Keeping Fit with Wii Fit Plus

I took this picture, and the one on yesterday’s blog, while I was out in India at the Imagine Cup World Finals in 2006. We visited Akbar’s Tomb to do some work there, and I tried to look busy by taking lots of photographs.

I’ve been playing with the Wii Fit Plus software. This uses the Wii Balance Board to keep you fit. I was quite pleased to find that, since I last used the Wii Fit a while back, I’ve only put on a couple of pounds. However, I did tell it I was wearing heavy clothing……

The game is pretty much the same as before really, although there are some neat new exercises (I like the Kung Fu one) and enhancements to the older ones. All of the exercises are now unlocked at the start, which seems sensible to me, and by the end of half an hour I’d managed to work up a bit of a sweat. I’m trying, again, to get some kind of an exercise regime going, and with a bit of luck this might fit the bill. If you will pardon the pun.

Tom Speaks

If you want to get ahead, get a blog. Last week I reported that Iain had started blogging, and today I’m pleased to be able to tell you that Tom Hulton-Harrop is now also blogging.  Tom is one of our final year students, very into programming and XNA.

Imagine Cup Live Meeting Fun

Well, I did my Imagine Cup Live Meeting today. Just me sitting on my own in my little room with a headset on, talking to students all round the world who must have got up early/stayed up late to find out how to succeed in the Imagine Cup Software Development challenge.

It all seemed to go OK, although it is a bit un-nerving when you are just speaking out into the void with no feedback other than a set of coloured indicators showing how happy the audience is. I knew that green was good, and red was bad, but when a couple of lights turned blue I had completely forgotten what that meant. I thought it was either “Speak more slowly or speak more loudly” and so I solved the problem by SPEAKING SLOWLY AND LOUDLY for a while until the lights went green again.  Actually, I’ve just thought some more. Blue could mean “speak more quietly” or  “speak more quickly”. Oh well.

If you were in the audience, thanks for turning up, I hope we managed to answer all your questions. I think my finest moment was when somebody asked “How many countries are in the Imagine Cup?” and I finally managed to come up with “All of them”. Actually, as Matt informed me a second after that, the real answer is 70.

If you have any other questions that sprang out of the presentation you can post them in the forums, which you can find here:

http://imaginecup.com/forums/18.aspx

When the presentation had finished I left my microphone switched on for a few minutes, which meant that the assembled multitude were treated to the sound of my heavy breathing for a while. Sorry about that.

Marking and the Micro Framework

Spent a big chunk of today (like yesterday and the day before) marking exam scripts. However, I did find time to upgrade my system to the .NET Micro Framework version 4.0. This platform is getting really interesting just now, with some fantastic hardware coming out and a whole set of great new features for embedded developers. I’ve been a fan of the framework ever since I saw one of my C# programs running on a device the size of my fingernail.

Much more fun than marking.

Using Digital Photo Frames as Lamps

I was wondering the other day why nobody had thought of using digital photo frames as lights for macro photography. So I thought I’d find out for myself. I’ve got a couple of little frames (the ones that you can now pick up less than 20 quid in some places). So I made some images of single colours using Photoshop Elements and spent some time balancing the frames precariously over the two model cars I wanted to  photograph.

You can see how I arranged things here. I used one frame as the “sky” and the other to light the background.  You can just see the front of the cars peeking out from underneath the black frame at the front. I just used white paper as the background.

Once I had the frames lined up I put the camera on the tripod and fired it up. I was using a macro lens to focus onto my tiny cars and it was hard to keep everything sharp. I ended up using a really small aperture (F16 or so) to get as much depth of field as possible. At that aperture, with the camera set to 200 ASA, I was exposing for a couple of seconds or so.

I’m quite pleased with the results. The great thing about working like this is that changing the colour of the light is very easy, you just advance the frame to the next coloured image. On the picture frame I had, I could do this using the remote control for the frame, so I didn’t have to touch anything.

So,  as a light source the frames do work. The light you get is not that bright, but it is very even, which is nice. This is probably as effective as using a small light tent,  and it works best if you can get the frames really close to the items being photographed. I’m certainly going to try some more later.