Al Stewart - Back to the Bedsit tour

If you're of a certain age, like me, then you'll remember Al Stewart. His Year of the Cat album is one of the best records ever made. With Time Passages running it a close second. Both albums had amazing cover art too. Number one wife spotted that he was playing live in Hull tonight as part of his "Back to the Bedsit" Tour. 

Of course I got tickets. 

There were just three musicians on the stage. Dave Nachmanoff, Tim Renwick and Al Stewart himself. And the sound was awesome. The show started with a solo spot from Dave Nachmanoff, which was excellent, and then Al Stewart hit the stage with him for some songs and stories. The stories were a nice element. Any anecdote which contains the phrase "..and then Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel turned up in a silver Rolls Royce...." is alright by me. 

Tim Renwick was introduced as "the man who did all the impressive guitar playing on my albums" and he's lost none of his style. The solos were note perfect and sounded really good. And three really well played guitars (and a bonus violin on one track) made for some splendid versions of some of the classics, including the "Year of the Cat" song of course. 

A great night out, if you've got fond memories of the old albums (and have kept your vinyl originals) then you won't be disappointed.

Developing for Unity and HoloLens at NASA Space Apps Challenge

I've always said that a hackathon is a great place to investigate new technology. It's an occasion where you can spend time concentrating solely on something, and that can be both instructive and useful. So, when I signed up for the Nasa Space App event I was keen to try something new.

I had a tiny go with Unity a while back, which was fun, but I've never written code for a Microsoft HoloLens. Number one son had an idea for an app that let you see where satellites are in the sky or in the ground. The idea was that it would use satellite data to predict positions and then render them in a way that was locked to your present position and orientation. Then you can look around and see what is up there, even through the surface of the earth you're standing on. 

It was quite an objective, particularly as neither of us had developed for the HoloLens before. But we thought we'd have a go. Number one son was in charge of getting the satellite data and doing things with it, while I looked at finding and displaying a globe. 

You can get the Unity framework here. It's free for personal use. If you want to make HoloLens applications you'll need some other things which you can find out about here.  You don't need a physical HoloLens to get started, there's an emulator you can use to find out what your apps will look like. I managed to run the emulator, Unity and Visual Studio on my Surface Pro 3 with 8 Gb of memory and it worked OK (although it got a little upset when I tried to load Adobe LightRoom as well....).

Number one son was using a MacBook Pro for his part of the development, so he installed the Mac version of Unity and the .NET framework and set to. I was amazed that you can do HoloLens development on a Mac, but when we took his code and moved it to the Surface Pro it worked fine, which I found astonishing. Even compiled dll files added as assets moved across.

A Unity solution is driven by the assets that it contains. These can be images, models, scripts, dll files, shaders, sounds and lots of other different things. You create scenes by bringing assets together and create behaviours by binding scripts to events. The scripts can be written in C#. I really like that. 

The items in a scene are fiercely hierarchical. Changes a container will affect the things in it. Scripts can be bound to objects and there are start and update behaviours that you fill in to get your scripts to act on your objects. Variables in your scripts can be mapped onto elements in game objects and used to affect their appearance and behaviour.

If you've played with game development in XNA you'll find the "set things up and then update them every frame" way of working very familiar. But it is both more powerful and more confusing, in that every item in your game can have its own start and update, rather than being driven from a single, central, game engine. You can run your game in the editing environment at any time, and you can turn elements on and off at will. 

Unity have created an asset store that plugs directly into game projects so that it is very easy to find paid (and free) items that you can include in your game. In no time at all we'd found a really nice globe and I'd kind of managed to get it into a Unity project.

There are some settings that need to be customised in Unity for HoloLens development. You can do this by hand (there are instructions here) or you can find a ToolKit that automates the process. 

You create your software in Unity and then use it to build a Visual Studio solution that is compiled and deployed to the target device. We had the HoloLens attached to the Surface Pro via a USB cable, and we ran the program that way. You can use WiFi deployment too, but one of the golden rules of hackathons is that once you've got something to work you stop working on it and move on to the next problem.

Number one son made awesome progress. He found some tools online for computing orbits and even tracked down some 3D models for the satellites themselves. I learned a lot (which is software engineer speak for went more slowly) but I did manage to get a globe displayed and spinning.

