Seam Client Fun and Games

I think this should be fast enough…

Now that we are getting into networked game nights I’ve decided that I have a need to play games on the big telly in the living room. Thoughts turned to a Raspberry Pi 4 running Steam Client. This was suspiciously easy to set up: there are a couple of splendid guides online that you can find here and here

Then I did some testing. One thing I didn’t appreciate is that fundamentally Steam Client is a souped up remote desktop. I was installing it using VNC on my PC and things got somewhat surreal when my PC desktop appeared on a machine where it shouldn’t be. I could see my VPC desktop on a remote desktop on the Pi. It was a bit like that bit in SpaceBalls when they watch the video of the movie inside the movie.

I wanted to take a screenshot but I was afraid this might cause a rift in the space-time continuum.

Anyhoo it seems to work for most games. Now I need to figure out how to do the video chat part of the evening.

Sorting out my cables...

I spent very happy while doing this with all my Dupont cables today. I think it really was time well spent.

Home Networking Tips

I’m sure that most of my readers know this stuff, but just in case you don’t, here are some home networking tips. Feel free to add yours at the bottom in the comments.

• If you can use wire, use wire. Nothing like a wired connection. If your laptop doesn’t have a socket you can get a USB adaptor (search Amazon for USB network). It makes a big difference.

• You can also get boxes that let you send network connections over the mains wiring in your house.

• Switch your router off and on again. It really works.

• Try changing your WiFi channel to improve performance. Some channels are susceptible to interference from Microwave ovens and the like. Your KC router should automatically scan for a quiet channel when you reboot it, so you might find this will ease your problems a bit. There are WiFi scanner apps that you can get to tell you which channels are in use in your area. Take a look at Vistumbler if you have a PC.

• Look at WiFi signal boosters if you have any “hard to reach” parts of the house.

• If you keep files at home remember security. Don’t have only one copy, and don’t leave important data lying around. Tools like Microsoft Onedrive are a great way to put your files in the cloud so that they are secure. They can even find old versions if you make a bad edit.

• Remember to “switch off” every now and then and just do something that doesn’t involve the computer (that’s the one I’m worst at following)….

Hardware Meetup now on Teams

Last night we had our first ever “Hardware Meetup on Teams”. There were only a few of us, but it went surprisingly well with only a few minutes spent saying “Can you hear me?” and “No.”.

If you want an invite to our next meetup, ping me an email at hardwaremeetup@robmiles.com and I’ll see what I can sort out.

A Walk in the Woods

I went out for my “one trip out of the house for exercise” walk today. I took the camera to try and lend some impression of purpose to the trip. I have to say that the outside is looking very nice at the moment.

Hull has great networking

It’s nice to have a service that promises speed and then delivers….

With everyone now confined to their houses and living their lives on the internets it’s great to be in Hull. This is the performance that I was seeing yesterday when I was downloading the games that we wanted to play. Awesome.

Playing Smallworld 2 Online

Smallword is a nice little board game. Players try to build empires of different races with different attributes. The skill-full part of the game is deciding when to ditch your race, send it into decline and reset your conquering ambitions.

We played it in person a while back and tonight, because we can’t get together any more, we had a go at the online version. It worked very well, there were some network hiccups but nothing that got in the way of having fun. In fact, without the need to move bits of cardboard around and count up scores the gameplay went at a fair old clip.

If you want to play it, you can find it on Steam for a modest sum. Well worth it for the fun that we had, and we are definitely going to do it again. We used Discord for in game chatting and that worked well too.

Of course I’m only posting this because I managed to win one of the games we played…..

USB Power Supply

This is a really useful device. You feed it power from a USB socket and it puts out a range of voltages from around 14 volts down to two or three. You can also set it to limit the current supplied and it has a nifty display of current and voltage. Great for testing simple circuits and well worth the price.

I got mine here and the customer service was excellent. My first device arrived with the perpsex covers smashed. I messaged the supplier asking if they could supply a couple of spare covers as the electronics worked fine, but they sent me a complete replacement. Good product and good service. Thanks for that.

Note: One thing to be aware of is that the device arrives with the output voltage set to maximum. Make sure that you adjust this down to your required voltage before you plug it into the device you want to power with it.

Crocodile Dentist is still a thing

When our kids were a lot younger than they are now we had a lot of fun with a game called “Crocodile Dentist”. The gameplay is simple enough: pull teeth out from the crocodile and be careful not to pick the one which makes him close his jaws and chase you across the table. Last we we got out our old copy and played it with a new member of the family and discovered that it still retains its nerve wracking charm.

It’s very pleasing to find that you can still buy it. I guess this means that there might be someone out there who has spent nearly all their working life producing copies of the game. That would look great on any CV.

