A while back I wrote a little post about ChatGPT. And then, in yesterday’s Observer I found one of their technology correspondents echoing my thoughts. “Aha!” I thought as I entered a comment on the piece making this point and linking back to my article “This is my chance to be recognised as a great seer with thousands of readers hanging off my every word”.
I checked my traffic stats this morning. They had gone down a bit. Oh well.
Today we had two bulbs fail. So I went to my little drawer full of different types, pulled out a couple of replacements and fitted them. I love it when that happens.
I’ve been recording videos for the practical examples for “Begin to Code: Building Applications and Games with the Cloud”. The text contains “Make Something Happen” exercises and I thought it might be fun to make a video walkthrough of each. Way to increase your workload Rob.
Anyhoo, I’m up to number 28 which is about half way through the book. The video is walking through the process of taking a working node.js application and deploying it into the cloud. I’d just about finished recording it yesterday when the home phone rang. As I was reaching for the handset I brushed the music player and so if you watch through the screencast you can hear me grappling with the phone and get a very small snippet of music (big prizes if you can work out the track). I’ve a strict policy of doing everything in one take. After all, I never got to redo any of my lectures (although I often wanted to). I find that this makes them properly live.
Sometimes things go wrong (like they used to in lectures) and I leave those bits in too - the process of finding the problem and fixing it is often the most instructive part of the session. In number 28 I had a bit of this when my deployed application failed, but I was able to show how to debug it, find and fix the problem and then redeploy the application. I’m really enjoying making these. You can find the complete playlist here. You can find the book website with a draft copy of the text here.
I’m still working with my large format Intrepid camera. It’s great fun. I’m down to around twenty minutes per photograph now….. On Wednesday I sent off some negatives to Harman Labs for developing. Their service is excellent. Yesterday I got a call from them saying they had received my film but I’d neglected to tell them what kind of film I’d used….
Today the negatives arrived back fully developed. I’d taken four pictures so I could check out the film holders and make sure that my light tight changing bag (which is where I loaded the film and then put it into box for posting) was actually light tight. I was very pleased to discover that all the pictures had come out. They were negative though. All the whites were black and vice versa. The clue’s in the name.
I opened up an empty white page on the iPad and then took some pictures of the negatives laying on the screen with my iPhone, Then I used a free app to reverse them. This is not an optimal workflow. I’m going to have to figure out how to get a film scanner in on the action to extract more detail from the negatives. However, as you can see above, they seem to have come out OK. I love the quality and the way things seem to stand out of the frame. I think I am now a large format convert. Next step is home processing….
You know how it feels when you try to make something better and end up breaking everything. Well, today I went there. For a while I’ve been perplexed as to why the eero router next to where I work doesn’t connect to the wired network. The wire is plugged in and everything. I’ve been blaming lots of things, but today I thought I’d try to get to the bottom of the problem. So I unplugged the eero from the wire to see what happens. The answer was a bit of a surprise. All of the machines in front of me fell off the network. Everything was suddenly cut off from the internet. A quick check of network status from the service provider confirmed that things were still working (I once had all the networks in Hull fall over as I was doing some network changes at home. That was hilarious.) so it was definitely my fault.
Such is life. All the machines around me were definitely plugged in, but none of them could see the network anymore. I plugged the eero back into the network. And the machines all came back on line. Have you figured it out yet? Turns out that a cable in another room (I have a fairly tortuous home network arrangement) had become disconnected and taken the little network in my room offline. The eero in my room had noticed this and promptly reversed the way it was working. Rather than working as an access point hanging off its network connection it turned into a network connection for the tiny network in my room. That way the machines in my room stayed online, although they are now all running over WiFi. This explained the fairly appalling network performance of my computers and why the WiFi was always so busy. As soon as I fixed the broken connection everything came back to life and things got a lot faster for me, which was nice.
It would have been nice if something in the eero app could have told me what was going on. The information I get is very minimal and not that useful. It seems that to get a proper view of the network I have to pay Amazon a subscription. Which I’m far too mean to do.
