The hardest way to take photographs

It was a lovely morning

We think we might have found the hardest way to take pictures. You start with a twenty year old “digital back” which you fit on the back of a sixty year old camera in place of the film magazine. Then you plug the back into a fifteen year old Apple laptop and take the whole lot down to Hessle foreshore near the Humber Bridge. Then you take some snaps.

Each photograph is sent over the wire into the laptop. You’re not really supposed to do it like this unless you are in a studio. One of us was carrying the camera. The other the laptop. From a distance it must have looked like I was being taken for a walk with my camera.

Then we came home, took the pictures off the laptop and did some tidying up. I really like the results. They are very sharp and detailed and the light first thing in the morning was lovely.

I’m not sure this will become my preferred way to take pictures, but I’m very pleased that we managed to make it work. I took some shots on film too, but I’ll have to send those off for processing.

Poetry for Neanderthals

Spent some time today playing “Poetry for Neanderthals”. It’s a great little game which comes with an inflatable stick you can use to hit players with. The idea is simple enough. There are two teams. Team members take it in turns to describe the concept on a card using works of only one syllable. If anyone uses a multiple syllable word or otherwise messes up they get tapped on the head with the inflatable stick. Get as many words right as you can before the egg timer runs out. Then the next player from the opposing team gets to have a next, and probably wacked.

Once everyone has had a go cards are counted and the winners identified. Cards contain a simple word (for example milk) and also a two word phrase (for example chocolate milk). You get one point for the simple answer, three for the more complicated one and lose a point for every mistake and skipped card.

We won. Although the fact that we had one extra team member might have had something to do with it. As an icebreaker it is great fun. Strongly recommended.

Wanted Man

Just two days after telling the world that I’m learning the saxophone I get this from LinkedIn. I think I’ll pass.

Splendid Tech Session Tonight

Hot on the heels of DDD North last weekend we now have more high quality technical content which has free food (thanks to Hull University for the spread). Tonight at the Tech Sessions we had two excellent talks.

First up was Martyn Coupland who has the kind of life that I want when I grow up. By day he pilots planes around the world. And at night he develops software using .NET (actually this might not be precisely how he divides his time, but he definitely does both). His talk was titled “Cleared for Takeoff: Navigating the Intersection of Aviation and Technology” and gave some great insights into the hugely complicated business of getting people from A to B safely through the air.

It was nice to see the views from his “office” at 30,000 feet but it was even more interesting to see the server room underneath the cockpit containing all the computers that keep the plane in the air. There are four copies of one crucial component, along with a box that contains the height above sea level of just about every point on the surface of the earth. Aviation tech has to be done right and this point was made time and again as systems were described. Everything was pilot-centric since they are the people who have to make decisions that are literally life and death. Very impressive.

Next up was Elliot Fearn talking about “Building a RAG-Based LLM with Vector Databases”. Elliot explained that RAG stands for “Retrieval Augmented Generation”. This is a technique for boosting the usefulness of a Large Language Model (LLM). An LLM takes in questions and gives you answers to them. Elliot gave a great explanation of how this process works, with individual tokens in a question being converted into vectors which are then mapped into the knowledge space of the LLM to produce a useful answer, one token at a time.

The RAG bit serves as a kind of “booster” pack of local knowledge which is combined with the content of the prompt string which is given to the LLM to get the answer. For example, you might ask an LLM about “sales”. This could mean that you want to know where things are being sold cheaply, or how well a marketing plan is working. If you have a system that puts the word “sales” in a marketing context by adding sales information to the prompt string you have better chance of getting a useful answer.

Elliot described systems that could help to automate this process, so corporate information could be packaged and formatted to be used in this way. Very interesting stuff with some nice demonstrations of the tech.

I really looking forward to the next session. If you want to join in go here on Eventbrite and follow The Tech Sessions.

Baker Street or Bust

Great fun to photograph

Last year I acquired a pair of green cord trousers, a cardigan and a saxophone. I’m on my way to becoming a fully fledged beatnik. All I need is the hat and some skills. With that in mind I’m telling both my readers that from now on I will be reporting on saxophone practice at regular intervals.

It turns out that the saxophone is both tricky to play and very loud. But I have persevered. And I can now play any song which is comprised of the notes B, A and G. More notes later.

Right-angle USB adapters

What do you do if you want to put a Raspberry Pi inside a device but don’t want to have to make room for the USB plugs that have to stick out of one end? You get some of these. I’ve ordered some. it will be interesting to find out if they do the job.

Tech Session at Hull University Thursday 27th Feb

Yesterday I did a post about things you can do that will help you get a job in the future. One great thing to do is attend events, meet folks and learn new stuff. There’s an event this week which is just the kind of thing you should be going to. And you might learn something too. A group called “The Tech Sessions” has organised an event on Thursday evening this week at the University of Hull. They’ve got two speakers, Martin Coupland is talking about “Aviation’s Tech Lessons “ and Elliot Fearn is talking about building large language models. It starts at 6:60 pm and you can sign up here.

