The place we are staying has this fantastic mural in the caffeteria
We are staying right next to a water park, so we thought we’d go and do some swimming. I’m not usually a fan of swimming. All the faff with towels and wet costumes, pruny fingers and the lingering smell of chlorine. But it was great. There was a fake beach (of course) with real waves and a lazy river which went all around the park. And it was so warm that you didn’t mind getting wet and cool for a while.
Fake Snow
Today it was all about “The Wizarding World of Harry Potter (tm)”. It’s all very well done. Although a lot of the scenery just reminds me of York.
This man says that your wand chooses you. I’m not sure I’d want the kind of wand that would choose me.
We did the “Wand choosing experience” which was great fun. Then we went out and waved the wand at scenery to make it react. This worked super well, once we got the hang of wand waving. I constructed a careful theory of a digital wand packed with motion trackers and accelerometers which decoded “spell” movements and then sent a spell message over Bluetooth BLE. But it turns out that the wand just contains an infra-red led which is tracked by a camera in the attraction. Which is much simpler and cheaper. I’ve resolved to make the wand work when we get back home. It should be possible to use a little camera to get the tracking information I need. Watch this space.
They had some very nice sweet shops
Dragon based bank security
In the afternoon, for a change of pace, we went to see the movie Hoppers. Going to the cinema in America is around half the price of the UK, the seats were powered recliners and presentation is great. The movie was good too.
Today is all about moving house. After nearly a week of the Disney experience we are now transitioning to Universal. This involves packing, grabbing a Lyft to our new location and then hanging around waiting for the room to be ready. To pass the time we went to Walmart.
Walmart is amazing. They sell everything. Including things you didn’t know existed.
Look Ma! no Driver!
While we were waiting for our Lyft back to the hotel we saw a driverless Waymo car go carefully round the parking lot. I wonder if it is still there.
When we checked into the hotel we were offered a free upgrade to a nicer room with an outside view. After being reassured about the precise meaning of free (i.e. properly free) we took up the offer and discovered that we could see the Epcot fireworks through our window. Actually, the first time we discovered this was a less than cheerful occasion. Being woken up in the middle of jetlagged sleep by a series of distant explosions is not the best. But once we got used to it, the problem was to stay awake long enough to actually take some pictures. Tonight I managed it and, with the camera balanced on a glass topped table and some hand fettled exposure, I managed to get some useable shots.
The thing that amazes me about this is that they do it every night. There’s an island in the middle of the lake at Epcot which has rows of firework launchers which are replenished each day.
A veiw without many people. Surprisingly hard to get
Up until now our magical powers of rising early have served us well. Not so today. We got to the park just as it opened. But so did everyone else. My goodness it was busy.
A cultural highlight
The cast’s all here
One of the highlights of a trip to the Magic Kingdom (after Mickey’s Runaway Train which is really good) is a trip to the Country Bear Musical Jamboree. Mechanical bears in various costumes sing country music extremely well. It has the benefit of being fairly quiet and out of the rain.
State of the art for the 1960s
Unfortunately things didn’t move on very far from this
Another must-see at the Magic Kingdom which I’m pretty sure will be quiet when you go is the “Carousel of Progress”. This uses life-sized puppets to enact scenes from past which show how far we have come over the years. And, given the role given to women in the whole presentation, how far we still have to go. It premiered in 1964 at New York World’s fair and is apparently is the longest running stage show in American history. It was last updated in 1994 and my goodness it shows.
Some of my fans
Photographer on the Jungle Cruise ride
Tomorrowland
High fiving Pooh while his minder looks on
Another great day.
We’ve had a bunch of really enjoyable, high impact days and now it is time to dial it down a bit. Our experience is that you can do the first few days away on adrenaline and excitement, but then you start to run out of steam. So you have to start easing up the pressure a bit. Otherwise you find yourself in a hotel room with no energy to do anything but watch “X Files” reruns.
So today we went back to Epcot and just had a mooch around looking for souvenirs and interesting bits that we missed on our first visit. It’s a lovely place.
Use your skill and judgement to work out which country this is.
I think Epcot is my favourite park because they take their gardens really seriously and they look wonderful.
,,, and this one
An attempt to be artistic
The start of the queue to get into france
We staggered back to the hotel at 3:30 pm. Everyone was very surprised to see us back early Actually this is not true. These places are so big that nobody has time to pay attention to us.
we walked past this every day on the way to our room. Such clever marketing…
We had vague plans to go out for tea, but a cloudburst put paid to that so we ended up in the ice cream parlour in the bottom of the hotel eating ice creams and chips. Not on the same plate.
It must have been a really big Airfix kit
Disney Hollywood today. In the rain. Turns out you can get rain in Florida. We’ve been skipping around the puddles and pulling waterproofs on and off all day. I’m not complaining though, it’s great to be here and see all this.
