Dual band transceiver

My latest new toy. I bought myself a handheld dual band transceiver that covers the 2m and 70cm bands. All I have to do now is interpret the Chinese inspired manual to get it working with the local repeaters. Now I can stay in touch, wherever I am.

DevWeek 2012

Another good set of sessions at DevWeek this year. Picked up loads of programming tips. Hope next year might have a track on programming the Raspberry Pi but I think that's probably as likely as a track on assembler :)

Had a good in depth look at Windows 8 and the new visual studio. I think Windows 8 will be good for home / phone users but I can see large companies being happy about the way the UI works with apps and normal Windows legacy applications. Only time will tell if this is Microsoft’s new “Vista”.

The Barbican in London is a great location and the sun was out all week. Here is a picture of a couple of my work colleagues enjoying the sun after some dark sessions in “the pit”. Looking forward to next year.

Pro Kart racing at Rye House

When I’m not writing games in my spare time, I take my son kart racing. Here he is at the second round of the Junior GP Championship at Rye House. This round was incredibly wet with almost continuous rain throughout all three sessions and the final race. My son did very well considering he had never raced in the wet before. These Pro Karts were running slick tyres in the rain, on a track that had standing water. Power slides were the best way to tackle the corners. Here is a picture of my son in second place after exiting the last hairpin. At the end of this year’s season I hope to invest in a kart of our own. My son will then be old enough for us to race in the Pro Kart endurance series where we will share the kart for three hour long races.

My son's first YouTube video

My son has started a YouTube channel. Check out his first video here: Minecraft

The MCTM24 animation was created in After Effects and the screen capture was created using MS Expression Encoder 4 (the joys of having an MSDN account) The video was then put together using MS Live Movie Maker.

EuroGamer Expo 2012

Just bought a couple of “early entry” tickets for the EuroGamer Expo in London. I’ll be heading straight for the retro section.

Raspberry Pi

After trying for hours I managed to get onto the Farnell website and pre-order a Raspberry-Pi. It won't be shipped to me for over a month as the first batch sold out but it'll give me some time to get my head round Linux. With any luck I'll soon have some "retro" games running on them. Check out the Pi website here: Raspberry-Pi

Windows phone port of the remake for Cavern Fighter

Looking forward to developing my Cavern Fighter remake for the Windows phone. The first job was to dig out my old tools and see if I could extract the map data from my Delphi app into something useful. It didn’t take too long for me to use my map making tool to export the data as XML. Now that it is in a more manageable format, I can start to think how It can be used with a new rendering engine. This isn’t going to be a quick project but it makes a change from then day job.

The original level design tool

The original byte data converted into XML