Shameful garage

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No hot water this morning. Nothing says “welcome to the new day” like a cold shower. The boiler is showing a fault code, which in a way is a good thing for me because it means the problem is now out of my hands. And probably not my fault. Although it might of course be very expensive.

We called the plumber and he came round this afternoon, took one look at the huge mess in the garage and told us that he couldn’t really do anything because he needed to be able to get close to the patient without having to hack his way through heaps of stuff. Fair comment. I’ve spent the afternoon clearing a path and sauntering down memory lane. He’s coming back tomorrow.

Up town photography

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Apparently they’ve cleaned the windows on Hepworth’s Arcade.

We went up town today. Not the best of moves as it turned out, what with one of the main roads being totally shut. We spent a lot longer in the car that we expected. I’d taken one of my film cameras and I was looking forward to taking some “proper” pictures with it. Thing is, the picture above wasn’t taken with a proper camera. It was taken with the phone. And I’m really, really pleased with it. The overall quality is excellent and the way that the people and items in it just arranged themselves in front of me was lovely. I would have had to work quite hard with a proper camera to get this result.

Mamiya 645 camera on Kentmere film developed in Rodinol

The picture above was taken on a medium format camera. I suppose a phone could have produced a result as good, but I’m pleased with it too.

Over the Air Updates for Connected Little Boxes

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Groverner Club

I’m adding “over the air” updates to my Connected Little Boxes. I’ve had the button on the device management form for a year or two. Over the last week I’ve been putting some code behind it. Over the air updates are magical. You can ask the device to download and install a new version of its firmware. On the surface it is quite easy to do. Except if, like me, you have a solution that uses nearly all the memory in the device. I’ve come up with a solution. When an update is required the device boots into a special “update” mode where the only element running is the code fetching the new firmware from the server. It is nearly working. Rather exciting.

Describe your bugs

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I took this while I was testing the olympus. Still works very well.

Found a bug today in the code that manages the “friendly names” of Connected Little Boxes. I let the user add a friendly name to a device so they can call it “Downstairs light” rather than “CLB-12d7ef”. I’ve added handling for the situation where they try to add a device with the same name as an existing one (I used the same method as Windows file explorer). If you try to use an existing file it adds a number on the end. The second version of “fred” is called “fred(1)”.My technique with bugs is to write a nice long description of what happens and how to fix it. I find that this gives my brain a bit of time to catch up and think it through. This is my description of the error and how I fixed it.

When you save the edits for an existing device it creates a new friendly name for it because it discovers that the old friendly name already exists – which of course it does. The current behaviour works fine for adding a new device (a new name is what you want), but breaks updating an existing device.  

Fixed it by passing the original friendly name back to the device edit Post handler. This can then check if the friendly name has been edited and add generation information if it has. If you try to make a name with your own generation, for example create a name called “fred(1)” where “fred(1)” already exists the program will make a new name of “fred(1)(1)” which is acceptable. If you want to get “fred(n)” where n is the next available fred generation you just leave off the number and brackets. I pondered whether to remove the generation value from a clashing name so that it would automatically pick the next number in the sequence, but this could result in confusing number changes where someone saves “fred(6)” and ends up with “fred(10”.

If you are faced with an error I strongly suggest that you do something like this and then add it to your daily journal so that you can go back and refer to it. If you don’t keep a daily journal I strongly suggest that you start one.

The art of film development

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the radio still mostly works - which makes it something of a rarity apparently

It turns out that developing film is an art. Who knew? It’s a chemical process. The parts of the film that were exposed to light react with the developer to make particles of silver which end up on the negative as dark spots called “grain”. The more light, the darker the spot. Hower, the amount of developer you use and the time you leave the film in it are important, as is how you agitate the film to put fresh developer into contact with the film surface.

And then there’s acutance. This happens along the borders between bright and dark areas on the image being developed. The developer in an exposed area is “used up” as it reacts to make the silver film grains.. This causes developer to migrate over from an unexposed part, resulting in the enhancement of edges in the finished picture and making brighter areas “pop” out of the image. The amount of acutance you get depends on how much agitation you give the film. There’s also “stand development” where you just leave the film standing in the developer for an hour or so.