I know very little about either of these topics, but I’m looking forward to finding out more.

How to get job

One of the wonderful things about DDD North yesterday was that a bunch of developers (and me) spent a big chunk of their lunch hour in a meeting with students telling them how get a job in this business. There was a lot of good discussion which I’ve boiled down into 10 points. I apologise if I’ve misquoted or misconstrued folks who were there - feel free to hit me in the comments…

• Employers hire people who “get stuff done”. So, get some stuff done and tell the world about it.

• Employers also hire people who they know about. So, get out there and meet them. Join user groups, go to conferences, contribute to open source. If you get it right, they call you before you call them.

• Keep your bio brief and to the point but put in things that differentiate you from the rest. Recruiters are busy people. Put your technical skills and project experience right at the front of your details to encourage them to read more.

• Don’t say “I can’t do that”. “I’ll find out more and get back to you tomorrow.” is a much better response. Then find out more and get back to them tomorrow.

• The recruitment process can be a snake pit. Be prepared for industrial scale rejection and duplicity.

• Get yourself into a situation where you can get lucky. And if you aren’t lucky try to take something from the experience and go on to the next one.

• Work with people who aren’t software developers and learn to see the world through their eyes. Solutions aren’t just built by coders, there are lots of other folks involved and you need to be able to work with them.

• Consider everything you do in terms of “how can I use this to promote my brand”. Even “train wreck” projects can be useful if you describe what you learned from them.

• Keep learning. Your knowledge has a half-life of a few years. It will start to decay in usefulness as soon as you’ve learned it. (Although you should also remember that there are universal constants in terms of how you work with people)

• Stay nice. I’ve found that nice people end up the happiest.

Making Stuff at DDD North

What a great ajudience looks likE…

Well, that’s the presentation over. It’s been a while since I took an audience picture. I took this at the end of the presentation too. And they were still smiling. Thanks for that.

I’ve put the slide deck for the presentation here. If you actually decide to make something it would be lovely to hear from you about it. And if you are in Hull you are welcome to come along to our Hardware Meetups. They take place every couple of weeks in Hull MakerSpace at the top of the Central Library. The next one is on Wednesday 5th of March starting at around 5:00pm.

You don’t have to bring any hardware to the meetup, although I like to take things along to talk about. If you are thinking of building something (or if you aren’t sure what to build) then it woudl be lovely to see you for a chat about it.

Thanks to Derek for the picture

Ready for DDD North tomorrow

I’ve got all of my gadgets together, and most of them working, for my session at DDD North tomorrow morning. I’m quite looking forward to it, which is probably more than the audience are…..

A talent for self-sabotage II

I had a very nice email from someone who asked about my talent for self sabotage and offered me a collaboration opportunity on my blog. I was very flattered, but I fear for anyone who wants to formally associate with someone who makes posts like this:

“Officer, I’ve just been attacked by an enormous camera which beat me up and stole all my money”
“Oh dear, I think it must be one of those new 20 mugger pixel models…”

Most Excellent Meetup

Full fat cheesebox and red phone

We had a most excellent hardware meetup tonight. Thanks to everyone who came along. Here are a few pictures. Next meetup is in two weeks on the 5th March.

ready for your closeup….

Light music

Finger music

People tracking with AI

Drawing Trees with ChatGPT

ChatGPT and I are now drawing trees together. It’s quite fun. It’s all in JavaScript, which means that I can run the code in the browser, make some comments and then play with the next version when it has been written. The best bit was when I said “Now do it in 3D” and ChatGPT obliged. It’s not perfect but I’m finding out a lot about drawing 3D graphics in JavaScript and that has got to be a win.

I’m not sure how people will learn to program in the future, but I think it will be something like this.

Projects page now live

Today I did something which I really should have done a long time ago. I’ve created a projects page for the blog which makes it easy to find a few of the things I’ve been fiddling with over the last few years. Each entry has a link to the repository where you can find out even more.

I hope you find them interesting. If you decide to have a go at making one of them, or use it as the basis of something else, I’d love to hear from you.

A talent for self-sabotage

Today I spent 40 minutes looking for the latest version of some software I wrote a month ago. I eventually found the file in the scrap folder of a project I worked on in 2022. I’d opened an old file to use as the basis of my new development and then failed to save the updated version anywhere sensible. Why it has got moved into the scrap folder is a total mystery.

And all this in the age of GitHub. Shame on me.

Trees

I really like taking pictures of trees this time of year, before the leaves appear. It’s always fascinated me how a tree knows to be that shape.

