Toys

A couple of weeks ago I "volunteered" to help with a visit by some high school pupils at the university. Our task was to sell computing as a possible career to those who weren't necessarily interested in it - so obviously it was an excuse to roll out some toys to play with. My job was helping to look after a 3D printer, something I've not every had a shot on before. This was a bit smaller than the concrete printing one at Loughborough but still quite interesting to see.

Some interesting shapes we printed. The thing at the front is meant to be a Penrose triangle, the clip is for food bags, and the bike was an Airfix-style kit.

The printer in action

We had the aim of giving a Stirling branded clip to every one of our visitors. Unfortunately they were quite tricky things to print and several ended up with missing parts like the one near the top.

What happens when things go wrong.

Various other cool widgets.

I've also recently taken delivery of a very shiny new machine to assist with the project I'm working on. This has 24 CPU cores, and a Titan X GPU (over 3000 GPU cores) - in short, very fast. Lovely.

Finally, not so much a toy, but here are some cakes I made recently for the leaving do of one of the chaps in my office. Tasty indeed.