Saturday Open Day

First sitting

Second sitting

Up until now we’ve been very lucky with the weather for our open days. Not so today. The weather dial has flipped over to “horrible” and seems to be stuck there. However, we did have quite a few brave souls who made it through the wind and wet to come along to see us. I did a couple of presentations and showed off my Cubelets And why not.

Thanks to both bunch of folks for being great audiences, laughing at my jokes and even going “Wooo” when I uttered the immortal words “robmiles.com”.

Adobe Creative Cloud for Academics

If you are thinking of spending some money on a new camera, then welcome to the club. I’m always thinking of spending some money on a new camera. But before you buy a camera you might want to think about investing in some software to make the best of the camera you already have.

I’m a big fan of Photoshop Lightroom as a way of getting pictures out of the camera, tweaking them a bit and then managing where they are stored. It also has very good integration with Photoshop itself, along with lots of other plugins that can do lovely things with your pictures (for example Photomatix Pro for High Dynamic Range work).

Some time ago (in fact around a month and a day before a new version came out) I bought a copy of Photoshop. I’m proud to be able to say that I know what nearly a quarter of the buttons do now. But I really want the newest version, because that works best with the RAW files (images direct from the sensor) that my cameras produce.

Now you can’t really buy Photoshop any more. Instead you rent it by the month. Up until now I’ve not been that keen on that model, I much prefer owning things. However, in a world where (no – this is not  a movie trailer) new versions of cameras and software come out at least once a year, renting makes quite good sense. Particularly as they have a deal at the moment where students and academics can get pretty much all of Adobe software for around fifteen pounds a month by signing up for a Creative Cloud subscription.

People spend more than that on cigarettes, and for your money you get access to the latest versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat Pro, Dreamweaver and lots of other things that would probably be useful if I knew what they did. The offer is open until the 27th of October. Well worth a look.

Nokia Glance Background Pictures

 

One of the many nice things about having a Nokia phone is that it provides “glance” content. This is stuff that appears on the screen when the phone is locked. The display is not very bright and seems to have a negligible effect on battery life, but it does add a lot of value. Currently the glance content is just the time and the charge status, but hopefully over time it will extend to include missed calls and alarms, and maybe even calendar details.

However, right out of the blue, Nokia have released a beta version of a program that lets you put pictures on your glance screen. The application ships with a few pre-set pictures, including the rather nice tiger above, but you can also process your own and add them to the four that cycle round. If you have a Nokia phone that is running the GDR 2 release (this is being rolled out at the moment) then you really should grab a copy and have a play it really is rather neat. You can get the program here.

3D Printing Fun at C4di

Well, that was fun. Peter, David, Helen, Paul and myself all got together to talk about 3D printing and scanning at C4di. I took along Una, my Ultimaker printer, David, Helen and Paul took along their 3D scanner and MakerBot printer and Peter showed off his “Richmond” printer.

Within no time the place was full of the smell of hot plastic and the sound of machines whirring away. We had a huge audience (in that there were lots of people, not that they were giants) and they seemed to really enjoy finding out about 3D printing. I started things rolling, with a quick zoom through my presentation about how I got into making things and then Peter followed up with a talk about how he came to design and build his own 3D printer from scratch. As you do.

Finally David rounded off with a description of how 3D printing and scanning technology is being used in his business and how it will undoubtedly develop in the future. Helen and Paul were showing off their modelling and scanning skills and the whole thing ended with lots of happy people wandering round, taking a look at the technology and getting to grips with it. Without getting their hands burned.

Thanks to Jon Moss for setting up the session and C4di for hosting it.

Postgrad Party Fun

We had our Postgraduate Welcome party today. Some of the same attractions as lst week’s Undergraduate paty, including the Occulus Rift, which I had a go with and turns out to be great fun.  We had the racing cars. And some of the same quiz questions.

These folks came first and were very pleased with their prize. As they should be.

These are the folks that came second.

And this is the “Malteaser” team who came third. But they did get two boxes…

My favourite question from the quiz was this:

Any ideas?