Get Microsoft Copilot to be your Christmas Quiz host

I like to do a Christmas quiz each year with my family. The problem with that is that I never actually get to play the quiz myself. This year, I thought I’d sprinkle a little LLM magic and use GPT4 to be my quiz host instead!

I just gave it a quick test and thought I’d share it here so you can have a try to over the festive period. I’d also love to know if you have used AI for any interactive games?

Christmas Copilot

I decided to use the Bing Chat to run my quiz. This is because it’s free to use GPT4 (the latest and greatest LLM from OpenAI) and it can also search the live web and generate images with DALL-E 3.

Note: Bing Chat and Microsoft Copilot are the same thing at the “free” level, there are just different ways to access them. If you use a work or school account then you get the added security of the conversation happening within the security boundary of your existing Microsoft 365 tenant

Run your quiz

To get started go to bing.com/chat.

For the 1st prompt tell the chat what you want them to be and what you want them to do. Remember, the more detail you put in the prompt, the more accurate the results will be.

💡 Tip: Use Shift+Enter to start a new line in the chat box

Me:
I want you to be a quiz host.
The theme of the quiz is Christmas trivia.
Tell me 15 questions based on the theme. Pause after each question and I will tell you when to ask the next one.
At the end of all the questions you can reveal the answers

Bing:
Alright, I will be your quiz host for Christmas trivia. I have prepared five questions based on the theme. Let’s begin!

Question 1: Which popular Christmas beverage is also called “milk punch”?¹

Me:
next question please

Bing:
Question 2: What animated 2004 film is based on a 1957 children’s book by Chris Van Allsburg?

Me:
next question please

And so on. At the end Bing will either prompt you or you can ask for the answers

Me:
final question please

Bing:
Question 5: What is the name of the reindeer that has a red nose?

That was the last question. Do you want to know the answers?

Me:
Yes

Bing:

Okay, here are the answers to the Christmas trivia quiz:

Answer 1: The popular Christmas beverage that is also called “milk punch” is eggnog. Eggnog is a drink made with milk, cream, sugar, whipped egg whites, and egg yolks, and often spiked with rum, brandy, or whiskey.

Answer 2: The animated 2004 film that is based on a 1957 children’s book by Chris Van Allsburg is The Polar Express. The film tells the story of a young boy who boards a magical train on Christmas Eve and embarks on a journey to the North Pole.

….

I hope you enjoyed the quiz. How did you do? 😊

The great thing about Bing Chat is that it remembers the whole conversation, so you can use more vague questions as it already knows the context. I thought it would be fun to get it to do some art with the powerful DALLE-3 integration. I love the results but it still struggles a bit with text (although much better than DALLE-2). If I wanted I could have tried a few more modification prompts and it’s likely to get it right. However, as this is my Copilot and not trying to replace me, I can simply edit any of the pictures myself.

Me:
can you design a poster for my quiz please

Bing:
Sure, I can design a poster for your quiz. I’ll try to create that.

Further Ideas

I was thinking of how to carry this on a bit further – what are your ideas? Perhaps when I’ve figured out the quiz winner I can ask Bing to create a congratulatory song for the person to the tune of jingle bells! If I had a bit more time to prep, I would probably try actually putting the people’s names into the prompt so Bing could ask them each a question – that might be a good idea if we need a tie-breaker.

Conclusion

I have saved my prompts to notepad so I can quickly copy and paste them in during the main event. I’ll plug my laptop into my TV so I can present it to all all the people in my front room but this would work just as well virtually.

I’m now all ready for when my family come to visit and this certainly saved me a lot of time of a busy period!

 🎄Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays to all my readers 🎄

Sustainability starts at home (or blog)

You may have noticed a change to the look of my blog. This isn’t just your average refresh; it was an attempt to make my blog post have less of a negative impact on the environment. This was something I never really thought of before, but when I heard the stat below, I wondered what I could do within the limits of my free WordPress hosted blog

The internet consumes a lot of electricity, 416.2TWh per year to be precise… that’s more than the entire United Kingdom.

https://www.websitecarbon.com/

Could you be a vegan for a month?

Are you up for a challenge? How about you give Veganuary a go this January? I thought it would be good to share a bit more about what Veganuary is, what’s in it for you and why I’ve taken part in it over the last few years. If your gut reaction is “I could never give up steak/cheese/bacon” then this post will hopefully give you some food for thought.

What is Veganuary?

The Veganuary challenge asks people to eat a purely plant-based (vegan) diet for the whole of January.  That means not just giving up meat (which would be a vegetarian diet) but all animal products and by-products like milk, cheese, eggs and honey. This diet has proven health benefits, including increased energy levels, lower cholesterol levels, lower blood pressure and it also helps to combat weight gain. It’s the most environmentally friendly diet too. It has been calculated that one person eating a vegan diet for a month will save 124,900 litres of water, 84 square metres of forest and 273kg of carbon dioxide emissions (better than giving up a car for a month).

