Camera Strap

Further to my post on Wednesday, and with a 10% discount coupon from Ebay I have bought myself a camera strap.

Cooplands Baking Kit

I love it when people try new things, especially in difficult circumstances. I was in the local Cooplands bakery getting some sandwiches for lunch and I noticed that they were selling baking kits. I’m not a huge fan of baking itself but I am a huge fan of the things that people make when they do it. So I bought a kit. It’s very nicely presented with nicely printed recipes and beautifully packaged ingredients. You even get some utensils, including the cutter for the gingerbread man and a tray to bake things in.

We’ve done the gingerbread men and the brownies so far, with pizza to come. They were delicious. If you’ve never baked and fancy having a go these are a really nice one-stop shop for all the bits. I hope that they keep making them.

Castle Howard Looking Good

I’m having a tiny break from writing. Today we took a trip to Castle Howard which is one of my favourite places in the world. Before we set off we went onto their web site, dutifully filled out the form, booked our slot and got the QR code that would allow us and a few other people to go in.

When we arrived the place was mad busy. I’ve never seen so many people there. I’m far from convinced that everyone there had done as much forward planning as we had. The good news was that the grounds are so vast that they swallowed up all the visitors and we had a delightful amble round. The weather was kind enough to only threaten to rain a couple of times.

Walk Picture

Went for a walk today and took this picture. Which was rather nice.

Akai MidiMix

A long time a ago Andy, a very wise friend of mine, explained why so many computer people were also into photography. “You see” he said. “All computers do pretty much the same thing. Once you’ve bought a computer it is hard to convince yourself to buy another one, since it will do the same stuff as the one you already have. But photography is different. There are no end of lenses, tripods, filters, case, straps flashes and whatnot that you can hanker after”. He was right too. But I think I’ve found something even worse than photography. It’s called music.

For me the crucial difference is that I can do photography (a bit) but I can’t really do music. So I tend to hanker after new music kit just to avoid facing the awkward truth that I can’t actually play any of it.

Anyhoo, enough of my neurosis for now. I’ve just got myself an Akai MidiMix MIDI control surface that I can use to twiddle the settings in my synthesizers. It turns out that you can get an awfully large number of knobs and sliders (and even a few lights) for what seems a pretty reasonable outlay. And I’m going to investigate what else I can control using MIDI messages. Which should keep me off the piano keyboard for a while….

More Netgames.io fun

I’ve mentioned this site before, but I'm going to mention it again because the games are so good. We spent a very happy evening playing a variety of different things on our phones, pcs and tablets. They all worked a treat.

Quick Landing

It turns out that going flying is a social thing. We meet up on a Monday, someone suggests a flight plan and off we go, trying to keep each other in sight. Tonight’s flight was going well until someone remembered that there was a TV program on in 8 minutes that they rather wanted to see. This was a cue for everyone to drop 10,000 feet and head for the nearest airfield. It was all rather exciting. I’m even planning on getting a proper joystick because although it is possible to fly a plane from an XBOX gamepad I’m pretty sure that the professionals don’t do it that way.

My Little Scythe is pie fighting fun

Over the last few weeks we’ve spent quite a few of our regular game nights playing Scythe on-line. I seem to have a love-hate relationship which Scythe. The love is directly proportional to how well the last game went. At the moment I regard not coming last as a badge of honour, and I’m working my way up from there.

My Little Scythe is stepping stone (or gateway drug if you prefer) to the “proper” game. When we played it today I spotted a lot of the gameplay elements in a much simplified form. And you don’t have battles. You have pie fights. One of the things about full fat Scythe that I find a bit annoying is that some features of the game just seem to be there to make the gameplay more complicated. There are (to me) needless interactions between game elements and lots of different ducks that you have to get precisely in a row to be able to make progress. Perhaps what I’m really saying is that I don’t have the mental horsepower and concentration to play the game properly.

My Little Scythe is much simpler and I liked it a lot. But then again, I did manage to win.

Slave to my ego

Here’s a question: If you’d written a book and then you found that there was a Chinese translation of the book out there, would you try to get a copy?

In my case, it turns out that the answer is yes. I’ve just ordered a copy of the above.

There’s also a Polish version. It seems that having an inflated ego can get expensive….

This is difficult

I’m writing about this in JavaScript. This is quite hard. Especially because to describe this you end up using the word this to mean this not this. And I can’t find another word that means this that I can use to replace the this that doesn’t mean this.

Oh well.

Chapter 10 of Begin to Code with JavaScript now available

I’ve just uploaded Chapter 10 of Begin to Code with JavaScript. It tells you all about building a cool class hierarchy in JavaScript. You can find it, along with all the other chapters, here. You won’t be able to hear it for a while though I’m afraid. It turns out that writing deadlines are more important than reading deadlines.

New Keyboard Time

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. This is a nice keyboard with a good long key travel. Need to work on the wrist support perhaps, but it is a step forwards from the previous one if it remembers what it is doing and stays powered up all the time. The stand isn’t much of a help for my wrists but the angle is very good. The keyboard layout is a dead ringer for the Microsoft one that it replaces apart from the function keys and arrows which tend to be all over the place anyway.

I’ve pulled off the Apple keycaps it had on when it arrived and replaced them with Windows ones that are supplied with the keyboard (along with a key puller). I had a nasty moment when one of my favourite keyboard shortcuts (WIN+SHIFT+S) failed to start up the screen capture but I fixed this by flicking the keyboard configuration switch underneath the keyboard to the Windows position.

