Applicant Day Meeting

Some of the folks at the briefing. Sorry if I missed you off the shot.

The university is soon going to be starting the round of Applicant Open Days for this year. Perhaps you’ve been invited. As part of the preparation we had a meeting today about what we are going to be doing on campus to make sure everyone has a good time and learns a lot. And I was asked to say a few words about what we do in our department (but not to tell any jokes). I told a joke anyway, as you do, and learned a few things that we can add to our open day experience, which was nice.

Cheese Lander is Coming To Windows 8

I spent some time today (lunchtime actually) playing with the latest version of MonoGame 3.0. This is the awesome framework that lets you take XNA games and run them on a growing number of platforms. I was interested in seeing if I could get a game to run on my Microsoft Surface. And I did. Behold, above you can see the venerable Cheese Lander actually running on my machine. Works a treat, and you can remote debug over WiFi. I’ll be talking more about this in my Rather Useful Seminar tomorrow.

Using Everything Everywhere at Hull

To be honest, I don’t use my phone much to talk to people. But when I do, I expect it to work. Last week it didn’t. And text messages didn’t get through either. Most annoying and embarrassing. I’ve had this problem before on the university campus, with a number of different phones. I thought it was just me until I spoke to James, who is also with EE (Everything Everywhere, a result of the merger of Orange and T-Mobile).

The good news is I think I’ve solved it. Delving into the mobile network settings on the handset I found that the Network selection option was set to “Automatic”. This means (I think) that the phone will search through available mobile networks and find one it is able to use. I wondered what would happen if I changed this to manually force the phone to select my network. So I brought up the menu to pick the network and found a couple of EE networks in the list. I tried each one in turn and, sure enough, one of them rejected calls and bounced text messages, while the other seems to work fine. So I’ve left the phone set to that version of EE.

I’m not sure if there is any downside here, my theory is that Orange and T-Mobile have “merged” their networks by simply giving them both the same name and one of them doesn’t work properly. This might mean I’m only using one network, rather than both of them, but I haven’t lost a call (that I know of) or failed to send a text message since I made the switch, which is definitely an improvement.

Update on Tuesday, January 22, 2013 at 12:19PM by Rob

Ha. As soon as you blog about fixing something it breaks again. Still got problems with this. In fact, after discussion at coffee, lots of people with different devices on different networks have been suffering from problems recently. Perhaps it is the "upgrading" to 4G that we are hearing so much about....

Printing Lumia Cases

My printed case, and Joanna. The cutout for the camera fits absolutely perfectly.

BrianT popped a comment on the blog last week about the Lumia printing templates that Nokia have just released. They can be used with a 3D printer to allow you to print your own shells for the Lumia 820 phone. You get designs for the shell plus the buttons. You can download them here. What with having a Nokia 820 and a 3D printer to play with I thought I’d had a go. Initial results weren’t successful because the back section is very slightly curved in the original Nokia designs, which for a 3D printer like mine is impossible to print (although other kinds of printers will do this kind of shape). However, a chap on Thingiverse has created a Makerbot version of the case with a flat bottom. This prints a treat, as you can see above. The only thing I don’t like is the Makerbot logo, what with me having an Ultimaker printer and all.  But I can fix that by spending a few minutes in FreeCAD. In fact I can put whatever I like on there. In any colour I like.

The shell snaps onto the phone just like a “proper” one and I was very surprised to find that even the tiny buttons fit well and work OK, although I’m going to have to do a bit of trimming to make them move smoothly.

Remember that the lack of a 3D printer doesn’t stop you from making your own unique phone cases. Places like Sculpteo will take your designs and print them, including full colour if you really want it. Kudos to Nokia for making these drawings available for anyone to use.

Young Developers Launch Session

Hi to everyone!

I actually met up (over Skype) with the Young Developers today for the first time. They are taking part in a programme being run by Seton Hall University in New Jersey which aims to teach programming using Windows Phone as the target platform. A great bunch. They even laughed at my jokes.

I’m looking forward to working with you all over the coming weeks as we get started on the course. Feel free to get in touch and let me know what you want to build for your phone. This is going to be such fun.