Stationfall is good back-stabbing fun

This is what the rabbit thought the boad looked like at the end. Note the cheating three-handed player on the bottom left.

Stationfall is a board game that plays out on a space station falling from orbit to the ground. On board are a totally motley crew, each with their own agenda. Some want everyone to survive. Some want everyone to perish. Some just want to have fun (or so it seems). When the game starts nobody knows which game players are assigned which game characters, and players can use their influence to move any of the characters and make them do things (for example release deadly killing machines from quarantine at a really annoying moment).

I think we are going to have to have another go at this because there was a lot of stuff to take in at the start. But we all did enough to agree that it is good back-stabbing fun.

Life Tip

Not sure if this is a life tip, but it is a good tip nonetheless. We spent a big chunk of today arranging a funeral (helped by the wonderful Kelly from the Co-op). This was made much easier because my father-in-law had taken the very sensible step of making clear exactly what he wanted to happen and sorting it all out in advance. Doing this really helps those that are carrying on.

Sunday of Sport

Spent the afternoon watching a Spanish chap win Wimbledon and the evening watching the Spanish football team win the European Cup. Truly a good day to be Spanish.

This is what the Rabbit thought of the menu

Another trip to Leeds to day for a birthday bash. Had a Most Excellent meal at Hickory’s Adel. My menu tip: go for the frozen custard. It’s awesome.

Fun writing Python

I suppose it might just be me, but I really enjoy programming. I spent a big chunk of today writing code to drive stepper motors from MicroPython and I had a whale of a time.

Life goes on

We’ve got all kinds of activities and stuff planned for the next few weeks and we know that Rodney would have wanted us to keep going. So we are doing, starting with a trip to Leeds today. As is the way, I bought a new lens (although it wasn’t that expensive - honest). This one is an F 3.5 35-105mm zoom lens for my Pentax A which I’m presently using to take colour photos. Turns out it works a treat, as the picture above shows.

Farewell Rodney

This is a blog mostly about frothy fun stuff and tech with bits of hardware and jokes alongside the occasionally useful aside. But every now and then real life intrudes. My father-in-law Rodney passed away on the 10th of July at the great age of 94, with his family by his side. He was a splendid fellow and will be sorely missed. I’m going to take a break from blogging for a little while as we deal with this, but I will be back..

Bolex Gear Fun

This is the gears in place

A while back I got a 16mm camera. That’s not a camera that is really small (ho ho) it is one which uses 16mm wide film. This is all part of my “get Rob into the movies” project. The snag is that the camera I got uses “double perf film” which has holes down both sides. Modern film is “single perf” to leave more room on the film for a wider picture. But if you put “single perf” film into my camera the pins on one side have no holes to go into and the film jams up. Above you can see one of the rollers in the camera with pins on both top and bottom. The solution to the problem is quite simple. Just remove the top row of teeth from the roller.

So the first step is to remove the roller from the camera. This turned out not to be easy. A crucial component needs to come out first which was held in by a screw that would just not budge. You can see it on the top left hand side of the picture . The screw has some damage to the slot, the result of numerous failed attempts (some by me) to undo it. However today I had another go, motivated by the thought that if I don’t do this I effectively own a paperweight that looks like a movie camera.

We need to make sure we file off the pins on the top

And I succeeded. Above you can see the two rollers which now need to be “de-pinned”, a process that involves a file and a fervent prayer that the rollers aren’t made of hardened steel.

Antique Dealer

I’m surprised it is not more dusty. After all, it is an antique.

What do you do if you want to own a genuine antique? You buy and Apple product and wait six years. Apple have just announced that the original Apple Homepod (released in 2018) now has “antique” status as far as they are concerned. This not not much of an honour for the poor thing though. It means that it is no longer deemed repairable and probably won’t get software updates. I’m used to devices going out of date, but this seems a bit much. I’ve got batteries older than that which are still working.

New Old Canon Dial 35

Bought another Canon Dial 35 last week. I tell myself it was cheaper than a video game (which it was). This one was sold as broken, for me that’s the game part. Turned out that the spring power unit was sticky but because I’ve bought a few video games cameras already I happened to have a working spare attached to a really broken version. I got the camera winding film through and it seemed OK. Popped a battery in and the meter and the shutter seem to work fine. So the next step was to put a film in and take it for a walk around the village.

Of course the camera could break at any moment. But for now I’m calling it a win.

Getting the Rabbit's view of your pictures

I’m really enjoying using the Rabbit r1. I particularly like the way you can use its “Magic Camera” to produced processed versions of pictures. But what if you have some photos that you want to “rabbitise”? Simple. Just point the Rabbit at the monitor. It works really well.

This was the original picture.

Debug ESP32/ESP8266 programs in PlatformIO using the exception decoder

This is the prototype. I think I need to make a PCB for this..

