Discarded wit

I’m writing some stuff about creating your own programming language at the moment. As I write I find things that I quite like, but aren’t really suitable for publication. Good thing I’ve got the blog then….

• Bottom-up design: Start with the low level functions and build on them.

• Bottoms-up design: Start by getting very drunk and writing some random code

• Bottom-down design: Just get more and more depressed about what you are trying to do

• Bottom-out design: Hope that things won’t get any worse.

• Top-down design: start with the big picture and then break it down into chunks to build a map of your solution. Then create each chunk.

• Top-up design: find a coffee place that does free refills and then keep drinking caffeine until inspiration strikes or you have a seizure.

• Top-trumps design: forget about writing software and spend your time playing card games from your childhood.

Delayed DIY

It took me around 20 seconds to add an extra screw to fix the wobbly shelf in the kitchen cabinet that’s been annoying us for years.

I’m sure there’s a lesson in this somewhere, but I’m darned if I can find it - which is probably the problem….

MagPi Paparazzi Camera Edition

The very latest MagPi magazine is out now. It’s a good read, made even better by the inclusion of lots of maker content now that it incorporates HackSpace. In amongst all the stuff is an article from me about making a Paparazzi Camera. This is one which follows you around the room. I had a lot of run playing with servos and person detectors.

These boots are made for walking. Hopefully.

Went up town today and bought myself a pair of “Doc Marten” boots. They are verry nice. People in the know about these boots tell me that you have to go through a process of “breaking them in” before they are properly comfortable. I’m not sure if I like the sound of having to impose my will on footwear. We’ll just have to see how this goes.

Junked Joystsicks in MagPi magazine

Number one son even made the cover…

In a shocking development I don’t have an article out this month. But number one son does. So at least the family is out there. If you get this month’s MagPi magazine you will discover an article from him describing how to bring junked joysticks back to life.

Camera Reviews Coming

A good piece of advice to writers is “Write what you know”. This poses a problem for me because I ran out of things that I know to put in the blog around 10 years ago. So another piece of advice could be “Write what you like”. I like cameras, and I probably like writing about them. I plan to find out just how much by posting a regular camera review every Monday, starting next week. I’m going to work my way through my collection of classic old cameras with comments and sample photos. Should be fun. If it isn’t, I’ll stop doing it.

Blog up to date

Writing a blog post about having got my blog up to date does sound a bit meta. And is probably only of interest to me and ChatGPT, but here we are.

I’m now properly determined to keep the blog up to date and am trying to make adding content part of my daily routine.

We’ll see how that works out.

Incidentally, I used ChatGPT to make the picture at the top of this post. It is interesting how the image creation process now uses ChatGPT to generate a text description of the required image and then makes a picture from that. I asked for something depcting an artist putting the finishing touches to a great work of art, and ChatGPT lobbed in a lot of extra words before going off and making the picture.

Caffinated Coffee in Trinity Market

The centre of Hull is a really nice place to be. Even when the weather is wet there are great places to go. Starting with Caffeinated Coffee in Trinity Market.

Whitby Steam Rally Movie

We’ve got our 8mm film back from processing and for a first attempt it doesn’t look too bad. What it lacks in definition I reckon it makes up in atmosphere.

Prettiest Recycling Centre in Britain

Took my old chair to the tip recycling centre today. Good riddance.

The recycling centre in Beverley is in the prettiest place, next to the river Hull with a terrific view of green fields. I took the Minox camera and grabbed some shots. We’ll see if they come out.

DJI Neo is a super little drone

As part of my demob happy persona (back to work tomorrow) I also got hold of a DJI Neo quadcopter. It’s tiny and it works. Very well. A lot better than the Parrot drone I was playing with back in 2011. That was properly scary. This one just gets on with its job of flying round and taking good looking movies. It even has built in behaviours you can access from the button on the top. You can use a phone, and a proper joystick thingy,

it was great fun to fly, the pictures look good and it will land in your hand. Should be a lot of fun.

Ho for Ikea

Mildly demob happy today. A few things I’ve been working on for a while have completed and so it was off to Ikea to get some sawdust and formaldehyde to celebrate. Got a new office chair as part of the fun. I bought one a while back that was not a good buy. I had to mend it with a spanner. This one has the racy name of JÄRVFJÄLLET and incorporates a lumbar support. And it doesn’t sink down to the floor when I sit on it, which is nice.

I did not buy this camera

This camera was a gift from the the chap at Beverley Camera Centre. He’s not sure it works, and one of the little covers has come unstuck and fallen inside. I’ve kind of stuck it back into place, dropped in some batteries and all the knobs and dials seem to work . So I’ll be popping a film in to see if it can take pictures.

I can’t seem to find out much about the Fujical GER other than it came out in 1972. I think it might be Fujifilm’s answer to the very successful Yashica Electro 35. I like the idea of a tiny rangefinder camera with a built-in light meter and so I’m hopeful that it will work.

I’ve been after a nice one of these for ages

Now I did buy this one. I’ve been after a clean Olympus Trip 35 for ages and one just happened to be on sale. This is a classic camera with an amazing battery free metering system and zone focusing. My Auntie Anne had one and took it all over the world recording her exploits. Her pictures were always sharp and well exposed. I hope the one it produces are too.

How not to organize an event...

Hull CS50 was great, but I always write down a list of things that I might want to think about next time I help to run something like this:

• The Fisher Price Code a pillar is a great toy for kids and grownups to play with. You can track them down on eBay if you really want one. If you want to hack one, take a look here.

