Schools App Challenge

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I've spent a bit of time over the last few days going through entries for the Schools App Challenge, helping with the judging. Such fun.

The challenge is a fantastic enterprise. It is a kind of "magic bullet" that hits a whole bunch of great targets all at once. It gives kids confidence in presenting and discussing their ideas. It helps them learn to work as a team. It engages them with technology. And it gets them thinking about how you can do things to improve the lot of other people.

You can find the entries on the web site and you might like to take a look at them. I found it very cheering.

Home Alone Rob

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I'm having some time "Home Alone" as number one wife is away for a few days. This is rather interesting, as it doesn't happen very often. I've been going round the kitchen to see what happens in there and taking a look in the cupboards. Most of them seem quite sensible, with some things in them that I recognise. Cups, plates, breakfast cereal etc. Others are rather strange.

Apparently there's a "magic cold cupboard" that holds the milk and whatnot, and a magic warm cupboard which is where I can put things if I want to heat them up. Although I'm not completely sure about why I would want to do this. Perhaps it is something to do with this "cooking" thing I see so much of on the telly.

There's another magic cupboard with a round opening that I can't quite figure out. I put some crockery in there and turned it on, and all that happened was a horrendous noise and a lot of broken bits. So it's not for washing dishes.

I've been shown a bunch of things in the "magic cold cupboard" that I can transfer to the "magic buzzing cupboard" to make them warm enough to eat. I've even been planning my menus for the next few days.

In my opinion the way that we eat today is boring. Just because something has worked fine for many years is no reason to keep doing it (at least that is what seems to be driving the world these days). What we need is some novel approaches to eating. Heaven knows, we've had enough of experts telling us how to eat over the years. It's time for some radical thinking. I've come up with the following possible plans.

  1. Eat nothing. This might serve as a handy weight reduction plan and definitely save some money. However, the long term prospects may not be great.
  2. Eat nothing but food that I really like. After millions of years of evolution and adaption it seems stupid that things that are supposedly "good" for me don't taste very nice. My body knows what it's doing. If it wants nothing but honey roasted peanuts and Kellogg's Cocoa Pops then perhaps that's nature's way of saying that's all I should eat. There may be a downside to this, but I'm struggling to think of one.
  3. Eat everything on the first day. Number one wife is back on Sunday. I could eat a whole four day's worth of food today and then nothing for the rest of the week. I'm struggling to understand why we don't already do this. It would be so much more efficient. On the other hand, I may discover why about half way through my third lasagna.
  4. We normally have breakfast, lunch and tea each day. Why? I could have all my breakfasts on Wednesday, lunches on Thursday and so on through the week. If I run out of meals I can start at breakfast again, or even invent new ones. This would add a bit of novelty to my life and bring back memories of my time in a bedsit when I actually did this, for the simple reason that the only food I had to hand was Kellogg's Cocoa Pops.

Made in Hull

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As well as an awesome firework display, the start of Hull's reign as UK City of Culture was also marked by artwork projected onto the major buildings in the city. There are a number of different installations, the most impressive are the one in Victoria Square and the one projected onto the side of The Deep.

If you live in or around Hull you ust go and see these. If you don't live in or around Hull you must move to Hull and then go and see them.

They are on until the end of the week.

In with a Bang in 2017

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Happy New Year everyone.

Hull is UK City of Culture 2017. Yay!

To celebrate this we had an amazing firework display tonight. Around 25,000 people came along to see, including us. It was very cold, but we were lucky enough to find a space in the only pub in the neighbourhood and have a quiet drink until the display started.

It was awesome. Two barges loaded with fireworks had been parked in the river over 15 minutes or so they set them all off.

Relive the opening night of Hull's year as UK City of Culture 2017. www.hull2017.co.uk

You can get a flavour of the event from this video, which is better than any pictures that I could take and includes some lovely shots taken from the air.

I was a bit worried about the size of the crowds and getting home, but after a brisk walk across town we were soon on our way back. It was a wonderful evening and a real credit to the wonderful city where I live.

Not Alone Game

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Not Alone is an asymmetric card game. One player is "The Creature" and the others have to escape from the planet where the creature lives. The players work as a team although, as someone pointed out during the game, if they talk about their cunning plans there's a good chance of the creature hearing them.....

Players have to move between locations and collect artefacts that help them escape. The creature has to figure out where they are going, get there first and sap their will to live.