Update: This fascination goes back a long way.

Rabbit r1 Revisited

Now including seasonal artwork.

You might remember the fuss last year when the Rabbit R1 went to market missing lots of features. I bought one, egged on by a good review that turned out to be a tad optimistic. It still doesn’t do lots of the things that were promised, but I don’t really care. I always regarded the “Large Action Model” stuff as a bit far fetched. The idea that a device could ever infer from a web site exactly what to do struck me as very unlikely, and I thought that the idea of letting something loose with all the passwords and authentication it would need to be able to act on my behalf would be a deeply silly thing to do. But I liked the colour and the form factor. And it has neat tricks. It answers questions well and I really like the “Magic Camera” which you can use to get an interesting twist on shots that you take.

This is what it thinks the cable release device looks like inisde…

If there is a prize for software development teams (and there hardly ever is) I’d give a special award to the folks behind the Rabbit R1. They were set an impossible goal at the start but they’ve kept plugging away adding loads of features and fixed lots of things:

• The user interface now makes a lot more sense.

• The battery life is OK. You can get through a day as long as you don’t get carried away.

• You can view your pictures on the device. Say “Show me my pictures” and you get to see all your recent shots.

• The Large Action Model is still mostly a work of science fiction, and I really wouldn’t trust it with anything important, but you can have fun playing with it and sort-of-automating interactions with the web.

• You can change how the user interface looks and the voice it uses. This is huge fun.

• There is now multi-language support.

• Interactions with your rabbit earn you carrots you can spend in an “r-cade” where you can pick up costumes and add-ons.

I like having the Rabbit with me and especially like taking pictures with the camera. People enjoy seeing what the Rabbit thinks they look like (unless it’s an old fisherman when you really aren’t one).

I hope that Rabblt keeps going. I’d even be happy to pay a monthly subscription to retain access to the things it does. Lots of things have AI baked into them alongside everything else, but I much prefer having a device that just does this one thing. And I still like the colour.

3D Printed Lens Cases

I fancied some 3D printed lens cases. So me and ChatGPT wrote a little Python program that runs inside FreeCAD to make them. I find ChatGPT a useful coding companion. It doesn’t usually get the code right, but it does provide enough insight into how the code is supposed to work to make it much easier to create something that does what you want.

As an additional flourish, we managed to put text on the outside of the case by rendering a TrueType font into a shape and then cutting it out of the case. You can see the results above. Next step is to get some foam and make some inserts to keep the lens nice and safe. I’m going to tidy up the code a bit and put it on GitHub.

Mamiya Press 23

They say it is ugly, but I like the quirky charm it has. This one has the extra viewfinder on top for the wide angle lens.

If you were a photographer working for a Japanese newspaper in the 1960’s you’d probably spend a big chunk of your life carrying round a Mamiya Press camera. The camera is actually a whole ecosystem of film backs, lenses and other bits and bobs. The one above is a setup with a nice wide angle lens which will make a good job of the kind of scene setting pictures the editors of the day wanted.

The camera is big and heavy but the hand grip, which also incorporates a trigger shutter release, makes it quite easy to wield. It can take enormous 6x9 cm images on 120 roll film. You get loads of detail in every shot, which must have been greatly appreciated at the time.

The viewfinder is bright and clear and has a rangefinder spot in the middle which is coupled to the lens. This makes focusing very easy and accurate, as long as your lens and camera body have both been properly calibrated. The lenses are lovely and very sharp. The Mamiya 23 above has been in the wars. Some of the screws are missing and it could do with a good clean up. But it still turns out really nice pictures.

However, it is a nightmare to use. Taking a picture involves a sequence of steps which must be followed precisely if you want to get a result. And you only find out if you’ve missed a step when you develop the film and find you have empty frames, two frames on top of each other, blurry images and whatnot.

When you get everything right though the camera really sings. The good news is that if you fancy getting into large negative photography on the cheap these are a great way in. They are much less expensive than the Pentax 67 and no less capable. They are also much easier to repair. The shutter assembly is part of the lens, making it easy to swap out a broken lens for a working one. And lenses are not expensive. The rangefinder adjustment on the camera body is a bit tricky, but not impossible. And the film backs are all interchangeable too, so if that breaks you can get another. They were built for heavy use by working photographers and that means they are pretty tough. There are a number of different versions. I rather like the simple utilitarian appearance of the earlier models.

Worth a look if you’re prepared to put in the effort and put up with the odd wasted shot.

Watch Paradise

Yesterday we watched the first episode of Paradise with the feeling of “Ho Hum, this looks like something that we’ve seen quite a few times before”. Then, five minutes before the end things took a sudden, sharp turn. We’ve just watched the second episode and I think it is fair to say that we are hooked. I just hope they can keep up the momentum. Very strongly recommended.