Widen your angle

On Saturday I bought this stick on wide angle lens thingy. It is a kind of sticky thing that you can put in front of the camera on your phone to give you a much wider field of view. As it only cost three quid I was not expecting great things. However, the above shot (taken from the same position as yesterday) shows that it actually does quite a good job of pulling in even more office untidiness than the standard lens.

I love taking wide angle shots, and so I think I'll keep this with me. If you want one you could take a look here, but they are much cheaper from the Red5 shop in Hull.

testing again

This is just a little test to see if I can still post pictures from my mobile phone. Yes, this is my office, and no, I haven't tidied up for a little while.

Fun with Code

I'm doing some more weekend coding. Some people jump out of planes for fun. Others go diving. Apparently the most popular "sport" in the country is fishing. Whilst sitting by a canal in the rain waiting for nothing to happen is not as dangerous as the first two, it still has somewhat limited appeal to me.

I write programs for fun. (it is not the only thing that I do for fun - that would be deeply scary) However, I've been turning out some code today and I've really enjoyed doing it. It is all for a talk which I'm giving in March at the Game Developers Conference. I'm trying to make a video game which starts with you taking a picture of a chum and transforming this into an item in the game itself. The provisional title is "Playing with Friends" but that may change. Anyhoo, with just a few lines of code I've got my picture, and with a few more I've made it into a pretty game sprite. (it runs a bit slowly at the moment - but it is early doors).

Eventually the whole content of this little endeavour will be released to the outside world. I'm sure you can hardly wait....

Tiny robots will make me complete

Nearly bought some tiny robots today. They were on sale cheap (but they had none left). Up until now I had not realised that the thing I need to be complete is a tiny robot fighting arena and a couple of robots to fight in it. But now I'm sure that it is (mainly I suppose because there are non available)

I'm not sure if this is a significant step along the road to my own particular brand of spiritual enlightenment, but there you are.

Update: The shop is trying to get me some from another branch. We shall see....

You don't know what you've yot ''till Its gone

My office machine is crumbling again. It went through a bad patch a few weeks back and I thought I'd put it back on the straight and narrow, but now it is becoming seriously wobbly. I think it has actually reached the point where it is more trouble than it is worth, so a rebuild beckons.

This means that I am frantically backing up all the files that I think are important, prior to a day spent reinstalling everything. The problem with this is that you don't know what is important until you lose it. I work on the "distributed backup" principle, which means that the files that are vital to me are smeared over three machines, my office, my tablet and my home computer. This works pretty well most of the time, but it is not unknown for vital files to drop through the cracks.

When I do the rebuild I will of course build onto a brand new disk, and keep the slightly broken one as a combination novelty paperweight and get out of jail card. The idea is that I can probably get it to work long enough to pull off that file I didn't think I needed, but turns out to be vital. In fact, I have a little pile of such discarded disks in my cupboard at work.....