Home time

We took our guest home today, which was rather sad. But we’ll be picking her up later in the month.

Hull is Awesome

Culinary innovations at Ferens Art Gallery cafe. We call it the “shot sandwich”.

What do you do if you have a five year old that you want to impress. Why, you take them to Hull of course. We started with a coffee (we had coffee - she had juice) at the amazing café in Ferens Art Gallery. Then on to the next room, where they had a fantastic Lego exhibition. Then down to the Museums Quarter to scoot round searching for robots and dragons. Then back for lunch in Ferens, a look at the fountains and then back home for a rest.

Hull is awesome.

Fun Furby Autopsy

What do you show a young guest who you’re trying to impress? How about the insides of a dead Furby. Not my idea actually, she saw them in a box and wanted to take a look. We went through all the various bits and I described what they did. And then we had a performance from the two working ones…

Whitby Traction Engine Rally Fun

I know that this is not steam powered, but by gum it was fun to watch.

it was really nice to be able to go over to Whitby for their steam fair. It’s the first time we’ve made it in a few years and it was lovely to see it back to its best in beautiful weather. And we managed to fit in a fish pie at the Magpie too. That’s what I call a Sunday well spent.

Got guests

I don’t think anyone who arrived today was actually that impressed by how tidy my room now is. Although they probably appreciated the way that they were able to walk from one end to the other.

Happy tidying

I’ve spent the entire afternoon tidying up. I can now see most of my office floor. I’m starting to like this tidy thing.

CSI is back

The CSI (Crime Scene Investigators) franchise goes back a long way. I’ve still got some of the original DVDs that we bought ages ago. One or two still have the crime scene tapes around them. They must be worth a fortune. Or not.

Anyhoo, after starting in Las Vegas it then moved to New York and Miami. Then it kind of stopped. And now it is back. Unfortunately it is only showing on the Alibi network in the UK, which is not one I have access to. But we managed to get to see an episode last week and it has retained all the bonkers science it used to have, including a rather interesting use for a 3D printer. Worth a look if you can get to watch it.

Quiet Hardware Meetup

I had a nice set of devices ready for the hardware meetup tonight, but I was the only one who turned up. No matter, it was nice to have a few chats with the folks in Hull MakerSpace.

To the Science Museum...

Our trains leave mid-afternoon. And the Science Museum has luggage lockers, so it was back to South Kensington for some Science Museum fun. When we arrived the ground floor was a bit of a zoo, but we skipped up to the first floor (medicine) which was lovely and quiet and they had some fascinating stuff. Then up to the information technology floor for even more stuff. Panels from the original Leo computer? Yes please. We went a few years back and the computation stuff was terrible. Just a tiny model computer room from the early eighties. But now they have loads of stuff. And they had a really good game which showed how infections spread around.

Good lunch too. And then we braved the ground floor, at one end of which was a huge and expensive looking exhibition about carbon capture. Which was horrible. It presented this as a viable solution to the policy of burning things for energy. Which I’m not convinced it is. They showed this hugely expensive looking industrial plant that they reckoned could get rid of the emissions of six households. Which is tiny. Why not spend a fraction of the cost of this thing on insulating twelve households so that they only use half the power. One of the worst examples I’ve seen of “green-washing” I’ve seen. In the Science Museum. Wah.

Then we grabbed our luggage and headed for the train. Found a nice nature park near King’s Cross for a drink and then got on the train which left right on time, connected right on time and got us into Cottingham right on time. Everyone was great, trains were clean and shiny and the seats were comfy. And now we’re back.

Prom night

Up early-ish. Then off to the Tate Modern. Tube travel with an Apple watch is great, you can use it to pay for your trip as long as you hold the thing right up against the reader and wait for the beep before you try to walk through the gates. Otherwise you just bounce off them, which other folks might have found funny if they had time to.

The art in Tate Modern was good, although I’m not clever enough to understand most of it. And there is a disturbing tendency for them to whack a video projector in a room with white walls and call it art. Another nice coffee though….

Then a walk through London to Foyles bookshop for lunch which was great. They didn’t have my books in the shop though. Then up to Leicester Square (Lego store closed – wah) for a look in the Japan Centre, Covent Garden (quick look in the Apple store) and then back again to the flat to rest up for the evening’s entertainment.

Then on to the Albert Hall. We were sat in “the choir” which is a posh term for “behind the orchestra”. However, it was fascinating to watch the players at work and the sound was really good. They played some stuff I knew, plus one “far out” piece that, if I heard it again, I probably wouldn’t recognise – although I’m tempted to have a go at the game in question just to discover what it sounds like there. It was interesting to see how game music has gone from “whatever we can squeeze from the hardware” into an art form in itself. And, like true art, it now has the capacity to be a bit “up-itself”.

I really hope they have another event like this. It was great. And I think I know the best place to sit…

Design Museum and Selfridges

Headed to the Design Museum which had a lovely coffee shop (something of a theme) and some good things to look at. Staggered back and grabbed some food at a splendid little place in Notting Hill. For the afternoon we headed to Selfridges on the promise of a look at a Superfutures exhibition. This turned out to be a bunch of things around the shop, and arrows on the floor, but the shop was awesome.

