Lego have this neat idea where you can propose ideas for kits and, if there is enough interest, they'll release one. Lego Birds is one idea that has now made it into the shops.
I got one today. It looks rather fun and the models should go nicely on the mantelpiece.
..then I decided that this would be silly.
I thought Id try out a few New Year Resolutions, just to see if any of them would work.
One thing I thought might be sensible and give me a bit more free time would be to resolve not to blog every day.
So I fancied having a go at building one of these Sainsmart balancing robots. But I wasn't sure how hard they would be to build. So I hatched a cunning plot. Get one for each for myself and number one son as Christmas presents and then, once he had built his and got it working, carefully copy it.
The plan was working very well until a wire came off my robot and rather than providing a nice friendly 5 volts to the robot controller it delivered a much more unpleasant 11.3 volts. This did not end well. The voltage surge took out the Arduino board, the radio receiver and the gyroscope. Around ten pounds worth of damage. Wah.
The good news is that the spares arrived today and my robot is now back on his wheels, lurching around the kitchen under sort of remote control. Getting the robot to balance was a bit of a challenge, my top tip is to just use the values given at the end of this video.
I'm looking forward to adding a few more features. Ideally I'd like to make him self tuning, or at least be able to tune the PID loop using the remote control rather than the fiddly trimmers that are supplied.
The kit is good value, the components are good quality and you get a lot of them. This would serve as the basis of a lot of interesting projects.
I've just had an idea for a game where players ring each other up and tell them not to wash any more. The working title is "Call of Dirty".
The Roundabout game is completely crackers. You play the role of Georgio Manos, 'arguably the world's most famous revolving chauffeur'. Your job is to drive a bunch of wacky characters around the town of roundabout using a constantly rotating limousine.
The game is a fantastic example of how an interesting movement mechanic (timing the moves of your spinning car around obstacles including, er, roundabouts) has been used as the basis of a weird but wonderful narrative built around the strange folk who want to be taken for a ride.
The whole affair, from the knowing dodginess of the acting to the crackers story, is a delight. You'll play through it in an afternoon (at least that is what number one son did) but there are missions aplenty once you've finished. You can find it here.
So I'm tidying up at home today (it does happen) and I come across a box of Christmas cards that I bought last year and never sent. Oh well.
Last year I got everything wrong. I bought a whole bunch of cards and then didn't get around to writing them. Then I noticed that some folks around the place were not writing cards this year, but instead donating to charity and sending round an email . So I thought I'd do the same.
Then the Oxfam web site crashed half way through my transaction and I wasn't sure whether I'd donated or not. By the time I got a bank statement that confirmed the money had moved it was too late to send any messages around. So I looked like I'd not even tried.
So this year I did things properly. Cards were written and delivered around the department (I was especially proud of how I wrote them in the order of the offices in the corridor so I could deliver them in one pass) and I've also made a donation. I had just enough cards too. (or so I thought until I found this extra box).
My retirement plan. Probably.
I blame Adam for this. During the build up to our Super Smash Bros Christmas Bash he was waxing lyrical about the amiibo models and the way that some of them are quite collectible as Nintendo (who cut their business teeth selling trading cards) have stopped making them already. The one I really wanted was the villager, along with the Wii Fit trainer. I got the pink one because I thought it looked cute.
Now I get to agonize over whether or not to take them out of their boxes....
As well as racing camels, we also found some time to do some quadcopter flying on Christmas Day. Number one son had built a new one (I think one of his hobbies is building flying machines) that had a POV (point of view) camera and we took it out for a quick fly.
The wind was a bit strong but we managed to get a bit flying action. I'd taken along my much more sensitive Parrot drone and I felt a tiny built guilty when, having watched number one son battle horizontal gusts of blustery wind, I decided not to fly mine.
I did take some pictures though.
In flight
Point of View View.
Hope you had a great Christmas. Ours was lovely. And we spent some time playing Camel Up, the best camel racing game I've ever played. (and I've played one or two).
You get to place bets on the leader at each stage and also on the the ultimate race result. The balance is very finely wrought and leaders can switch position in the blink of an eye, so you have to be somewhat strategic in where you put your money.
My opinion of the game is in no way influenced by the fact that by some inspired bets I managed to win the first time we played (I came last in the second game).
Great fun for up to five players.
Christmas Eve Fun Fact: Bokeh is the term used by photographers to describe the quality of the out of focus parts of a picture. Turns out that the designers of a lens pay nearly as much attention to the blurry performance of a lens as they do to how sharp the in-focus parts are.
By playing around with the aperture value (the size of the hole through which the light arrives at the camera) you can get some quite nice bokeh effects. Try using your camera settings to make this hole as large as possible by using an f-stop value (the unit that cameras use) as small as you can. Great fun with Christmas tree decorations.
Spent quite a bit of time today printing out shades for the LightMesh project. I've now built enough lights to set up a test strand and it is looking pretty good. It's not going to be ready for Christmas, but there's always next year..
Last week a bit fell off our oven, forcing me to abandon some pinball fun and go home to fix it. I love pinball, but I like eating even more.
Anyhoo, once things had been put back together I noticed that the bulb in the oven light had failed. It was underneath a screw in glass dome that wouldn't come off. So I did what every self-respecting man of the new millennium would do. I went on to Amazon to find out what was out there that I could use to fix it. And I turned up a kit that include a replacement glass dome, a bulb and, most importantly, a special tool that could be used to remove the dome.
Except that it didn't work. What do you call a special tool that doesn't work? Well, it's not special, that's for sure. So I had to do something that really, really, hurts. In all kinds of ways. I called in a man to fix it.
