C4DI and Bald Secret Agents. And wedding lights.

We had our third hardware group meetup at C4DI this week. A bunch of plucky souls turned up to develop some software to help secret agents who have no hair. No, really. You can find the notes here if you want to have a go yourself. 

I took along a few of my wedding lights to show folk how they work. You can see them under construction above. The next meetup will be in a month or so.  I'm presently writing up a document that covers exactly how they work, which you might find useful if you ever want to create remote controlled stuff.

Pass Student BBQ

I told these folks they'd be in the blog, and here they are.

For the last couple of years the department has been working with students from later years who provide support for the first years. The Peer Assisted Student Support sessions are run by PASS leaders who give up their time to help. Their sessions have proved very popular and a lot of students owe quite a few percent of their grades to the patient support of these folks.

Today, by way of a thank-you, the university organised a barbecue, knowing that one thing that students prize above all others is free food. There were also certificates to be had. From the left we have David Arrowsmith-Cooper, Gareth Andrews, Antony Nunn and Phininder Balaghan. 

In the middle, wearing the suit, we have Dr Richard Heseltine who is the Director of Library and Learning Innovation and University Librarian. Well done folks.

We are presently recruiting PASS leaders for next year. If you fancy having a go, feel free to get in touch.

C4DI Accelerator Program Launched

I got this slide from Jon's deck today. I hope he won't mind...

Today Robert and I went down to C4DI in Hull to see the start of something big, the launch of the C4DI accelerator program. An accelerator program is a way of making ideas real. Take a good idea, a bunch of folks that want to run with it, add in some mentoring and a ton of hard work and you should end up with a strong pitch that will get you on the road to great things. 

C4DI have partnered with PwC who will be supporting the enterprise, along with Handlesbanken, Campaign Monitor, FreeAgent and Ebuyer. 

The principle is that you get funding, a place to work and support and mentoring in exchange for a chunk of your action, on the basis that any percentage of something is better than 100% of nothing.

Selection starts in October this year, with the first teams in place by February 2015. Then, later in the year they will hold the final pitches and demo day. There's space for 8 teams, each of which will get up to 16K of  seed investment and 16K of match funding to keep them going over the 90 day incubation period. (I stole all these facts from Jon's presentation - go there if you want more details and a picture of a dog dressed as a horse). 

This is such wonderful stuff. I would so love it if some of our graduating students took that amazing idea they don't know what to do with, and ran it through the C4DI accelerator.

Autographer Fun

The Autographer is a strange device. It is a little camera with no shutter button. The idea is that you clip it onto yourself and then head off and have interesting experiences. The Autographer will take a picture every now and then when it thinks something interesting is going on. It uses its compass, PIR sensor, accelerometer and GPS to keep track of what you are doing, and it has three levels of "alertness".

From a photography buff's point of view the pictures are nothing much to write home about. There is a 5 megapixel sensor, but the lens has a very wide angle of view, which means that you can often find lots of stuff in the frame. The thing that makes the Autographer interesting is that it lets you get pictures that you could not obtain any other way. And you just don't care that lots of them are rubbish. The 8G internal memory can store literally thousands of shots that might be taken during the day and there are smartphone, PC and Mac applications that let you pull out all the best shots and make them into animated gifs and videos. 

I wore the device during some of the "Wedding of the Year" and I'm very glad that I did. Some of the shots are lovely.

You can clip it to your shirt or hang it from a lanyard, but what I really wanted to do was stand it somewhere. Sadly it doesn't have any kind of stand, so I've designed and printed one, as you do.

This will screw onto one of those tiny tripods that you can get, which means you can use it for time lapse photography, something it does rather well. 

I've put the design on Thingiverse if you are lucky enough to have one of these neat little devices and want to stand it somewhere.

I'll post some pictures I've taken in some later blog posts.

Veronica Mars now Available in UK

For anyone that thinks that TV with smart, sassy dialogue and well drawn characters starts and end with shows written by Joss Whedon I'd like to draw your attention to Veronica Mars. It first came out a while back with an astonishing first season which sagged a bit into seasons 2 and 3 (although they were always watchable). 

