Read "The Midnight Library" by Matt Haig

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Every now and then I read a book and think “Other folks might like to read this”. Much more rarely I’ll read a book and think “Everyone should read this”. The Midnight Library is in the second category. Its a beautifully written story about a place where people can experience all the different possibilities thrown up by their lives. But it is also about what constitutes the best kind of life and how a person can look at their options and weigh them up in a constructive and uplifting way. Yep. You really should read this. I think it is a book I’ll be going back to at regular intervals just to enjoy the writings and the feelings that they conjure up. Very strongly recommended.

New Year Schrodinger's Photographs

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Happy New Year to both my readers. We had a great New Year’s Eve. Watched a Bond film, saw in the year with the fireworks and then went to bed.

Today we went out to Hornsea on the coast for a trip out. We do this most years. Pandemic permitting. The weather was very kind we took our instant cameras.

I took a bunch of pictures and dropped them into my pocket to develop as we went around. It occurred to me that they were kind of “Schrodinger’s Pictures”. They might have turned into great pictures in the pocket, or they might be rubbish. I reasoned (probably incorrectly) that the pictures existed in both states until I looked at them. I wondered briefly about embracing the uncertainty and never looking. That way I could claim to have probably taken some amazing pictures.

I’m not going to tell you how many turned out badly…

In the end curiosity got the better of me and I took a look. I’m still learning how to use the camera, but I’m pleased with what I got.

Quantum Thoughts

I’m referring to the “Schrodinger’s Cat” thought experiment in which a cat is placed in a box with a radioactive detector which will poison the cat if it detects a certain number of particles. The idea is that because you can’t predict whether or not the particles will be detected the cat must be both alive and dead right up to the point where you open the box and take a look. I don’t think this is the origin of the phrase “curiosity killed the cat” but it might be…..

This experiment doesn’t map onto my situation particularly well, in that the fate of the pictures is pretty much determined by what I did with them before they went in my pocket, but I’m enjoying pondering about quantum photographs, which is the important thing.

Lost Judgement Game Review

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One of the great pleasures of the holidays is watching number one son play video games. This time he was playing Lost Judgement which is at time of writing on discount in the Sony PlayStation store. In the game you play as a detective/lawyer/ninja type solving a murder that gets murkier with every chapter. You do this by beating people up, solving puzzles, interviewing suspects and beating people up. With a bit of beating people up on the side. The violence is very cartoony (which is just as well considering what the fighters do to each other) but the fighting is quite deep (number one son says).

You have free range of the environments and the amount of freedom you have is very impressive. You can go into pretty much every shop, bar, café or gambling den that you find on the street. There are gaming arcades full of retro Sega games to play. You can dress up as a mascot and go around town doing good. Or you can teach the the local school dance troupe some new moves. The side quests are numerous and some are hilarious. The main story is by contrast pretty gruesome.

We are a few chapters in now and the plot is really thickening. It really is like taking part in a glossy TV detective show, with all the camera moves and captions you’d expect. Very strongly recommended.

Keeping the customer happy

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I recently bought a couple of Lomo’Instant Square cameras. One for me and one as a Christmas present. When they arrived I noticed a fault with each. The lens cover was stuck open. After a brief browse I discovered that this is not an uncommon fault. I contacted the supplier and asked what they could do about it. I wasn’t expecting to get to talk to a person, but I ended up having a conversation with Jason from their support team. He was very helpful and in the end we decided that as compensation Lomo would send me a couple of light painters. These are great fun if your camera can hold the shutter open for a good length of time. I then ordered a couple of cheap lens caps for the cameras and all was well.

I’ve always liked the free and easy tone of the Lomography site. It is nice to discover that they do seem to care about their customers and try to make them happy. It’s a pity that the camera arrived with this fault, but it doesn’t affect the quality of the pictures and I’m a happy customer, which is the important thing.

Lomo’Instant Square Review

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I’m getting quite into instant photography. I really like the idea of producing a physical artefact when you take a picture. There are problems of course. From an ecological point of view it is a disastrous thing to do. The “films” are expensive and wasteful. The individual pictures are packed into a little plastic carrier which ends up being thrown away. The pictures themselves are a bit small and the quality is nowhere near as good as even an elderly smartphone can manage.

And yet I still like taking instant pictures. In the olden days (which I well remember) taking a picture was a bit of an occasion. People had to be positioned in the shot, readings had to be taken and transferred into settings on the camera. And the end result (which sometimes took ages to arrive) was often a disappointment. The good news was that when you ended up with a good photograph you felt that you had really made something. These days you can just tap the screen of your iPhone to get something that is perfectly focused and exposed. And exactly the same as the picture taken by the person stood next to you. Recent phone cameras let you use different focal lengths and will provide you with the right kind of blur if you ask for it. And you can apply filters to make your pictures look a bit different. But for me things are just a tad too easy and repeatable.

I got a Lomo’Instant Square as a Christmas present along with some film to get started. Now rather than asking for socks as gifts I can put in a request for more film. Number one son also ended up with one, so that we can compare results.

The Lomo is not easy to use. For a start the viewfinder is horrible. It is hard to see through and doesn’t always show you what the lens is actually seeing. You have to remember to remove the cap protecting the lens. Then you have to set the lens to focus on the right part of the scene. The exposure system (the thing that decides how much light to let onto the picture) is a more than a bit wayward. The camera has a flash with a very short range which will blow out the foreground and leave the background horribly dark. Pressing the shutter button feels you are like placing an expensive bet. The shot might look good, or it might not. It definitely won’t look like the picture taken by the person stood next to you.

You do have inputs though. You can ask the camera to brighten or darken the picture. You can do crazy things like just open the shutter for a while or take lots of exposures on the same frame. You have a remote control you can snap out of the camera and use to trigger shots or long exposures from a distance. With a bit of practice you start to learn to compensate for the viewfinder and the exposure and start getting interesting results.

