Saturday, June 23, 2012 at 05:50PM 
I bought this today to replace my old rechargeable drill, which started to make a funny smell whenever I tried to use it. Who knows what damage I can do with this new one?
Incidentally, I’m a bit confused as to why they call it a “funny” smell. It didn’t strike me as particularly amusing. The only funny smell I can think of is laughing gas. Ho ho.
Life Friday, June 22, 2012 at 04:03PM Another day, another plug from Rob for some Microsoft stuff. Actually I do buy things from other companies too you know, as far as I’m aware Microsoft do not make Strawberry flavoured milk yet.
Anyhoo, they do make some things that are quite nice. I’ve always liked their bendy keyboards, being fairly sure that the main reason that my fingers have not dropped off/seized up yet is that I’ve been using their Natural Keyboards for many years now. They provide very good wrist support and let you type at a more natural angle. Of course you lose all that when you open up your laptop. Until now.
The Microsoft Bluetooth Mobile Keyboard 6000, which you can see above, is intentionally bent. It also comes with a somewhat superfluous numeric keyboard which I’ve left in the box as I can’t see the point of it. But the keyboard is very good. I’ve paired it with the Samsung Slate and it works a treat. It is very thin, so it fits in my bag with no problems, and when I’m typing I can feel the difference.
The key action is pretty good for a device of this type. The Bluetooth keyboard that comes with the Samsung Slate has a very nice action, but is not bendy, and for me some of the keys are now wonky on that keyboard, which is a bit annoying. Actually, the mobile keyboard with the best key action is the Apple Bluetooth one, but unfortunately it isn’t bendy – at least not in a way that would leave it useful afterwards.
I picked up my keyboard cheap from Amazon. They have this thing now where you can find used examples of stuff that you want, and for the first time I tried this. It worked very well, the item arrived well packaged and in good time. This is looking like a good alternative to eBay. None of the bidding daftness, and the prices are very competitive too.
Gadgets Thursday, June 21, 2012 at 08:42PM 
I’ve been spending more quality time with my Ultimaker 3D printer. Making designs from other people is kind of fun, but I really wanted to design and build my own components. So tonight I fired up Autodesk 213D beta and had a go. Turns out to be quite easy and fun. The Autodesk program is quite easy to drive, although it definitely has the feel of beta software, with the odd crash and lockup here and there. You also have to sign into the Autodesk site and the default is to publish your designs for everybody to see, which worried me a bit, particularly as the first design I did was the one above….
It proved quite easy to draw some text, extrude it into 3D and then connect it to a block. The 123D program can export to STL files and I used the Cura program to create the file of printer commands.
Tonight I actually got around to building up the UltiController part of the system which allows me to print objects without needing a computer. I just put the design files onto an SD card, pop the card in the controller and set it off. The printer is behaving itself at the moment, with no leaks (reaches out and touches convenient piece of wood) and did a pretty good job. My first attempt got the size a bit wrong and tried to print one that was a bit large, but I re-rendered the design in Cura with a scale factor of 0.25 and got the result above, which is around half an inch on the long axis.
The next step is to design and make some plastic components to mend the piano, at which point the printer will probably have paid for itself…..
Ultimaker Thursday, June 21, 2012 at 07:13PM If you are a fan of Hull Computer Science Blogs and have a Windows Phone then your life just got even better. Danny Brown has just made a Windows Phone application that provides ready access to all posts on the site, along with Microsoft Marketplace applications published by Hull students, RSS feeds and all sorts. It’s a free download, works a treat and you can get it from the markeplace here.
Link, Windows Phone Wednesday, June 20, 2012 at 11:31AM
Coming to a Windows 8 Phone near you….
Hot on the heels of the Windows Surface announcement, today we had the Windows Phone Summit “sneak peek” at the next generation of Windows Phone. I must admit it looks very nice. Windows 8 phones will be based on the same operating system technology that powers Windows 8. They will be able to sport multiple processors and share driver technology with their bigger brother. They will be able to use Near Field Communication to exchange data with other devices, including Microsoft Surface. Programmers will be able to write games (and other programs) which will be compiled into fast running binary code that executes directly on the processor, with graphics powered by DirectX. There will be support for more screen resolutions. You will be able to upgrade the storage using an SD card. Operating system updates will be sent directly to the phone. And the Start Menu is going to get a bit bigger.
One piece of less good news, for me at any rate. Existing phones will not be upgraded. My lovely Lumia 900 will always be a Windows 7 phone. I can live with that though. When Nissan bring out a new version of the Cube I’m not expecting them to provide a way for me to upgrade my car for free. And actually I love my Cube just the way it is. A new version of Windows Phone 7, version 7.8 (where do they get these numbers from?) will bring some of the UI enhancements to existing devices, which will be nice.
It looks like all my XNA and Silverlight skills will still serve me on the new platform as well as the old one and I can still continue to make a fortune via sales of Cheese Lander on the new device…
All things considered it looks like the phone is on a very good trajectory.
Rob
Just to clarify, the way I understand it, you can continue to create XNA games for Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 8 using the existing toolchain. If you publish the games in the Marketplace they will be available to Windows 7 and Windows 8 phone users. If you want to use any of the new-fangled options, such as directly compiled C++, then you are just targeting the Windows 8 phones and you will have to use the new SDK (as yet unreleased) to do this.
I'm very sad that XNA does not seem to have a future in the brave new Metro world. It is a perfect platform for quick game creation and is great for teaching. I'm hoping that Microsoft aren't going to leave a great big gap in their developer offerings that could be all to easily plugged by frameworks like Playstation Suite for Vita, amongst other non-Microsoft things.