A good hardware meetup is one where you don’t have time to take pictures because you are too busy talking. By that standard the meetup this evening was a great success. But unfortunately there are no pictures. There was a great range of discussion covering all kinds of stuff, from Pure Data to new Bluetooth standards for device location.
The next Hardware Meetup will be on the 1st of March, starting at 6:00 pm at Hull MakerSpace in the Central Library. Come along. We’d love to see you.
What do you do when you’ve got yourself a large format camera? Why, take some pictures of sweets of course! I ended up taking three versions, trying to get the exposure right. I’m using Instax film which becomes much less sensitive when the light levels go down low.
These should serve as useful references if I take more pictures at the same light level. Essentially it looks like the film needs an extra four stops worth of light at this exposure. The top frame was taken using settings suggested by the light meter, then I opened up two stops for each of the successive ones.
I’m very impressed with the level of detail you can get from the film though. I got out my magnifying glass and I could read all the tiny printing on the wrappers.
Proper photographers talk about “reciprocity failure” which is when the film becomes significantly less sensitive at low light levels. This might be something along those lines.
Took this picture while we were on our walk this morning. It’s almost as if the squirrel was hiding from us….
I’ve been taking pictures with various wacky cameras for a while, today I thought I’d take some shots with the proper one. The lighting was good and the sky was interesting so off we went. I’m quite pleased with how they came out.
The picture above came out really well. It was taken from the bridge looking down onto the beach. One of those occasions where the light and the subject just come together. Great fun. I should do more of this.
You’ve probably played Uno already. It’s a card game that goes back years. I can remember playing it with the kids back in the day. And we’ve found a new version, Uno Flip.
I’d love to have been at the product meeting where someone said: “You know how our cards have numbers and colours, and the aim is to match them. Well, why not put numbers and colours on the backs of the cards too, and then make the players flip between front and back?”.
Genius. So now you have extra cards that you can play to flip everyone to the other side and totally change the gameplay in the middle of a game. And the backs (also known as the dark side) have some really nasty new actions including one that makes someone pick up cards until they match the colour you’ve chosen. We played the game today and it was hilarious fun. The mark of a great game is one I enjoy even when I lose. Uno Flip is a great game.
Hi-Fi rush is an excellent rhythm, platform, beat-em-up. It might be the only one of its kind. The hero, Chai, is stuck in the middle of an organisation which will add extra bits and bobs to your body, whether you want them to or not. After accident in surgery involving a music player he becomes infused with the beat and the target of the various quality control systems around the place. This leads to fights, upgrades, platform jumping and finding allies. All the acting is great, the graphics are super and the whole thing moves along with a good, if probably electronic, heart. The key to winning battles is to strike your opponent on the beat. Get it right, with different beat combos and you can wreak a lot of havoc. There’s a story to follow, we’re not very far through it but we are looking forward to finding out more about the dodgy doings in the factory.
You can buy it for most platforms, but if you have the Xbox Game Pass you can already download it and play. And you should, it really is great fun.
The bellows camera arrived today. It’s awesome. This is the third picture I’ve taken with it. It came with a Lomograflok back which lets me take large format pictures straight onto Instax Wide film. As you can see, it mostly works. The picture is of some Spintronics components. It turns out that by extending the bellows nearly all the way out you can make a pretty good close up camera. I’ve just noticed that the copy of the image I took above is a bit messy because I just grabbed a snapshot of it with the phone. Sorry about that. If you are wondering, this is how you take a picture:
Clip the ground class screen onto the back of the camera with the Lomograflok spacer between it and the camera.
Open the shutter.
Set the aperture to F5.6 so you can see a faint image on the ground glass screen.
Adjust the focus until the image looks sharp, and then frame the picture.
Use a magnifying glass to make sure that the image really is sharp.
Close the shutter.
Use a light meter to get the shutter speed and aperture and set them on the camera lens.
Cock the shutter.
Remove the ground class screen.
Turn the Lomograflok back on.
Slide the Lomograflok back onto the camera and clip it into place.
