Hammonds of Hull is a great place for a burger

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Another trip out today. This time to Hammonds of Hull, a department store turned food hall and shared workspace that’s just opened in the middle of Hull (the clue is in the name). It’s a very nice place to shop for foodie things, drink excellent coffee and grab a meal from one of the vendors. We did all three during our trip up town. The conversion of the store has been done with taste and style and I can see it being a hit with folks visiting, living or working in the centre of Hull.

Using MIDI devices with Simply Piano

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Simply Piano is an awesome application. Over the last few months it’s taken me from “someone who can hardly play to the piano” to “someone who can hardly play the piano except for ‘The Entertainer’”.

Simply Piano can use the microphone in the iPad to listen to the notes that you play, but a MIDI connection to the program is much more reliable. It also means that you can practise while wearing headphones, something number one wife prefers.

Unfortunately recent “upgrades” to iPad OS have made it much harder to use this. It seems that iPad is now having problems recognising USB MIDI connections from some devices. If you, like me, are having problems the best recommendation I can make is to get hold of a MIDI adapter that uses the big round DIN connectors to link to your keyboard. I made the change and it now works for me.

Blurry Pictures

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I mentioned a while back that I’ve been playing with a film camera. I got the pictures back from the lab and there seems to be a problem with the focus. Distant things are great, but close ups are horribly blurred. Oh well. I think that focussing screen and the film are out of alignment. The good news is that some of the pictures look really nice anyway. I don’t think I’ll be taking many more film pictures (the cost of film seems to have rocketed since I last bought any) but if I do I’ll be making some adjustments to the focus..

Matrix Resurections

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There are few better illustrations of the law of diminishing returns in movies than the Matrix series. The first one was flat out awesome. It was the first DVD I ever bought and we played it to death on my PlayStation 2. with Dolby surround sound through dodgy speakers.

The sequel was OK. The third? Don’t ask.

And now, quite a while later, we have the fourth one. We watched it this evening. All the actors they have allowed back seem to have aged incredibly well. The plot was as wacky as ever and the production as glossy. They even recreated a few of my favourite scenes, which was nice. Newcomers to the franchise might be wondering what the fuss is all about. But for the rest of us I’d say that it was a lot of fun and not as bad as it could have been. Worth a look.

April Hardware Meetup was awesome

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We had an awesome hardware meetup last night. I don’t measure the success of a meetup by the number of folk who turn up (although we were nicely quorate). I measure success by how much stuff gets passed around from person to person. Here are the things that we talked about. There were probably a few others that I missed.

  • There is an awesome “Minecraft alike” program called Minetest that you can download and play with for free. It’s written in C# and Lydia of Starbeam Rainbow Labs fame has added some excellent extensions for it that you can find here.

  • Karen has discovered origami on YouTube. It’s a great way to relax by making stuff. If you’ve ever fancied folding your own toilet, you can find the instructions here.

  • You can use the Kidzoom printing camera to make wonderful little sketches of people by converting their portraits to “colouring in” pictures and printing them out on the built-in printer.

  • The Furby Connect has a reset button hidden next to the battery compartment that can be used to bring the toy back from the grave. That, or we joggled the batteries when we were pressing the button. Either way, the Furby lived.

  • You can make a flat piece of wood into a very flexible thing by cutting loads of slots in it with a laser cutter.

  • 100% of the people who started writing a diary after I told them to say it is a very good idea. So starting a diary is either a very good idea or they are very polite people.

  • There is a video arcade with lots of retro games machines in the basement of the Princess Quay shopping centre in the middle of Hull.

  • The Badger 2040 e-ink display is as cute as a very cute thing.

  • There is now a successor to the .NET Micro Framework. It’s called the .NET nanoframework. It lets you run and debug C# code from Visual Studio 2022 on devices like the ESP32. And it rocks.

  • If you happen to need a mobile device to take round and check for LoRa gateways and map them for you, Brian has built one.

Thanks so much to Hull Makerspace for hosting the event. It was terrific fun. You only get these kind of things by actually meeting up in person. Here’s to the next one.

PICO Chord Keyboard in Hackspace Magazine

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If you pick up a copy of the April issue of HackSpace magazine (issue 53) you fill find an article from me on page 68. This one is all about how make a chord keyboard powered by a Raspberry Pi PICO. It’s based on a device I had a loooong time ago which I really loved, and it was great fun to make a keyboard inspired by it.

If you want an electronic copy of the magazine you can download it for free from here.

Fixing my Deluge

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My Synthstrom Deluge is on of my favourite instruments. I bought it second hand a while back and I’ve had some great fun making music and rhythm patterns with it. However some of the buttons and encoders have been a bit intermittent of late. The good news is that the word on the street is that this is all very fixable and spares are readily available at reasonable prices. I ordered the parts a while back and this week they arrived, all the way from New Zealand where the Deluge is made.

Today I spent a lovely two hours stripping down the device, replacing two rotary encoders and all of the rubber buttons.

This is a close up of the circuit board. The “star” around each led provides the contacts which are connected by a conductive material on the underside of each button. Some of the stars were a bit grubby, but they cleaned up fine with a bit of isopropyl alcohol.

This is the board with all new keys, ready to go back into the case. It works perfectly now.

On the mend

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I’ve been putting off this post for a while because of the possibility of headlines like:

“Only hours after posting how well he was recovering from a recent illness, Rob Miles was today hit by a falling piano while out for a walk….”

Of course this would never happen. There would be no headlines. Anyhoo, I’ m feeling a lot better. I’m having a nap every day and only spending an hour or so on the computer. I’ll be back soon with lurid tales of daring do and brain scans (at least they managed to find one).

Pick a card

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I’ve spent a huge chunk of today installing new debit card and credit cards. The new debit card is very fancy. It is only printed on one side, has a fancy colour scheme and a different number. The credit card has the “old fashioned” relief letters but the number is also changed. Which means I have to go through all my accounts and change the details.

It’s actually proved quite a useful exercise. I’ve moved lots of subscriptions onto my debit card so that I can see them go out on the main statement. I’ve also realized how many things I pay for each month. Scary.

Elden Ring

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I was very surprised when number one son suggested that I might like to have a go at Elden Ring. I’d put it in the category known as “Too difficult for Rob”, especially in my brain damaged state. But he was serious. Apparently you don’t have to win fights to progress and the world is so vast and intricate that you can have endless fun just exploring. And you get a horse you can use to run away from anything really nasty.

Well, I’ve got the game and I agree with him. I’ve even beaten a few people (usually by sneaking up and stabbing them in the back - but hey, a kills a kill). I’ve also died lots. But this is how the game works. Being made dead is part of life. You just get put back in the game and then have to stump off and find the money that you dropped with you died.

The environment is awesome, the options deep and the whole thing is very impressive. Fighting is interesting, in that you go from having no idea how to beat something, to building theories about when to attack and when to retreat and finally to winning the battle and wondering why it seemed so hard at the start. Very strongly recommended by me and just about everyone else who’s played it.

Post surgical piano

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During my recent hospital stay I really wanted to do the violin gag:

Rob: “After my treatment, will I be able to play the violin"?”

Doctor: “I don’t see why not”

Rob: “Great, I can’t at the moment and I’ve always wanted to”

Unfortunately, the occasion never presented itself, and I didn’t really want to give them more things to worry about than just my headaches. Anyhoo, today I was able to try some piano practice to see if the treatment has had any affect on my keyboard skills. The good news is that I’m no worse than I was at playing “The Entertainer”. The bad news is that I don’t seem to have acquired any extra skills.