And then there’s how much you dilute the developer and the number of minutes you leave the film in it, as well as the exposure you used when you took the shot. I’ve been working with 1+50 dilutions of Rodinol developer. This seems to work quite well. It also makes developing film very cheap. I’ve got a bottle of developer and think it might last a long time.

If you want to get into this (and it is rather fun) I can recommend the Massive Dev website for development times (there’s also a really good app) and this video.

Ebay Bargains from Rob

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I took this with a camera I’ve just bought….

In a vain attempt to get in some cash to pay for all the cameras that I seem to have bought over the last six months I’ve put a few things on ebay. The way I see it, I’m getting paid to make space in the cupboards. Win win. Although I will miss some of them a bit.

Every item will be perfectly packed and promptly posted.

Avoiding Photo Heartbreaks

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This is a nice part of cottingham

I now regard a new ten shot roll of film as “ten potential heartbreaks”. This is perhaps a rather depressing, but I think it’s is realistic. Digital camera users don’t really experience the sinking feeling film photographers get when they see the developed renditions of the lovely scene they composed in the viewfinder. And for a digital photographer; if a photo comes out wrong you can always take another one there and then.

Today I took the Pentax 67 for a walk and took ten shots. Then I developed them. Most of them were not exposed correctly - including the one above which required some serious fettling to get it to look reasonable. Robs black and white photography tips (which he really should follow himself):

  • Exposure is really important. Getting the right amount of light onto the film is crucial. I was trying a technique where you get a light reading from the darkest part of the image that you want to see, go back two stops and then use that as the exposure. I got this wrong (didn’t find a dark enough place) because the photographs were all horribly over exposed (I’d let too much light in). Before you dial in the settings do a quick “sanity check” to make sure that the numbers make sense. If I’d done that I’d not have ended up with the bad shots that I got.

  • Focus is really important. A perfectly exposed picture is of no use to you if it is blurred. Aim for sharpness and make sure that all the subjects that need to be sharp are sharp. If the people in the scene are different distances from the camera you need to either move to line them up or adjust the focus so that you have enough depth of field (the distance range in which things are sharp) to make the picture look right. The only good news is that you can make your out of focus pictures look a lot better by only using very small versions of them. So make a mosaic of your blurred shots.

  • Holding the camera still is really important. If you get exposure and focus right and then wave the camera around like a fire hose when you take the shot you will end up with a blurred photo. If the focus for a picture is wrong some parts of the picture will be blurred. If you don’t hold the camera still every part of a picture is blurred, and you will have to print it the size of a postage stamp to make it look right. If the shutter speed (the time the film is exposed to light) is less than a sixtieth of a second you need to steady the camera somehow. Use a tripod, put your elbows on a table or wall. Breath in and hold your breath for the time it takes to take the shot. Squeeze the shutter button, don’t press it.

There are of course lots of other things you can do wrong. Particularly if, like me, you’re daft enough to process your own film at home. But I do find that in the shots that I take there are some which are good enough to make me keep going.

Bought some board games

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Now I just have to work out where to put them….

I found out about the board game sale via the Yorkshire Boardgaming group on Facebook. This morning I was down in a garage in Willerby looking at hundreds of games arrayed on trestle tables. I started with a little pile of potential purchases, but then things stepped up a gear when I was told that everything was being sold at half the sticker price. I ended up with a boot full.

We’ve not played all the games just yet, but we did have a quick go at Tonari last night. I bought it because I liked the look of the game art on the box (this is how I buy most of my games). It turns out to be extremely strategic, with simple rules, pleasing play pieces and lots of scope for cunning. We can work our way through the rest of them over the next few weeks.

Bluetooth Chord Keyboard

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Now avaialble for left and right handed users with adjustable key positions

The Raspberry Pi PICO-W powered Bluetooth Chord keyboard (I call it “Blue Chords”) is now on GitHub. You can find it here. I’ve updated the code to use the latest version of the Raspberry PI PICO SDK and updated the PC design and matching case design.

I used the Kicadstepup plugin to import the board into the design

I’ve built some prototypes (you can see them at the top) but I’ve not built the final design yet. The project will be the basis of an article in an upcoming HackSpace magazine.

Smiggle Python Puzzle Game

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I’ve not maanged to make thie elephant yet, but I plan to Try

This is a nice little puzzle game courtesy of number one grand-daughter that you can pick up here. It’s a meter or so long and is made up of sixty little wedges which are all connected together in a line. The wedges can be rotated 90 degrees and you can fold sections back into themselves to make interesting shapes.

