Lego Ghetto Blaster

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It’s become a kind of ritual. When we go up town in Leeds we visit the Lego store and fill a plastic cup with bricks from their “pick and mix”. I like doing this because you can get a huge number of one particular Lego piece. On a previous visit I got an enormous number of Lego gear levers and we used them to make a brush, among other things. This time we got some funky angled pieces and I used them to make a Lego Ghetto Blaster with six speakers and a sub-woofer. Great fun.

Mudfall

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Today was going great right up to the point where I fell on my back in the mud. I was just about to shout “Careful, it might be slippy” to our six year old charge when I illustrated this fact to great effect by falling over. Fortunately no lasting damage was done, although I did have to spend the rest of the trip walking round in a slowly solidifying coat and jeans.

Watch Extraordinary Attorney Woo

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Extraordinary Attorney Woo is a Korean TV show about an attorney with autism finding her way around a big law firm. Most of the episodes are self-contained although there are also a few longer running story arcs and a love story. Some of the stories give really interesting insights into the Korean way of life, although sometimes they do get a bit bogged down with procedure. I think it does a good job of balancing the issues presented and watching it certainly teaches you lots about the things faced by folks on the autistic spectrum. I really like it because the whole thing is fundamentally uplifting (although not every case has a happy ending). Well worth a watch if you happen to have Netflix.

Failday the 13th

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Today I recorded 8 demo videos and every one of them failed in some way. By half way through I had a “I wonder what is going to go wrong this time” running gag going in each recording. The good news is that I’ve now finished all the videos for the book. All 67 are complete and uploaded. Now we have to make sure that the QR codes and the links in the book text all line up.

Bolt inserts for fun and profit

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These arrived today from Amazon. I’m looking forward to having a go with them. And no, they are not bullets. They are for placing brass inserts into 3D printed plastic. You put them on the end of a soldering iron and heat them up so that the plastic melts around the insert. The inserts have screw threads in them. If I can get this right I can make 3D printed objects which I can screw together properly.

These are the inserts. They take m3 bolts.

Rob's Video Recording Tips

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I’ve recorded over 50 videos for the new book. So now I think I’m qualified to be able to give advice on how to make videos.

  1. Use a proper tool. I’m using Camtasia, which is wonderful. I’ve built a template and now I just have to make a new file from it, add the video bit in the middle and then hit publish.

  2. Build a workflow. For me the workflow starts with the name of the video in the book. I copy this into the filename for the video in Camtasia, which then uses that as the name of the video I publish onto YouTube. Then, when the video has published I copy the link back into the document and then use Edge to make a QR code (you can make a QR code for a url by right-clicking the site and then selecting the option from the menu that appears). I copy the QR code into the document and then save the image in the chapter file. Then I move on to the next one.

  3. Keep going if it all goes wrong. Maybe I’m wrong here, but I’ve done fifty videos this way and I’m not going to change. I used to spend ages trying to make my videos perfect. If I made a mistake I’d go back and re-record that bit. If a demo failed I’d re-record that too. But then I decided that “The perfect is the enemy of the good”. My videos don’t need to be perfect. My lectures certainly never were, and there was no way of rewinding those and going again. And besides, the bits that went wrong were always the bits that the students found the most interesting. So now I do every video in exactly one take. If it goes wrong I fix it and then carry on. I do make good use of the ability to pause recordings though. If something fails I’ll pause, fix it, and then resume and explain what happened.

  4. Don’t use your development machine for the videos. I’ve been caught out in the past when my sample code fails to work on the user’s machine. This is usually because there is something on my machine that I’ve forgotten, perhaps a device driver or a setting, which makes it work on my machine. Now I use the cheapest, lowest specification machine I can to record the videos. I install everything from scratch on a brand-new installation of Windows and go from there. I’ve lost count of the number of things that I’ve discovered testing the exercises this way. I’ve used a virtual pc on my machine in the past, but I really like the idea of having real hardware. I’m presently using a super cheap laptop for all the videos.

  5. Remember to be yourself. You and your viewer are going to be together for a long while (especially if you decide to make over 50 videos). You need to be able to relax while recording until you reach the point where you can properly be yourself.

Blackfinger

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I’m 3D printing a camera at the moment. I’ve discovered that one of my early design decisions was not the best. It turns out that white PLA is not the most opaque colour I could have chosen. Cameras that let the light in are not optimal.

