Cheap Ring Light

Some time ago I bought a ring light for my camera. This puts a bunch of super bright LEDs around the lens for illumination with no shadows. Works very well and wasn’t that expensive.  It is great for taking pictures of small items. I’ve just discovered that you can get something very similar for well under a fiver.

The Wilko Multi-purpose LED light is actually a very good light. We are going to use one to light up our summerhouse in these dark winter nights. However, it also has a hole in the middle where you can put a small camera lens, and so it also makes a rather good ring light. At less than a fiver it is well worth a look.

Worth tracking down, whether you are after lighting up underneath the stairs or taking interesting close-ups.

Tech Ed Deck Frenzy

Spent today working on my presentations for Tech Ed 2010. In exactly a week I’m going to be out in Berlin getting ready for the conference. I’m giving two sessions this year:

Wed. 10th November WPH307 – “Building Windows Phone Games with Microsoft XNA and Visual Studio 2010” at 12:00 pm in Hall 7.1b London 2

Thu. 11th November WPH310 – “Giving your Windows Phone XNA Games Plenty of Whizz and Bang” in Hall 7.3b Europa 1

I’m going in demo heavy for this one, with loads of stuff to show what you can do with Windows Phone and XNA. All the demo programs will be available for download so that you can download them and submit them to Marketplace learn how to write your own great games from them.

Should be fun. If you are going along to Berlin it would be great if you could drop by and say hi.

Saturday Photography

The light today was so good that I could have quite happily spent the entire day taking photographs.

I’ve finally found a camera/lens combination that does justice to the windows in Hull Holy Trinity Church.

Pong HD in the Windows Marketplace

Harry Overs, one of our second year students, has taken the version of Pong that he wrote for coursework in his first year and made it into a Windows phone game. It is now on the Marketplace for anyone to download. Harry got a free Marketplace membership from Dreamspark.com (any student can do this) and submitted the app a little while back. He did the bulk of the development on the emulator and then just popped into my office and tried the game on my device to make sure that the touch and tilt elements were properly calibrated.

Well done Harry. If you want to check out the game you can find it by searching the Marketplace for Pong HD. Any other Hull students out there with games they want to try on a real device, just drop round to my office and we’ll fire them up.

Note: This doesn’t include the two First Year students who bought the first two HTC HD7 devices in Hull, and stopped me from getting one….

Idiot Rob and his broadcast receipts

I’ve got lots more like these…

Today I finally got around to claiming money for some work that I did ages ago. (Actually, the results of the work have just been published here) . As part of the claims process Microsoft, not unreasonably, likes to see receipts of all the things I bought, including food and bits and bobs. So, I did what I usually do, which is make up a zip archive of all the relevant paperwork and put it on SkyDrive for Microsoft to read. This is not particularly confidential, so I just made a folder, dropped the file into it, emailed the link and thought nothing more of it.

Turns out this was really stupid. I forgot that lots of things out there are watching what I do and then sharing that information with lots of other people, including folks on  Facebook. I got a message last night that the file was visible and that Facebook had told all my friends about it.  I changed the protection so nobody could see it any more, but of course there are by now thousands of copies of the file out there on the web, and probably even a video on YouTube.

There’s nothing in the file that anyone couldn’t find out about me by doing a simple search of my name (apart from some aspects of my eating habits I guess) but I guess this is a salutary lesson to anyone who uses the cloud on a regular basis that if you want to keep thinks private, you should mark them private. Security through obscurity was never really an option, and with this kind of “auto publicity” it is now even less of one.

Update on Friday, October 29, 2010 at 04:35PM by Rob

Turns out that this is easy to fix:

1. Go to your Windows Live Messenger Social page so that you can see the item you didn't want to put there.
2. Click the "gears" icon in the top right of the offending item to open the "Options" menu.
3. Select "More Options" from the menu.
4. On the page that appears next, clear the tickbox in "Updates about shared documents on SkyDrive"
5. Click Save.

No more updates about saved files.