Hull Devs at Hull

Hull Devs is shiny new. They have T shirts. They have free crisps. And beer. And they meet up at on the last Wednesday of every month at c4di. And we end up in the pub.

Joe Stead, the man behind a really good talk a while back, returned to Hull with Richard Tasker, who gave a lovely talk about the Raspberry Pi. I know a bit about this device, but Richard put me onto some interesting new directions which I'm looking forward to exploring. 

If you're a developer in Hull you should go along to Hull Devs. They've got a great programme of talks running into 2018. It's also a great place to meet up with other developers from the Hull area. And don't forget, there's also the awesome CodePen sessions (the next on is on 9th October) and of course our hardware meetups (the next one is on 5th October).

It's great to see all these initiatives taking off in the areas. Thanks to Joe and his sponsors for getting the ball rolling.

Finished Writing

That's it. Chapter 16 (writing games with pygame) is done. I've finished writing the original material for Begin to Code with Python. Now I just have to finish the editing. But at least I don't have to go to bed thinking about what I'm going to write tomorrow. 

My points are expiring and I don't care

Internet companies seem to be getting increasingly desperate in their marketing. The latest trick seems to be to award me some discount coupons and then send me loads of emails telling me that they are about to expire. Just FYI folks, I neither know nor care about your coupons. If you happen to be selling something that I need right now and you've got coupons that make it cheaper, then great. But there's no way I'm going to rush out and spend money on stuff just because you're giving me some discount. 

I've a horrible feeling I might be growing up...

Hull Solar Gate

Hull's "Solar Gate" sculpture is now properly in place.  It's rather impressive. If you go and see it (and you should) then make sure you take a proper look at all the plaques set into the ground around the sculpture.

Hull Pixelbot: the future is clear

We had another splendid hardware meetup at c4di today. Karl has done some sterling work on the design of the Hull Pixelbot chassis and we now have a price for a laser cut version. It comes in at less than four quid, which I think is an excellent price. The next thing to do is decide how many to get....

Back writing....

Now that we're back in Hull it's time to finish off the last part of the book. 

You might not here from me for a while....

Journey from Hell

Well, that was fun. In retrospect signing up for the 10:40pm flight home was not a great plan, but it did give us one more day away. We arrived back in the country at 2:00am all bleary eyed, but just about up for the two hour drive back to our house that I was expecting. After all, the roads would be nice and quiet, right?

If only. All the motorways were shut. And I mean all of them. And the diversions seemed to send us from one shut motorway to another. And another. And there was fog. 

Apparently they are working on "installing smart motorway technology". And adding dumb diversions. The diversions were so bad as to actually feel insulting. We lost track of the number of different symbols we had to decode in our fruitless quest to find "the one open road over the Pennines".

We got back at around 5:30 in the morning, unplugged the radio and slept 'till 10:00am. 

It was a great holiday though. 

Heading home..

This is our last day in Lisbon. We actually saw some grey clouds and some rain, which I think is preparing us for what we can expect back home. On well. We will definitely be back. 

Roman Amphiteatre

The Romans liked Lisbon too. They built a dirty great big amphiteatre just to show off. There are still some bits of it left which you can see, yes, at another museum.

We like museums.

Lisbon Culture

More culture today. The Puppet Museum (only a bit creepy) and the Oriental Museum. All good stuff. And I seem to remember some good food and drink too. 

Lisbon Castle

Today we headed for Lisbon Castle. It has a great view of the surroundings; what with it being on the top of a hill and all that. 

Tram 28

We're in Lisbon for a few days. Lovely place. I came year a few years ago to do some Microsoft Technical conferences and loved the place, even though most of my views of the city was through the windows of the taxi on the way to and from the airport. 

We've got a little apartment and the place is lovely. Today we took Tram 28 for a tour around the place. This is a forth minute tram ride from the centre of the city around most of the tourist areas. It was lovely. Then we wandered back across the city to the apartment where I spent a happy time working on the pdfs for chapter 8 of Begin to Code Python. 

Then it was out for tea. We seem to be near a street with a whole bunch of really nice cafes, restaurants and shops. But, from what we've seen so far, this is actually typical of downtown Lisbon.  

Happy Holidays

We're having a few days away. Don't tell the folks at Microsoft Press, I'm supposed to be finishing of the final chapters of "Begin to Code with Python". 

