Shelf slicing today. Made some shelves into slightly narrower shelves so that they fit in the newly modified unit. Quietly impressed by the way that I managed to find nearly all the tools that I needed. Pro-tip for the day: If you want a nice edge to cuts in laminated or veneered materials put some sticky tape along the line you are cutting and then cut through that. It protects the edge and reduces the damage to the surface.
Slight change of pace today, mowed the lawns (both of them) and then fiddled with speaker which will be going under the carpets (which should arrive on Friday). Had great fun with this. Seem to be moving from "every wire is visible" to "no wires are visible", which I think is a good direction.
Continuing with the DIY theme from yesterday by pulling up all the carpet from the living room and taking it all to the same tip as yesterday. And this without checking if the replacement carpet has arrived. Truly, living on the edge.
Started the week by moving the shelf supports in the TV unit so that the centre speaker can actually be in the centre. This seemed to go well, so next I took a shelving unit apart and took the bits I don't want to a tip in Beverley. The rest has gone in the garage. My watch is very impressed with the amount of physical work I'm doing at the moment. Me, less so.
I used my iPhone to take all the pictures of our holiday last week. It does a very good job, although all the results do look like they were taken with an iPhone. They look great on a phone screen but when you enlarge them to take a proper look you do start to notice all the processing that has been going on. Anyhoo, one added benefit of using the phone is that each picture is geotagged with the location of the place it was taken. Although, as you can see above, this is not exact. I’m sure I’d have remembered taking these shots from the middle of the lake….
I’d taken all the sensible precautions. I had number one wife and number one son present in the shop to stop me from doing anything silly. And I was only going to take a look at the thing. And then, of course, I bought it. I was expecting my family safety net to kick in and tell me not to be so silly. But instead they told me to just go for it.
There are two possible reasons for this. Either it is a really good deal and will do just what we want. Or they knew that saying no would just lead to further visits to keyboard shops, searching on eBay and earnest discussions of the best thing to get. Anyhoo, it arrives once we have carpet in the room to stand it on. Rather excited.
We drove home today from the lakes and spent the afternoon fitting ceiling fans. As you do. I’d rather like the fan makers to know that this step is actually a lot more tricky than it looks. You are supposed to be able to just slide the infra-red receiver into the gap in the bracket. But the diagram doesn’t show the thick bunches of cables in the bracket and coming up from the fan. And when you’re reading the instructions you forget that the whole thing is attached to the ceiling at this point. It turns out that it is possible, but requires the use of a lot of language I’m not particularly proud of.
Last day today. Wah. We drove up to Wray Castle and then took a walk around the side of the lake.
Todays’ walk was in Grizedale, which is a wonderful place. Like all the places around here.
OK, so technically today is not all walking. After three days of climbing up and down hills, today we thought we’d let the boat take the strain. So it was onto the ferry on a trip to Bowness. The weather is improving, which made the trip on the water all the better. And we did walk around a bit when we arrived.
Quite a nice sunset too.
Walk number three finds us in the woods just outside Ambleside. Apparently one of the trees here is the largest in England. They all look pretty big to me.
There were also some amazing views of the lake.
Today’s walk took us to a “tarn” on the top of a hill. Tarn is a local word for “pond”. Apparently these are always placed on the hills in pairs or, as the locals say “One good tarn deserves another”.
The weather forecast said “good chance of rain”. But we went out anyway. And it didn’t rain, at least until we got back inside. A lot of our route coincided with a local marathon so we had a bit of company on the way round, which was nice.
We’re doing lots of things we’ve not done for a while. We’re going somewhere else. We’re having a holiday. We’re eating food off different plates. Today we headed out to the Lake District for a little while. We made a policy decision not to look forward to the trip on the basis that lots of things we’ve looked forward to in the last year or so have vanished at the last (or first) moment. But now we are here, perusing weather forecasts and walks. Great stuff.
I spent a big chunk of today ripping cable trunking off the walls and trying to minimise the amount of wall which came came off with it. The trunking sections had been fitted with a special kind of glue which doesn’t grip when you want it to (the trunking kept falling down) but will hang on like grim death if you need to remove it. I wonder how they make it do that.
I had a bug in my random number generator which was interesting. I’d used the wrong variable name at one point in the code and I was getting “the wrong kind of random” values generated. It’s fixed now, and my Connected Little Box devices will now properly synchronise their random light displays, as you can see above.
Not sure if anyone reading this blog really needs to know this one, but I need to keep a record of it somewhere and it it is what I’m doing today. If you (or even I) ever want to debug a Things Network Kickstarter gateway you can do this by connecting a seral cable to the jumper inside. I’m using a Raspberry Pi serial connector and with that you connect the white wire (which is the input to the computer running the terminal program) to the RX connection on the pins in the top right hand corner. The black cable goes onto the ground connection. I actually used my SimpleTerrm browser terminal to view the output from the gateway:
We’re trying to convert our gateways to Things Network version 3.0, which is proving an interesting experience at the moment.
Spent a lot of the day building Name in Lights devices. I’ve got quite a few now. If you want one of your own, send me a note and I’ll see what I can do.
Nomids is a lovely little game. There is a lot of chance involved, in that a good dice throw can make you a quick winner, but it also provides a lot of very nice “shafting mechanics” (in other words there are some neat ways that you ruin the game for another player. Having said that, when we played one person just kept winning. I guess they were just very lucky.
Actually, Nomids is as much a game framework, as a game in that the ten sets of little pyramids can be used in lots of other games that are described in detail on the game website, And it is rare to find games for up to ten players that are as much fun as this. Strongly recommended.
Nothing like a bit of success to turn you into a football fan….
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
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