Christmas Wrapping

I took this picture with my Lumia 920, fiddled with it a bit and then posted it onto Flickr, all from the phone. Not bad eh?

I spent a reasonable sized chunk of today wrapping presents. I’m rubbish at this. Firebox used to have this “crap-wrap” service where they’d wrap something badly for you, to save you working at being awful. I could give them tips. My Auntie Julie once spent a while working in a store in York wrapping presents for customers. She got really good at it. You could always spot her presents because of the neat edges and perfect corners.

I notice that some wrapping paper you can buy has a grid printed on the back so that you can cut things squarely. Of course the stuff I got didn’t have that. However, after spending the morning sticking tape to myself and cutting things the wrong size I have learnt one thing from the whole experience:

“Always start wrapping the biggest thing first. Then, when it turns out that you have cut the paper too small for it, you can use the resulting piece to wrap the next one down in size”.

Head Tracking and Helicopters

Hand tampered hat with tracking LEDS

Number one son is here over Christmas, which is great. He’s brought his “proper PC” with a hairy graphics card and a helicopter game which is great fun to watch him play. Particularly the bit where he spends five minutes doing pre-flight checks, starting the engines, aligning the controls, lifting off and then instantly crashing sideways into the tarmac.

He’s been experimenting with head tracking, where you put a camera on the monitor which tracks three leds that are attached to the headgear of your choice (in our case a Visual Studio baseball cap). It works very well. Particularly the bit where you put a piece of exposed film in front of the camera to filter out the visible light and only allow the infra-red leds to show through.  (Thanks to Simon for the LEDs by the way).

After a bit of careful configuration we now have a system which allows the player to look around the cockpit of the helicopter. It’s not completely real of course, since when you move your head the view itself stays in the same place, but it is good enough to be useful apparently. Great fun.

Wii U Nintendo Land Coin Drop

The Wii U is growing on me quite a bit. Mostly with NintendoLand. I’ve worked my way around all the mini-games now and they are all fun. The Donkey Kong themed game, where you have to tip the controller to roll a little wagon (containing your head on a spring) over a fiendish obstacle course, is great fun if a bit frustrating. And I’m spending a lot of time on the throwaway mini-game which involves dropping coins (which you win for completing games) into a playfield where they bounce down to targets (the blue bits at the bottom of the screen).  This is determinedly eight bit, even down to the sound and cheesy graphics, but is still tricky and horribly addictive.

New Doorbell

I don’t have any pictures of doorbells, but I do have a picture of a teapot.

It seems that, where doorbells are concerned when you have replaced all the batteries and it still doesn’t work properly it is time to buy a new one. The old one has served us well. The switch in the bell push broke and so I unsoldered it and swapped it for the configuration switch to eke another three years of life out of it. I was particularly proud of this soldering job because I did it without actually using any solder. At the time I could find my soldering iron but not the solder to go with it. Then I went through a patch where I had loads of solder, but the iron had vanished. Now I’ve got both readily to hand, but I don’t need either of them just right now.

Anyhoo, I got the new one from Homebase. It wasn’t particularly expensive but it has a whole ton of different melodies and the sounds lack the square wave sound of the previous one. We’ve found a suitably tacky sound to reward visitors with and so, if anyone comes to see us there is now a slightly higher chance of the door being answered.

Hull Global Game Jam Lives

If you liked Three Thing Game, you’ll love Global Game Jam. It is the same, only the fun goes on much longer. Twice as long. It also lets you meet up with gaming experts and specialists in media and content creation, as well as programmer types.

For Hull students it is pretty much perfectly timed, at the end of the inter-semester week, far away from any coursework deadlines. You must, must, must take part.

Find out more and sign up at the web site: http://globalgamejamhull.com/