Begin to Code with JavaScript is now available

Begin to Code with JavaScript is now in the shops and available online. With lots of lovely illustrations, full colour pages and a whole bunch of programming insights.

And even the odd joke…

Wrong Sized Holes

This is the top panel for a new creation I’m working on. I want to make a pixel ring surrounded by pushbuttons. So I added a pushbutton button ring element to my design program and then printed it out.

Of course, after a two and a half hour print I then discovered that all the button holes are too small. You can see in the picture some of my attempts to make the holes bigger, but PLA (which is what I printed it in) is horrible stuff to work with.

Moral of the story: If you’re printing things with holes to fit other things into, perform a tiny test print with just one hole to make sure the size is right before you go and print the whole thing.

Tiny Raspberry Pi PICO box

I’ve got another Raspberry Pi PICO powered project (that’s a lot of alliteration) in the works. To celebrate this I visited my box designer program (otherwise known as 2,500 lines of ‘technical debt’) and added the PICO platform to it. Then I printed it out and it works fine. This is the smallest box you can make, it just has a hole for cables and a slot for the USB connector. I can now add the PICO to other device designs and it should just work. I’ve put the design on Thingiverse, you can find it here.

VOIP phone

The chap from Kingston Communications came along today to fix our broken phone. Except that he didn’t fix it, he changed us over to “voice over internet”. This was actually a very sensible move. There’s not a lot of point spending time and effort mending a connection to something that will be torn down in a few years anyway.

Now our fibre optic connection is also our phone connection. The dial tone is the same and everything works as before. This means we can continue to receive the spam calls that make up most of our landline use.

The only snag that I can see is that if the mains power goes off our phone connection goes too. However, we all have mobile phones, so in that situation we can use those instead to ring someone and ask “Our power’s gone off, has yours too?”.

Haircut

Had my hair cut today. Despite my ongoing efforts to try and keep the “lockdown crazy” style in fashion I eventually decided that I had to have something done just so that I could see out.

WEX in Leeds is worth a visit if you like cameras

The trend these days is for specialist shops to close. But WEX are bucking this. They’ve recently opened a slew of actual shops, one of them in Leeds. We went there today. I was permitted a few minutes to look round at what was on sale. But I wasn’t allowed to talk to any assistants or make any moves involving my wallet.

The store is really nice. There’s a good range of kit and you can also buy chemicals and bits and bobs for home film processing (which I’d love to have a go at again one day).

I think that WEX have realised that there is nothing quite like actually handing the equipment you are about to buy. They do a very nice line in demonstration videos (I’ve actually bought from them on the strength of these) but it is really useful to have an in-person option for buying this stuff again, even though I’ll have to make a pilgrimage to Leeds to do it.

Codewords smut overload

We spent a very happy (and silly) evening playing Codewords. It’s a great web based version of a popular board game. Two teams take it in turns guessing their team’s words from a set of shared ones using one word clues from the “spymaster”.

When you start the game you can nominate the types of words that you are using as the start. Tonight one of our number thought it would be hilarious to use nothing but the “innuendo” selection of words. In the game we were playing as “spymaster” doing two things: thinking up clues for smutty words and trying to work out why some of the words are smutty in the first place.

We did win that game though, I’m quite proud of our use of the single word “stringy” as a clue for “snake”, “floss” and “hairy”.

Broken phone

We hardly ever use our land-line telephone. Most of the calls that we get are of robotic voices telling us that our Amazon account is about to explode or we owe a bunch of income tax. However, we’ve stopped getting even those calls now, as the wire to the phone seems to have snapped somewhere. The good news is that the Kingston Communications folks are great to deal with and someone will be coming out later this week to take a look.

How to make a Kick Drum in PureData

I’ve been writing an article about PureData for HackSpace magazine. I sent it off on Friday and with a bit of luck and a following wind it will be in next issue. I didn’t have room for the above illustration, which is rather sad. I’ve put it up here instead.

The program on the left shows how a linear ramp is converted into a drum sound. The three graphs on the right hand side show how the waveform starts as a straight line before being converted into a curve and then finally a sequence of sound waves.

The sound wave graph is compressed at the left hand side because the first part of the drum sound will be high frequencies. The spaced out waves at the right hand end (so to speak) are the low frequency parts that give the drum its kick sound.

Subscription superpower

Jack Reacher, the rough tough star of 100 books and a couple of films, has an “internal clock” which is perfectly synchronised with real time. I’ve got something broadly similar, but mine works with online subscriptions. Today my “subscription sense” told me that it would soon be time to renew the subscription for my blog hosting. I was right, it’s tomorrow.

Article in HackSpace magazine

issue 46 of Hackspace magazine is now available. Find out more here. It’s a great read, and I’m not just saying that because it has an article in there that I wroted.

Things Network Version 3 now works!

We had a great Hardware Meetup last night. We were celebrating success with our The Things Network Version 3 devices. Brian and I were in a baffled place, but last week Adam had a go and managed to make it work. It turns out that what you had to do was change the gateway name slightly and off it went. You can read the full story on this forum post here. This is splendid news. Now we can plan a way forward for our various networks and devices.

Organelle Book

One thing that I thought I’d mention when talking about the Organelle is this lovely book which came out recently. It provides a useful introduction to PureData and then dives into the specifics of the language for the Organelle device. There are some sample applications too which serve as good starting points for patches of your own.

Fun with the Organelle

A combination of lockdown and a sudden influx of royalty payments last year had be buying (or “investing in”) a bunch of interesting musical instruments. One of them was the Organelle. It’s interesting because although it is a proper musical instrument it ls also a powerful computer, packing a Raspberry Pi compute module.

You program it in PureData which is a great way to create software that works on flows of sound and control. I’ve had quite a bit of fun with it, and now I’ve got the chance to write an article about PureData for HackSpace magazine. This has meant that the house has been filled with clicks, beeps and thumps. It really brings out the fun of changing patches (which is what PureData programs are called) just to hear what they do.

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.