Elven Assassin is great fun

How we tend to look after a session

I know a few folks with Quests, which is nice. We’ve been playing Elven Assassin which is great fun. We position ourselves on platforms around the landscape and try and stop nasty things from wandering into our village/temple or whatever by shooting them with arrows. There were a few glitches getting started, but once we got going the game worked very well.

The graphics on the Quest don’t look as impressive as the screenshots on the game website. But they are perfectly adequate for the job and the important bit (taking aim and shooting with your bow and arrow) works really well. If you and your friends have Quests it is a fun way to get together and do stuff.

I’m fairly rubbish at most video games, but in the coop version of the game it doesn’t matter quite so much. Those with sharper shooting skills than mine can take up a bit of the slack and, most importantly, they aren’t shooting at me.

Prescription lenses for Oculus Quest change everything

I’ve had my Oculus Quest for quite a while. I’m always impressed by the quality of the experience that it delivers, but I’m less impressed by the way it makes my glasses dig into my face in a rather painful manner. So, last week I ordered some prescription lenses from VROptition.com. It would have been a simple process, except that I’d lost my prescription and when those nice people at EyeSite responded with the information I had to contact them again to ask what it meant…..

Anyhoo, the lenses arrived today. Amazing. I’ll write that again. Amazing. This must be what life is like for people with normal eyes. Lucky for them. I don’t need the glasses spacer any more so my field of view is much wider and the lenses themselves (which are beautifully presented as you can see above) are multi-coated so I get virtually no reflections from the optics. And, with no glasses I have no frame digging into my face any more.

The Quest has suddenly become properly viable for long term use. If you wear glasses you should investigate getting some of these. I’d even be inclined to suggest you get some “blank” ones if you don’t wear glasses because of the way they reduce reflections. I’m looking forward to spending a lot more time in VR now.

Back printing

Well, that was quick. Thanks to 3DGBIRE for super fast service. I’ve replaced the Bowden tube and the knurled bolt too, so now my filament feed is super smooth. And I can print at a much lower temperature now that the print path isn’t quite so bunged up.

Still supported after all these years....

I’m not sure many companies are still providing support for eight year old products. Apple make a big song and dance about how they provide updates for their phones for “at least five years” after manufacture (which I think is a bit rubbish bearing in mind how much they cost). I find it amazing that tech companies are allowed to get away with this. Nobody else (for example car makers) is allowed to call time on their products in this way.

Anyhoo, rant over. Today I contacted Ultimaker about replacement bits for Una, my printer. I’ve found some things on Ali-Express which look like they might fit, but they have a twenty day delivery (if I’m lucky) and so I thought I’d go back to the source. They put me onto their UK dealer who had the parts I need in stock and they are in the post. Should arrive tomorrow. Awesome.

Animal Crossing is keeping me sane

Well, probably not. But it is keeping me occupied. As distractions go it is hard to beat. And I’ve even tracked down an electronics kit to play with. If this doesn’t convince people of the social worth of video games, then I don’t know what will.

The Button Hole Man

Number one wife is busy sewing “scrubs”. I have no sewing skills at all, but I am quite good with gadgets. So it turns out that I’m the one who can understand how to use the button hole attachment on the sewing machine. I’m quite proud of the above.

Una has fallen...

Una, my Ultimaker original 3D printer, has been happily printing out bits and bobs for the last week or so, although I have been needing to use higher and higher printing temperatures to get a decent flow of material through the print head. Not a thing that should be happening on the way into summer. Anyhoo, today I set her off as usual and went back to check on progress, only to discover that she had been waving her print head around for an hour or so, printing nothing.

So, I took everything to bits to discover that the filament had melted into the end of the Bowden tube (the tube that delivers the filament to the print head). This has produced a pretty solid blockage which is not going anywhere in a hurry. I think it was caused by the little PTFE fitting (the white bit in the picture above) wearing out and collapsing.

So, no more 3D printing for a while. I’m going to have to track down some spares.

Thermos flasks are the future

If I was into the stock market (which I am not) I reckon at the moment the smart money is going into thermos flasks.

Think about it. Soon folks are going be allowed to go out a bit more. And when they do they will find that no cafes are open So, instead they will have to take their own food and drink when they go out. And that means that they will want to keep their drinks nice and hot. So they will all rush out (or rush in) and buy a new thermos flask.

You heard it here first. Oh, and it reminds me of my favourite thermos flask joke:

Stooge 1: “What’s that"?”
Stooge 2: “It’s my new thermos flask”
Stooge 1: “What does it do?”
Stooge 2: “It keeps hot things hot and cold things cold”
Stooge 1: “Awesome. What have you got in it?”
Stooge 2: “A cup of coffee and a choc ice”

Getting forgetful

Why is it that when you forget an idea that you have had, the only thing you can remember about it was how great it was.

New Business Idea

I’m thinking of starting a business making blurry furniture. I reckon it would be really useful to put behind yourself when you are doing a video call.

DotNetSheff-York Air Quality with added Top Hat

Thanks to the DotNetShef folks for the picture.

I was supposed to be going to a couple of .NET events to talk about Air Quality earlier this year. But instead I’m sitting at home in front of a camera waving my arms around. It was great fun though, and I hope that everyone enjoyed it. You can find some code resources for the presentation here.