There’s a gift shop on every corner
The Star Wars area in the park is really impressive. It boasts a great big model of the Millennium Falcon and lovingly creates a market area with tons of period detail. Even if the period itself doesn’t really exist.
Random artifacts outside the shops
We had a good mooch around, went on a few rides and generally had a great time. Lunch was at the Prime Time Diner.
I’d love to see the signs when they are lit up
Like everything else on the park, this is a recreation of something, in this case fifties kitchens.
The fake TVs are all custom made and had authentic video noise and picture artefacts
Another selling point of this place (over and above the décor and the superb food, was the waitresses that tell you off for putting your elbows on the table and dish out “clean plate awards”. Great fun. We had a good look around and staggered back to the hotel arriving at, you’ve guessed it, exactly 5:00pm.
The trick when going to America is to use jetlag to your advantage. The time difference has you waking up at five in the morning raring to go. So why not get up and go? The parks are are their quietest for the first forty five minutes of the day, so why not get there when they open? Also, said the photographer, you get the best light early in the day. There’s probably some good light to be had towards the end of the day too, but since using that would involve staying up beyond 7:00pm it is unlikely I’ll be seeing it for a while. Another thing that the photographer said was “Don’t get a new camera a day before you go away and then spend your quality holiday time trying to figure out how to use it.”. But I seem to have ignored that one, as we shall see later.
Today sees us at the Animal Kingdom theme park, where Disney takes cultural appropriation to another level by co-opting mother nature in the production. It’s done really, really well. They even manage to conjure up a Tibetan village in the foothills of Everest.
The mountain is much closer than you think and contains a roller coaster
I think you could buy the umbrellas
While I was looking around the souvenir shop (of course there’s a souvenir shop) I noticed a big display of cameras, none of which were for sale. I got chatting with the sales assistant (everyone in America is wonderfully chatty) and she told me that they were cameras which had been left on Everest by various climbers and tourists. I’m assuming that they took the film out of the camera and then discarded the heavy camera bodies to ease the journey back. I’m trying not to entertain a more grisly explanation. Anyhoo, it was very impressive to see them all in amongst the keyrings and fridge magnets.
Blurry giraffe
They do a really good “jungle expedition” ride which puts you in an “jeep” and then takes you round a huge safari park. It’s great. I got a seat right at the back which I thought would be perfect for photos, what with the extra view right out of the back. What I hadn’t reckoned with was the way that the ride also emulates an extremely lumpy track through the savannah. What with me being a long way from the back axle, I was flung all over the place, making considered long distance photography a bit tricky.
By the end I’d kind of got the hang of things and was using the old “spray and pray” technique where you just set the camera to take pictures as quickly as possible and then hold down the shutter button. Using this I managed to get twenty slightly different pictures of an ostrich. All of which were slightly blurred because I had the shutter speed set too low. Oh well.
The tree is made of concrete and has an auditorium below it
I really hope that there are boats like this in the real world
We had a wonderful day. And got back to the hotel at exactly 5:00pm again. Go us.
What Disney think that the UK looks like
The Epcot theme park is a peek into the future and a huge pile of cultural appropriation. The peek into the future gives us, amongst other things, a Guardians of the Galaxy ride (which is apparently very good although I haven’t been on it owing to my issues with fairground rides and regurgitation) and a restaurant in space.
The cultural appropriation gives us regionally themed areas around the park dedicated to different countries. The UK area has some red phone boxes and a fish and chip shop. The Mexican area has a beautiful plaza and a boat ride which features Donald Duck in a Mexican outfit. I know which I prefer.
Eating in Space
We had lunch in the spaceship restaurant. It is very well done. You get in a “lift” which takes you up a hundred miles or so and one wall of place gives you panoramic views of the earth in space. The views are constantly changing. Spacecraft turn up and dock, space-suited figures drift past and there’s even a dog in a spacesuit if you wait long enough. The food was very nice too.
My favourite picture so far
The great thing about this place is the way that you really do get insights into the ways of the world. The Japanese area has a fantastic exhibit all about Japanese cute and the little “local” shops sell a huge range of interesting artefacts.
We were very proud of the way that we managed to last to 5:00pm without collapsing, but anything more than that (like another ten minutes or so) would probably have seen us keeling over.
Oooh. Dollar prices
I find it amazing that you can have breakfast on one continent and then tea in another which is thousands of miles away. But we just did. The weather is lovely (if an English person writes about somewhere they are going to mention the weather pretty quickly).
They seem to have things around the place just to look nice. Which is nice.
I don’t think we’re in the country of America. We’re really in the country of Disney. It’s very nice, though. In the UK we tend to make things charming by leaving them to themselves for a few hundred years. Here it is all very designed. But still very pretty.
This guy didn’t make the final cut
Today we taking our first step to our holiday destination, a hotel near the airport. I’ve got four cameras and twelve pairs of socks among other things. I’m now a big fan of packing cubes, which let you put all your socks together in one place. The flight leaves tomorrow. Allowing myself to get slightly excited about all this.