I’m surprised that I’m deserting Microsoft comfort keyboards in this way, but this is a very good price and I’ve decided that Bluetooth is just not a good technology for a keyboard that you want to leave switched on all day. Plus the Bluetooth interface on my desktop is flakey. I can make this keyboard into a Bluetooth one if I fancy, but at the moment I’m using the supplied dongle and it works very well. I’ve always been a big fan of split keyboards and this is a nice option. It doesn’t have the premium feel of the Microsoft keyboards but it seems sturdy enough. Let’s hope it keeps going.

Enigma on Netgames.io is great fun

I’ve mentioned netgames.io before. Its a tiny web site that lets you play multiplayer games. They’ve added another game to the site, Enigma. Opposing teams have to give clues to code words and pass messages without them being intercepted. You need at least four or five players and a means of having private chats (we used Discord) but the gameplay is brain bending fun. I was quite pleased to be on the winning team.

Formation Flying in Flight Simulator

If you look very carefully at this picture you can see the two other planes I’m, ahem, flying in formation with….. It was a lovely evening. The plan was to take off from Elvington airfield and then land at Humberside airport. And we did. Mostly. My goodness, flying properly is hard. Something simple like keeping a constant speed and height seems to involve constant control fiddling.

After our Yorkshire flight we went down to London City Airport and then flew over to Filton near Bristol. London looked magnificent in the evening sunshine. I managed a very bouncy touchdown and then crashed into a tree taxiing for a group picture. But it was all great fun and something we will definitely do again.

A walk in the woods

One of the great things about living where we do is that five minute walk can get you this view.

The Search for a New Toaster

We didn’t need a new toaster when I woke up this morning. But, after I’d reset the earth trip for the second time we decided that it probably was time to get one.

I’ve a suspicion that all the toasters in the world are made in a single large factory somewhere and then have different shaped and coloured skins added in the factory next door. Although having said that there seems to be a huge range of opinions about the various different types when you start reading Amazon reviews. And it turns out that you have to work quite hard to find a toaster that will toast a large piece of bread all the way to the top. The contender above was a good price and doesn’t seem to have too many one star opinions attached to it. It should arrive fairly soon. Then I can stop eating bread and jam.

IoT Cricket looks very interesting

This looks like a very interesting device. It’s called the IoT Cricket from Things on Edge. It looks like it brings Lora levels of battery performance to a WiFi connected device. It apparently has the ability to wake up, connect to a WiFi network and push out a packet of MQTT data in around 8 seconds. Which is pretty darned fast. There is only very simple PIO available for data inputs but there is onboard temperature and a clock that turns everything off between readings. You can power the device from one or two AA batteries or a LiPo and they are talking about battery lifetimes in the months and years.

It’s only 16 quid to get one, which will be a good price if it does what they claim. I’ve ordered one, looking forward to having a play.

Microsoft Word Speaks

I was working on the book (did you know I was writing a book? - you can hear it here) when my fingers caught a key combination that I’d not used before. And Microsoft Word started reading the text aloud. It was kind of scary until I figured out what was going on. The reading is actually pretty good, and it is a fantastic way to proof your writing.

When I read stuff that I’ve written I find that my brain automatically edits it, adding words that I’ve missed and correcting the spelling. But if I hear it read out to me I can hear all the mistakes. You might find it useful too. You can find the Read Aloud command on the Review tool ribbon You can change the reading speed and the voice and the inflection is quite natural. It even has a good go at reading program text with variable names in it. Although it can’t say the word JSON.

Microsoft Flight Sim is awesome

Very exciting day yesterday. Installed Microsoft Flight Sim. It only cost me one pound to get it. I’ve signed up for Xbox Game Pass for PC which will end up costing me four quid a month. Total bargain. Although I guess I should also factor in the cost of a larger SSD drive to hold all the games I’m now going to download….

The game itself took a while to download, what with it taking up over 120 Gbytes. Apparently you can buy it on 20 disks if you want a physical copy. It. Is. Awesome. The install process took ages and the game itself takes a while to get going. But once it is running it is fabulous. The views inside and outside the cockpit are very impressive. You can fly anywhere in the world, although it might not look quite as you remember. The Humber Bridge you can see above looks like it needs a bit of work. You can just see the shadows of the towers that should be there at the bottom of the screenshot above.

I’m not very good at flying the plane (the wings came off shortly after I took the picture) but I’m having great fun. I’m using a wired XBOX controller which gives me all the control I can handle just at the moment. We’re planning our first group flight soon, which should be fun.

If you are interested in flying, or just seeing the world, you should have a go.

Learning from your kids and their kids

Many years ago I took my kids to the university to “show them what daddy does for a living”. This turned out to be sit in front of screen pressing keys with the odd bit of shouting at people, which is pretty much all I did at home, so I’m not sure they learnt much. But I learnt a few things from them. Number one daughter picked up a mouse and pressed a button on it. The screen in front of her immediately sprang into action. Brian, who was watching, was very impressed. It seemed that nobody had ever thought to press that button before.

I was reminded of this when showing number one granddaughter my venerable Twilight Zone pinball machine. She leaned one of the buttons and promptly dropped the machine into “In the Zone” mode which triggers all the options and releases all six balls onto the playfield at once. This is something I’ve not been able to do in the many years I’ve owned the machine.

I’m not sure what to show her next time she visits.