Putting the fun into funicular

/

We used our special power of getting up early to ensure that we got to the funicular railway before the queues started. Side note: Nothing pleases us more than walking past a big queue for something we walked straight into an hour ago. Anyhoo, the railway was great, the views tremendous and they had a splendid wildlife park at the top of the railway. With goats.

They were also running some kind of, er, run, at the top with figures in track suits tightening shoelaces and donning ankle tracking brackets to precisely time their entries. We just had a hot chocolate and watched them all.

Then it was back down for a quick sandwich lunch and a walk around Bergen, which is lovely. Getting lost is not a problem if you know that you can always walk downhill to the water’s edge. Then it was out for another nice meal. Italian this time. By the time we’d finished – walking out past a huge queue waiting to get in – yay! It was close to sunset and we’d enjoyed the funicular so much we thought we’d do it again. So we did. Slight snag. The sun sets right behind the city, so the pictures had to be taken right into the light. But as it got lower this became less of a problem. And it was great to see the city slowly light up below us.

Yet another cruise

/

Time for another cruise this morning. This one was not electric but was pretty high-speed diesel. Going out on the deck to grab pictures was braver and more exciting than I would have liked and the light wasn’t that amazing – although the scenery was. A member of the crew was saying that if the captain is in a good mood he’ll take the boat right into a waterfall cascading down the side of the fjord. He was and he did. I wondered about asking what the captain would do if he was in a bad mood but decided against it.

We found a lovely place for lunch by mistake, looking for a different (and as it turned out probably lessor) one. Then, in our quest to find the missing B&O hifi store we found a really nice wool shop. Norway folks take their knitting and crochet really seriously. In fact, they seem to take everything in life properly seriously. Until you make them laugh, at which point they really go for it.  

We did plan to go back to the same place for dinner (a mistake we’ve made many times) but it was full so we were forced to strike out and find somewhere new. Which we did. The owner told us he had only opened the day before. It was awesome. Just the right amount of food for us. On a stick. Although I’m told that the proper name for this form of serving is skewer.

Boat, Bus, Train

/

The day started with a trip on a boat. Which was very nice. Same kind of setup as the first day, but with slightly less pleasing weather. That dropped us off to pick up a bus ride past even more nice scenery to Voss where we caught the train to Bergen.

Tunnel vision on the bus

Not our train

Everything fitted together nicely, including a filling station purchased meal, eaten in the Voss station waiting room. Then on to Bergen. A quick walk from the station to the hotel. Past a Bang and Olufsen HiFi shop. Not seen one of those in a while. We must be in the posh part of town.

Down in Flam

/

Flam is lovely. Based at the end of a fjord it is a tiny village with just hotels, museums, souvenir shops and a general store to its name. Business looks to be good though, what with a succession of cruise ships dropping of interested folks with cash to spend and time to kill.

We took a walk around and found a little Farm Café with superb garden and even a swing. In the afternoon we did a bit more wandering, then headed for our poshest lunch of the tour (it turned out).

We managed to inadvertently shoplift a bag from the museum (the assistant forgot to charge us), but having decided that we wanted good rather than larcenous memories of the place we took it back and offered to pay. They were pleased to see us and we got a discount. So honestly is not a bad policy after all.

Six hours to Flam

/

The title of this post is a bit of a fiction. It’s actually six hours to Myrdal, with another hour or so down the side of the fjord to Flam. The trip was billed as one of the most beautiful railway journeys in the world and I quite agree with this. Although it turned out to be spectacularly difficult to capture the scenery through the thick, double glazed, train windows.

The lines in the sky are the reflections of the carriage lights. I need to find a way to get rid of them.

We got on the train first thing, got off it a couple of hours into the journey to stretch our legs for ten minutes, and then climbed up above the tree line to Myrdal. Which was quite chilly and totally vindicated our choice of cosy clothing. The train ride down on the Flam Railway (which is a thing) was very nice, with a stop halfway to look at a waterfall.

