The cake was delicious
I’m writing an article about Meshtastic. Part of my preparation involves making sure that I can transmit messages over reasonable distances. Such as from a really nice coffee shop to my house. Tests are going well at the moment.
I’m not sure ifyou should buy a camera just becuase of its looks. But then again…
The Lomomatic 110 camera is the first completely new 110 film camera to be made for a while. Lomography (who specialise in interesting cameras) released it a little while back. It’s a rather expensive alternative to a cheap second hand 110 camera, but it does have a ton of style. It also has a proper electronic shutter and a glass lens with adjustable focus - which are not things you usually find on a 110 camera. Of course, I got my hands on one and loaded it up with Lomo Purple film. It’s a fun camera to use. You wind it on by opening and closing the body and you can also attach the cutest little flash gun to the side. It is very plasticy though and I found the shutter button a bit fiddly to press (best to use a fingernail and press it with that). The 110 film has tiny negatives, but I wasn’t too unhappy with the level of detail.
This is not how I remember Dalby forsest looking…
Should have held the camera horizontal
I think the camera shake adds a lot to this one…
The camera didn’t get the colours wrong, that’s down to the awesome film. But it did get the exposure and the focus mostly right. The only times things went wrong were when I forgot to adjust a setting. I took some pictures of people and they came out sharp and snappy, but with weird colours which added a lot to the atmosphere.
It’s a nice enough camera, very stylish and beautifully presented. I’m not sure I’d advise anyone other than a camera nerd to get one though. Probably better to pick up a cheap second-hand 110 camera if you want to try the format, or perhaps a Pentax Auto 110 (which is an awesome tiny SLR camera of which more later).
What I would advise you to do though is pick up some of the funky Lomographic 110 films. They are available at quite appealing prices in 110 format and you can get them developed at around the same cost as a 35mm film. I’m presently trying the “turquoise” film (which seems to turn people cyan). I’m looking forward to seeing the results.
This one is almost artistic
A while back I made the mistake of sending the same film through the camera twice. At the time I vowed never to do that again. Well, that worked. Above you can see the results of doing it again...
The first pass was with a Canon Dial 35 and the second with a Canon AE-1. While it saves me a bit in film it has the disadvantage of leaving me with lots of unusable pictures.
I took this picture with my little Canon Dial 35 half frame camera. I’m quite pleased with how it turned out.
Some of the lenses in my cameras are radioactive. Not in a particularly dangerous way, although if you managed to swallow one or left it in your underpants for several weeks it might not do you much good. As the radioactive elements decay they turn yellow, which means that some of my pictures have a yellow/gold tinge that I don’t really mind that much. It gives pictures taken in Hull a nice “French Riviera” look. The solution, when I get around to it, is to shine a bright UV light on the lens and speed up the decay process and turn the yellow white again.
Today I dug up a big plant in the garden and threw it in the bin. I just hope it was the right one.
It works!
Today finds us at the Rural Lincolnshire Enterprise Hub where Ross of Hardware Meetup fame is showing of his digital piano. This is no ordinary instrument, although it did start as an ordinary piano. Then Ross fitted a whole bunch of solenoids and electronics to control them. He now has a piano that accepts MIDI music and plays it.
How it works
But Ross didn’t stop there. He’s also built an Alexa interface so that you can request music by name and have it played for you. And there is also an AI element which can tell you more about your musical choices and we even heard some attempts, not always successfully, to use AI to make new music. Great fun and a very impressive project. You can see it working here.
Magnifying glasses are a great idea
We had a great time at the Hardware Meetup this evening. Brian has designed a printed circuit board that lets us use a Raspberry Pi PICO to control a Hull Pixelbot. The board uses surface mount components and tonight we used a little hotplate to solder them all in place. Stage one is to put some solder paste on each of the connections. Then put the components in position and finally heat the board up so that the solder melts and forms the connections. You also get some really interesting movement of the components themselves as they float in the molten solder and surface tension pulls them into exactly the right position.
Great fun.
Went to York today and took a bunch of pictures. But I won’t be able to show them to you until I’ve finished the roll…..
Phone and exchange in perfect harmony
Finally shipped the Telephone Exchange article. I managed to get things to work mostly sensibly and learned the huge importance of prompt strings when using large language models.
I need to work out how to scan these pictures
We took one of our converted Polaroid cameras for a walk to the pub tonight. We took some pictures on the way and they came out quite well.
Hmm. What to do…
…because if I do, I’ll buy something. Today it was a lens. But it did allow me to capture the above tense moment in a hard fought game of Pokémon.
