Robot parts and a guest appearance from my right foot
I'm running a course at c4di tomorrow: "Build a robot in one day". Which means I'm going to need some robot kits. Iv'e found the best way to prepare them is to lay them out on the floor....
If it all goes well there'll be 10 more Hull Pixelbots in the world by 4:30 tomorrow.....
Does Darth Vader use "Windows 10 Destroyer's Edition"?
Every now and then I take a picture that I'm quite pleased with. This is one of them. Although I'm not completely sure why.
One wonderful thing about Hull being City of Culture this year is that lovely little artworks are springing up around the city. You have to look quite carefully in the car park of The Deep to find these ones. Based on perfectly ordinary cars (which will be driven away and sold at the end of the exhibit) the Washed Up Car-go is a musing on just what you find if you go down to the beach today.
I don't think these are factory fitted options
The installations contain projected video and sound effects which come from sea-shell speakers. Well worth seeking out.
Sea shell speakers by the sea shore...
Hull city centre is quite a colourful place just at the moment. In one part we have some Lego daffodils, and in another poppies.
I think we made the best of the weather, managed to get a far as the seaside at Hornsea and back without getting rained on.
After we'd had coffee at Hornsea Mere of course. I kept saying that I wish they had a pinball machine there so I could play "Mere Bagatelle". Nobody laughed.
I must admit that I've never really thought of a place like Hull as having architecture. It's just got lots of nice buildings.
However, I've found out a lot more about the area from this book, which even told me who designed the place I'd spent nearly 40 years of my life working in at the university.
This version was published in 2010, which means that it was just in time to be able to give the low down on places like The Deep.
It's a great reference and even has guided walks around the city. If you're coming to Hull for something City of Culture related, and you want a well written, well researched and good to read guide to where we live then it is well worth a look.
I've no idea how we ended up in the audience at one of the first showings of Fast and Furious 8 tonight. I think a Meer cat with some half price cinema tickets had something to do with it, but even so....
Anyhoo, it is a fun film. With some jaw dropping car sequences and a fantastic sequence involving a child in a baby seat plus a bunch of gunmen. And the usual mix of former enemies joining together to face a larger foe. Etc etc. It seems to me that this time the franchise has turned its attention to the GI Joe style of movie, with cyber crime and super soldier antics on top of the car mayhem.
If you're a fan of daft films made in a universe where the laws of physics don't actually apply properly, and you like a big helping of cheese with your dialogue then you'll love it.
Dileepa made this lovely little video about the c4di. I'm in it for around two seconds, blurry and in the background. Just how I like it.
I love hackathons. I actually won a prize at one once. And at another I was part of a team that won a special "most ambitious failure" award (perhaps less impressive). I also love hackathons because they are so good for those that take part. They broaden your skills, let you try out new ideas, meet new people and stretch yourself a bit. They look good on your CV, you can talk about them at interviews. And you get to eat pizza. Lots of pizza.
I'm helping to run a hackathon at the c4di at the end of April. It's in partnership with NASA, and the winners of the Hull heats are entered into the NASA round of the competition for consideration for worldwide acclaim. There'll be a bunch of space related themes that we aren't allowed to tell you about just yet, and all kinds of fun things to do.
It's over the weekend of the 29th-30th of April. You can work all night, or you can nip home for a few hours sleep (which is what I'll be doing). We'll be working at the c4di down at the waterfront, so if we are lucky we should get a nice sunset and sunrise over the water to spur us on.
You can sign up here, and you really should. I'm after team members; get in touch if you fancy working with me.
I was gardening today. As you do. Got to thinking about the mad scientist who tried to clone himself. He used a new technique, where you start at the top of the body and work your way down. Everything was going fine until he'd just finished the neck, but when he tried to do the shoulders it all went wrong, with arms and legs in all the wrong places. Ugh. He turned to his assistant and said.....wait for it....
"I knew I should have quit when I was a head".
Had a quick trip to York today. Took the bendy lens, so that I could get all of York Minster in one frame. I think it sort of worked...
The Douglas DC3 is one of my favourite airplanes. They stopped making it in 1942, but there are still thousands of them in use today. I'm not sure you could say the same about the cars of the same vintage.
Another good night of discussion at the c4di hardware group. I always leave the meetups with lots of ideas of things to do. We'd love to see you too. Find out about the next meetup here.
Hot on the heels of the Korean translation, I've just heard from Dimitar Minchev that he's completed the translation of the book into Bulgarian.
You can find the text here.
Thanks so much to Dimitar for his awesome effort.
I think I'm the first person ever to write a blog post with the title "Goldilocks Gas Struts". Not that it's a first I really want. I've been improving the guinea pig cage to give it a "lift off roof". The problem with a cage that has doors at the front is that if your pigs have a sprightly nature (and ours do) then you can open the door and then find that the hairy monsters have made a break for freedom.
They quite enjoy the process of being caught. We don't enjoy the process of catching them.
I've fitted the hinges and the cage lid now opens rather nicely. That way we can do stuff in the cage without any risk of escaping pigs. And I quite like the god like aspect of removing their sky.
Anyhoo, next I need to find something to hold it open. It turns out that you can buy gas struts to do this thing, and they are very reasonably priced. They are calibrated in Newton's, which is interesting, but not particularly useful to me. I bought a couple of 120 Newton ones, figuring that the lid of the cage is quite heavy.
Not that heavy. I couldn't get the darned thing to shut. So I bought a pair of 60 Newton ones.
Which of course are not heavy enough. The lid won't stay open. What I need is the "Goldilocks" ones, which I think will come in at around 80 or so.....
Twelve robots, six hours, hundreds of people coming. What could go wrong?
As it turned out, not a lot. While we had the occasional "rogue robot", and at one point the network decided to completely reset itself, I'm very pleased to be able to write that most of the time things worked very well. We had so many robot races that in the end I ran out of winner's certificates. But everyone left happy.
Thanks so much to my helpers, and the University of Hull for organising such an awesome event.
These are the parts for my newest robot, made of a clear blue plastic. She's called "Crystal Masie" (perhaps my favourite robot name of all) I spent two hours today modifying software to try and improve the performance of her distance sensor, which didn't seem to be working as well as it should do.
Then I found out that I was using batteries that were a bit flat.....
Hull Science Festival is awesome. And this year it's going to be even awesomer (if that's a word).
I'm going to have a whole bunch there on Sunday. You can come along and have a go at racing them, or just watch them dance. There are some tickets left, you can sign up here.
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.
