Readly looks to be good value

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If you like magazines you should definitely take a look at Readly. For the price of a couple of magazines a month you can get to read pretty much all of them. The reading experience is very good on iPad. The magazines load up smartly and moving around them is a breeze. You can also read on your PC. There are quite a few crossword magazines which I thought was a bit silly at first. Turns out that you can screen shot the pages and then print them. So if you like word searches etc etc then that must makes the deal even more compelling.

Some of the “magazines” are those collection ones that you find in the newsagents. I like reading these and there are quite a few, from photography to piano playing.

Our local library uses the RB app to make available a bunch of free magazines (you really should be reading these) but the Readly app is much better and the range of reading is enormous.

If you’re looking for a few things to read during the lockdown I reckon this is a good bet. And you get two months free membership if you sign up.

Note: I’ve not got anything free from Readly, I just think that they provide a good product.

M5 Atom is absolutely tiny

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A new computer arrived at our house today. The postman just popped it through the letterbox. The Atom is a tiny new microcontroller from M5Stack. It contains a button, a multicolour led and an accelerometer. It has enough pins to be useful along with a Grove socket.

It’s a little bit bigger than the top of my thumb, it contains an ESP32, it can run MicroPython and hang off Azure or Bluetooth. And you can buy them for six dollars apiece.

I know that the world today is a right old mess, but there are still some amazing things to be found.

Making trivets

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I love the way that 3D printing lets you go from an idea to a thing really quickly. Thanks to a what seems to be a worldwide shortage of liquid soap (I wonder why that might be) we now have a soap-powered cleanliness routine. This has led to a need for soap dishes. We’ve re-purposed a bunch of little dishes, but we have the problem of the soap getting wet and icky (and dissolving) in the dish when it gets wet.

We needed something to keep the soap out of the water that runs off it after use. A kind of “soap trivet” that fits in the bottom of the soap dish. A few minutes with OpenSCAD and I had my design. A little while later we had our printed trivets. And now Una can go back to making PPE visors.

If you have a need for a soap trivet, you can find the OpenSCAD code here.

Tkinter tip: putting buttons back to their original colours

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Another of those “blog posts that you write so that in six months time, when you hit the same problem you can search for it and find the answer that you wrote for yourself…”

I’m building a little editor for Hull Pixelbot HullOS programs. The editor can deploy code via MQTT or serial terminal so my editor has buttons that let you select which connection you are using. I thought it would be neat to make the buttons change colour to indicate which connection type is in use. Making buttons go green is easy:

button["bg"] = "green"

You can regard a display element as a dictionary (everything in Python is a dictionary) and one of the keys lets you set the background colour.

However, getting a button back to its original colour is a bit more tricky. Word on the street was that the default button background colour is “light grey” but this didn’t work. Perhaps I spelt “grey” wrong. Anyhoo, the correct way to do this is to use the following:

button["bg"] = "SystemButtonFace"

The colour “SystemButtonFace (why am I thinking of boat names?) is the colour that you need.

Thanks for the free book. Whoever you are.

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Whilst enjoying our government mandated walk in the outside earlier this week we came upon a blue Ikea bag full of kids books in splendid condition. Over the bag was displayed a note that said “From our house to your house. Please feel free to take one of our books”. What a nice thing to do. And number one granddaughter loves books. So I picked up a book, checked the location of the house (it was the one with rainbows in the window) and then we completed our exercise.

The next day we headed out with a “thank-you” note. When I get to the location of the blue bag I look for the rainbow in the window and find that two adjacent houses have rainbows. Dratt. Now I don’t know who to thank.

So, in the extremely unlikely event that the generous family actually read my blog I’d like to say thank you here.

Just had a thought. If I find out who they are I could give them a free copy of Begin to Code with C#. Not sure what they’ve done to deserve that though…….

Busy Fibre

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Earlier this month I re-imaged my PC. Using your skill and judgement, can you work out from the above graph of internet usages when this was?

The two peaks are around 60G each, which is rather impressive. It’s a good thing I’m on an unlimited contract. It’s also a good thing I’m on KC Lightstream fibre to the house. I shudder to think how long it would have taken to download this much content a few years ago.

Camtasia is Wonderful

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Full disclosure: Camtasia were kind enough to give a free licence for this as part of the TechSmith Influencer Program. Thanks very much.

I’ve been using Camtasia for years. And now I’m using it again. My new book (I love saying that) is going to have lots of video extras so that I can talk the readers through some of the subjects. So, of course, I’m using Camtasia to make them.

Camtasia is one of those products that just seems to be on your side. At no point do you feel that you are having to bend what you do to fit the tool. The video capture element just works. I’m capturing the desktop of a VPC so that I can record everything and can set the capture area to exactly fit the window on my screen. I can record with a narration as I go, or add the narration later. Or do both and argue with myself. The process of bringing items together to make a seamless whole is very easy. And the publishing is as easy as it can be.

It even managed to get my machine up to 100% loaded by using all the cores when rendering the video. I’ve not seen many programs that manage to do this.

Its really easy to add titles and animation effects (although I’m trying very hard not to go nuts with them). If you’re stuck at home wondering how you can produce videos with a professional finish then this is a really good way to do it.

Printing Trains

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Chris likes trains. So it seemed appropriate to make him a birthday card with a picture of a train on it. I found this picture amongst a bunch that I took in Haworth nearly ten years ago.

I tried to print it onto thin card with my lovely HP laser printer. It did not go well. Lots of black toner everywhere. I really thought I’d broken the printer.

Fortunately a few tests confirmed that all was well. The printer was just having trouble with the card stock I was using. Turns out that the answer was to do just what you should do. Tell the printer you are using a different kind of paper. When I selected “thin card” it worked a treat. It runs the printer more slowly so that the toner has more time to heat up the card and fuse the toner to it.

PSU Supports for LED cube

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I’ve gone back to working on the led cube. I’m using a great design for the supports but the power supply support boards for each panel don’t fit my particular led boards. So I’ve started making my own. Because the designs of these things have to change a bit I’ve made the program as flexible as possible. If you want an OpenSCAD program that you can use to make a plate with holes and rectangles in, then this could be just want you want.

First Visors Delivered

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I dropped off a few test visors at Dove House Hospice today (with some stickers). I gave them a call and they said that they would find them useful. They do fantastic work. It amazes me (in a bad way) that services as important to the community as this are not routinely provided by the health service. But they aren’t, and so Dove House has to exist as a charity, depending on donations (which have dried up a lot recently). If you can help I know they’d appreciate anything you can give them.

They were very pleased to have them and so I’m going to just keep Una the Ultimaker printing them out and I’ll drop some more round when they are ready.

Begin to Code with JavaScript is a Thing

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The “Begin to Code” series is going to be a trilogy. They’re letting me write another book in the series, all about JavaScript.

I’m using GitHub as the hub of the course (the clue is in the name). Readers will get started by cloning the sample repository and then make their own changes. They can then use GitHub to publish their creations as web pages that the whole world can see.

It’s going to be fun.