Such was the dedication of the fans that earlier this year a Kickstarter funded movie was released which apparently holds together quite well. If you are new to Veronica, or want to re-live the whole thing from proper region 2 DVDs you can now get all three seasons, plus the movie from Amazon for a reasonable price. 

If you liked Buffy, you will love Veronica...

Rob on Channel 9

You might (or might not) be interested to know that you can view videos of my sessions, (including the recent ones at TechDays 2014 when I was moaning about my suitcase being stolen) on Channel 9. Take a look here.

There are sessions on Windows Phone and Bluetooth/NFC and MonoGame, among other other gems. 

Wedding of the Year

Number one daughter got married today. And it was lovely. Everything and everyone involved worked, ran on time, played their part to perfection and made it a properly grand occasion. If you were there (I gave the blog a plug during my "Father of the bride" speech, as you do) then thank you so much for coming. There might have been a few people on the day who were happier than me (I can certainly name two) but there can't have been very many. And so now, along with "number one daughter" and "number one son", I now have "number one son-in-law". Welcome sir.

During my speech I mentioned that on these occasions, along with quite a few others, it is best to make sure that the man makes all the truly important decisions. Number one wife and daughter dealt with all the low level details such as the groom, the venue, the date and the time, the food, the colour scheme etc etc. I was left to wrestle with the really difficult stuff, such as the type and configuration of micro-controller to put in the table decorations and how to make them all remote controlled from my phone.  Number one daughter had asked for "some coloured lights in vases". I reckoned I could do a bit better than that. 

Above you can see the system in action. The application in my phone is talking to a Bluetooth adapter in one of the lights which is then relaying commands over a 2.4 GHz connection to all the other lights, each of which can be addressed with commands to make it flicker, change colour and do a few other tricks. All the lights and the vases were 3D printed and assembled specially for the occasion. And it all worked splendidly on the day.

I'm going to write up everything and make the code available which essentially gives you two way communication between a phone application and any number of remote network sensors/controls. Making it all work was great fun and a perfect distraction from the proper aspects of the occasion. At least until the enormity of what was going on hit me as they were going through their vows.... 

Cortana tells it like you don't want to hear...

Number one daughter is getting married tomorrow. I must admit the weather forecast doesn't seem too great according to Cortana.

Oh well. 

Pictures by Month on Windows Phone 8.1

Windows Phone 8.1 lets you view your pictures by month, which is nice. Today I found out that if you tap on a month you get a nifty little set of short cuts to other months, that can save a bit of scrolling up and down. Which is nice.

The Restart Page

If you want to come over all nostalgic, head over to The Restart Page and take a look at all the ways we've reset our computers over the ages....

Student Led Teaching Awards Dinner

Well, I didn't win a prize this time. But it didn't really matter. Really. We had a lovely time at the dinner, there were some great speeches and we left the event really happy.

I love the way that the university is driving the recognition of good teaching. And from the look of tonight there is a lot of it going on at Hull.

Cottingham Church Looking Great

Cottingham Church was holding a flower festival today so I took along the big camera with the fat lens. And some of the pictures came out quite well.

Sunday Printing

Having spent some of yesterday printing out the wrong sized switch supports, I thought I'd spend some time today printing the right sized ones.....

Coffee Machine Guru

For the most part our coffee machine works really well. But it does have a foible which is that every now and then when you hit the power button it refuses to light up, and we have to turn it on and off at the mains. Then it wakes up fine. I'm wondering if it is something marginal to do with one of the internal sensors, or whatnot. To be honest I've no idea what the problem is and, since it has been doing it for ages with no observable ill effects I'm OK with this. Also, I'm mainly a tea drinker.

But such is human nature that I'm now using whether the coffee machine starts first time as a harbinger of doom or non-doom. If it lights up first time the day feels somehow lighter, as if things are going to go well. If it doesn't I seem to regard this as the first of a succession of things that are bound to go wrong over the day.

