Startech Docking Station–One plug to bind them all

It’s been a few years since I went mostly mobile. I have a big desktop machine at home, but I only use it when I want to do some space heating, or move some dust around the room. The rest of the time I plug my laptop into network, keyboard, mouse, display, external hard disk and power supply each time I arrive home. It’s a bit of a pain to be honest. Whet I really want is a box which lets me do the connecting thing, but with one cable.

That’s what the Startech Universal Docking station lets me do.A single high speed USB 3 connection gives me keyboard, screen and all the other gubbins except power. It seems to work too. The video connection uses a technology called DisplayLink and lets me connect two external monitors to my lovely Microsoft Surface. There is some cunning compression involved in sending the video, but it seems to work fine with office productivity and software development, along with watching videos. It also makes arriving somewhere a lot easier. I’ve persuaded the folks at work to get me one for the office, and I think I’ll pretty soon have one for home use.

Monsters University

They even have a fake university web site, which is well worth a look.

We went to see Monsters University tonight. A prequel to Monsters Inc,, one of my favourite films ever, it tells the story of how Mike and Sculley got together and started their child scaring career. It’s a good romp, but for me it didn’t have anything like the emotional depth of the first film. There are some great moments and the animation is astonishingly good, but since there was no way it could have the character “Boo” I guess it was always going to be a step down from the original.

Having said all that the short film they showed before the main feature, The Blue Umbrella, was an absolute master class in how to fill a little film with emotion. When you get to this level the fact that the pictures were made using computers seems completely incidental. They just used the tools to make something quite wonderful, and almost worth the price of admission by itself. I really hope it makes it onto the Blue Ray release.

Birthday Animal Crossing

Last week I found out that my age entitles me to a discount on my haircut. The last time this happened was when I was eight years old. I hope I didn’t upset the hairdresser though. Having asked for my age and informed me of the money I could save she probably expected me to be pleased, rather than baffled. In the end I left a rather large tip, exactly equal to the discount that I could have had. Anyone who has met me will know that I’m not one for spending much on hair styling, so this won’t really free up a lot of funds, but it still feels odd to be offered a saving just because I am now “officially old”.

And today it was my birthday. And the great thing about it was that I got given toys, among them some “Despicable Me” models and a copy of “Animal Crossing New Leaf”. I remember the first time I played Animal Crossing on the Gamecube. After playing it for two weeks I eventually had to force myself to stop because it was just taking up too much time. I fared a little better with the Nintendo DS versions, at least I could carry them around with me and play now and then. And now we have the latest version. This one is different because you not only get to take part in the community, you also get to run it when, for reasons that are not really adequately explained, you are elected Mayor as soon as you arrive in your new town.

As part of enrolment you have to tell your assistant when you were born. And she gets ever so excited if you arrive on your birthday, take it from me. I’ve not really spent that much time in the town of “Cheesy” yet, but it looks like the usual fun and games just getting along with all the folks who live in the neighbourhood, doing stuff and making friends.

If you like the previous versions of the game you’ll love this one. If you’ve not played the game before, but are hankering for somewhere to go that is just plain nicer than anywhere else, full of folks who are quirky but not nasty and lots of things to do, then it might well be for you.

DecalGirl: A Model of an Internet Business

This is one of my designs for my Surface RT. I just like the colours.

While I was at the Imagine Cup I was admiring the rather nice skin that Ben Riga had on his Surface device. Turns out that it is supplied by Decalgirl. Ben showed me the web site and within no time I was wasting hours trying to find the perfect skins for my devices. Then I found out that you can upload your own artwork and I then lost even more of my life finding suitable pictures and uploading them to their skin design pages. Thanks Ben.

Anyhoo, the skins arrive in a couple of weeks and I’m looking forward to seeing how they have turned out. But for me the reason for mentioning the company is that I reckon that they are just about the perfect web trading operation. Their site has a snazzy design and is quick to use. Within seconds of arriving on the home page for the first time I’m offered the chance to sign up to get a discount on my first order. Then, when I don’t buy anything for a while I get a follow up email with an even better discount. When I left my partially completed order on the system for a few days I got an email reminding me my order is still out there and giving me a chance to finalize it. Then I get regular emails detailing the progress of the order and I’m sure that I’ll get more over time as new designs appear. And all done in a way that leaves me thinking that I’m not being badgered to buy stuff, but helped along with my purchases. Very, very well done.

If you are involved in ecommerce and want to see it done well (and by the by find some awesome skins for your various devices) then they are well worth a look.

Difficultifier is “People’s Choice” at Hacked

Hacked presentations, an augmented reality remote controlled quadcopter game. Amazing.

This afternoon we had the judging and the presentations at Hacked.. After working tirelessly through the night on my solution nipping back to the hotel for a shower and a few hour’s sleep I had to get everything working for the 12 o’clock deadline. Of course I’d made one of the standard project mistakes, I’d tried to add lots of extra features without getting the core behaviours working, and so it was time for a few hours of frantic fiddling to get something working that could be shown off. At the very last minute things came together and I was in a position to put on a reasonable show.

There were lots (and I mean lots) of presentations. That we finished before midnight is a testament to the skills of the presenters and the backstage staff who kept everything ticking along rapidly. Each team had precisely ninety seconds to present, which was fortunate for me because I had precisely ninety seconds of content. The good news is that everything worked. The great news is that I managed to win “People’s Choice” award. This is voted for by those taking part at the contest and I was very, very pleased to win it.

Anyone who won a prize got to spend some time in the VIP box at Indigo while waiting to have their picture taken. Very posh. Then I had to zoom off to catch my train back to Hull and real life.

Hacked was wonderful. It must have cost a small fortune. The venue was amazing, the food was great (and free) and the organisers worked really hard to make sure that the delegates (who had not paid to attend) had a splendid time. When they hit a problem at the event (for example some issues with the WiFi) they escalated their response until everybody was sorted out.

I really, really, hope that there is another one, and I really really hope that I can go along. I’ve put some details on the project on my Difficultifier page.