Smart Meter - Dumb System

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Today was going to be the day they installed our new smart meter so that we can watch our money go up in smoke in real time from the comfort of the kitchen. So I was up first thing in the garage throwing stuff into the car to clear a path to the meter ready for the swap.

The installer turns up, takes one look at the electricity meter and says he can’t fit a smart gas meter. Apparently my electricity meter is smart, but not smart enough. It is a SMET 1 when it needs to be a SMET 2. He leaves having done nothing and I headed off glumly to the tip .

I have really no idea why the installation of a smart gas meter is dependent on the electricity meter. I’m also annoyed because I deliberately waited until I knew that SMET 2 meters were being installed before getting our electricity meter done. Then they installed a SMET 1 meter anyway. I guess they had a warehouse full of the things.

Anyhoo, I’ve emailed the electricity company to ask for a meter upgrade. Let’s see how that turns out.

Beverley Camera Centre is awesome

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You know those shops that you thought had all disappeared? The ones with lots of stock and sales staff who know what they are talking about. And interesting second-hand bits and bobs that you didn’t know you needed until you found one?

Well, Beverley Camera Centre is like that. They have loads of photography stuff including cameras new and old, accessories, bags, tripods, lots of film - including instant - and even chemicals for home developing. I was in there today for a quick visit and I’m looking forward to going back and having a proper look round. The most important thing to know about the place is that it is closed Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday, so if you turn up then all you’ll be able to do is stare through the window at the fun stuff within. If you are into photography or want to get started (using film is currently a trendy thing to do apparently) then go down and have a look at what they’ve got.

Printing a Will Travel camera

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I’m printing a 4x5 print camera. I fancy some hand held large format camera action. I started the printing around 7:30 am this morning. We are now eleven and a half hours into the print. It is supposed take around 14 hours, but I’ll be very surprised if it is finished before we go to bed. The good news is that all is well so far. I put some glue onto the print bed (just a thin layer of Pritt stick) and that seems to have stopped the corners from lifting too much, which is nice.

White might not be the most sensible colour for a camera, but the plan is to line the inside with black felt to reduce reflections and keep the light out. And it should look cool…

The return of Una

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A while back I was given a lovely lens. Today I’m starting the process of 3D printing a camera to go behind it. I’m using the Will Travel design from Morten Kolve. This looks like an excellent starting point. Morten was kind enough to send me through the designs for a build which will match my lens.

Today I put the designs into Cura and sliced them for Edna the Ender to print. This showed a print time of 23 hours. Which Is quite a long time. And I’m not keen on running a printer overnight. So I tried slicing them for Una the Ultimaker and got a time of 13 hours, which was a worthwhile saving. Even if it took me 5 hours to get Una going I’d still be ahead of the game.

Unu is an original Ultimaker 1 which I first built 2012. I’ve built her again several times since then, most recently when I swapped the the print head for one from an Ultimaker 2. However, once I got the Edna the Ender-3 I’ve not used Una that much because Edna is a bit better at detail. However, I don’t really care about detail for this print. I just want a camera body. So I spent a few minutes cleaning Una up and making ready and off she went. So far she is working rather well. I’ll do the big print tomorrow, which should be fun.

Golfing for real

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I’ve played a lot of golf recently. Or something. Most weeks you’ll find us firing up Walkabout golf for nine holes of fun and games. Today I got to find out if any of my Oculus Quest skills have transferred to the real world when we met up for a round of real crazy golf at Puttstars Leeds. I think my practice has made me a bit better, I can swing and hit the ball at a repeatable angle, which is nice. The major difficulty was that the greens played a lot slower, so lots of my shots fell short.

But it was still great fun. I can recommend Putstars Leeds, the folks there were friendly and they also had a whole bunch of video games. Great fun.

Old Jokes

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Found this as I was going through the archives searching for something else. It is part of a Red Nose Day Lecture from 2001. If you find any of these funny you are very old….

Little Known Programming Languages

Threetran

- a precursor to Fortran. Programs are written on punched tablets.

Failscal

- similar to Pascal, but is so strongly typed that nothing ever compiles.

C--

- an attempt to take all the dangerous things out of C. The language syntax contains just the open and close curly bracket symbols.

Invisible Basic

- all the program code is stored behind one button on the screen, which is hidden.

Fifth

- a stack based language which uses a much stronger spring on the stack so that programs run faster.

Nescafe

- create secure, distributed, object oriented, platform independent, multi-threaded programs just by adding hot water, rather than grinding beans.

C Flat

- an early version of C#. Also called Microsoft Java.

Disassembler

- used to write machine code programs which fall apart very quickly.

AMLOG

- similar to PROLOG, but used by AI programmers who aren't actually being paid.

Stealth postman

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Our postman is lovely. Great bloke. But I think he has a bit of ninja in his soul. I think he may have perfected the art of stealth knocking. That or our doorbell is broken. This lunchtime we were having lunch (what were the chances eh?) and I received the message. “We have tried to deliver your package but nobody was home”. I hate it when that happens. I’m not in a particular hurry to use what’s in the package now being “returned to the sorting office” but this all delays the closure of actually getting the thing to my house, which I hate.

Fame at last. Or not.

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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.

Make Something Happen Happenings

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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.

Negative results

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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….

Wobbly network

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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.

Hardware Meetup

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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.