What do you do when all the talk is of war and disaster and life as we know it is coming to an end? You go off to a theme park for a holiday. At least, that’s what I’m doing. I’ll be back in a couple of weeks slightly more tanned and much more poor.
I had all these plans for the Hardware Meetup today. I was hoping to persuade folks that the camera I was using to take portraits was so old that it only took black and white pictures. What a wizard April Fools joke that would have been. But then I found that the Instax back I was using to “process” the pictures was full of colour film. So that ended that.
But we did manage to get some good pictures though, along with some glorious failures. I was very concerned about focus. So I adjusted the bellows on the camera until I had a subject in focus at a particular distance. Then I cut a piece of string to that length. Now, to get a sharp picture I just had to put the bellows at my known position and then use the length of the string to set the distance of the subject from the camera. Worked for me, and the subjects. I did manage to lose a few shots. A couple were under exposed and two more went through the processor the wrong way. But I was able to hand out a few nicely sharp and well rendered prints, which was nice.
The next hardware meetup will be in three weeks on 22nd of April. I’m going to be further improving my portrait action then.
Beverley Camera Centre is no more. It closed today. I bought a couple of things and the retiring owner (if you see what I mean) was kind enough to give me a tiny digital camera which he has had lying around for a while. Tiny digital cameras are all the rage at the moment so I’m going to have a go at getting it to work. The good news is that it is powered by an AAA battery. The bad news is that it needs custom USB drivers to make it work. Should be fun.
I’m going to miss the camera centre though, it has been part of my weekly routine to drop buy there and almost never except sometimes buy something.
Thie pieces were really hard to get off the print bed…
Had a great idea for my mosaic program. Why not chop the image up to make a mosaic puzzle? So I did. Unfortunately I managed to create a 64 piece puzzle what was pretty much impossible to reassemble. Just because you can build something doesn’t mean that you should…..
For the first time ever we are having a meetup on April Fool's day. With that in mind I can definitely confirm that we will not be taking your portrait with a 130 year old camera, playing with googly eyes or creating 3d printable picture mosaics. And there will be no Furbies present whatsoever.
Come along on Wednesday 1st April from 5:00pm in Hull MakerSapce in Hull Central Library to find out who the fool is. And bring your own foolish creations too.
Sure is a good looking camera from the front thogh..
So I went to the Photography Show and bought a camera which is perfect in every way. Except one. The plastic around the viewfinder is broken. Wah. I can’t stress enough how little effect this has on the camera. It works fine and you can’t even see the fault from the front. But it bothered me. So I bought a differently broken camera with an intact viewfinder surround and tried to replace the damaged part.
It didn’t go well.
I managed to get both cameras to pieces, removed the broken part and got the replacement in place. And then it all went wrong.
this is the doner camera. That powder used to be foam
This is the replacement part in perfect condition. But the wrong size
I’d assumed that because the parts on the cameras looked the same, they would be the same. The cameras were different versions of the same model, but nobody would subtly change the design of a part just because they could, would they? Of course the answer is yes. The replacement part is around half a millimetre thicker than the old one. And that’s all it needs to be not to fit. Double wah. So I’ve had to put both cameras back together and continue the quest. Or convince myself that it doesn’t really matter. As if that’s going to happen.
The only piece of good news is that while I had the lid off my original camera I was able to make the flash work properly. The camera has a socket for connecting the flash gun, but when I got it the connection was always short circuited, causing the flash to fire when it shouldn’t. I had a quick look and a connecting tab on the socket was shorting against body of the camera. I bent it out of the way and I now have timely flashes.
I’m going to call this a score draw. Book now for round two…
These are just the colours that happened to be in the printer. I think they worked rather well.
I’ve been playing around with Python programs in FreeCAD for a while. Today I did a bit of image processing. The little program I’ve built reads in an image, resizes it, reduces the colour depth to 4 and then drops out four STL files, one for each colour. These can then be combined in the slicer to make a low-res picture.
The pictures look better the further you are away from them. A bit like me. At the moment I’m using a resolution of 128x128 pixels. I’ve got to tidy the code up a bit, and then I’ll put it all on GitHub.
There’s a new issue of Raspberry Pi magazine out. It’s got some really nice articles. And a couple that I wrote. My favourite so far is the one that describes how to install and run Stable Diffusion on a Raspberry Pi 5 with 1G of memory (or even a Raspberry Pi Zero. The good news is that it works. The bad news is that it takes several hours to create the image.
I don’t see that as a problem though. At the moment I’m trying to get it working on a Raspberry Pi attached to an e-ink display. I think it might be rather cool to have randomly generated art popping up every now and then.
I didn’t know you could actually blow up servo motors. Turns out that you can though. I was doing some calibration of my googly eyes and typed in a wrong number. The servo tried to go to a place it couldn’t and got very warm and stopped. I should have been quicker unplugging it. Fortunately I have plenty of spares…
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.
