenda as such, just bring along your retro gear and be prepared to tell its story. We had some great stuff turn up, including a laser disk system and a Theramin.

Peter had brought the Apple II (by the way, the missing key is the | key) and a Palm Pilot. Ian brought the Sinclair Scientific calculator and I brought the hand cranked calculator. (did you know that people that used these were actually called computers?).

You can play "How many of these did you own?" here. I had two, and I really, really wanted an Apple Newton....

It was very interesting to see just what people had brought. There were Sinclair Spectrums, Walkmen (Walkmans?), Amstrad Portable Computers and all kinds of tech. It is sobering to reflect that these were all state of the art in their time, and that the iPhone that you adore so much is destined to become just as retro as these gadgets in a few years time. 

Thanks to Jon for setting it up. The next meeting of the Hull Digital is Thursday 16th January, when they are having the first Hardware Meetup, which should be very interesting. 

How to use Python in Visual Studio 2013

I've taken quite a shine to the Python language. Although I'm still strongly wedded to C# think that Python is also a great placed to do stuff. A bit like swapping the sensible Ford Focus for a Mazda MX5 for the weekend kind of fling.

What you might not know is that there is an implementation of Python that works a treat on .NET (so that you can combine Python and other languages), and that there is also a lovely plugin for Visual Studio that lets you write, and more importantly debug, Python in "The Best Place to Write Code in the Universe and Space".

I've written a tiny howto that tells you how to get started. You can find it here.

New C# Yellow Book Available - and on Kindle

The latest version of the C# Yellow Book is now available to download from here. There are a few fixes of typos and I've added some new content about array initialization.  But you'll be pleased to hear that the jokes are all exactly the same....

This is the "Rubber Duck" edition. The next one will have something else yellow on the cover. Probably custard.

My New Year Resolution this year is to finish things off that I've started, and with this in mind I spent some time last week preparing a Kindle version of the text. This is largely in response to some enterprising soul who has taken my PDF file and created a rather poor quality version of the text which is on sale at the moment. 

My version has all the diagrams and text and although I'm not completely happy with the format it is perfectly usable. You can download it from here.  Unfortunately it is not free, but it is well worth the nominal cost.

Living in Project Spark

Project Spark

Someone very kindly sent me an invite code to the Project Spark beta yesterday. Tonight I had a quick play. It looks to me like  a cross between Disney Infinity, Minecraft and Project Kodu. With some Little Big Planet thrown in. You can design and create your own worlds and populate then with objects and characters. Each object in the game has a "brain" which controls how it behaves in response to particular stimulation.

It looks really good, the world editing tools work well and the programming side is very interesting. Microsoft plans to release it across Windows 8 and Xbox One (and I'd love a copy on the phone too). 

There are lots of high quality tutorials and you can share the worlds that you make with other people. 

C4DI Retro Hardware Meetup

C4DI are having their first meetup of the new year next week. The subject of the meeting is "retro technology". We have been invited to take along something old that is involved with technology. Time for a trip up into the loft methinks. 

Learning a New User Interface would seem to be hard

I'm slowly getting my hang of the new user interface for blog publishing that I have to use now.

For now my pet hate is that some important behaviours are initiated by text that you have to click on, and others by buttons.  I hate that, and I've no idea why designers think it is a good idea. I reckon that if an element does something it should look like it does something, not like a message.

Oh well, I'm just going to have to get used to clicking on everything to see what happens....

Ultimate Werewolf Game

We had great fun at the Christmas Bash playing a version of the Werewolf game. Last week I managed to get hold of a "proper" copy of the cards that you can use to play the game. There are lots of extra roles in this game, including ghost, hunter and idiot.  

We are so going to have a go at this. 

Moving into the Future

Some time back I tried to move my blog. It didn't end well.  Now I'm trying again. The main reason is that changes to Twitter and Flickr have broken my blog posting workflow and Windows Live Writer (my blogging tool of choice for years) has been badly compromised by the way that high resolution displays in Windows 8.1 show the text as too tiny for my elderly eyes.

This move is not without cost. I'm expecting that some permanent links to resources may break during the move, I'm going to make a pass through the last six months or so of posts and fix them. If you find that a resource is not available then please let me know and I'll re-host the files and update the link. I think that if you access things via robmiles.co.uk you should be able to get everything as before. Then again, if it all goes horribly wrong you won't be able to read this post.....

The good news is that the new site has lots of lovely features that I'm very keen to try out. So please bear with me.

Welcome to 2014. I think...

In 2013 the first day of the year was lovely and after that it all went horribly wrong weather wise. For around a month and a half. Today we have had nasty grey clouds (I hate it when you open the curtains and the room gets darker) and dreary rain.

Here's hoping for a lovely January from tomorrow on-wards.

I hope the New Year brings you nothing but good stuff and happy endings.

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.