With half an hour to go before judging we brought the software over from the Mac, fixed a tiny issue with exceptions in the satellite code and then built and deployed the program to the HoloLens. And then the problems started.

Everything was upside down and wrong way round. The code worked fine in Unity on the PC, but on the device it was wrong. And, since we'd not done anything that could cause this behaviour, we didn't really know how to fix it. Not good. 

After a bit of frantic searching we managed to find this which fixed the problem. By turning off an apparently irrelevant option (MSAA) we got the code to work. This was very annoying. There is no mention of this issue in any of the release notes anywhere. It means that anyone who carefully follows the "getting started" sequence for the HoloLens would be rewarded with a solution that does not work properly and no information as to how to fix it. Not good. 

I was really impressed by the ease with which you can get started and the power of the HoloLens itself. I'm going to try and hang on to my loaned device for as long as I can.

Space Apps Challenge Judging

A tense moment in the judging.....

That was such fun. At the end we had four teams that produced projects that gave Derek, our judge, some meaty developments to get his teeth into. In the end the overall winner was the Fire Finder app, although everyone who took part produced some lovely results. 

I was part of Team "What'sUp", trying to build a HoloLens application that let you look into the "sky" (or the ground) and see what satellite are around relative to your position. It was my first foray into Unity and HoloLens development and it's worthy of a blog post all it's own. Which it will get....

You can find details of what the teams got up to here. Many thanks to c4di for the use of their lovely work area and to Dileepa for hosting the event. And getting us pizza.

Everyone who took part had a whale of a time. All of the starters finished with a working solution. Here's to next year.

NASA Space Apps Challenge

We started our NASA Space Apps Challenge at c4di first thing this morning. We've got teams looking at the NASA challenges and getting to grips with them. We've got satellite trackers, fire reporting systems, solar power simulations and orbiting robots. And another 24 hours or so to finish.....

..although of course it's really all about the stickers...and the pizza....

Mario Kart 8 on Switch

So today, in the middle of getting ready for the Space Apps Challenge, I nipped out to Toys'r'us to get a copy of Mario Kart 8 for my Switch. I've found that the toy retailer is a good place to buy games. The prices rival Amazon's, and this weekend they were giving 10 pounds off any sale of fifty pounds if you have a Toys'r'us membership card.

I do now.

I was intrigued to see how the Amibos work with Mario Kart and so I bought some (which actually came close to free once I've factored in the discount).  The Amibos I've got unlock extra outfits. Fun, but not a must-have I suppose. 

The game is Mario Kart. No surprises there. Although you get lots and lots of tracks, including ones that were previously extra purchases. You also get the ability to hold two weapons rather than one, and there are some new battle tracks. I loved playing previous versions and I love playing this one. Particularly as I'm getting a high quality game experience on a hand held device. 

The more time I spend with the Switch the more I like it. I've put in hours on games simply because I can. Rather than traipsing upstairs and firing up the console, I can put in a few laps in front of MasterChef. I've been told that half the population of Switch owners went out today and bought Mario Kart. I guess the other half will be buying their copytomorrow.

Hull Pixelbots at the MVP Community Connection

Today it was just a simple matter of driving to London, running a few robot races and then back again. And it all went beautifully. The event was held at the RAF Museum in Hendon. So I put the postcode into the satnav and headed out. The journey down was smooth enough, and after a while I was all set up, with just a bit of nervousness about the network connectivity. 

As it turned out, we had a few races and at least one winner. 

This is one of our happy winners, with his winning robot. After the racing it was back into the car, enter another postcode (the one for home) and head back. I got into Hull just after midnight. It was great to meet up with a bunch of folks that I'd not seem for a while and talk "proper shop".

Thanks to Claire for inviting me. 

Amazon Look

So. Amazon have launched the "Echo Look", which is a basically a webcam linked to Amazon which has AI powered fashion sense. Apparently you can use it to tell you if your outfit "works" and take photos that look a bit like fashion shots if you squint your eyes.

I'm not a fan. Are people so desperate for validation that they will now take the opinion of a deep learning AI machine in preference to their own?  And moreover, a machine that has an agenda strongly aligned with selling stuff. If so, I'm afraid the human race may be doomed.