So today I decided to remedy that by painting the inside of the camera with matt black paint. I bought a spray can of the stuff, found a place in the garden as far away as possible from everything else and set to. It worked rather well. I’ve put on two coats and it is now looking a lot darker inside the camera, which is a good thing. The only snag is that it has turned out to be impossible to stop the black paint getting onto the outside of the camera (at least for me) so the next part of the plan is to paint the outside of the camera black too. That way I also get even more opaqueness.

The really good news is that the paint I’m using seems to stick really well to PLA. The only other snag has been that I now have a black finger (the one that has been pressing the button on the spraycan)…

Video payoff

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I’m recording video walkthroughs for my Begin to Code Cloud book at the moment. I’m really pleased I’m doing this. Today I found an horrendous issue with a setting which broke a bunch of demos in the book text. Moral of the story folks: don’t just use your main machine for demos you want to give away; it will have configurations that make things work for you that won’t work for anyone else….

Broken Mamiya

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After watching a few YouTube videos about the Mamiya 645 camera I’d convinced myself that I knew enough about the camera to be able to venture onto eBay and buy a “for spares or repair” camera that came up for sale. It was a nice set of bits, including a waist level finder, a lens and a metered prism. It also included a camera body. Well, the camera arrived last week and I call it my “downstairs” camera as it looks as if it has been thrown downstairs at least once or twice. The lens works fine, but has a bit of a ding in the filter mount. The waist level finder works fine too, even though the mounting on one side has broken. The camera body is a bit of a mess though. By fiddling with it I’ve managed to lock the mechanism up completely. I’ve nothing against the seller here, nothing was sold as working. And I still think it was a great deal for the price. I’m gong to pop it back on eBay and see how much I can get for a properly broken device.

Scanner fetching

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Today it was up bright and early and off to Leeds to pick up the thing I bought on Tuesday which will make it much easier to get pictures into my computer. I got it home, opened the box and a whole bunch of furry creatures with wings flew out of the box and disappeared. I rang up the seller and told him what had happened. “That’s fine.” he said “You did buy the bat-fled scanner didn’t you?”

Apologies. But I couldn’t resist it. Anyhoo, the scanner is now back home and I’ve been scanning some of the shots I took with the new camera I got last week. It turns out that I can use it to take pictures of leaves.

One takeaway from this is that black and white is not the same as colour. Duh. Two things with different colours might be rendered as similar shades of grey. Another takeaway is that with film photography dust is definitely a thing. You get spots and stray hairs all over your negatives and keeping them at bay is a constant struggle. But it is all great fun. Next step is home processing.

Double Chapter Power

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I’ve been editing the chapters of the new book. Today I sent Chapter 9 through with my edits in place. Folks were pleased, but confused. I hadn’t sent them Chapter 8. Turns out that there is a difference between thinking about doing something and actually doing it. I thought I’d sent it through but it seems I only thought about sending it.

Anyhoo, the chapter has now been sent and I’ve only got three more to edit before the book is completely complete.

Bluetooth Location Tracking at the Hardware Meetup

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We’re still having regular Hardware Meetups at the MakerSpace in Hull Central Library. First Wednesday of the month. Start around 6:00pm. Bring hardware to show off or problems you want to talk about.

Today Martin brought along some nifty Bluetooth location tracking hardware to show us. The device on the end of the stick (in the picture) is being tracked by four carefully positioned devices on the table. We could wave it around and the laptop showed the realtime position. It was awesome. To think this is being done using radio is amazing. One day we might use it to find our way around airports and public buildings.

I took along my big camera (took 1 picture) and a robot dog. Great fun was had.

Got scanner

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Very excited. Managed to bag myself a flat bed scanner that can handle large images. This is a big thing. It turns out that you don’t get optimal photographic goodness by photographing negatives lying on your iPad screen. The new (to me but actually around 15 years old) device is huge and I’m going to have to drive over to Leeds and pick it up because I’m scared of what might happen if it is posted. But still, yay!

Hello Octopus

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Today I received a letter from British Gas saying that they had been unable to fit a Smart Meter because they couldn’t get access to my meter.

No.

As the person who spent two hours clearing a path through the garage I know this is not the case. Also, the engineer told me that the reason I couldn’t have a Smart Meter was that my electricity meter was a SMET 1 smart meter. He was supposed to be sorting out an upgrade of my electricity meter but it turns out that E.ON don’t do upgrades. So I’m stuck.

I’ve come to the decision that neither of these companies deserve my business any more. So I’ve switched to Octopus for gas and leccy. The switch was suspiciously easy. Just one email and a web form to set up the bank details. I know that my readers live for my posts about gas meters, so I’ll be sure to bring you updates as to how it all turns out.