If you want an insight into how nice people are, just go “Trick or Treating” near way we live (it probably helps to go on the 31st October). We had a fantastic walk around the neighbourhood. The weather was lovely, lots of folks had really gone to town on their houses and there were families wandering around dressed as skeletons and all sorts. And we got home with a bucket full of goodies. Great fun. And just a bit scary. Especially one particular doorbell……
Yes. The Mac is running Linux
We have a super-splendid Hardware Meetup in MakerSpace in Hull Central Library this evening. Loads of folks turned up to show things off and see what others were up to. Ross brought along his prototype piano keyboard reader which uses distance sensors to read key movements. It’s analogue and it works. Two things you can’t say about the things I make…
There have been several editions. I think we played the first one.
Of all the stupid things people can say, I reckon one of the most stupid is “Let’s split up and search the place”. Especially if you are in a decidedly dodgy location where even the rooms themselves have it in for you. But that’s exactly how “Betrayal at House on the Hill” starts off. You all get your personas and then head off into the hallways, rooms and basements, uncovering all kinds of stuff - must of it unpleasant. Then, suddenly one of your party is at the centre of an evil plot and all the other players must team up and do some thwarting. We just had to beat the devil at chess, but other tasks involve monster slaying and whatnot. There are around fifty of them to work through.
We had a go at the game tonight and much fun was had. We managed to win thanks to some inspired dice wielding right at the very last minute. It’s a great game and we are definitely going to play it again.
This was supposed to be my first camera review. Instead you are going to have to make do with a post saying sorry for not writing one yet. I blame the time it takes to get my film back from processing…..
It makes some great sounds too
The Lego Radio is a lovely build. It comes with a little sound brick that plays different sound effects as you scan through the radio channels. Great fun. You can put your Smartphone inside it if you want to turn it into a bluetooth speaker.
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.
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….
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