In an attempt to save humanity I therefor present the Rob Miles Deep Learning AI Powered Fashion Guru. Simply run this program each time you want to try out a new look (you may want to change the name).

Windows 10 Creators Edition Clean Install

So yesterday I did a clean install of Windows 10 from a memory key. It was for my HP Sprout, which had got itself into a big of a pickle after I upgraded the hard drive. 

I booted from the memory key and up came the setup program. It had a slight whinge about all the partitions on the disk and so I thought I'd get rid of everything. If you press Shift+F10 at the disk management menu in the Windows 10 installer you get yourself a command prompt. Which you can use to load the Windows Disk Partition Tool, diskpart. So I did.

The Windows disk partition tool is strong magic. Like, make your system not work any more and all your files vanish magic. It lets you specify the fundamental arrangement of the storage areas on your hard disk. The Sprout had all these recovery partitions and weird bits and pieces lying around which I really didn't want. (and of course I'd made a backup). So I used the "clean" command. 

I've not used it before, previously I've removed and merged partitions by hand. But clean makes it much easier. Scarily so. I was expecting some form of confirmation dialog when I issued the command but no, it just went ahead and cleared the drive. Windows 10 then had a shiny empty disk to go to town on, and it did. 

The Windows 10 installation process is now very slick. It's fast too. I had a working operating system around 10 minutes after cleaning the disk. And it rounds off the installation with a chat from Cortana to set the final options for your machine. 

I like the Creators Edition very much. The only downside I've found so far is the fact that the old style command prompt has been replaced with the new fangled PowerShell. The command prompt harks all the way back to MS-DOS, and I really like that. PowerShell is way, way, better, in many ways, but I must admit that for me the command prompt is nicer. However, if you get the PowerShell prompt you just have to type CMD and press return, and your command prompt is back in all it's glory....

Feed the birds

I think the name was carefully chosen to inspire confidence

We're embarking on a bit of garden renovation. I'm not a fan of gardening. It seems to me that you do it and then, after a year or so, you have to do it all over again.

Anyhoo, one thing that we seem to need is a bit of grass where there is presently just tundra. We've put down a bunch of seeds with a really impressive box (see above). I don't think SMART actually means that the seed has a Bluetooth interface, but it wouldn't it be awesome if it did.

Hull Raspberry Pi Jam

Today I was in Hull doing a bit of shopping. As you do. I also dropped into Hull Central Library to give Matt a pixel for his Hull Pixelbot. He's written a lovely blog post about building a robot last Thursday, and I thought I'd give him something extra to work with.  Matt was helping at a Hull Rasp Jam event.

Libraries have changed a bit since we used to take the kids every week to swap their books for different ones. There are still books there, but you can also find crafting sessions, people playing chess and  Raspberry Pi events too. Great stuff. 

I wasn't able to stay long at the jam, but it was great to see lots of people engaging with technology and having fun doing it. I'll try and make a bit more time for the next one. 

Hull Pixelbot Code Version 3.0

The latest version of the Hull Pixebot Code engine is now available on Github. You can use this to download little programs into your robot where they are stored and interpreted. It makes controlling your robot a snap (said the man who wrote it). 

You can get the latest version of the code here

You can get the latest documentation here.

This is a stepping stone on the way to a full scripting language which will run inside the Hull Pixelbot. This version provides support for variables, simple expressions and conditional execution. It is designed to provide the execution engine for the script that I'm working on.

I'm quite proud of it. 

Build a Robot in One Day

The team at the start of the day. Click through for a 360 degree view

Well, that was fun. By the end everybody had a robot moving around and using a distance sensor to notice things. Thanks to c4di for hosting, Robin for providing invaluable support and everyone for getting so absorbed in their building that they forgot two coffee breaks and I had to order them out of the room for lunch.......

Intense concentration....

Washed Up Car-go

One wonderful thing about Hull being City of Culture this year is that lovely little artworks are springing up around the city. You have to look quite carefully in the car park of The Deep to find these ones. Based on perfectly ordinary cars (which will be driven away and sold at the end of the exhibit) the Washed Up Car-go is a musing on just what you find if you go down to the beach today.

I don't think these are factory fitted options

The installations contain projected video and sound effects which come from sea-shell speakers. Well worth seeking out.

Sea shell speakers by the sea shore...