Raspberry Pi at c4di Hardware Meetup this Thursday

If you were at the "Easy as Pi" HullDevs presentation from John Tasker last week (incidentally he has put his slides and sample code here) you might like to come along to our Hardware Meetup onThursday this week at the c4di, starting at 6:00. 

If you have any questions, or have a Pi that you want to get started with, or want to see what you can do with your Pi, then come along. Hardware welcome. I'll be bringing some of my Pi collection, including the world famous Logo Blaster. You can sign up here.

Microsoft Surface Ergnomic Keyboard and Bluetooth

Ha. It works now I've replaced the Bluetooth adapator. So, pro-tip. If you want to use the Microsoft Surface Ergnomic keyboard with your desktop under Windows 10 I would suggest that you use the Pluggable Bluetooth USB adaptor. This works a treat. If you've got a Surface Pro 3 I'd advise you not to get this keyboard at all, or at least try it to make sure it works before you part with any cash.

I'm hammering away at the keyboard now and I like it very, very, much. My previous keyboard, the Microsoft Sculpt Comfort one, was very good but it lacked the numeric keyboard and arrow keys that I'm used to. Mine version of the Sculpt Comfort also has the American keyboard layout which works fine most of the time, but had me keeping an old keyboard around (really) just so I could type the backslash character. Which I can type just like this now: \\\\ Yay.

Bendy Keyboard: The plot thickens

Well, the replacement keyboard arrived today. Still stylish. Still beautifully made. 

Still won't work with my PC. But it works fine with my iPad. Interesting.

I've ordered a replacement Bluetooth adaptor for the PC. The one I'm using was one I happened to have around when I needed it. At the time I thought this was lucky, but maybe it isn't after all. 

Bad Bendy Keyboard

I love the Microsoft Ergnomic keyboards. I’ve worked my through a whole bunch of them over the years. I’m convinced that if I’d spent the last thirty years typing on a “normal” keyboard I probably wouldn’t be able to type now. To celebrate completing “Begin to Code with Python” I thought I’d treat myself to the latest and greatest Microsoft ergnomic keyboard, the shiny Surface one. Then I can write another book with it.

The keyboard arrived today. It’s lovely. Beautifully made, with a fantastic touch action and a great range of keys.  

But it doesn’t work. I can’t make it pair with my desktop (which uses a usb Bluetooth adapter) or, really annoyingly, my Surface Pro 3. I’ve put it in the post and ordered a reaplcement which will arrive tomorrow.  

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.