Thanks to a cancellation he turned up in good time, produced a special too that looked exactly like mine and used it to remove the dome. Oh well. Perhaps some of the specialness in these tools comes from the person wielding it....
Anyhoo, we are now in a position to be able to watch the Christmas turkey cooking, which is exactly where I wanted to be.
Forza Horizon 2 is an excellent game. It's probably not one for purists, I think that Forza does that better. I reckon it has the slightly "floaty" handingling reminiscent of Burnout and Need for Speed. But it is none the worse for that. And I know that I wouldn't even get around the first corner in a properly accurate driving simulation.
Forza Horizon 2 has a great narrative that has you driving from town to town taking part in racing events as you build your reputation as someone who's good with a steering wheel. If you are the kind of person that doesn't like racing on the same track every time it is well nigh perfect. The environments are very well realised and there are tons of different ones.
And now we have Storm Island. This is an add-on pack that rights one of the few wrongs with the original game. It adds lots of off road action. For sixteen pounds you can have access to trucks, rally cars and all kinds of exotic off-roaders. Along with some suitably lumpy environments to drive them around.
I've always loved rally driving games. Gran Turismo had some fantastic rally stages and while the cars in Forza Horizons 2 are all lovely and shiny I really missed the chance to sling them around in mud during a tropical rainstorm. The Storm Island add in brings the same quality of experience (driving narrative, excellent graphics, fantastic in car view, plenty of cars) to the off road experience.
If you have Forza Horizon 2 I reckon you really should get this. It's around 3.5 Gbytes of download and well worth it.
Global Game Jam is an amazing 48 hour game development event that runs worldwide (hence the name). We've had events in Hull over the last couple of years and this time the folks at Grimsby Institute are hosting the event. For those at Hull new to Global Game Jam; it is a bit like Three Thing Game but you all share the same theme. For those who don't know what Three Thing Game is like, you can find out here.
We'll be organizing a "magic bus" to get us all to Grimsby and back (actually it will be quite an ordinary bus, but the magical part is that we will be paying for it - not you) and sorting cheap accommodation for the event.
From a Hull University student's point of view the timing is pretty much perfect. The even runs over the weekend of the 23rd - 26th of January, just at the end of the inter-semester gap week, giving you time to get together with your team and sort out project management (see yesterday), toolchains and game plans. If you want to take part (and you really, really should) you can sign up here.
Peter and I have spent quite a bit of time this week watching our second year students present their solutions to a commercial development problem that we set this semester. We created groups of students, gave them an incomplete specification, some legacy database code and turned them loose. It's been great fun.
One thing that is very important is that team members are in contact with each other during any development like this. Lots of teams told us that they had created private Facebook groups and used these to set up meeting and manage interactions. This worked well because, as they pointed out, they are all on Facebook and this makes it easy for them to keep in touch with each other. So it works, but is it professional?
After a few presentations I'd think I'd figured the right way to make the point that this probably isn't the best way to do it. I asked each group if they thought it would be OK for Peter and I to use a private Facebook group to store and manage their assessment results. Nobody thought this was a good idea. Even though the situation is exactly the same as someone writing software for money.
So, the lesson here is that if you're working on a proper project you should probably use proper tools to manage your group interactions. Take a look at Yammer, Basecamp, or Trello. These are perfect for short term student projects as they seem to have trial (or free) versions that would sit will with student assessments. And they are another skill you can put on your CV. Employers are just as interested in your experience with project management tools as they are with anything else.
You could even do something cunning like pick a system you've not to used for your next Three Thing Game team entry. Then write a blog post on how you got on with it later.
If you fancy having a go at the wordsearch that we used yesterday you can find it here.
Today we had our Christmas Bash. This is usually a fairly quiet and select gathering, what with a lot of coursework being due and folks going home for Christmas. But we still found enough people to get through 128 pounds worth of pizza, which is a success of sorts....
Thanks to Adam and his advance purchasing power this event had a strong Super Smash Bros theme. He had managed to get a complete set of amiibos as prizes (including the much sought after Villager amiibo) and set up a tournament for folks to win them. We also had the lovely folks from Platform Expos with their network of Xbox One consoles playing Titanfall. Lob in Halo collection, Super Mario Kart and a wordsearch and you get a pretty good night's worth of entertainment.
A tense moment in Titanfall
If you have any fears about the survival of Nintendo or the future of their Wii U console I really don't think you have much to worry about. From the reaction to the 8 player action (and the fun I had playing it too) I reckon they are going to be fine. One hard core PC gamer left with a newly acquired amiibo and a plan to try and get a console for Christmas. Great stuff
The winners with their prizes
Of course we had a wordsearch. Of course some people came along, sat down with it and spent all their time finding words. And one of them won a prize.
A worthy winner, but still some words left to find...
We were having so much fun that we forgot about the timings and the event ran on for quite a while after the finish time. And we will definitely be having another Super Smash Bros session next year. There are more pictures of the event on Flickr. You can find them here.
Today I ordered the final component for the "Wall of Lights" project. I've decided that it is worth getting proper devices where mains is concerned so I've plumped for a nice little Mean Well power supply that can deliver 20 amps at 5 volts. This should be comfortable with the 300 or so coloured leds that I'm going to be plugging into it as part of the Light Mesh project. With a a bit of luck it should arrive in the next couple of days. I'm hoping to get the thing going before christmas.
Someone was kind enough to complement me on the desktop background that I used for the Linx tiny (and very good value) tablet. I took the picture a while back in Melbourne. After about 50 years of taking photographs I've got a bunch of pictures that I consider quite reasonable. I've made a album of them on Flickr, which you can find here. Enjoy.
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.