Buy a copy of Fritzing

If you are into electronics you should be into Fritzing. It’s a fantastic way to visualise circuits at breadboard level, schematic level and finally on a PCB. I’ve been using it for ages. I’ve just installed it again on my newly built PC and I noticed that this time there’s a proper option to pay. Which I was very happy to do. Software of this quality deserves to be supported.

Self Isolation Tip: Start a Diary

I’ve been self-isolating now for a couple of days and so I now feel that I have acquired sufficient experience to be able to give out a few tips to you, dear reader. After all, it is only a matter of time before you have to do it too.

My biggest tip so far is to do something that I’ve been doing for a while anyway. When I stopped having a “proper” day job a few years ago I found that it was hard to focus on things that I was working on. So now I have a diary that I fill in every day. Some of the items are under headings for particular projects, but others are just things that I want to keep track of having done. If I have a bunch of things that need to be done I put them on the day as a series of bullet points and then tick them off when complete. I then carry any left overs onto the following day.

I find that this gives a nice structure to what I’m doing and means that I can see what I’ve achieved going forwards. I’m sure there are some good programs for this (what I really want is one that I can use to tag items to make it easy to search for entries on a particular topic) but for now I’m just using a Microsoft Word document. I keep the master copy on OneDrive so that I can update and view it on any platform, including the phone.

I’ve found it very useful in real life too. I don’t have to try and remember when I ordered those tickets or whatnot, I just look up the event in the diary. And of course when historians want to find out just when the great Rob Miles did all his mighty deeds they will have just one place to look…

Save on Animal Crossing at ShopTo

Looking forwards to playing Animal Crossing on your Nintendo Switch but not looking forward to spending fifty quids to do it?

You can reduce the hit on your wallet a bit by heading over to ShopTo where you can pick up the download for about ten pounds less.

Facebook Portal TV

I thought that the Facebook Portal TV was an interesting device when it came out, but at the time I didn’t think that I had a particularly good reason to own one. That changed this week, with the prospect of spending a while unable to meet up with people in person. So I’ve got one.

It works rather well. You clip it to the top of your TV and plug it into your TV and the mains adaptor and away it goes. One real annoyance is that it needs an HDMI cable to connect to the TV but one is not supplied in the box. Facebook are not selling this device cheaply, and to leave out a crucial cable is just annoying penny pinching.

The setup is easy (although the firmware update took ages) and the calling to other Portal owners works smoothly. You can call people via Facebook Messenger or Whatsapp. Since the device is made by Facebook (the clue is in the name) I think it is unlikely that they will be adding Skype or Zoom capability in the future. But what there is works well. And there is Amazon Alexa integration too which is a strange inclusion, but works well. There is even a little speaker in the Portal itself so you can hear responses without having to turn your TV on.

The camera will try to find the people in the room and frame the image around them. It is not a particularly high resolution device and when it zooms in the picture can get a little bit blocky. It also has an annoying habit of occasionally heading for interesting wallpaper patterns or book cover that it finds interesting but in general it works very well. Audio is picked up by a bunch of 7 microphones and is quite clear.

There are some very neat Augmented Reality features on show with the “Story Time” applications. These let one party in a call read a story to everyone else with animated graphics and sound. Sometimes the narrator is given a dynamic costume or mask overlay in the story which is both impressive and amusing. There are also a bunch of fun environments that you can overlay on your room and a picture frame mode that you can use to view photos.

As a way of keeping in touch with family it works very well. We’ve had a few calls drop out, but this is not necessarily something we can blame the Portal for.

The biggest problem that I’ve had with it is that it is a very “needy” HDMI device. Plug it into a TV and turn it on and it will automatically tell the TV to connect. This is useful if you want to just switch to an incoming call, but at the end of the conversation it will frequently refuse to give you your TV back. You end up having to manually select the TV input which makes using it a bit more fiddly than it needs to be.

The fact that the device is produced by Facebook is mildly concerning, although I’ve always thought that a faceless multinational corporation with thousands of shareholders might not be entirely on my side anyway. If they can find a way of making commercial use of what happens in my living room then good luck to them. I’ll live with the lack of privacy for now. And later, when we can go and see people in person I might relegate it to the spare room. But for now I think its usefulness outweighs the risk.

If you’re really concerned about your privacy you can cover over the camera with a little shutter and press a button to turn off the microphones.

If you can get one I reckon they are a good buy. Having a call on your TV does really seem to open up a window into the world of the person you are calling. I think the smaller devices are less compelling; if I want a small device to make video calls then I’ll take a look at the Echo Show.

Self Isolating Rob

These are the strangest times that I can remember. And I go back a long way. Today we discovered that one of our family was showing some symptoms that meant that we have to go into “self isolation” mode. The good news is that self-isolation doesn’t stop you from sitting in front of a computer for multiple hours a day, and so I think I’ll be just fine.

