Hello from Blackpool

The most difficult part of holiday preparation (at least for me) was deciding which camera to take…

We’re having a few days away. Today we headed onto Blackpool’s Golden Mile. Everything you would expect from a British seaside resort. I managed to talk folks out of buying me a “Kiss me quick” hat. But we did have fish and chips for lunch and they were excellent. Then we went up the tower.

This is a view through glass, but I still think it looks pretty OK

Behind the golden Mile

Heading for Holidays

Today we headed off for a few days away. Forgot my hat, which should mean we are in for some good weather.

Holiday prep

We’re heading off for a few days away. I’ve tidied my room a bit so that when I get back I can tell whether or not we’ve been burgled.

Tidy cable storage for the win

This is much preferrable to having all the wires in one draw…

I’m between jobs at the moment. So this morning I spent a very happy hour doing the above. I’m very pleased about it but not sure I should be.

Dog photo

Digby was in a good mood today

I’m getting quite into photography with the big Pentax camera. It has this way of making the backgrounds nicely blurred that I really like.

Use Proper Printing Paper

The picture looks even better in the flesh. For some reason a photograph doesn’t do it justice.

I’ve been playing around with thermal printers and using them to print pictures. One piece of strong advice that I have for anyone else doing this is to get some proper thermal paper. While you can use cheap stuff purchased from stationers, you will get much better results with higher quality stuff. I’m using refills for the wonderful Kidizoom print cam. These aren’t massively expensive and they last a while. Plus you can print sticky labels too.

Lidl Led Panel

It runs very well off USB battery packs

If you are after a led panel for tracing, or you want to back-light some negatives so that you can photograph them, you should take a look in the centre isle of Lidl in the UK. They are selling a rather nice LED panel for 10 pounds. The lighting seems nice and even to me, and it works very well. It goes quite bright, so you could probably use it as a softlight as well.

Tip Tips

Took a bunch of stuff to the tip today. Going to the tip is becoming increasingly complicated. Now they have lots of different categories for rubbish. My pro-tip (which I will follow for next time) is to put different rubbish in different bags. Otherwise you will be standing there for ages pulling bits of cardboard out of a huge bag that you’ve just filled. Like I did. The other tip (at least where I go) is to go in the morning. The afternoons seem to be a lot busier.

One of the things that used to puzzle me back in the day was “How to you get rid of an old dustbin?”. If you leave it out for the dustman they just empty it and then move on. It turns out that the answer to this age old riddle is to take the bin to the tip and throw it into the skip by hand…

Bank Holiday shock - with added AI

I was going to write “We had good weather today which was a bit of a shock, what with it being a bank holiday”. My blog host now has an AI button. I asked it to write something too:

We had good weather today. Bank holiday weather is always a topic of conversation in the UK, and unfortunately, it's typically not the most favorable. On the one hand, we have high hopes for clear skies and warm temperatures, but on the other hand, we are often met with gloomy, rainy weather. It's not uncommon for people to plan for a barbeque or picnic and then be forced to relocate indoors due to the rain. However, there are those rare moments when the weather decides to cooperate, and we are blessed with sunny days and blue skies, allowing us to fully enjoy the holiday weekend. So, while the weather may be unpredictable, it never stops us from making the most of our bank holidays.

There are a lot more words here, but I’m not sure how much value has been added…

Tears of the Kingdom vs Lego 2K Drive

It’s not really fair (or perhaps meaningful) to compare the new Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom with Lego 2K Drive. They are completely different games. But then again, why not?

Tears of a Kingdom does an fantastic job of building on an amazing game (Zelda the Breath of the Wild) and making a six year old console feel new again. Lego 2K Drive is a racing game in the Lego universe with shades of the splendid Lego City Undercover. Zelda is great because of the depth and the number of things you can do. Although at the moment I’m still in the learning curve and expect to be there for some time. The nice thing about Lego 2K Drive is that the amount of learning that you have to do at the start is fairly minimal. It’s a driving game - and I’ve done those before. But the sheer scale of the game is very impressive with a huge open world to play in. I love the way that your vehicle changes to match where you are, flipping from car to boat to buggy as you smash across the terrain. The racing is intense, although the game works hard to keep up the tension by making sure there are the right number of cars in front and behind most of the time. I’ve not got the Lego game - with a bit of luck it will fall in price a bit and I’ll get a copy.