I've not really managed to determine if it really can see into the future. The truth is, I've usually completely forgotten about it by the time I leave the house in the morning. But I am wondering if I should start keeping score.... 

CPC Good Service

Rather a big box for just 10 3.5mm jack plugs, but it did arrive the next day....

I think you find out most about a company when they are operating in "failure mode". CPC just did this, and they passed with flying colours. I'd ordered some bits and bobs for the wedding lights (where I've been spending most of my time recently - big reveal to come later - at a wedding) and I'd ordered a pack of 10 plugs. However, just 1 turned up in a bag all on its own.

I rang up CPC and told them how lonely the plug was, and how it was missing its 9 friends who somehow seemed to have got left behind. They promised to sort it out and the following day a box with the missing plugs in it turned up. Of course I'd have been slightly more impressed if it had all arrived at the same time, but I'm very pleased to see that when things don't go right they own the problem and then fix it. 

If you are buying any bits and bobs they are a great place to take a look. Their service is good (see above) and their prices are pretty reasonable too. 

Windows Phone 8.1 Cortana will change your life

So I'm driving into work this morning and as I'm sitting at the traffic lights I remember that I need to buy some cables when I get to work. So press the "Phone" button on the steering wheel and say "Remind me to buy cables when I get to work". Cortana confirms the command and then when I get to my office the phone beeps and I see this on the screen. 

This is something that will change my life. The way that it works is just transparent to me. I have to be a bit careful of phrasing, but I now have a phone that is properly useful in this context. I

If you've got a Windows 8.0 phone you are in for a treat when 8.1 comes out. I reckon it is worth registering as a Windows Phone developer just so that you can download the developer preview of Windows Phone 8.1 and start using this technology early. My next step is to investigate how I can integrate my applications into Cortana.  

Shortlisted Rob

A couple of years ago I was lucky enough to be shortlisted in the Hull University Union Student-led Teaching Awards. I was in the "Most Inspiring Teaching" category and I actually won, which was wonderful. 

Well, I'm shortlisted again this year in a different category and and next week I get to go to posh dinner and find out if I've been fortunate enough to have won again. Which is very, very nice. You can find out more about the other shortlisted folks here.  

Banjo Madness

I'm getting a lot of questions about banjos from students at the moment. This is because we are in the final stretch of the assessed coursework for our programming module which involves either creating a management system for a "Banjos for Hire" shop, or creating a game where you have to use your accordion to fight of hordes of invading interstellar banjos by shooting killer notes at them.

Today I got to see some work in progress from some of the students. I saw a Windows Phone game that was pretty much ready to go to market (just needs some sound and it should go straight in the store) and a close to complete WPF implementation of the store. Great stuff. 

Windows Phone Jump Start This Week

Windows Phone Jump Start is a wonderful kind of free lunch. For the price of nothing you get a whole ton of high quality teaching and content with the aim of getting you started in Windows Phone development. 

The latest one, which coves all the lovely, shiny, stuff in Windows Phone 8.1, starts this week. You can sign up here.

Publish and be Great

Most developers have them. Things that they have made, probably pretty much finished, but then other stuff came up and they never got around to shipping them.  And all it would take is a bit of effort just to get the thing out of the door and into the store. 

Publish is for these projects.  It's a worldwide event for Windows Store developers to get together and head for the finish line. It runs over the 16-17th of May and I'm nipping over to the event in Manchester to join fellow MVPs and developers in getting stuff finished. 

From my experience with Three Thing Game, Global GameJam and Hacked I know that it is amazing just how much you can get done in a short time if you just focus on a single task. Of course it also helps if you are surrounded by folks all doing the same thing, and that you get pizza and fizzy drinks (the fuel of champion developers the world over).

If you want to join us in Manchester you can sign up here. There are events planned all over the world, you can find a local event and take part here. You can even set up your own local event if you want, or just take part from the comfort and security of your own desk. 

I'm really looking forward to it. Perhaps that Windows 8 version of Cheese Lander might actually see the light of day.........