(actually I'm spending a goodly chunk of each day away on chapter edits, so my conscience is clear...)

iPhone X - it will be interesting

The Kinect's Eye view of a sofa....

A few years ago I spent a lot of time playing with the Microsoft KInect. I even wrote a book about it. The Kinect contains a special “depth camera” where pixels don’t give you light intensity, they give you distance. The depth camera works by viewing an array of dots which are projected onto the scene in front of the sensor. Software works out the distance between the dots that the camera sees. The further apart that the dots appear, the further away that part of the scene is. 

As far as I know Apple have put a Kinect sensor on top of the iPhone X which works in the same way. The depth information returned by the camera is a big chunk of how the phone recognises its owner.  

I really hope it works.  

The Kinect worked great for middle  distance readings, but if you got too close all the little dots smudged together into one big dot and the camera stopped working. It would struggle a bit in very bright conditions and I never tried to use it to recognise my face when I was wearing glasses.  

I’m always tempted to get the very latest in technology. I think it stems from my much younger days, when I used to enjoy owning my own copy of the current number one music single, but I think I’ll sit this one out until I’ve seen it work. With glasses.  

Overcooked

Let’s say this at once. Overcooked is great fun. You and a bunch of friends control cooks franticallly grabbing ingredients, following recipes, washing up, putting out fires and trying to keep the customers satisfied. I’ve not laughed quite so much playing a game as I did when we were all blundering round the kitchen, getting too many mushrooms (cries of STOP GETTING MUSHROOMS) and setting fire to things (cries of FETCH THE FIRE EXTINGUISHER).  

You start off in a fairly conventional kitchen, but before long you’re on the deck of a pirate ship or, worse yet, on the back of two speeding trucks. There’s a back story of sorts, and you work through a map of different locations in your little van, trying to rack up enough points to unlock the next level. As a multi-player game this really, really shines.  The Nintendo Switch is a great platform for this kind of mayhem, you can rock up with the console and a bunch of joycons and have totally crackers, shouty, fun. Very strongly recommended.

One Day Maybe

One Day Maybe is incredible. Very hard to describe, but I'm jolly glad I went. It is part tech demo, part history and part interpretive dance (in a good way). The performers (and there are lots of them) work very hard to build a piece of art that muses on the sacrifices made to build a better future, and whether or not that future really merits them. It leaves you thinking about the bravery of people prepared to stand up against oppression, the way that the oppressors frequently get away with their crimes and the darker aspects of the future we are all hurtling towards. 

Great stuff.

Busses in Hull

They had some busses at the Hull Transport Museum today. There were all different kinds and they were all shiny. And they had a brass band too. There's nothing like a brass band for injecting a nice feel to any occasion. 

Death Squared

The people who wrote Death Squared must have played quite a bit of Portal. (If you’ve not played Portal, where have you been? It’s a series of fiendish puzzles which are overseen by a nasty computer with a great line in one liners).

Death Squared uses a similar scenario (you have to perform a series of tests for some reason) but the actual tests themselves involve each player getting their coloured cube from the start position to the end position. Each level involves a lot of experimentation, and it works really well the more people you have. Two player is rather good, three player for us was hampered by the need for one player to control two cubes. The puzzles are nicely progressive and really encourage the players to work together. Nowhere near as frantic or silly as Overcooked (of which more later), but fun for thinkers who want some cooperative action. 

Perspex Pixelbots at c4di

This is lovely. I've been pondering how to make Hull Pixelbots quickly (printing one takes around 8 hours or so) and then someone walks into the Hardware Meetup with a perspex pixelbot. 

Then Karl walks in with a laser cut chassis. He'd taken my stl files and converted them into flat components. Then he'd taken the designs to his work and got some prototypes cut out of perspex. The next step is to find out how much it will cost to get a bunch made. 

Snake Pass

Snake Pass is a charming little game in which you have to steer Noodle the snake around a range of different locations, picking up points and and climbing around things. The biggest problem I have with the game is that the snake is a bit hard to control. Snake steering is not too tricky, but it can be hard to climb things. You’re supposed to be able to contract the snake to grip things, but I seem to lack the skills to grab things and climb up them. I found it a bit frustrating when I couldn’t reach high things and even more frustrating when I fell off the game world and plummeted to my doom.

Perhaps I should spend an evening practising climbing fence posts, but that sounds a bit too much like work to me. The environments are sumptuous and the snake is charming though. I'm going to have to put in some proper practice methinks. .