It got quite tense towards the end, with a very close finish. A good game and refreshingly different from anything I've played recently.  A good, fun, thing to play on New Year's Eve.

Appalling User Interfaces: Squarespace Edit

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I use Squarespace to host my blog. Most of the time it is wonderful, but the web based page editing is a bit of a pain to be honest. One of the things I really hate is this dialogue, which appears if you click outside the post editing window.

It carefully explains what Discard and Save do, while neglecting to tell you anything useful about Cancel, which is the button that you really should press.

Discard throws away your work, Save ends the editing session and closes the window (meaning that you have to open it again if you want to keep working on the post) and Cancel takes you back to editing the post, which is almost always what you want to do.

Ugh.

Appalling User Interfaces - App Suggestions by Siri

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I seem to need to have an Apple phone. My favourite, Windows Phone, doesn't do all the things I want, and I've tried Android and that was fairly appalling too. What can I say? I'm picky.

One trick that the iPhone plays drives me completely nuts. The phone provides "Siri App Suggestions" based on the things that you do most. You can use these favourites to slightly compensate for the horrible way that the iPhone manages large numbers of apps on the device.

The suggestions are based on your use of the phone and are updated each time you visit the screen. But here's the appalling bit. They update and redraw themselves in the fraction of a second between the page appearing and you actually selecting something.

So your finger can head for the Nest icon, but by the time your digit touches the screen the icon underneath can be replaced by a different application. So the wrong thing is selected. Most annoying.

This single piece of stupidity makes the feature completely useless to me. Here's a tip Apple, why not update the sorted list before you display it on the screen?

Forza Horizon 3 is Wonderful

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I liked Forza Horizon 3 so much that I've bought it. At the time I got it they had a discount in the store, so I've got it for both Xbox One and Windows 10 at what I think is quite a reasonable price.

I can now take my Tesla out and go drifting in the Australian outback. Awesome fun. It is the best racing game ever. I've played a few over the years, and I really can't fault Forza in any way. The breadth of vehicles, the quality of the driving experience, the feeling of being part of something. All wonderful.

I don't play games as much as I probably should. No, really. But Forza is probably going to change that. I've got to smash a few more boards and collect my very own Reliant Regal.....

Rogue 1: A Star Wars film

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We went to see Rogue One: A Star Wars story today. 

It's a good film. I really enjoyed it. Bearing in mind that we went in knowing the story in advance (stealing the Death Star films to set up a movie made forty years ago) they did a very good job of making the film fresh and interesting with some great characters. 

If you like Star Wars you'll love it. It you don't care much about Star Wars, this might give you cause to start caring a bit more. 

Snaps Video 2 is now out

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The second video from the "Begin to Code with C#" series which accompanies the book by Rob Miles. Discover how the Snaps framework runs programs and how you can create your own simple behaviours.

I've made another little video to go with my book "Begin to Code with C#". It follows on from the first one, which shows how to get started. In this one we play with the Snaps framework and make some programs that might even be fun.

You can find all the videos on my channel here

Reliant Regal in Forza Horizons 3

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Forza Horizons is an awesome franchise. I have great memories of playing Forza Horizons 2 with the Storm Island add-on. Number one son has got Forza Horizons 3 and we were playing it this evening. The game has "Barn Finds", cars that you can unlock by, er,, finding them in barns dotted around the map.

We had a look for barn finds today and found a Reliant Regal three wheeler van in one barn. This was actually my very first car, although I don't remember it being painted in quite such a lush shade of green.

This is the vehicle made famous by the "Only Fools and Horses" sitcom, although people often refer to the one in that show as a "Reliant Robin", which it is not. The Regal is much less sophisticated than that. It has a fibreglass body over a steel chassis, with a 700cc engine sitting nearly in the passenger compartment. Nought to sixty in "You don't want to go there...".

Number one son had an experimental drive and noticed that it is surprisingly easy to tip it over. And slow. And noisy. But the exterior and the interior have both been lovingly recreated.I think this feature is probably worth the price of the game on it's own. If it had a Nissan Cube and a BMW i3 the game would be completely perfect.

Actually, the gameplay and the sheer depth of content make the game an absolutely fantastic buy anyway. I'm tempted to get it in the "dual" version so that I can play it on the PC and on the Xbox One.