I’ve been hard at work adding RFID abilities to Connected Little Boxes. It’s going mostly OK. It worked first time, which I hate because it means that the pain comes later. And it did, in the form of random crashes. The program would run for a while and then reset with an exception. The ESP devices produce a lump of debug output when they fail, but you then have to decode this text. The great news is that this behaviour is built into PlatformIO, the wonderful tool that I’m using to make the application. All you have to do is add the following line to the platformio.ini file in your project:

monitor_filters = esp8266_exception_decoder

The serial monitor will now look for the messages that mark the start of the debug information and then use the build file to tell you where the program was when it fell over. Very useful. In my case it allowed me to determine that the program was failing in WiFi code, not something that I wrote. Of course, even though it is not failing in my code, I still have to fix it. I have two golden rules when debugging embedded code:

1. First check the power supply.

2. Second check the memory allocation.

In this case the power is OK, so the problem must be memory. I thought I had enough free memory for the system keep going but this turned out not to be the case. I freed up a bunch of space and the device has been running solidly ever since.

Rabbit r1 Magic Camera

Just found something that the Rabbit R1 can do which is really rather awesome. You can take a picture with it and shortly afterwards a “Rabbit Magic Camera” version appears in your Rabbit Hole site.

This is what it did to my picture. Perhaps I should grow a moustache

Apparently this is my desk

.. and this is my audio mixer, which I think looks awesome

The Rabbit is not perfect. But I think it is definitely growing on me..

4x5 Film Dryer

I’ve been drying my 4x5 negatives on windowsills. This works OK in winter, but when folks start opening windows and the sun comes out it might not end well. So I’ve printed this which works a treat.

Canon Dial 35 for the Win

Just some trees

As if to underscore how good the Canon Dial 35 is after my earlier post I thought I’d post some pictures I’ve just processed. The Dial that I used is a bit slow and has the meter switch wired the wrong way round. A lot can happen to a camera in sixty years. And it does still mostly work. Anyhoo, the meter under-reads, which meant that the shots were all a bit over exposed. So I compensated by developing the film for a bit less time (quite proud of that) and the shots speak for themselves.

Blackpool Booth

Blackpool tower and a spitfire

Humber Bridge Park

MPP Camera Resources

Hmmm. Could use a bit of a dust..

If you are lucky enough to own a Micro Precision Products (MPP) Micro-Press camera I’ve made a couple of 3D printable resources you might find interesting. The first is a lensboard (the thing which holds the lens in front of the camera). The second is a spacer which makes it easy to use a LomoGraflok back with your MPP camera. You can find them here.

Minox Cassettes Nearly Ready

Ready for testing

Spent a big chunk of today finalizing the design for some Minox cassettes I’m making. These are version MV1. I’m going to load them with film and see how light-tight they are.

"The Exchange" Video

I’ve made a tiny video about “The Exchange”. It is a large language model that runs entirely on a Raspberry Pi. You can access it via “The Red Phone”. If you want to find out more, or even build your own, take a look here.

Meshtastic in HackSpace Magazine

I should proibably update that picture. I’ve heard that top hats are out of fashion

If you want to find out a bit about Meshtastic (it is rather fun) you can find an article of mine about it in the latest HackSpace magazine.

Rob and the Rabbit R1

It is impossible to overstate how orange this thing is

I mentioned to number one daughter that I’d got a Rabbit R1. “But aren’t those supposed to be useless” she replied. Well yes. And no. She wasn’t surprised that I’d got one. All it took was one vaguely positive review a while back to get me to whip out my credit card. And I do have a record of buying doomed devices, Nabaztag Rabbit, Chumby, Berg Little Printer, Windows Phone. And I had just got paid. For the same outlay I could have bought a few meals out, a not very good golf club or three or four video games. But I got a gadget instead. Big surprise.

It arrived yesterday. Well packaged and presented. No power supply, just a snappy little box. And it works (as in it does the few things that it is supposed to do). You can ask it questions and it will give you useful replies most of the time. It now has the ability to control Apple Music, but having seen stories about how badly protected the internal software is, I’m not going near it with my Apple credentials any time soon. And anyway my phone has a better speaker. One thing I do really like is the “tell me what you can see” feature.

Mostly right

I pointed the Rabbit at Hull MakerSpace last night at the meetup (which was great fun by the way) and it came up with the above description, which I think is about right (although it is not really that messy). Holding a conversation is fun and context is maintained very well. I’ve not tried getting it to do something, but if they ever release a way of creating your own scripts and whatnot (and they are scripts - I don’t think the Large Action Model is really a thing just yet) then I’ll be tempted to have a go.

I’m not sure how much I’ll use my Rabbit, although it is nice to have something you can just ask a question any time. If I was using my phone or computer I’d have to stop what I was doing, find the appropriate application and enter the question. And then I’d forget what I asked and have to ask it again. With the Rabbit you get a RabbitHole web page that gives you a lovely time sequence of questions and answers which you can go back through.

I guess my biggest concern is whether the Rabbit will still be here in a year’s time. It was sold as a device that gives you free access to a high quality large language model and it does that in a responsive and useable way. But that model is not sustainable in the long run. All of the devices that I mentioned at the top (with the exception of Windows Phone) failed because they used backend servers that needed to be paid for.

I’d be happy to pay a subscription for my Rabbit (or better yet roll that subscription into what I’m already paying for ChatGPT). However, I don’t think enough of the other Rabbit users will be happy to do that. So unless someone with deep pockets and a long term eye for market share steps in I’m afraid that in a while my Rabbit will in a box in the loft alongside all the other next big things up there. But I’m enjoying it for now. It’s an interesting signpost on the road to where we are all headed.