We arrived starving and found a lovely place to eat which also served good beer.

..although some of the staff were a bit wooden. Ho ho.

Electric Cruising

/

Lots of boats

Best way to see Oslo? From boat. Best kind of boat? An electric one. We were up bright and early to get on the first of our pre-arranged “trips around the bay”. This was on a super modern, carbon fibre, all electric boat which glided silently out into the bay and around a bunch of pretty islands and inlets. You could wander around the boat taking pictures, so I did. The weather started super-grey – a bit like being at home – but it got nicer and nicer until we arrived back in something approaching sunshine.

Private island

Walked back from the boat past an amazing bakery where we had a couple of amazing sandwiches. No dry ice , but it did have a really good view of the harbour.

After a quick freshen up at the hotel we headed for the opera house. They let you walk on the roof, and this is totally a good thing. The views were superb and the lighting rather special.

I even managed to find a really nice camera store where I didn’t buy a camera. Or a lens. But did get a rather nice bag.

A change of pace for tea, where we headed for “Proud Mary’s”, a pub/venue which served up a bunch of nice nibbles which, considering the huge breakfast and lunch that we had enjoyed, fitted the bill perfectly.  Then to bed. Big journey tomorrow.

Hello Oslo

/

Today finds us in Oslo as part of our one-week world tour of Norway. We were up at 6:00 am and off on the road by 7:00am. The journey to the airport – always a giggle – was enlivened by plenty of queues and jeopardy. But we got to Manchester in good time and after a quick trip in and out of the car park (got to love their signage) we got parked up and hot footed it over to Terminal 2 in time to have a coffee in a place with thousands of people and no seats.

Then through passport control, a quick lunch, a half hour delay in the plane and off we went. I think short haul flights are allowed to have their seats closer together than long haul ones. All I can say is ouch.

We got to Oslo in good time and had a very smooth train journey to the hotel. Checked in, a quick walk around and then tea at The Duck and Dumplings, a place I spotted on the map while making plans on the plane after landing. Very nice food and deserts with dry ice.

I asked if all meals in Norway are accompanied by billowing white smoke and I was told that they are. Rather looking forward to breakfast tomorrow.

You may have noticed some interruption to the service at robmiles.com today. It turns out that the day you leave the country is probably not the best day to transfer your domain name. Particularly if the domain you are moving is used in the email address used for 2 factor authentication with your DNS provider. All of which added up to an interesting conversation with a NameCheap support person who was super helpful and managed to give me enough access to able to sort it out with the help of the hotel wi-fi. Very glad I brought the laptop now…..

Magical Athlete

/

Talking, as we were, about wacky board games we come to Magical Athlete. We played this last night too. It’s a bit like snakes and ladders, but with no snakes and no ladders. Instead players get to pick athletes for four dice powered races round the board. All of the players have extra abilities, some of which affect other players. For example the “party animal” draws all the other players one square towards them. Some of the board squares have actions on them which might trigger other player actions, so moves can compound in interesting and very amusing ways. It’s a dice game at heart, which means that getting super strategic and thinking things through is not really a thing you can do when you play. But as a party game it is super fun.

Pili Pili

/

We played a bunch of games tonight, one of which was Pili Pili. It is a trick taking game. At the start each player makes a bid that sets out many tricks they intend to take in the round. The total number of tricks must not be equal to the total number of cards each player has, so someone is bound to fail. Then you go off taking tricks using cards numbered from 1 to 56 plus a joker. Anyone who misses their target gets a chilli. Get five chilli’s and the game ends, lowest chilli count of the remaining players wins. Simple eh?

Oh, but I forgot one thing. Each round has a different “mode”. Sometimes you have to pass some (or even all) of your cards to a neighbour after you’ve bid. Sometimes you have lay our cards face up in front of you after your bid, Sometimes you hold your cards above your head so that everyone can see them but you before you bid. There might be one where you have to play your hand standing on one leg. We’ve not played it that much. But these different modes make all the difference and turn the game into something else. Every hand. It’s easy to pick up, great fun to play and doesn’t last that long. Strongly recommended.