At least the camera photographs really well
Today we took our converted Polaroid camera to one of my favourite places in all the world, the gardens at Harlow Carr. We did get some pictures, but we need to work on exposures and framing a bit.
I know that there is no such word as andswer, but I didn’t want to type the thing out a fourth time…
I thought I’d give the redphone AI telephone exchange a hand-typed instruction card in keeping with the retro style of the whole thing. So I grabbed my old typewriter from the loft and hammered out the above. Turns out that manual typewriters are quite hard on the fingers.
It has always struck me as strange how a piece of software can know when a deadline is fast approaching and then choose that moment to fail in new and completely unamusing ways… Oh well.
Bohanza is a bean trading game we played years ago. Tonight we had another go. It was kind of embarrassing. Last time I played it I carefully put all the cards in elastic bands. But a lot can happen to an elastic band over 10 years or so. Prior to dealing I had to scrape bits of elastic off the cards. Oh well. The game was great fun.
After the first part of the operation
We had a lot of fun today drilling and sawing. We’re following these instructions to convert some Polaroid Land cameras from very old Polaroid film which is no longer made to 5x4 and Fuji Instax. The procedure is simple enough, although you do need to be careful when using the drill (and it is best if you have sharp drills). You have to remove the back of the camera, along with a pressure plate assembly which used to squeeze the chemicals onto the photographs. You then add a 3D printed back plate along with a film holder.
We need to tidy up the tape we added to make the camera light tight against the 3D printed back.
We’ve got the back off the camera, adjusted the camera focus and fitted the new back. The next step is to change the “infinity stop” on the front of the camera so that it will focus at the correct place for the Instax Film holder we are using.
This is actually of a group of people
Photography is hard. First you have to set the lens aperture and shutter speed. Then finally, you have to point the camera in the right direction. Took some pictures today using a camera which uses a “sports viewfinder” which is just a wire frame you look through in the right direction. I looked in the wrong direction and we now have a bunch of tree pictures we weren’t expecting….
You can even see me in this picture if you look carefully enough….
Up town today to take some pictures at a local “May the Fourth” Star Wars event. It was great fun. Lots of bits and bobs for sale and loads of people in character. I was using Ilford HP5 film which is fast and gives a really nice grainy effect.
You talking to me?
Warren asked me for some words about the upcoming Hull Computer Science 50th Anniversary.
The celebration runs over Friday 11th October and Saturday 12th and takes place on the Hull University campus. We start with a welcome event on Friday evening, but the main celebration event is on Saturday 12th. We'll have robot rugby for the kids, research talks, campus tours, Hull Stories, Retro video games, embed you in carbonite with our 3D printers, slot car racing, and a 'Computer Science Welcome Party Redux' in the evening where you can relive your first departmental social engagement at Hull, complete with a dodgy quiz.
If you fancy a doing a bit of coding while you’re here, we'll also be running a Three Thing Game hackathon. Get your three 'game things' at our online event on the evening of Wednesday 9th of October and then spend as much time as you like building something impressive in our lab. We’ll be judging the games on Saturday afternoon and then presenting the winners that during the welcome party.
Ticket holders will get lunch and dinner on the Saturday, and those awfully nice folks at Visr (visr-vr.com) have put some money behind the bar for the evening celebrations. Why not come for the weekend and spend Sunday exploring the city or revisiting old haunts.
The event will formally start on Friday 11th of October at 6:00pm with a meetup on campus. A good place to meet up and unwind after your journey up to Hull. We'll be around to chat about the old times.
On Saturday morning our day of celebration starts at 11:00am with tours around the campus, or a coffee in the Bronte Brasserie. We'll have a memory board for pictures from the past (send us some if you want to be famous-ish) plus retro consoles to play on. After lunch we'll have a sequence of micro-talks, starting with an overview of current research activities and then moving onto stories from Hull past and present. If you've got something to tell we'd love to hear from you.
At 4:30 we'll award the prizes for the Three Thing Game competition and serve out the food. Then, at 7:00pm we start the evening's entertainments with a 'Welcome Party Redux'. If you've got fond memories of your first social gathering here this is your chance to relive them.
We're going to have a Welcome Quiz with fiendish questions, retro games, slot car racing we'll even 3D scan you and create an image of you in carbonite.
(this programme is slightly provisional and may be subject to change - especially if we can't find any carbonite)
You can find out more (and maybe even register) here.
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.
Make your own programming language. Find out more here.
