Making high dynamic range pictures from one photograph

I’ve always liked making High Dynamic Range photographs. These are created by merging several different pictures with different exposures. The idea is that the combined picture has a great range of light and dark. However, making the images can be a bit of a pain. You have to take three or more shots and then use a program to combine them. And if things in the picture move, for example a tree blown by the wind, you can get some annoying artefacts.

So yesterday I tried a simpler approach. I deliberately under exposed each picture to make sure that I captured the sky detail and then made the dark parts of the picture lighter using Lightroom. I’m quite pleased with the results.

Day out in Dalby Forest

Today we actually went somewhere other than upstairs. We went to Dalby Forest. This is one of my favourite places in the whole wide world and today it was on fine form. Plenty of room for social distancing and facilities that were the cleanest I’ve ever seen them. We had a smashing time. I took a lens that I got just before lockdown that I’ve been waiting to play with for ages. The weather was kind to us, with interesting clouds in the sky and I’m very happy with the way the pictures came out.

I’m starting to like the outdoors again….

Overthinking MIDI Connections

I want to connect my venerable QY-100 to the computer, and so I’ve got myself a USB to MIDI connector cable. The design is quite simple. One wire plugs into a USB port on the computer and there are two MIDI plugs labelled IN and OUT on the other end. The QY-100 has two MIDI sockets, also labelled IN and OUT. So it should be simple to plug them together…..

And then my brain started overworking. Are the plugs labelled with their role, or are the markings on them telling me which socket to plug them into?

Fortunately it doesn’t do any damage if you plug them in the wrong way round, but after some experimentation I can confirm that a plug that is labelled IN is an input and should be plugged into an output. And vice versa. And now I need a lie down.

Cooking by other people

Apparently it is a “thing” to post pictures of your baking. I didn’t do these though, other family members were toiling in the kitchen this morning while I took care of important business involving the purchase of turnips.

Anyhoo, these soft pretzels were delicious.

Free Stickers and Badges

There was a time when I lived for badges and stickers.

Actually I still do.

Anyhoo, these appeared mysteriously through the letterbox one evening last week. They are a token of esteem for a session I did a few weeks ago. Thanks very much.

Time to mow

Got an actual guest coming to see us today.

So I’ve mowed the lawns.

Talking Air Quality at Notts IoT

Well, that was fun. Steve and I both did talks at Notts. IoT. Steve managed to remotely control a door lock using a cunning combination of IoT and AI. I managed to make the lights on my hat flash. You can find the PDF of my presentation here. You can find a complete recording of the event here.

Thanks to Pete for inviting me and making it so much fun.

Chapter 3 Begin to Code with JavaPodcast now available

I’ve recorded the audio and screencasts for Chapter 3 of Begin to Code with JavaScript. You can find them here.

Quiet Day

Had a fairly quiet day today. Here’s a picture of a rose.

Making Shadows in CSS

You can get some quite nice effects in CSS to make 3D text. Above you can see a heading for one of the exercises in the Begin to Code with JavaScript book (get the draft chapters here). It was simple to set up as a style:

.menuHeading {
font-size: 4em;
font-family: Impact, Haettenschweiler, 'Arial Narrow Bold', sans-serif;
color: red;
text-shadow: 3px 3px 0 blue, 10px 10px 10px darkblue;
}

A shadow is specified by three values and a colour. The first two values give the X and Y offset of the shadow and the third controls how diffuse the shadow is. You can add multiple shadows to a single style, which is how I got the sharp blue shadow and then the blurred deep blue shadow behind that.

Quite fun.

Rob's Podcasting Tips

I’m still not sure why I decided to make podcasts by reading out all the first drafts of Begin to Code with JavaScript. But I must admit that I’ve learned a lot by trying to do it. Here’s what I’ve learned so far:

• Don’t read from a script. Unless you are very (and I mean very) good it will sound like you are reading. If you listen to my earlier efforts you can tell that I’m reading words what I wrote. In later podcasts I’m using my words as a starting point for what I’m going to say which sounds a lot more natural. By all means have some notes, but don’t write down exactly what you are going to say.

• Have something for your hands to fiddle with while you talk. My mind tends to be able to run faster than my mouth (which is surprising) so I have something to fiddle with to keep bits of my brain busy that would otherwise run ahead and make me trip over my words.

• Don’t have a squeaky chair (or indeed anything else).

• Make sure you stay a constant distance from the microphone. I do this by using a headset mic, I’ve always had real problems using desktop microphones. Other tricks include putting your elbows on the desk to stop yourself from rocking backwards and forwards.

