Thursday, March 12, 2009 at 10:30PM All the clocks in my house are slightly wrong, but if I take the average of them all I get the right time. Except sometimes. Why?
Life Wednesday, March 11, 2009 at 10:13AM I fondly remember Polaroid cameras. I even had one for a while. You forgave them their dodgy colours and blurry nature because they were so instant. They are pretty much gone now, but the desire for instant printed gratification hasn’t, so Polaroid are still making portable devices that let you print tiny pictures. Of course, the colours are still a bit dodgy, and there is a bit of blur, but they actually look pretty darned good.
The thing I’m talking about is the Polaroid Pogo. This is a device around the size of a portable hard drive, which will print out onto 2x3 inch prints, that can be made into stickers. You send the prints either from your camera using the usb PictBridge interface or via Bluetooth from any device that can transfer files that way (which includes most mobile phones but unfortunately not the iPhone for some reason).
I nearly bought one a while back, but reckoned they were a bit expensive at around 90 pounds. For some reason the price seems to have halved recently, which is either good (we’ve sold so many that we can drop the price) or bad (we’ve not sold any, and so we need to get rid of them). Either way, it worked for me and so I got one from Amazon.
It works a treat. It is particularly good at printing Microsoft Tags. These are the things that you can scan with your mobile phone to direct you to a web site, or business card or something. I can fit a couple of them onto a single 2x3 output and then stick them around the place.
Pogo and printout. You can even follow the tag from the image above, which is pretty amazing.
I can see this being a huge hit down the pub, where you might want to take lots of pictures and then let folks take a copy home. The paper is a tad pricy, working out at around 30 pence per print, but I guess that is the price that you pay for immediacy.
We are going to have a Tag Treasure Hunt in the department at the Mad March Bash (coming soon…) and now I have the perfect device for printing the tags.
Gadgets Tuesday, March 10, 2009 at 12:57PM What did you do this lunchtime? I bought and fitted an immersion heater switch. Turned the power off and everything (it seemed best to do it that way).
Hot showers tonight for everyone..
Life Monday, March 9, 2009 at 12:52PM I will be giving a Red Nose Day Lecture in Rhyme at 11:15 on Friday 13th of March in the Foss Building Lecture Theatre 1. An older boy told me to do it.
The lecture is part of the 08120 Programming 2 course and will be on the subject of class design in C#.
Students who turn up in fancy dress will get out half price.
If you want to sponsor me (and you do, really you do) then you can visit:
Life Sunday, March 8, 2009 at 08:45PM You can’t beat being busy with jetlag. In between writing deathless prose for lectures, trying to find out why we have no hot water and where on earth that thing is that I put down a second ago I’ve been trying to write some poetry.
I’ve decided to give a lecture in rhyme on Friday as part of Comic Relief. I’ve loads of other things that I should be doing, but I’ve given them over the last twenty years or so, and I feel that the tradition really should continue.
I’m going to be talking about class based design in C#. The tradition is that I have to pick up whatever is in the course at that point and give a proper lecture on that subject, but entirely in rhyme. I did think about making the whole thing up on the day, but that is potentially dangerous, and so it was into Powerpoint and on with the rhyming dictionary…
Life 