XBOX Remote Play works a treat

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One of the main problems with having the Xbox plugged into the proper TV downstairs is that of an evening other members of the family tend to want to watch “Call the Midwife” rather than me playing “Yakuza - Like a Dragon”.

The good news is that I can use XBOX remote play to sort this. I’m using it on an iPad with a Bluetooth Xbox controller that I bought a while back. It works a treat. It means that as number one wife is stories of newly born babies coming into the world I can be happily despatching bad guys at the same time.

Yazuka - Like a Dragon

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Watching number one son play Lost Judgement has got me interested in Yakuza games . The Xbox game pass has a bunch of them available including the recently released Yakuza Like a Dragon. It is definitely a grown-up game. I don’t think the language and the themes explored would be very suitable for kids. But having said that, the general principles that underlie the characters are very sound indeed. The main protagonist has has a strong desire to do good and always tries to see the best in people. Of course he’s also not above whacking folks with a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire, but always in a good way.

The main story is interesting and well told and the side-quests are completely crazy. The fighting is turn based so you are not frantically bashing buttons (something I’m not that good at). Instead you can spend time weighing up the best attack moves and who to target before you weigh in.

Playing the game is like taking part in a well written action movie. And you end up really caring about the characters. Very strongly recommended but only for grown-ups.

Elven Assassin Upgrade

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We played Elven Assassin on the Quest tonight. It is still great fun. They’ve improved it quite a bit since we last had a go. They now have a feature you can use to skip past the easy first levels and get onto the gritty ones right at the start. They’ve also added a new player vs player environment and seem to have upped the number of simultaneous contestants which has great potential. A game with 12 or so people taking part would be hilarious.

Lost Judgement group play fun

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Number one son and myself had great fun playing Lost Judgement together when he was over for Christmas. I say playing together, actually he played the game while I made sarcastic remarks. But I did enjoy it.

This afternoon we played together again, except that this time we were a couple of hundred miles apart. We used the PlayStation 5 group play option and it just worked. We were able to hold a conversation via the microphones and speakers in our controllers and I watched the game as it was being played. I was surprised how well it works. If you want to experience gameplay together I can strongly recommend it.

Microsoft Flight Sim on the Xbox Series X

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I must have been a good boy last year, because I managed to wangle an Xbox Series X as part of my Christmas present. I got a notification that Shopto had got some in stock so I pounced. The machine arrived on Christmas eve, two days after I’d ordered it, which was most impressive. I’m now going to have to sell the old console and a bunch of other bits and bobs to pay for it. The machine is super. It works a treat and I’ve loaded all my Game Pass games onto it, including Microsoft Flight Sim.

I can’t believe how good Flight Sim looks. And the loading times are pretty speedy so that it is very easy to go for a quick flight during a coffee break. The only slight snag is that I’m having to control the plane with an Xbox controller, but the good news is that the flying skills I’ve picked up from my weekly flying sessions on the PC have transferred across. Although I still managed to plant my aircraft into the runway a couple of times in front of everyone.

Instant Piano Practice

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I’m still doing my piano practice every day. I can just about play “The Entertainer” without falling off the seat. Apparently the trick is not to practice until you can play something right. You have to practice until you can’t play it wrong. In my experience the difference is at least one order of magnitude.

But I digress. Today I hit on a wizard wheeze to keep my piano practice scores tip top. I’m using Simply Piano which has a bunch of sheet music (including Steely Dan) which you can learn from. You play the song and the program tracks what you are doing and marks you. I’ve connected the keyboard to the iPad over MIDI for optimal note tracking. And the piano can record and playback tunes that you tap out. So, all I have to do is record the song once and then I can get get a few minutes of piano playing credit just by pressing the play button.

I’m fully aware that what I’m doing here is cheating myself, in that I don’t think watching a tune being played automatically will improve my skills much. But I’m definitely going to have a go just to see if I can make it work. And I really wish I’d had access to this technology when I was around 11 years and forced to do 20 minutes of practice every darned day when I’d really be rather doing anything else.

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.