Remove the dark slide (a metal plate that keeps light off the film) from the Lomograflok back.
Trigger the shutter.
Put the dark slide back into the Lomograflok back.
Remove the Lomograflok back from the camera.
Eject the photograph from the Lomograflok back.
Wait for it to develop.
I’m not going to show you pictures four and five that I took because I forgot to put the darkslide back into the camera Graflok back (step 14) after taking the shot, and ruined them both...
At the moment it is taking me around five minutes per shot. Perhaps I will improve with practice. Then again, perhaps not. I’ve got some film holders that you can also use with the camera, enough to hold four shots. I don’t think I’ll be taking many pictures with it, but I think they are going to great fun.
As a follow on from Ivan’s lens of yesterday, today I ordered a complete which I manged to get second hand at a very attractive price. It’s a 4x5 bellows camera made by Intrepid It is even harder to use than the hardest camera I’ve ever worked with. I’m really looking forward to it arriving. And if it seems that for the last few months I’ve done nothing more than write book chapters and buy cameras you’d be completely correct. And I don’t care.
I’ve just received this from Ivan. It is a lens and shutter assembly for a 4x5 camera. I’ve always fancied getting into large format photography. There are some interesting designs online for 3D printable camera bodies. This is going to be fun..
I’ve spent today doing my tax. All day. Working out how much I’ve spent and how much I’ve earned. I’ve been very careful to get the numbers right. Unlike senior members of government.
I decided today that the blog needs to be updated. I keep a diary of what I’ve been up to and the every now and then I sit down and write all the posts. I’ve no idea why I do this, it is just that I feel happier doing it than not.
Anyhoo, today I was creating the posts and I thought it might be fun to add a picture of the bottom of the boat that I tried to print earlier. It came off the print bed as it was printing so that all I had was a small chunk of the bottom of the keel and what looked like a ball of wool. Beautifully printed though. I’d dropped it in the waste paper bin so I had a little look to see if I could find it. I didn’t find it, but I did find an Aibo memory stick for the robot dogs that must have fallen off my crowded desk into the bin at some point over the last week. I’m really pleased I found this, they are quite hard to get hold of and very expensive. Plus it contains a tiny bit of “dog personality” that I really don’t want to lose.
So at least my blog is useful for something.
I’ve taken to letting Bluey the robot dog wander round while I have my break. I’m sure he’s not a patch on a real one, but it is rather nice to watch him go through his paces while I drink my tea. The only problem is that if I put him on this mat he goes kind of nuts, because for him the colours of the squares match the ball. So he thinks there are balls all around him. This makes him very happy, but also somewhat confused.
My trombone controller article is now out in the latest edition of Hackspace Magazine. It was great fun to write, even though I made a disastrous design decision half way through. If you want to control your mouse using a trombone action, you should grab a copy.
Update: If you can’t be bothered to download the magazine (although you should - it’s a great read) you can find the article on Raspberry Pi news here.
Tonight we went to see “Space, the universe and everything” at Hull Minster. It was great. A set of huge sound and light installations placed around the minster space. I didn’t take a camera, but it turns out that the iPhone is actually pretty good at capturing low light pictures. The pictures and the sounds were glorious and the venue just can’t be beat. If you can get to see this in Hull you should go. I think they are doing shows in other places too, if you get the chance you should definitely try to get there. Wonderful stuff.
The battery arrived for my Panasonic Leica camera and so we took it out for a walk yesterday. The pictures turned out rather well. The resolution is not great, but colours look pretty good. I was looking back through some of the pictures I took a few years ago and they are around the same resolution (4 megapixels or so) so it turns out that size isn’t everything. The camera is great to use. It has an optical viewfinder that zooms in along when the main lens, which is rather impressive. Performance in low light is pretty appalling but it does have a flash.
There are lots of buttons and dials on the back
The only thing I really don’t like is the way they’ve used “soft touch” plastic around the viewfinder. Over the years this has turned into “sticky touch” plastic that is rather horrible. But I think I can live with that. I’m going to see what other kinds of pictures it can take.
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
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