• Don’t sweat the fluffs. If you make a mistake don’t go back and edit, just make a joke of it and carry on. I can guarantee that the second time you try to retake something you think you got wrong the first time, you will be a lot more nervous and inclined to get it wrong again….

• Find a style that you like and grow into it. I’ve noticed that my podcasts are getting better (at least I think this is the case) because I’m now more relaxed and at home with what I’m doing. I seem to be establishing a relationship with a listener even though I know that at the time (and probably afterwards) there is nobody there.

• Force yourself to listen to yourself. I don’t like doing this, but I do try to make constructive notes to myself to try and make the next podcast better.

• Try to enjoy it. I quite like doing podcasts and that for me is a good enough reason for doing them (although you can regard this as a form of public speaking and therefore very, very useful to get good at). It doesn’t really matter if nobody listens, just by trying to do this you are adding value to yourself.

You can find my podcasting efforts here. I’d love to hear what you think of them.

Netgames is great for, er, network games

This site is a hidden gem. For a while I was concerned about telling everyone about it on the blog in case everyone started using it and it got too busy.

Then I got real.

It is network gaming as it should be. Zero effort to create games, no crashes, no grinding of busy icons. It just works and the game implementations are spot on. And there are versions of some of our favourite games.

We tried Avalon and Codenames and they worked really well. All players need is a phone each (although it works fine via web browser on a PC too). And it is free, although they’ll take donations for a very worth cause.

Netgames.io

Garden pic

We’ve got one of these growing in the garden. I’m not sure what make of flower it is, but it does look rather nice.

Make good food with Simply Cook

Pretty much all I know about cooking can be summed up in this blog post from a while back. But number one daughter put us on to Simply Cook, which is livened up our mealtimes no end. You get sent sauces and whatnot to add to your ingredients, plus a well-explained recipe to follow. And the results so far have been excellent. We’ve had three of the four dishes above, just the Cuban Mojo to go.

We’ve set it up to get enough for four meals a month so we can have a new meal once a week or so. We can try out new ones or go back to favourites. We particularly enjoyed the Bokkeumbap. I never thought I’d like sliced cabbage that much….

Free Sound on Sound Magazine

I’ve been messing around with audio since I bought my first pair of headphones from Woolworths. Recently I’ve started reading sound magazines to try and brush up my knowledge a bit. Sound on Sound Magazine has been very useful for this. Lots of technical stuff, good coverage of gadgets and some nice content on the finer points of making nice sounding things. Unfortunately I’ve not been able to get to the shops to buy the latest issues, but now they have started putting their magazines online for free. Well worth a look.

Way to celebrate

Is it right to celebrate the completion of an article by mowing the lawns? Asking for a friend.

Riches Beyond the Dreams of Avarice

I’m really enjoying playing Animal Crossing. It provides a good chunk of escapism every day. And last week this happened. If you know the game, you’ll understand how exciting this was. If you don’t, the game lets you buy turnips and do a little speculating with them. I’d bought my turnips at a 94 bells, so this price had me turning a tidy profit. In fact the price was so attractive that I had folks turning up to sell their turnips too.

Great fun.

Rob at Notts IOT

Steve and I will be delivering talks for Notts Iot in a few days. If you really want to see what my home office looks like (and who wouldn’t) then you can sign up here.

Listen to "The Global Ventilator Race"

“The Great Ventilator Race” is a most excellent podcast about worldwide attempts to respond to the Covid 19 pandemic by making ventilators that will keep people breathing while their lungs recover from the virus.

You can find it on your podcast provider, and it is also here.

It’s a well told tale of hubris and a whole bunch of people finding out that some things are just hard to make and that people who have been making them for a while might have something of an inside track. I found it fascinating that large companies and very clever people were all falling foul of the same mistakes that I used to tell Imagine Cup teams off for making all those years ago. Lots of folks had plunged into making something before taking the trouble to find out if it was useful, deployable or even needed by the target audience.

Well worth a listen.

ArduinoJson is awesome

I’ve probably raved about this before. But, in case you missed it, here it is again. Arduino Json is awesome. Awesome, awesome. I’m using OpenWeatherMap to get some weather data into my ESP32 program. It arrives as a Json formatted string that I need to convert into values to use in my program. With ArduinoJson I can just pop their include file in the same folder as my application and away I go. No messing around installing libraries and wondering if they are the right ones. The decoder stays right with your code.

They’ve made it incredibly to create the code that you need to unpick your data. You just have to take the Json you want to work with and paste it into their web page. Then it comes up with the C++ code for you to drop into your solution to decode and encode the Json stream. Wonderful.