The connection between the wedges seems pretty strong, although the first one I got was in several pieces when I opened the pack, so you might need to be a bit careful. Well worth the price (especially now it’s reduced).

My AgendA Lives!

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She’s a bit dusty, and some of the dust is behind the screen…

I found my AgendA power supply in the garage today. I found the AgendA about six months ago, so this was quite a useful thing to do. The AgendA is a personal organizer from the 1980s with a fantastic chord keyboard. I loved using mine back in the day.

At first it looked like it was broken. Nothing appeared on the screen - then it started beeping every thirty seconds or so. Then I turned it off and on again and it sprang into life. The problem with the AgendA is that it uses nickel-cadmium batteries which have failed big time. So it only really works when plugged in. However, work it does. I’ve got the spreadsheet, some memory cards and even a low-level programming manual. Somewhere I’ve also got the serial and parallel connector cables. I might see about how much I can get working.

Next stop is the Cybiko……

Pardon?

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If you are wondering why I’ve put a picture of York city centre in a post about earwax, you have to ask yourslef what you would rather have a picture of…

I’ve been deaf in one ear for the last couple of days. The problems started when I was proving my manliness by going on the big water slides while on holiday. As a result I got a lot of water in my ears. Normally this disappears after a while. You get a warm feeling down the side of your head as half a pint of chlorinated water runs out of your ear into your collar and you get your hearing back with a pop and a gurgle.

Not for me this time though. My left ear was completely broken. I think a sudden inrush of water had forced a bunch of wax up into the ear and blocked it. In the long term I suppose this would save money on headphones and give me the perfect way of ignoring things I didn’t want to hear (which I have apparently been doing for ages). But I really wanted to go back to the stereo lifestyle and so today I tootled down to a place in Cottingham to have someone look into the problem. The process started with an examination of the working ear, which was completely clear. The broken one however, was very blocked. Ear wax removal involves using a funky sucking thing to gently remove the wax. My wax was apparently very sticky and it took several goes, plus some rinsing with another funky device, to get it all out. The sounds I heard during this process were awesome.

I was tempted to ask if they would do the job for half price, what with them only having to work on one ear, but in the end I was so pleased to get my proper hearing back that I paid up and left very happy.

Adventures in colourizing

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I’ve no idea how it knew that the dog was blue-grey. Or that the carpet had that pink bit

I’m taking lots of black and white pictures now. I thought I’d put one through the new Photoshop colorizing filter to see what it could do with it. The result is above. I’m actually very impressed. I made a few colorized pictures of people and it did a very good job on them too - even managing to spot the correct hair colour. If you really want a colour picture you should probably take it in colour, but it is nice to know that there are ways of adding colour that seem to work quite well.

Yet another camera for Rob

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This is the first picture I took… I think we are going to get along fine

Whisper it, I’ve bought another camera. It seems that I’m slowly converting all my music production devices into cameras. This was our first trip to York since before the pandemic. Last time we went I wandered into York Camera Mart and bought a lens. This time I’ve got a camera, for around the same price. It is a very old camera, but I really like the way it looks and how nice it is to operate.

When we got back home I processed the film and took at the negatives. Every time you take a picture on a film camera you are setting yourself up for a little bit of heartbreak when the developed version fails to match up to the lovely image in the viewfinder. This is especially true when you take black and white pictures. Things with different colours might map to exactly the same shade of grey and disappear into each other. I’m very happy with the shots that I got though. I need to work on my exposure technique - quite a few shots were over-exposed - but I’m very happy to do this because the camera itself is just so much fun to use. And now I’m going to sell another synthesizer….

Hello from Lytham

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I’ve on more piers in the last two days than I have in the last ten years.

Today finds us in Lytham St. Annes. It’s only a couple of miles from Blackpool (you can use the tram to get from one to the other) but it feels like a different world. The huge and wonderful beach is front and centre, although there are still piers and of course arcade machines. We did some kite flying, dug holes and buried bits of each other and all the other things you’re supposed to do on the beach. We even got to watch someone get their car stuck in the sand. Happy days.

The tide does go out a heck of a long way….