The 6 Rituals of Working from Home

My current job as an “Enterprise Architect” has my place of work officially listed as my home, although I’m regularly out visiting clients. I share that home with my wife, 3 sons and a cat (the cat is the only one with me in the daytime). As a relative newcomer to the home-working scene, I thought it would be interesting to share my experience over the last year in how I’ve adjusted to this new way of working. I was inspired by one of Scott Hanselman’s tweets around going for a morning commute even if you work from home:

Here's a tip that my remote team does – When you get up in the morning, if you're willing and able, try COMMUTING to your home office! Go for a circle around your neighborhood and arrive back home to your home/remote office! It psychologically marks the start and end of the day.

— Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) March 7, 2020

Now, I’m sure most home-workers will tell you one of the best perks of being based at home is avoiding the traffic-filled commute but something about Scott’s tweet definitely rings true. It made me think of what I’ve done to motivate me to get out of bed in the morning when I could just as easily roll out at 8:55. How do you get into good habits rather than develop bad habits? So here are my personal 6 rituals of working from home.

My desk in my snazzy home office

⏰ It’s been a while…

This is the news you’ve all been waiting for, I’m getting back into blogging!

A lot has happened since my last post, to me, technology and the IT Pro community. I’ve been really impressed by some of the work my peers have been doing publishing articles, producing YouTube videos and recording some great podcasts, so I feel it’s about time I jumped back in the water.

My blog posts will continue to be varied but will mostly focus on my interests in cloud computing and especially the Microsoft stack. I’ll be avoiding “paid for” articles like a few of my previous ones to keep a better sense of integrity and provide better value to those of you who may stumble across my ramblings.

The point of this article is to give me a kick to actually put some content on here, so hopefully that’s done the trick and you’ll see more regular posts (if I don’t get too distracted with updating my “about” pages and tinkering with the theme/layout!).

For now, follow me on Instagram and Twitter and say hi.

Review – Trainers from space (a.k.a. Airia Ones)

Disclosure: I was sent this pair of trainers free of charge in exchange for a review of them

I’ve wanted to pick up running again after a bit of a lull since Summer 2014. I’ve got a bit fed up with long distance running and thought it would be a good idea to focus on improving my running times for 10k and below. This meant I was very pleased when I received a new pair of Airia Ones to review.

The big deal about these Swedish shoes is that they have been designed with the goal of making you able to run faster. In fact, they give you a 30 day guarantee so you can test it out for yourself risk-free. I was immediately sceptical; it sounds like a big promise to say a shoe can make you run faster. However, as soon as you open up the box (which felt a bit like unboxing an iPhone for the first time) you can see that these trainers are different to your usual Nike or Adidas running shoes. They are so light when you pick them up it reminded me of the polystyrene blocks you get in packaging. The patented outersole (manufactured by Vibram) gives it the unique shape and is firm but flexible. The rest of the upper is made out of an airy mesh and when you put it on it hardly feels like you are wearing anything. 

My HeadSpace: 2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog. They do this every year and it’s one of the reasons I love using WordPress as a blogging platform!

Here’s an excerpt:

19,000 people fit into the new Barclays Center to see Jay-Z perform. This blog was viewed about 110,000 times in 2012. If it were a concert at the Barclays Center, it would take about 6 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

It seems like a long time since my last proper technical blog post, I blame OneNote for replacing my need to publish all my notes online! I intended to do at least one article a month but I was shocked to discover I only did 6 new articles in 2012, although I did update many existing ones. Even so, I’ve been getting impressive page views and glad to see the technical articles becoming more popular than fluffy ones (like my old 2009 Windows 7 theme packs posts from 2009)

As it is a new year, and I’m soon to be starting a new role, I thought it’s about time to share some of my problems to help others stuck in the same situation. Check back very soon for fresh, interesting and (hopefully) useful articles

The End of Movember

Some people dress up in a silly outfit for a day

Some people run a measly 26.2 miles

I spent 720 gruelling hours growing this moustache!

Please help me reach my target of £100 and improve the state of men’s health

mobro.co/thommck

The Return of Me: what I learned from my social fast

Last month I took on my wife’s challenge to abstain from any social networking over the six weeks of Lent. Some thought it couldn’t be done but I endured and think I may have come through it a little wiser.

At first, it was a real mental struggle. I can remember the very first day when I almost broke out in a sweat when not checking in to my train station on Foursquare. I could sense the long road ahead and could feel all my social clout slipping away from me. This was no joke and it helped me realise just how addicted to it I was.

Fortunately, the initial day was the only real struggle. I was occasionally tempted by a few notifications slipping through on my phone but once they were all properly turned off it was surprisingly easy to leave it all behind, refreshing in fact.

Addicted to Social Networking? I’m giving it up for Lent!

I’m sure a lot of us use social networking too much. By too much I mean using it,

• for procrastination,
• at inappropriate times and places,
• first thing in the morning and last thing at night.

This is becoming the latest addiction for our generation, and although not as harmful as drugs or gambling etc, it can cause a disruption in your real life and actually make you less social with the people you see on a day to day basis.