Last Chance at the Little Bookshop

The Little Bookshop in Leeds is one of my favourite places on the planet. Really. It’s just a lovely place with a great selection of kids books and a splendid cafe. We went there today for lunch and it was great.

There was a definite “end of term” feel about the whole affair, as if we were doing something for the last time for a while. I really hope that the nasty things that are coming down the tracks don’t put lovely places like this out of business. I wish them (and all places in the same position) the very best of luck.

The Raspberry Pi serial port is almost useful...

If you’ve ever played with a Raspberry Pi you’ll be familiar with the annoying way you have to configure the device before you can use it.

You might have no intention of using your shiny new Pi Zero W with a keyboard, screen and mouse but to get it set up you have to connect them all.

I thought I’d found the answer to my problems in the form of these serial connectors. You can connect them to the serial port pins on your Pi, plug the other end into your PC, fire up a terminal program (I use PuTTY) and then use the command line interface to set everything up.

A while back this would have been an excellent idea. Unfortunately modern versions of the Pi operating system are a bit more security conscious than the older ones, and disable the serial port command line by default.

So if you want to use this cable you have to use a mouse, keyboard and screen to turn it on and enable the serial console…… Oh well. It will still be useful for “on the fly” modifications.

Evohome Day 2

Today I completed the installation of the Evohome system. The system comes with two remote controlled relays, one for hot water and the other for heating. There’s also a remote temperature transmitter which you attach to your hot water tank. Once I’d done the wiring I had to take the controller unit around to each device and “bind” them together. This was slightly hampered by the fact that the controller has horrible battery life. The good news is that once I’d got the system installed I could then use an iPhone app to mange everything.

It’s been quite a pain free experience. These are my takeaways so far:

• everything works and looks to be well made (in the UK, which is amazing)

• the documentation is OK, but it glosses over some bits more than it should. However, once you get into the swing of how it works its fine

• the controller is very “last generation” with its resistive touch screen and Nmih batteries. However, the user interface itself is fine and seems to have been designed to make it easy to control your heating system, which is nice

• the radiator valves are a bit noisy when a little DC motor opens and closes them, but I think we’ll get used to this

I’ve not tried any of the fancy remote controlled features, but at this point I’m well pleased with how well everything works.

Evohome Heating Controller Fun

I’ve been meaning to do this for literally years. A while back I got all enthusiastic about replacing the radiator valves in the house with computer controlled ones, found out how much it would cost and then backed off a bit.

Earlier this week, armed with my “You’re not going to the MVP summit” bonus (in the form of a hotel room refund) I ordered a bunch of bits from these very helpful people and today a box arrived.

I’m using the Honeywell Evohome system. It’s been around for ages and has got consistently good reviews over the years. I like the idea of using something proven. The geek in me is intrigued by the If This Then That (IFTTT) integration. The Apple lover in me is rather upset about the lack of HomeKit integration but he’ll get over it.

Today I went round the house swapping the old mechanical control valves with the Evohome ones. The valves come with a couple of adaptors and these fit all but one of my radiators. At this point I’ve got a bunch of very clever but unconnected valves. Tomorrow I’ll install the remote controlled relays that will control the heating and then link everything together.

Ups and downs

On the plus side, I’ve finally got Una the Ultimaker to print something that has actually turned out quite well.

On the minus side, the dishwasher has just produced a load of soaking wet dishes.

James Bond Python

There’s always a moment in a spy film when someone says “I’ll just hack into their network and reconfigure it….” Today I did this for real. I suppose I was hacking my own network, but it still felt a bit like James Bond.

I was fixing one of our sensors on our Connected Humber network. These all use MQTT to send readings back to the server which then displays them on a map. The problem was that when I set up the sensor I’d set the publish topic incorrectly, so the readings were being sent to the wrong place. I needed to change that topic remotely.

Fortunately my sensor code can accept configuration commands, so this should have been an easy fix. Just send the appropriate message. The snag was that once the sensor has sent a reading it then goes into a deep sleep to save power. So it is hardly ever around to hear any messages. However, I’d built a delay into the software so that it stays running for a couple of seconds after it has sent a reading.

All I had to do was wait until I saw a message and then quickly send the configuration command. This seemed like a bit of a waste of time, and at my age there is no guarantee that I’d have the required ninja reactions that would allow me to send the message in time. So I wrote a bit of Python instead.

The program turned out to be simple enough. It just waits for an incoming message and then sends one straight out as soon as it sees it. The command that I sent was “Don’t go to sleep after each transmission”. Then I was able to configure the MQTT correctly, check a few other settings and finally put the device to sleep when I’d done it. And I really did feel a bit like a hacker in a spy movie while I was doing this.

I think I’ll build this out into a proper command transfer program. LoRa powered sensors work in exactly the same way, in that a LoRa device only listens for incoming messages after it has said something.