They had a ground floor tech place that was stunning. Even managed to buy a Divoom pixel factory. Then a coffee and brownie in the pinkest coffee bar I’ve ever been in, followed by a walk home for a really good pub meal. I’m calling to day a success. If only I could still feel my feet….

Pink brownie

London here we come...

Neat mural in the coffee shop

We’ve had our London trip planned for weeks. Always liked video game music? Always wanted to go to the Proms? Why not do both? On Monday we are going to the first ever BBC Prom featuring video game music.

But of course, first we had to get there. Today we were sitting on a bus for four and a half hours because of the rail strike. Two things stuck me about bus travel. First thing: It saves you a lot of money compared with train prices. Second thing: You earn that money. When we set out from Leeds the driver said “Next stop London. We have an emergency toilet on the bus if you need to use it”. Well, would you want to use a toilet marked as an emergency resource? I think the answer is yes, but it would have to be a proper emergency.

Anyhoo, the journey went smoothly enough. They put me in the “king seat” (the one right at the back in the middle) so I could have stretched my legs 20 feet if I’d needed to. Snag is, the king seat is not that well padded. So I arrived with something of a numb bum. But apart from that, all good. Then it was off for a much enjoyed coffee before heading to our rented flat.

The next few days are going to be fun.

Paid My Tax

What better way to start the day than by handing a chunk of cash away to the tax man. Actually, I don’t mind it that much, in that if I’m paying tax at least that means I’ve earned something in the last year.

All our numbers are now belong to you

I was at a meeting about air quality a while back and someone asked if they could have all our data. Of course they can. Lydia has been busy and has now created a file which contains all the numbers. You can find out how she did it, and get a download link, here.

JavaScript code answer

if (x!=x) console.log("Wahay!");

A while back I posed a little JavaScript question: When would the above JavaScript statement print “Wahay"?

This provoked a storm of apathy on the internet, but I’m going to tell you the answer anyway. You use the above test to detect a variable which is not a number (NaN).

JavaScript is a bit strange when it comes to handling errors.

x =  1/"fred";

Some languages would not even compile the above statement. Some languages would stop the program at this statement. JavaScript does something different. It says “Dividing a number by a string is silly, I’m going to set the value of x to a special value which means “Not a number”. JavaScript has other special values too. If you divide any number by 0 you get a special value called Infinity, which behaves like infinity. Add a number to infinity and you get infinity as a result. Divide any number by infinity and you get zero. Divide infinity by infiniuty and you get Not a Number - which is also right.

But I digress. What would the statement at the top do? Well, it is how you test for Not a Number in a JavaScript program. Suppose you want to check if x contains NaN. You might think that you do this:

if (x==NaN) console.log("Not a number!");

However, this statement will not work, because something which is not a number is not equal to anything, including NaN. So the test always fails. Which is why you sometimes see NaN in JavaScript forms because the programmer didn’t know this or test it.

However, a value which is not a number isn’t even equal to itself, which is why the test is so useful.

Chocolate Synthbox at the next Hardware Meetup

The next Connected Humber Hardware Meetup is on Wednesday 3rd of August at Hull MakerSpace, starting at around 5:30. I’m taking my Chocolate Synthbox, which I’m hoping will be a bit more reliable than last time I showed it off. If you want to have a play with it, or bring something musical along of your own, we’d love to see you Find out more here.

I sat on my laptop

A while back I bought a super-cheap laptop, just to see what you can get for 59 quid. It turns out that it runs Windows 11 - its the only machine I’ve got that can. I’ve been using it to make Windows 11 screenshots. Anyhoo, long story short, the laptop got left on a chair and I sat on it. The first thought was that I wondered why the chair was suddenly so uncomfortable. Then I heard the tiniest of creaks and I realised what I’d done.

The laptop was absolutely fine though. I’m really impressed. I’m not planning on sitting on it again, but it is nice to know that it can handle things like this. It’s still on sale too. You can find it here.

Point Salad is carrot counting fun

One of the games we played last night was Point Salad. It was great fun. You collect salad vegetable cards and multiplier cards (three points for every tomato was one of mine) to get the salad with the most points. Quite strategic, with quite a bit of arithmetic thrown in. Great fun.

Great Birthday Fun

Had a fantastic birthday today. We headed up town for a coffee and then took a walk around Hull Museum Quarter. The weather was excellent and the wonderful transport museum had even laid on a special exhibition of classic cars for us to look at. Then on to Berts for lunch. After that it was back home for cake and and fun and games. We spent the evening playing the excellent Point Salad and DownForce games. Great stuff.

Wrapping temperature sensors

One of the things we discussed last night at our Meetup was the our air quality sensors. We started out with four sensor three years ago, in locations around Hull. All the ones still in place are still working, but they have fallen foul of the recent heatwave.

The temperature sensors are wrapping round when the temperature gets above 40 degrees. To save space in each LoRa message the temperature data is restricted to a range of -24 to +40. This gives a range of 64 which can be expressed in six bits. As you can see above, this doesn’t work too well when things get really toasty.

I think we could use some cunning code to figure out what that temperature should be, even though it has wrapped around. However, the next version of the code is will need to be changed to handle these high temperatures that we are now seeing.