KidiZoom Camera is awesome

Number one granddaughter has now reached the grand old age of “nearly five”. For Christmas she was given a Kidizoom printing camera. Lucky girl. The camera is awesome. The pictures it produces are OK with a fixed focus, wide angle, low resolution sensor which is as good as it needs to be. You can get shots off the camera by using a micro-SD card. Or you can print them in black and white on the built-in thermal printer.

This would be fun enough, but then the camera makers went to town with extra features. The camera has a colour LCD panel on the back, so there are a couple of games you can play. There’s also a bunch of image filters and some very clever extra things you can do with the printer. You can print mazes, a tie or even your own money with your picture in the middle. Really great fun.

The heck with the grandchild. I want one of these…..

Broken hard drive

The hard drive above is broken. It contains 500G of - well, I don’t know what. I’m sure nothing on there is important because I never leave important things on portable (or indeed any) hard drives. And I don’t own any bitcoins. However, I guess you never know.

I was hoping that I would crack the drive open and find a drive and a USB interface card I could swap out for a possibly less broken one. However, that is now how things go these days. The drive and the interface are all one broken component.

What would be amazing is if a ninja reader of this blog took a look at the board and went “Oh yes, just tap this connecter and all will go well.” In the unlikely event that this actually happens it turns out that Brian has a similar vintage drive which is also broken in the same way…..

Police Squad and Rust at the Hardware Meetup

Another fun hardware group meetup last night. In between chats about Python, Rust and thermal cameras I mentioned the TV series Police Squad. You can find it on YouTube here. It is one of the funniest TV shows ever made. They only made 6 or so episodes for some reason - but in a way I’m pleased about this as it never got time to go off the boil or become stale. It is just continuous, brilliant, genius. Take a look and thank me later.

Oh, and the next hardware meetup is on the 3rd of Feb. Find out more here.

The joys of boiler servicing

We had our boiler serviced today. I’m not sure what the engineer does. I hate people watching me do my work (on those rare occasions I actually do any) so I try not to watch other people doing theirs. So I’ve no idea what was done. Anyhoo, everything seems to be OK and we’ve got the all-important updates to the service log.

Fast Driving and Fast Food

Back up the country today. And a chance to stop and grab another delicacy…

The Nioh Collection

The Nioh collection is a rock-hard fighting game. Lots of weapons, power ups and inventive opponents. Not quite my cop of tea (I don’t last more than around 30 seconds) but number one son seems to quite like it.

Doing some driving

Doing some proper driving today for the first time in literally years. All the way down the country. Fortunately I was able to stop for coffee and cake on the way down.

XBOX Remote Play works a treat

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

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

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.

More ammonia

I quite like this picture. I took it yesterday. It reminds me a tiny bit of one of my favourite album covers….

A walk in the woods

Went for a walk around the woods today. I wasn’t intending to take any pictures, but the clouds and the sun were just too good to pass up.

Another year of square motoring

Took the car for its MOT test today. And it passed, which is a good thing and means that we are still on the road for another year. Apparently it is the only Nissan Cube that they’ve ever seen in the garage and they rather like it. As do we.

Fun with Gödel

Today in the Guardian newspaper they have a puzzle involving Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. It’s one of those “these people always lie and these people always tell the truth” kind of puzzles. I must admit I found it quite easy, but this might be because I read Gödel Escher Bach a long time ago.

Lost Judgement group play fun

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.

Gotta love coloured wires

This is the wiring for my PICO chord keyboard. I made the artistic decision to use coloured wires, and I’m pleased that I did. Although I don’t think that the electricity cares that much.

Microsoft Flight Sim on the Xbox Series X

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.

Magic Puzzles at the Hardware Meetup

We had another fun hardware meetup this evening. The conversation went all over the place, from Magic Puzzles (which look like fun) to Monzo bank accounts. The next chat will be in two weeks, on the 20th January at 6:00 pm GMT. You can join us here: https://mattermost.connectedhumber.org/default/channels/meetings

Last Day of Christmas Lights

I think the best time to take pictures of Christmas lights is probably before it gets too dark. I wandered out into the late afternoon with the big camera and took a few pictures. After all the hit and miss fun of instant cameras it was rather nice to be able to get high quality images at the touch of a button.

Cottingham Church was looking pretty good too.

Instant Piano Practice

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.