Climbing Hull Minster

Looking south across the humber. On the left you can see “The Deep”.

I just happened to be up town with my camera, going past Hull Minster when I noticed a sign saying “Tower Tours £6”. I knew they could be booked on-line (you can do it here) but I thought there was no harm in asking if we could go up today. So I asked the question, and a guide was found who told us “I can take you up know if you like.” We liked. The staircase up the tower is a bit tight. My strong advice is make good use of the rope that hangs down the middle. But the views at the top were more than worth it.

This is the view west. On the left you can see the humber bridge on the horizon.

It was fascinating to hear how the bells and clock worked.

These are the bell ropes, ready for action.

Hull Minster has 12 bells, which apparently is a good number. The walls of the bell room were covered in plaques commemorating different peals rung in the past. Some of them can take three hours to complete. Although, as our guide told us, “Sometimes we just stop and head off to the pub..”

A workbench with a view

We climbed right to the top of the tower, stopping off at the clock room. This was a great experience. We were there for about an hour. If you’re from Hull you should go along and do the tour. If you’re not from Hull you should come to Hull, and then go on the tour.

3D Printed Camera article now in Hackspace magazine

One of the funnest articles I’ve written

The article about my 3D printed camera is now in HackSpace magazine, which you can find in all good newsagents. There’s lots of great stuff in there along with my few pages. If you fancy making a camera like this you can find the designs and lots of useful stuff here.

The camera is now light tight and works a treat

I took the picture above with the 3D printed camera. The amount of detail in the branches is very impressive.

A free man

I’ve shipped my “Bluetooth Chord Keyboard” article to Hackspace magazine. I’m now properly unemployed for a while with nothing outstanding (except perhaps for my talent - hem hem). It will be nice to have a break from doing much. Personally, I give it around a fortnight before I’ll be looking for things to do……

New Chair

It’s amazing what having a rubbish skip next door but one can do for your life. I’ve just got a new chair for my office. No - not from the skip. That’s where the old chair is going. The old chair is still OK to sit on, but the vinyl covering began to moult around a year ago giving of clouds of plastic particles each time I sat down on it. Then it developed this amazing squeak when I leaned back.

When I took the old chair to pieces for disposal I discovered a date stamp of 2003. I think its time had definitely come.

Thick Printing

This is the newly printed left hand version of the chord keyboard.

I’m printing some items for a HackSpace magazine article. This one is about making a Bluetooth version of the chord keyboard I made a while back. Today I printed the top of the left handed version of the keyboard. I’ve thickened up the top plate quite a lot. This has done a few things to the print job; perhaps the most notable thing is that it now takes over 6 hours to print. However, it has also added a really nice bit of extra “heft” to the keyboard.

Lots of things benefit from a bit of extra weight, and this is one of them. Up until now I’ve usually printed the thinnest structures I can get away with to save time and filament. However, I think from now on I’ll live with the extra time and cost and print things a bit thicker.

Dealing with a Dimpled Prism

The printing is not the wrong way round. this picture was taken in a mirror…

I’ve bought another camera. This happens. I think my camera buying hobby is now slightly cheaper than golf. Although I don’t know how much golf costs. Anyhoo, I went full-on brave for this one, I ordered it from Japan. For some reason the most interesting second hand buys are coming from there. You have to be careful about import duty and whatnot, so they are not quite the bargains that they appear when you first see them. However, I thought it was worth the risk. The seller had 100% feedback and seemed to have sold a lot of stuff so I took the plunge.