If you want to get involved with our efforts in Hull you can find us on Mattermost here

A look at the Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera

I’m beginning to wonder why we need “proper” cameras. My smartphone can now produce pictures that I can use for just about anything. And now you can get a high quality camera for your Pi. You can even swap lenses like the professionals. We are looking for something we can use to track robots, and so I thought I’d get one and see how well it works. I bought the “telephoto” lens because it seemed to be higher quality, but you if you can track down “C-mount” lenses (they are used in CCTV and video cameras) you can have what ever kind of lens you like. There is also a “wide-angle” lens which I’d quite like to have a play with now.

The camera connects to the Pi in just the same ways as previous cameras, but there must be an awful lot more data going down that little ribbon cable. I attached my camera to a Pi 4 and had a play. First thing I did was point the camera out of the window and take a picture. I got a 6.5 Mbyte Jpeg image. The top right hand corner of it looked like this:

This is not the entire picture. This is a tiny crop of the top right hand corner. There’s a lot of chromatic aberration going on (that’s causing the purple fringes) but detail is pretty good. Watch what happens when I stop it down a bit though.

Suddenly the image is much, much better. “Stopping down” means reducing the size of the hole that lets in the light. This means that the lens has to do less work and so I’d expect the image to be a lot better. The downside is that a smaller hole means less light, so the sensor takes longer to capture an image. This can lead to blur unless you use a tripod or increase the gain in the camera and get more noise.

I don’t particularly want to show you the view from my window, but what I will say is that the camera is doing a good job here. Once I’d taken some pictures out of the window, I took some of my desk.

This is the entire image of a corner of my desk. The minimum focus distance is not great for the tele-photo lens, at about 15 inches.

This is a 100% crop of the above picture, which should give you an idea of how much of the frame the branches above took. It should also give you and idea of the great quality of this lens and sensor combination.

This is a crop of the same image taken with the lens aperture wide open. This shows that you can get some lovely “out of focus” effects with this camera.

Good things to know:

There’s a really good book about how to use the camera. It’s a free download from MagPi Magazine here.

if you want to use the camera preview with VNC remote desktop you have to enable direct capture in the Troubleshooting Menu of VNC Server.

if you want to use VNC remote desktop to a Raspberry Pi with no HDMI monitor connected you have to use raspi-config to set a specific desktop resolution using the Resolution Option in the Advanced settings.

You can adjust the lens distance using a tiny spanner, but I’ve not done this. So it might be possible to get even sharper pictures.

The picture quality of the high quality camera is very good. But then again you’ll be paying around 100 pounds for the sensor-lens combination and so you’d expect something pretty impressive. I’m not sure how much the sensors in mid-range compact cameras cost, but I’d expect them to be around the same quality.

The “telephoto” lens that I got has quite a narrow angle of view, so if you want to do general stuff I’d suggest getting the wide angle lens instead.

Things will get properly interesting when these devices get into the hands of all the smart people that like to play with Raspberry Pi. There is considerable scope for some very interesting devices and if you want programmatic access to a very high quality image you’ve got that now.

M5Stack Development is Wonderful

I spent some time today playing with new M5Stack devices. They are wonderful. The development process is now super smooth. You write your code in the browser and then deploy it over WiFi directly into the device. You can write Micro Python or a block oriented language. And it works a treat. Everyone should get themselves some M5Stack devices to play with.

Windows for Free

In 2013, after a lot of effort, I bought myself a new laptop. It was a new fangled (for the time) UltraBook. I’ve used it on and off for years, lent it around the family and last week I popped a 40 quid SSD into it with the aim of speeding it up a bit. That worked a treat. Then I discovered that someone I know needs a laptop to work from home. And of course their employer won’t/can’t supply one.

So on Thursday I took the 7 year old machine from 0 to fully configured laptop in about 30 minutes. By the time I’d finished I had a newly setup machine with a new Microsoft Outlook email account. At no point did I enter any licence keys and it just worked. Just a tiny bit of fixing up because of a faulty touch screen.

The machine is well powerful enough and apparently it works a treat. Apple make a big fuss about the way they support their new smartphones for five years. Big deal. This was a seven year old laptop and it just worked. The Windows 10 installation was a breeze, I even had Cortana talking me through it.

If you have an old laptop that is not doing much, buy yourself a cheap SSD (I got a 250G one from Amazon for around forty quid) and slap a free copy of Windows Home on it. If you’re a student you can then top that off with a free copy of Microsoft Office 365.

Rob at DotNetShef

I was meant to be going to Sheffield a while back but, thanks to a nasty little virus, that got cancelled. However, you can’t keep a good presenter down (or even me). So on Tuesday next week I’m doing my session remotely from the discomfort of my own home.

If you want to join us (and you don’t have to live in Sheffield to do it) you can sign up here.

Apple Watch Fitness Ninja

At the moment my life is driven by small victories.

If you have an Apple watch you’ll know all about the “Stand goal” and how you have to stand every hour to get it. Well, I’m rather proud of the way that today I managed to do my stand goal at the last possible moment.

Ticket to Ride Near Miss

We played Ticket to Ride last night. Great fun and we nearly won. Interesting fact: if you all own a copy of the original game only one of you has to buy a game variant (we played Ticket to Ride Europe) for you all to be able to play it.

What an "erm" looks like...

I’ve spent a big chunk of the last couple of days removing these from my audio recordings….

Colourful Boxes

Today’s challenge was to “find something colourful”. I’m quite proud of my entry…

Rob in Hackspace Magazine

I’m a writer again! Hackspace Magazine this month have printed my article about using a Real Time Clock to control the power of a microcontroller. They’ve done a really good job laying out the pictures and words that I sent through, and the whole magazine is a very interesting read - as usual.

You can read the article (and the whole magazine) here