• When you are printing the signs for an event it is a good idea not to print them double sided.

• Talking of signs, don’t laminate them if they are going into Perspex holders. They won’t fit.

• If you decide to use RFID cards to manage the free drink allocation, take a log of all the unique card numbers before you start and build them into your application. Otherwise you’ll find smart students using their university cards, bank cards and maybe even playing cards to get drinks. Fortunately the folks doing this were showing off - nobody got extra drinks like this. But next time it will be properly secure….

• Don’t work on the basis that all your RFID cards will work. Turns out that if you buy 50 cards for an attractive price quite a few of them will not work.

• The bits that you think will be most busy won’t be. I thought that the busiest time would be the quiz at the end, but in the end we had peek attendance at the talks.

• People love having lots of things to do around them, even though they might not actually go and do them all.

• Don’t deploy a new version of your robot manager software at 6:00am on the morning of the event. It will break and you will have a very nervous few minutes waiting for someone good with GitHub (in this case number one son) to pull back the previous version and deploy that.

• Always take a picture of your audience. I completely forgot to do this during the talks (if you’ve got any pictures I’d love to have copies).

• If you’ve not seen a little lady totally over the moon because her delegate badge is a match for the one on the dalek, you’ve really not lived.

• Get T-shirts made. They add a lot. We got ours printed here. And modern banking systems make it really easy for people to pay for them. I used a Monzo link and it worked a treat.

• Remember that having fun beats everything else. If folks are enjoying themselves doing what they are doing, you really don’t need to go and tell them what they should be doing to have fun.

Hull CS50 Was Awesome

UnFair Quiz Survivors

Well, HullCS50 was the most fun. I took a bunch of cameras with plans to take a bunch of pictures. Didn’t take one. I was too busy chatting to folks and showing off the robots and bits and bobs. We had 40 or so people embedded in carbonite, lots of “Badge Answer Buddies” and even some slow-motion Scalextric crashes - including one which took out the phone filming it. The quiz was universally acknowledged as extremely unfair, so mission accomplished there too.

Many thanks to the “elves” who kept the show on the road. Thanks also to the Computer Science Systems team who went above and beyond to get everything working and the folks in the Canham Turner building who provided great support and lovely food. Thanks also to the sponsors: Black Marble, RJJ Software, and Visr-vr. Without your contributions we wouldn’t have had an event.

Everyone seemed to be having a good time. One question that kept coming up was “When is the next one?”. We’ll have to work on that.

Ready - ish

Well, we’ve got signs for all the activities, printed the answer sheets for the unfair quiz, tested the WiFi coverage at the venue, tested the carbonizer, got most of the slot cars running and written most of the unfair quiz questions.

At this point the only thing you can do is hope that you’ve not forgotten anything important, and that the stuff you’ve remembered will get you through. And then head to Wetherspoons on the campus to meet up with folks who will be coming along tomorrow….

Exciting times..

Using Brother P-Touch software with Windows 11

Some old software never dies. Take the Brother P-Touch software that I got with the thermal label printer I bought around 15 years ago. It still works on Windows 11. I’m using it to make the labels to go on the cards for delegates to the Hull CS50 event on Saturday. The labels will wrap around the cards. On the front will be the event logo and the name of the delegate. On the back will be the sponsors logo (thanks so much RJJ Software) and an answer from the scavenger hunt quiz.

I’m using mail merge to get the values from a CSV (comma separated values) list I’m exporting from the list of ticket sales. It’s not optimal, in that I don’t have a name for every attendee. If someone has bought four tickets I only have the name of the buyer, not the folks using those tickets. Anyhoo, I’ve found a way around that and I’m doing the merge. And it works fine until I save the label design, at which point the the first name field for the merge becomes corrupted. Wah.

Took a while to figure out what is happening. Its all about character encoding. The P-Touch program seems to get confused by the text in the file unless you save it as ANSI format text. Then it works a treat. A lovely example of a great piece of software, written years ago and still good today.

I’ve now got all the labels printed and number one wife and number one son spent this evening putting them on the cards and getting them into order for distribution on Saturday. Getting quite excited now…

Minox Colour Photography

I got the scans back from those splendid folks at MSHobbies. To say that the negatives are smaller than the nail on your little finger and colour film to boot, I reckon they look pretty splendid. I’m definitely going to be doing more of this. Taking pictures with the camera is great fun and the exposure meter seems very accurate. I just need to practice pointing the camera in the right direction.

I really like the results. My phone could produce pictures much cleaner and clearer, but I’d have to work very hard to get the same kind of atmosphere in the images.

RFID tags working

I’ve got the RFID tags working for the free drinks at Hull CS50. The first time you touch your card on the reader you get a green light. The second and subsequent times you do this you get a red light. There’s also a magic “reset” card (which I really mustn’t lose) which you can use to reset the card storage and let everyone order drinks again.

It was suggested that we just use drinks tickets. But where’s the technical fun in that?

Hull CS50 is Go!

Actually Hull CS50 has been go for a while. Ever since the first ticket was sold. We seem to have gone from “What if nobody comes?” to “What are we going to do with all the people that are coming?” in a few short days. I blame the student tendency to leave booking things until the very last minute….

Anyhoo, we’re in the final planning phase and today we took a walk around the venue. It’s a lovely place. We’ve got the whole of the ground floor of the Canham Turner building to play with. Plenty of room for slot cars, carbonization, robots, retro games, troublesome tanks. And Daleks.