The camera itself is an impressive lump of plastic with fabric covered panels and a bunch of buttons on the back. To take a photo you have to swing the lens open from its closed position and snap it into place. The camera feels well made although it would not stand up for long to “professional” levels of use. The lens is made of glass rather than plastic and really sharp. I’d call it a toy except for the fact that on a good day with a following wind it can produce fantastic results which would be impossible to get with any other device.

These are the first two test shots I took when the camera arrived. It had snowed the night before and some plants in the garden looked rather good. I like the pictures although a phone would have definitely done a better job.

I can’t recommend the Lomo as a camera you want to just grab and use. It will never replace your phone for just keeping a record of where you’ve been and what you’ve done. However, if you are prepared to put in the effort (and expense) of learning how to use it properly it can produce stunning results. It comes with a set of 25 “idea cards” which give a bit of inspiration.

For me the Lomo has put a sense of occasion back into photography which I really like. It was originally quite an expensive camera but if you keep an eye on the Lomography site you’ll find the price drops down every now and then. If you fancy breathing a bit of instant life into your photographic escapades it is worth taking a look at.

Fresh Food and Coloured Lights

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Our replacement fridge arrived today. Kudos to Currys for being able to deliver it so quickly and big thanks to the two chaps that were able to get it into position in the kitchen with a minimum of fuss. The new fridge has coloured lights inside. I’ve always been a sucker for coloured lights, even in fridges. The lights change colour to mimic the day-night cycle that our lettuce was experiencing before it was pulled from the ground, wrapped in plastic, shipped across the country and dropped into the salad drawer. The technology is called Harvest Fresh and apparently it preserves freshness and vitamins for up to five days or so. No, I’m not convinced by this either, but the fridge is nice enough. And the door is very firmly attached.

The "Year of Metal Fatigue"

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Do you know what sound a fridge door makes when it falls off? I do. It’s most impressive. An initial crash followed by what I can only describe as “rolly tinkles” as bits of broken glass jar spread themselves around the kitchen. I’m not pleased that it happened. But I’m very relieved that it didn’t fail on Christmas day when there might been little people wandering around the kitchen. This seems to be the “year of metal fatigue”. I recently broke my rowing machine when a bolt failed. I’m now nervously looking at everything else around the house and planning what I’d do if it suddenly broke or fell off.

The good (and slightly amazing) thing is that we have managed to buy a replacement fridge which should be arriving tomorrow.

PICO MIDI Cheese Box Constructed

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When you put your ideas out on the internets and in magazines it is always nice to see someone actually build one. “viragored” has not just built a device though, they’ve also designed their own case because I forgot to publish the design files. I’ve put my designs on GitHub now. You can find them here. But I think I like that the new one is better. I like the idea of using “push pins” to hold components in place rather than screws.

Remote Burglar Alarm Debugging

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Following on from the scary burglar alarm of yesterday I spent twenty minutes or so this morning on the phone to Chris, one of the support folk for Ring alarms. Interesting to see how support works these days. I used the app to authenticate the phone call so that by the time I was talking to Chris he already knew who I was and presumably what my system looked like. i was then able to send him a picture of the broken device (not sure what that told him) so that he could send out a replacement. I reckon that the true measure of a system is how well it works in failure mode, and by that yardstick I think that Ring did pretty well.

Scary Alarms

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So we were watching the BBC show “The Girl Before”. At the centre of the story is a spooky house which is totally controlled by a computer which is totally not going to turn out to be malevolent. And one of our burglar alarm sensors in our house started repeatedly muttering about being tampered with. Coincidence is a wonderful thing. The show is worth watching. We are half way in and pondering just where the evil lies. The alarm was much less fun. I’ve disconnected the offending sensor and popped its batteries out. If we get any tamper messages tonight I will be properly scared…

Console Nostalgia

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My PlayStation 3 ended up in my garage, not my loft. This is probably why it still works. Things I put in the loft tend to break. We got it out today and fired it up and were immediately transported back fifteen years or so. Mine is the first version of the machine, which means that it has memory card sockets, four usb connections and will run PlayStation 1 games. I think that PS3 was my favourite PlayStation iteration. It has a lovely glossy finish with just the right amount of black and shiny bits. The PlayStation 3 was the first thing we got with an HDMI connector, so it works just fine on our TV. Not sure what I’ll do with it, but it is nice to know that it still works. And Super Stardust is as awesome as ever.

To round off our nostalgia-fest we popped an XBOX 360 disk into number one son’s Xbox Series X. This just worked too. I think the game disk is just used to authenticate the download of a specially tweaked version of the software, but the experience was just splendid. Within a few minutes we had Dead Or Alive 3 running in what looked like very high resolution and even HDR. It was still extremely playable and a hoot. It’s interesting that the cut scenes now look much more dodgy than the in game action. I guess they can’t do much with the video, but with the game they can improve the textures and dynamic range.

Great fun.

Interstate 75

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Pimoroni do come up with good names for their products. Their PICO Interstate 75 looks very interesting. It plugs straight into the back of a HUB-75 based LED panel. These are the ones that we’ve been using to make a LED cube. They are the kind of panels you see on the side of buildings displaying brightly coloured graphics. The Interstate 75 is powered by an RP2040 chip (the same as the one on the Raspberry Pi PICO). This is a really good choice for driving led panels because it has special hardware that can be used to generate the pulse sequences that are used to make the display light up. It also has two processor cores, so you can use one to drive the display and the other to generate the image.

I’ve ordered one for myself for Christmas. And one for number one son. With a bit of luck they’ll arrive in time for us to play with them on the big day…