Maybe this blog might also come back to life...

To be honest, just like my Dutch more personal blog, this English more professionally oriented one has been effectively dead for years. The personal one has however had a new post in januari, and has sort of come alive a bit again, mostly around the topic of flying with drones and model helicopters.

Just like I did last januari in Dutch I am not making any promises at all. This post is just here to make sure something is more recent than 2012. To make it visually interesting and give you something to watch, I'll also add something from my YouTube playlist of drone movies:

Bye for now!

SpaceUp Europe, #ILATweetup and Mars

Busy weeks. Lots of (outer) space.
What have I been doing?

Well, first of all I have volunteered (and have been accepted) as part of the Media and Communication Team of the next Mars Analog Field Simulation of the Austrian Space Forum, that will take place in Morocco in februari of 2013. This means I have worked on putting together some of the press kit documents for the recent press conference for the mission that took place last week in Vienna, doing Skype-meetings with the team, being in Innsbruck for the upcoming dress rehearsal and finally being in Innsbruck for the first of the four week mission in februari 2013. I also plan to be writing mobile apps for ÖWF.

Secondly, I was at the awesome #ILATweetup in Berlin last weekend. This was a tweetup event organised by ESA/DLR during the ILA Air Show, where participants where treated to a dense program of interesting talks, a tour of the Zero-G Airbus A-300 and a meet-and-greet with four astronauts, including André Kuipers. I was clearly not the only one taking pictures (and video) during that day..

Finally (for this blog post), I have been at the very first SpaceUp unconference event in Europe, which was at the Cosmodrome in Genk this weekend. Lots of familiar faces were there, and interesting space stuff. While en route to the second day I heard Jens Timmermans of the largest radio station in the Netherlands talking about Twitter trending topics and asking "What's your hashtag for today?". On a whim I texted that I was going to #SpaceUpEU and he almost immediately called me back, giving me some airtime to promote this awesome event on national radio (link to recorded Dutch audio), which was unexpected.

So I have been keeping myself busy.
Tomorrow will be "just an ordinary day at the office".
;-)

Romo second generation protocol has been revealed

It seems that Romotive has released a full description of the new protocol to talk to their second generation Romo smartphone robots on their blog. I have not yet found the time to dig into upgrading my Romo SDK for Windows Phone with this, but I really want to, so keep checking the Codeplex site and this blog for more information on that.

Time for the yearly Layar update, it seems...

After all, I seem to be doing one each calendar year. Except that - surprise, surprise.. - there really isn't one, as far as I'm concerned.

I actually just said it out loud: I've given up on Layar. They are apparently never going to release their software on any device that I (want to) own.

Bye bye, Layar. I wish you all the best without me as a user...

Romo codeplex site is live

It does not contain much (yet), but the Codeplex site I created for my work on a WP7 SDK for controlling a Romo smartphone robot is now published and available.

If you have a revision 1 Romo and a developer unlocked Windows Phone you can now download a pre-alpha XAP file of an app that turns your Romo+smartphone into a moving compass.

Zaagmans has been featured on AppFlow

I just had a look at my phone, and this is what I saw on the AppFlow live tile:

This caused me to pause for a while.
I knew that app icon...
That's Zaagmans, the silly app I made!

Starting AppFlow proved that my app is the one featured app in there:

I'm guessing this is just for the NL marketplace (AppFlow recommends per marketplace now), but I still think it's cool!