The camera arrived last week. Above is a crop from the first picture I took with it. If you look carefully you can see some dimples in top part of the camera. These weren’t on the pictures attached to the listing. There were some marks on the box that indicated damage during transit. At first I decided to live with them as a natural consequence of having something posted half way around the world. But then I decided that since I’d paid for a non-dimpled prism I might as well see if I can get one. I raised the issue with the supplier and they just said “OK, we’ll send you another one without dimples”. Amazing stuff. Very pleased. If you are thinking of buying a camera from Japan I can recommend them. You can find them here.

Recycled Humour

I’m recycling jokes from the past because I think you all deserve to hear them again. This ones from February 27th 2006:

We were discussing paper sizes and I got to thinking about Caesar and his famous discussion about the dimensions of the posters they wanted to put around the colosseum, and how all that went horribly wrong when Caesar turned to his most trusted friend and said "A2 Brutus?".

The First Rule of 3D Printing

I am typing this with the nearly finished “Blue Chords” keyboard. After a five hour print the key cover looks really nice. The keys and the sockets on the printed circuit board all line up perfectly and it seems to work. I now have to create the bottom of the case and fix the battery in place.

Oh, and the “First Rule of 3D Printing”? When your printer is printing well do not touch it or change anything.

Power Cut Friday

Of course this might not be what caused it

First thing that happened was that the shower failed. It was producing nothing more than a low buzzing sound. Not what you want if you are stood naked underneath it. I’ve had this happen before. The usual solution is to fit a new shower (after you have got dressed). I’ve done this several times over the years. Once with jetlag. But I was hoping for a bunged up filter. I took the shower to bits and I was just removing the filter cover when the 3D printer stopped with an alarm. And wouldn’t power on again. I was just wondering what the third thing was going to be (problems like this always come in threes) when when the washing machine flashed up a fault code.

Then everything went off and I relaxed. It must be a power thing. I put the shower back together. And then the mobile phone signal vanished. I was expecting that important things like cellular networks to have some kind of battery backup, but apparently not. That was kind of worrying. We were completely out of contact with the rest of the world. This is how we must have felt in the seventies. Except that in the seventies our landline phones still worked.

The power came back after about twenty minutes. We did eventually get a text telling us that the power had gone off (in case anyone hadn’t noticed) but that was all. I reckon that for about twenty minutes before the power failed we had been running on a low mains voltage. Anything using a “switched mode” power supply would have kept working. But anything with a motor in it would be suffering. So computers and screens all worked fine. Showers not so much.

I always thought that the power companies tried very hard to provide either 250 volts or nothing, but it turns out that this is not the case. The good news is that everything has come back fine and so all we had to do was reset a few clocks and throw away a half completed 3D print.

A few weeks ago the UK had a test of an “emergency broadcast” thing where most people’s phones buzzed with the message “Do not worry. This is a test”. This made us all feel much safer (except of course for those who didn’t get the message). However, if It turns out that at the first hint of trouble our phones are all going to be disconnected it makes all that effort seem like a bit of a waste of time.

Roll film developing mayhem

This film had some lovely pictures on

This is turning into a photography blog. But I can live with that. I’ve started developing my own pictures. The starting point of the process is getting the film out of the roll and into the plastic spiral that goes inside the developing tank. I put the film and the developing tank into a light tight bag with elasticated holes for my hands. I then wrestle the film into the spiral (which reminds me of a pinball game), put the tank and then take it upstairs to add the chemicals etc.

The first time I did this it just worked and I was quite smug about this. The universe must have heard me. After a couple more successful loads I had a complete failure. I actually got cross with the whole thing (a very rare thing for me) and the result was one ruined film. Oh well. At least it gives me a spare film to practice with. I had similar problems today, but this time I had a plan. I rolled the film back onto the spool, put the roll of film into the developing tank (along with the black light-tight centre piece) and took my hands out of the bag for a breather. Then I got my old film and spent twenty minutes practicing until I could do it with my eyes closed (which was kind of the point). Then I tried it again and after a couple of false starts I managed to get the film into the drum and take it upstairs to process. Turns out that its necessary to practice once you’ve used up all your beginner’s luck.

“portrait of the artist as an old man..”

I was quite pleased with how the pictures came out.

This is my standard “tree test” picture. Now with added leaves.

“Bark and bokeh”