Slave to Pokemon Go

/

Never accuse me of not staying on trend. Just ten years after it started, I’ve finally got into Pokemon Go. It’s not cost me much money so far (apart from a stress purchase of some pokeballs a while back) and I am rather enjoying it. It makes going out that much more interesting I’ve not done much fighting yet, but I’m having fun building up my collection. It is a great case study in how to build a game which draws in the player and offers training and new things to do in just the right amounts to engage you.

Bourbon Classic Sneak Peak

/

You’ll know I’ve finisehd when I take the protective coating off the screen

After the worldwide (in my world) success of the Custard Cream Camera I’m now working on its successor. The Bourbon Classic. This has a much larger capacitive touch screen viewfinder that pivots. I’ve left the printer out of the camera to make a more portable device and it uses the Raspberry Pi 3 camera. There will be a separated printer box with a wireless connection. It will probably be brown too.

Needed to slightly tweak the camera slot for the prototype.

this one looks a bit like a different biscuit, the bourbon.

Why is printing things so hard?

/

It’s nice to know that even with the advent of super powerful systems and rampant artificial intelligence some things in computing are hard. For example printing.

I spent a chunk of today trying to print an image on a large piece of paper. I’d configured the printer properties, told it the size of the paper, previewed the output carefully in Lightroom and then got a picture that just filled a little rectangle in the middle of a sheet of very expensive paper that I’d just wasted. It turns out that Lightroom has a totally separate Page Setup menu button about as far away from the Print and Printer buttons as possible. That’s where you tell the program the size of the cell into which you want the picture to be placed. Get that wrong and it’s postage stamps all the way. Ugh.

Some systems are just sufficiently useful to be worth the trouble of using them. Lightroom has been teetering on the brink of this for years. Every time they release a new update with added AI that I don’t need I wonder if they couldn’t spend a bit of time making it a bit easier to use. At least I managed to find the “show preview” option on the printer driver so that I shouldn’t waste any more paper.

Fun with RADD Solutions at the Computer Sheds

/

Pictures taken and processed using the Custard Cream Camera

This time last week I was enjoying myself at the The Computer Sheds. I was there as a guest of RADD Solutions who were celebrating 10 years of being in the business of keeping railways and enterprise software on the move (see what I did there?).

It was a superb afternoon, rounded off with a really nice meal at The Manor Inn. If you want to see a slideshow of the pictures that I took and fiddled with, you can find it here. The pictures are all held on the Custard Cream Server (otherwise known as the Pi 5 on my desk) so we’ll see how well that goes…..

Custard Cream Camera Video now live

/

I’ve made a very bad video about the Custard Cream Camera. The way I see it, a bad video is better than no video. Your opinion may differ. I’ve also made the Custard Cream Camera repository public so you can build your own if you really want to. You can find it here

Hardware hijinks at the Hardware Meetup

/

Heading off to star in a film…

We had all kinds of fun at the hardware meetup tonight. And we discovered that a “simple soldering kit” is not always what you might think it is. Anyhoo, we did make some things work and I met up with some filmmakers keen to immortalise some of my light up boxes.

Productive debris

After the meetup the creativity continued at dinner, with suggested refinements to a joke in progress.

I had a go at visualizing the joke using AI and it seems to have done a good job. Until you count the number of arms the shepherd seems to have…

A Fine Time at the Maritime Museum

/

So much for cute polar bears

We had a fine time at Hull Maritime Museum yesterday. We booked tickets (you can do this on line and it costs nothing) and were there bright and early when it opened. There’s a lot of stuff here,

The history of Hull and the sea is well told, with thought provoking presentations about the life of a trawlerman (tough and dangerous) and the efforts it took to make fishing safer. For me the best bit was seeing what they had done with the rooms. The plasterwork and decoration was amazing.

The view from the museum is pretty good too, as is the café. If you live in Hull you should go. If you don’t live in Hull, come to Hull and then go.