Eight Minute Empire is a fun game (but longer than 8 minutes)

Eight Minute Empire is an empire building game that didn’t take eight minutes for us. It took a little bit longer. Perhaps we were over thinking it. You have a very limited number of turns and the moves for your turn are specified by a shared set of cards that you work through as the game progresses. It does suffer a bit from the “seeing a card that makes for a lovely move and then seeing someone else use that card to make theirs” syndrome, but you do have the fun of making good moves that thwart others.

It is all about making sure that at the very last turn you have more territory than anyone else. This means it doesn’t matter if the following move would see you wiped off the face of the earth, the tactic I used was to spread myself as thin as possible at exactly the right time. It seemed to work, because I won one of the games. The online play works pretty well, the game looks good and the background music goes on for ever. I’m sure they are hoping that it adds atmosphere to the gameplay but for me the biggest problem with the game was that once I’d started playing there was no way to turn the music down again.

So, recommended for a quick burst of world domination, but make sure you turn the music down first.

Another Day at Harlow Carr with a "fat rascal"

Spent another day at Harlow Carr, rapidly becoming on of my favourite places. And not just because you can buy a “fat rascal” from Betty’s on site.

Bought a shed

Bought a shed today. I seem to have reached the age where I find this rather exciting.

Piano playing vs typing

As I was doing my piano practice today (yes - it’s a thing) I was wishing that I could play the piano as well as I can type. Then it occurred to me that actually my typing, although fairly fast, is actually a bit rubbish. I frequently hit the wrong keys and the must used key on my keyboard is probably delete. With a document you can’t tell how many times the words have been retyped, whereas with a piece of music it is immediately obvious when you’ve played the wrong note (or no note). Piano players have to be right first time every time, which has raised them to a new level of respect in my book. And made me decide to perhaps type a bit more slowly and focus on getting all the letters right….

Synthstrom Deluge

The Synthstrom Deluge is a synthesizer, sampler and sequencer in a single box. It probably does other things too, but they don’t necessarily begin with the letter ‘s’. Anyhoo, a second hand one came up on Reverb shortly after I’d got paid for doing something or other. And the rest is the usual, predictable, history.

It is very nice. It has gold and black knobs and you control it by pressing coloured buttons that light up. It has a view of song structure that seems to make sense to me and doesn’t have the usual limitations on the number of tracks or voices that you usually get with devices like this. If you want to have 10 drum tracks you can have 10 drum tracks. You can then group them together so that you can control them all at once during a performance. Samples are played directly from an SD card (which can be very big) and the processor will keep on adding voices until it detects that it is running out of steam. The built-in synthesizer sounds are very nice too.

The manual is very thick, but I’m working my way through it at the moment.

Things Network Gateway Fun

I now know a huge amount about how the Things Network Kickstarter gateway works. I know how the code reacts to incoming packets, I’ve watched LoRa messages arrive and be processed.

But I still can’t get it to work. I think we need some stronger magic.

Dumb Smart Meters

The primary aim of Smart Meters, it seems to me, is to make it harder to take a reading when the energy company who installed the smart meter goes bust and its successor is unable to read it automatically.

A clue: you usually seem to have to press the 9 key to get the thing to show you the number you need to type into the web page..

Dominion winner

Busy day today. Went to Leeds and sprinted round Ikea wearing a mask. Then came back and played some Dominion Online. And won. Perhaps I play the game better when exhausted.

Neat USB Hub for Raspberry Pi

I really like the Raspberry Pi Zero. It's tiny and powerful. But connecting things to it can be a bit of a pain, particularly when you are setting up a system and really need a USB mouse and keyboard.

This little device makes things a lot easier. It is a hub which can plug straight into a Pi Zero and give you four ports of USB goodness. It even has an adapter so that you can use it as a “normal” hub as well. I found it in Amazon here.

Haunted USB sound adapter for Raspberry Pi

I needed a USB sound adapter for a Raspberry Pi device. I found this one on Amazon and also Pimoroni. it works fine. You get stereo audio output and mono microphone input. But the strange thing about it is the eerie glow that you get from the two sockets:

I don’t think the device supports an optical audio connection (which is the only reason I can think of for there being lights in there). However, they do seem to flicker when you plug the device into a Pi.

Whitby

I took this picture a few years ago. I want to go back there again..

Some days things are just not meant to work....

Just spent a very frustrating day trying to get a Things Network Gateway to work using Version 3 of their system. This is kind of important because the entire LoRa infrastructure around Hull is presently hanging off Version 2 and this service will cease at the end of the year.

Oh well, at least Brian can’t get it to work either…

Microsoft Flight Simulator in "even more awesome" shock

At the end of last month a couple of things happened to Microsoft Flight Simulator. The first thing is that it got smoother and faster (especially the loading times) and the second thing is that it now runs on XBOX. I’m not lucky enough to have an XBOX that it will run on, but number one son has and reports that it works rather well.

It is an astonishing piece of software. If you’ve not had a go with it you are definitely missing out.

Cleaning a camera sensor

When I was processing the picture tor yesterday’s post I realised that my camera sensor was absolutely filthy. The good news is that Lightroom is pretty good at getting rid of the resulting spots, but I don’t want to have to do this for every picture.

