Batman 2: DC Super Heroes for PS Vita

… and you get a free Lex Luthor model too.

I really like my PS Vita. I’ll like it even more when the Pinball Arcade people get the Twilight Zone pinball table onto it. However, that will be for a future blog post. Today I picked up a copy of Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes. I’ve always liked the Lego series of games, with their great characterisations and polished gameplay, and this implementation is just as charming as earlier ones.

They make a point of mentioning that the characters now actually speak, which is nice enough, although I always liked the way that they managed to make gestures and sound effects work so well. The PS Vita experience is remarkably like that on the big screen, although each area seems a little bit smaller than the ones I remember from other games. The emphasis is on teamwork, of course, and your computer controlled buddy is just as keen to help as a real one would be. It looks like you can do two player cooperative mode too , which is how the game should really be played.

The puzzles are mildly taxing, and it is impossible to die or get stuck, something which at my age I find really attractive in a videogame. There is also the attraction of being able to play as Superman later on, which will be fun.

If you have  PS Vita and you like Lego games then you won’t feel short changed by this, I’m enjoying ploughing my way through the levels.

Fun Fact: The original physics routines in the first Lego games were written by a graduate from our game development course at Hull, who saved the company a fortune by removing the need for them to buy an expensive physics engine.

Nokia 920 Wireless Charging

Pad of Power – Pity it isn’t Yellow..

When I bought my Nokia Lumia 920 I was offered a free wireless charging pad. Today it arrived in the post. It is a slim, white, affair with a slightly beefier power supply than the one that came with the phone. You plug it in, place your Lumia on the pad and it charges the phone.

That’s it.

It just works. It takes a bit longer than wired connection and it does work if the phone is in the case, although in this case it seems to take slightly longer and the phone itself gets warm. This is either because there is greater inefficiency if the phone isn’t directly in contact with the charging base, or perhaps the case keeps in the normal charging heat you get when you charge a battery. Either way I rather like it. The only thing I’m less keen on is the charging light, which is an ultra-bright white led. If you have the charger on your beside table you had best point the light away from you as it is super bright in the dark. If you’re like me you’ll have dreams where you are being chased by people wielding powerful torches until you turn it round a bit.

I can now feel the tiniest pang of pity as I watch number one wife plug her iPhone in every night for charging. Nice enough phone, just not keeping up with the times.

Blogging the Rob Miles Way

I’ve been blogging now for over ten years. I’m still not sure why. The best explanation I can come up with is that I’m happier blogging than not. And having done it for so long it would seem silly to stop.

At one time I thought that writing a blog would make my life more interesting, in that I’d start doing interesting things just so I can blog about them. It hasn’t quite worked out that way, but blogging has provided a place where I can jot down things that happen so that I can go back and read them later. It has also vastly improved my writing style and speed, so that I can dash off an article like this in around 15 minutes (I’m timing myself). If you are thinking about starting blogging, here are a few tips from someone with a lot of experience, if nothing else.

Pay for your services: I get my hosting from Squarespace, store my pictures on Flickr and host my domain names at Free Parking. There are lots of free services out there, but I really like the way that if I have a problem I can talk to someone with a financial stake in making me happy again.

Get a domain name: I was lucky enough to be able to get the use of robmiles.com. You might find that your name has gone though. Not a problem. I’m a big fan of running words together to make domain names. For a while I had theresalotofitabout.com but I couldn’t figure out what to do with it. Make a name that fits you and then register it. Your blog host will provide a way you can link that domain name to your site (Squarespace make this very easy) so that you don’t have an identity which is tied to any particular service provider.

Blog regularly: You don’t have to blog every day. Only an idiot would try to do that. Just make sure you have a regular heartbeat of a blog every now and then. If you start off blogging every day and then stop for a week it can feel like you have to do seven posts before you can put down that thought you just had. This makes a mountain between you and your next blog post that gets bigger every day. Just blog when you feel like it.

Blog for yourself: If you start blogging thinking that you are going to make a huge name for yourself and will get thousands of worldwide follows then think again. Unless you are very lucky, or very rude, you won’t get much attention. Your mum will read your blog, but there is no guarantee that anyone else will. I started blogging because I enjoyed the challenge, and because I wanted to improve my writing skills. I also thought it would be vaguely useful to be able to point people at my blog if they wanted to find out about things I’ve done. I also use the blog as a way of jotting down things that I’ve discovered and don’t want to have to discover again.

Don’t blog everything: There’s a lot of stuff in my life I don’t blog about. Don’t feel that because you have to blog every day you have to asset strip your private life just to get a post together.

Find a group: At Hull we have hullcompsciblogs.com which acts as an aggregator for blog posts. Posts from lots of our students are brought together there and shared. I have a habit of going on there and finding out what people are up to. Since my blog is on there this also means I have a “ready made” audience for my posts.

Syndicate: When I started blogging I found that people who wanted to comment on a blog post would just put their comment on my blog directly. That doesn’t happen now. Instead people will comment on Twitter or on Facebook. Look at using If This Then That to alert people to your posts, and make sure that you watch the feeds to catch comments and reactions. I use Windows Live Writer to create my posts, that has a plugin that will automatically send a tweet each time I make a blog post.

Track your Traffic: One nice thing about Squarespace is that it gives you very good traffic analysis. I also use Google Analytics to see what is happening on my site. This can be quite depressing, but it does provide a way you can find out if your audience is growing (it should do) and which of your posts were the biggest hits with readers.

Enjoy your blogging: I managed to find a voice, a style and a workflow that works for me. Every now and then I have the “Oh crikey, I have to do a blog post now” moment, but these are fairly few and far between. If blogging becomes a chore or a pain then you should either stop and do something else, perhaps a project website or get involved with a forum. Or write poetry, or a novel. Whatever you do I’d strongly advice keeping writing though, it is a very useful skill to have.

Learning and Teaching Conference

Some of the audience. There is another picture on Flickr, click through to find my photostream. The camera is going through a French Impressionist blurry phase at the moment (or I didn’t hold it still enough). Apologies for that.

Earlier this year I was gobsmacked to find that I had been given a “Inspiring Teacher Award” as part of the Student Led teaching awards at the university. Very nice. As a result I also got invited to do an “Oral Bite” (is there any other kind) about being inspiring at the University Annual Learning and Teaching Conference.

So on Monday I wrote five minutes worth of material and this lunchtime I got to strut my stuff. It went very well and they were a lovely audience, once I found my slide deck. There were also some great sessions on teaching, the future, and where the university is going with all this. It was really nice to meet up with a bunch of folks who teach quite different things, in different ways, but all with the focus on giving the students the best learning experience possible.

There were quite a few questions on blogging and stuff like that. Stay tuned for my post tomorrow, where I’ll be doing a blog post on how I make the publishing legend that is the Rob Miles blog…..

Kinect Augmented Reality Session

Some time last year I went down to London to give a talk about programming the Kinect sensor (and to gratuitously plug my Kinect Book) at an AR in Education Event organised by JISC.  The videos of the sessions have been available for a while and since this is my blog I thought I’d mention them….