fisharepeopletoo

Horse Chestnuts Roasting On An Open Fire

It’s now a little bit too close to Christmas to be true conker season, but Bluetooth Conkers can be downloaded from here.

It’s very basic at the moment, with graphics and power ups (a bit of games slang I’ve picked up) to be added in a couple of weeks, but it’s been instructive to make.

What seemed like quite a simple idea turned out to be a bit of a battle to put into practise.

The programming was done by Charlotte Pakes, a multimedia graduate with application and a reasonable amount of programming skill, but in the end she had to get some help from Daniel Blackburn, and the two of them had to do a bit of head scratching and fishing around for hints online.

And so far she’s only found a couple of Nokia phones it’ll work on.

It seems a shame that it’s difficult to mess around like this and build fun things for phones, so we’re going to make the code open source when it’s been tidied up, along with Charlotte’s thoughts about problems she came up against, so that other people with a similar level of skill can have a go at making their own daft Bluetooth games.

And now that the hard work has been done, I already have some more ideas of my own for daft Bluetooth games.

Bluetooth Fortune Cookies anyone?

(Here’s the wikipedia conkers page, by way of an explanation.)

The Hour of Fun

That's actually me playing against myself, which turns it straight into work.

Mobile Straight Edge

I’ve now done ten months without either a TV or fixed line Internet connection at home.

Which has given me a keen appreciation of the mobile phone internet.

The BBC WAP site is good, for sports scores and  “Cat stuck up tree, the Al Qaeda link” rolling news.

The National Rail timetable service is also useful, with handy little things to click like “My recent journeys” “Last train” and “Opposite direction”, that save thumb ache and waiting for too many new pages, which can still be slow, even with a 3G phone.

What there isn’t though is any mobile entertainment (for someone who doesn’t play computer games), something that makes use of being out and about in the world.

Having to make my own “olden days” fun, I search for Bluetooth devices just to see what funny names people have given their phones (Ok ok, maybe I should be getting out less).

So if you come across “Runes of Destiny” on a windswept Northern platform, that’s me.

A Lovely Drop

My Real Ale shame.

(If only the brewers weren't all such big Tolkien fans.)

Fourth Estate Management

OK, there's no getting round this one, no matter how often you quote Jane Jacobs and Elinor Ostrom:

"Journalists In China Get RFID Tags

China's Information Office of the State Council has announced that effective immediately journalists will have embedded RFID tags in their press passes to facilitate easy monitoring through checkpoints.

The electronic identification system helps display the journalists' personal data on a computer to show their identification when they pass the security check gates.

This appears to only apply to foreign and domestic journalists who deal directly with China's State Council on a daily basis, and therefore need quick access to the press conference briefing areas."

From China RFID News