So today I cleaned up my sensor a bit. One of the problems with a mirrorless camera is that there is nothing between your precious sensor and the outside world when the lens is removed. Which means that your sensor will get dusty. If you want to find out where all the spots are, here’s how I do it.

1. Open Notepad on your computer and expand it to fill the screen.

2. Turn on your camera and set your the exposure to Aperture priority. Then set the aperture to the highest possible value (I go for F22).

3. If you point the camera at the white screen you should see any dust particles show up as black dots.

4. Turn the camera off.

5. Take the lens off and use a dust blower to blow the dust off the sensor. Do not blow into the camera yourself. And definitely don’t sneeze into it. And don’t get the blower so close to the sensor that it touches. If you hold the camera upside down while you do this the dust should fall out. I got a dust blower shaped like a rocket that I rather like.

6. Pop the lens on, power up the camera and check to see if the dots have gone. They should have. You can always repeat the the process a few times. If you have some tiny ones that won’t go away there my advice would be to leave them put. Definitely don’t try to wipe the sensor yourself, either get a proper kit or someone else to do it. I think (he said optimistically) that camera sensors are covered with quite a strong protective cover, but I’ve no desire to test this theory and risk totalling my camera.

7. Oh, and one other tip. Make sure your monitor screen is clean. Otherwise you’ll spend ages trying to remove spots that aren’t there..

Temple Newsam

While we’re on the subject of where to take four-year olds who like running around, I can recommend Temple Newsam near Leeds. It has some lovely wide open spaces, a coffee shop which is excellent and a farm which is much bigger than you expected. Great place to visit.

The return of Piano Practice

Music lessons were one of the less fun parts of growing up for me. For a while I was learning the violin (mainly so that when I took the violin case into school I could pretend to be a Chicago gangster). But then I got bored with that. And, once that my friends discovered that all I had in the case was a violin, and not a sub-machine gun, they got bored with it too. I got out of that practice regime by the neat trick of being really bad at it. Truly, I put the vile into violin. After complaints from the neighbours in the next town I gave that up and returned to what was supposed to be my first love, the piano. A substantial part of my childhood was spent hoping that mum and dad wouldn’t remember that I hadn’t done my practice that day.

Anyhoo, as things do, piano practice has now returned to my life. This time I’m using the Simply Piano app to keep track of my efforts and I must admit that I’m rather enjoying it. I’ve connected the iPad to my new piano and so it can tell what keys I’ve pressed and track my progress. The app has lots of content, including versions of tunes I quite like. It runs on subscription, but it is much cheaper than proper lessons.

The nice thing about learning an instrument (which of course completely passed me by when I was younger) is that when you are practicing you really can’t think of anything else. You are too busy focusing on why your hands won’t do what you want them to. So if you want to escape from the worries of the world for a while you can just go in there and do battle with something that you can’t play yet but would like to. Today I had a go at playing Beethoven. Beethoven won, but I’ll be back for another go tomorrow.

Chromebook 11 for 99 pounds - well worth it

So my “mistakenly cheap” Chromebook 11 arrived this week and I’ve been playing with it. I’m actually very impressed. It just works. The keyboard is OK (although it is missing a row of function keys at the top) and the trackpad is useable and responsive. The screen is a bit of a weak spot, in that it has a big thick bezel and the contrast could be better, but the browsing experience is good. The battery life is very good, especially the standby time.

I’ve not added any programs to it just yet, but I did have a go at using Chrome to talk to a Connected Little Box processor (an ESP8266). To my surprise, it mostly worked. I can use the terminal program to talk to a device and the program uploader runs to completion, but the uploaded code doesn’t seem to stick. It is probably something to do with the way that the browser disconnects from the device after upload. I’ll have to take a look.

For the price I paid (99 pounds) it was a steal. It looks pretty sturdy and would be a great first machine for school use. It seems to run my Begin to Code with JavaScript (available at the end of the month - order your copy here ) sample code just fine. If it could run Visual Studio Code it would be completely perfect. Apparently it is possible to install Edge (my browser of choice) on the machine, but this involves setting up a trial version of the Linux environment which I’m a bit too lazy to do just now.

I can’t see how anyone involved in selling this machine can make a profit, which means that it must somehow be part of Google’s world domination strategy, but if you want something you can just throw into a bag to take away with you, and you don’t want to have to worry too much about losing/breaking it, this would fit the bill perfectly.

Tax Paid

Paid the second half of my Income Tax Self Assessment thingy today. At least if you are paying tax it means that you’ve earned something I suppose.

Best ever comment on the C# Yellow Book

Just had the best ever comment on the content of my C# Yellow Book from Jakeb. In the book I mention that programmers have to be responsible people, and I use the quote “With great power comes great responsibility” from Spiderman’s uncle.

Jakeb tells me this is wrong. It should be "Spider-Man’s uncle”. He even sent me an illustration to prove the point. Thanks for that. I’ll make sure it is fixed in the next version of the text.

Lights in Names on GitHub

If you want to make your own “Lights in Names” device you can now download the Python script that runs inside FreeCAD to make your own designs. I’ve put the code in GitHub, along with a wiring and construction howto. You can find it here.