Jonty welcoming us all to the festival
One of the nice things about using a film camera is that when you develop the film you are never sure quite what you will get. Today I found a bunch of shots I’d taken at Electromagnetic Fields earlier this year.
Taking a break with our Polaroid camera
The horizon is actually slanted at EMF.
yes. I do need a haircut
Up early and over the Humber Bridge today to pick up another camera I seem to have bought. One of the factors driving the purchase was that I would be able to go down and pick up the camera from the seller, who turned out to be a splendid fellow. I planned to take a few pictures of the Humber Bridge on the way back but the weather had other ideas, so I had to resort to indoor shots to give the camera a workout. Including the traditional self portrait.
I also took a shelf portrait too……
Spent a chunk of time tidying up today. Apparently if you make space to put things away you can then put away all the things that litter the place and get in the way. News to me.
We had a blind man come to see us today. Which sounds a bit like a contradiction in terms, but actually he was hanging some vertical blinds. Up until now I’ve hung all the binds in the house myself but this time I thought I’d let someone else take the strain and responsibility of drilling three holes in a line and then fitting some clips into them. The good news is that all went well, although apparently I’ve been hanging blinds in the wrong way for the last twenty years. Oh well.
The drinks manager device that we used for the Hull CS50 celebrations is mutating into an article for MagPi magazine. Today I got the finished device wired up and working. I’m adding an RFID sensor to the Connected Little Boxes framework so that you can create a device that will respond to different cards. It’s great fun.
The chap in the Camera Shop in Beverley knows me quite well. I think I might be his pension plan. Anyhoo, he has now taken to keeping old cameras behind the counter that he thinks I might find interesting. And, even nicer, he hands them over for free. Today I was the happy recipient of three such cameras. Two of them were Kodak Brownies which are nice enough, but use 127 sized film which is no longer made. So they are useless for taking pictures.
The third camera was a different proposition though. It is a “Kodak Folding Hawkeye”. It has bellows in good condition, a clean lens, a shutter that clicks with encouraging noises and, best of all, it takes 120 roll film which is still sold today. At some point I’ll pop a film in it and see what it can do.
I’ve invented “Rob’s Ten Minute Rule”. It goes like this: “It is often worth spending ten minutes on something that you are not sure about”. In ten minutes of searching and chatting with ChatGPT you can usually find out if something is a good idea or not. If it looks promising you can spend another ten minutes (or maybe even more) pursuing it. If it doesn’t work you walk away from the idea only having lost ten minutes of your life.
LittleFS is a great way to store files on your PICO or ESP powered embedded system. But it does have its foibles. Particularly when you switch from one platform to another. One thing that can trip you up is that on the ESP8266 and the PICO LittleFS the name method provided by a file object delivers the name of the file in the folder(test) but on the ESP32 LittleFS it delivers the file path to the file (\start\test).
I just discovered this while migrating the Connected Little Box code to the PICO. I’m putting this here so that I can find it again when I hit the same problem in a couple of years time.
I probably shouldn’t be quite so surprised when something just works, but I must admit to being slightly shocked when I managed to deploy a C++ application into a PICO using the Raspberry Pi debug probe the first time I tried.
Debugging just works too. I’ve now got a new PC (replacing my 8 year old one with something a bit more sprightly) and the build and deploy cycle is now pleasingly short. This really is a great way to work. I’ve now got the Connected Little Boxes core running on a PICO as well as ESP32 and ESP8266 and I’ve re-factored the code so that it is now easy to manage the feature set assembled into the code. This makes it much easier to remove features that won’t fit on the ESP8266. Great fun.
Today I could have done one of two things:
Totally rebuild a working codebase so that it uses objects because that would make for a better structured solution.
Add the extra feature that was the only thing that needed to be done.
Which do you think I went for? I’ve a feeling I may be growing up as a developer…..
We had a great meetup last night. Much fun was had. I made a video. I need to find some music for the next one…
A sad day today. I went to the funeral of Mike Brayshaw. I worked with Mike for quite a few years. He was a wonderful fellow who wore his deep knowledge very lightly and worked tirelessly to educate and support students and the university. I’ve got great memories of loading Raspberry Pi devices into his car and driving off to a conference. There is a lovely in-memorium here.
Farewell Mike, a great person taken far too soon.
We went to Leeds today. The reason we went was so that I could buy some more Lego bricks. I was hoping that my family would stage some kind of intervention, but instead they just came along for the ride…
This is almost exactly how it looked
On Monday mornings our boiler stops working. How does it know? Has it been programmed to make the worst day of the week a little bit worse by making the house cold? I’ve tried asking for help with it, but once reset it seems to come back to life. The fault code is as enigmatic as the sphinx. And it is hard to mend something that isn’t broken. The worst kind of bug.
Anyhoo, I’ve figured it out. It turns out that Sunday night in our house is also “have a soak in the bath” night. The rest of the week we have speedy showers, but on Sunday a hot tub is in order. And the bathtub and the boiler share the same downpipe. When the bath is emptied the huge surge of water overwhelms the pipe and causes the to back up into the condensation drain for the boiler. The boiler doesn’t like this, and shuts down. And we wake up cold on Monday morning.
I’m going to get the plumbing looked at when the boiler is serviced. We are still going to have baths, but I’m tempted to 3D print a flow limiter to put in the plug hole so that the bath drains more slowly.
The latest Magpi + HackSpace magazine is out. It’s lovely to see that the HackSpace ethos is coming through loud and clear, with lots of making articles in there with the Raspberry Pi goodness.
One of the articles is the first in a two part series about Python-Ish, a programming language I created by accident to control Hull Pixelbot robots. I want to take some of the mystery out of how programs get to run. In this article I’m all about the low-level run time part. I think it is worth a read, but then again I am a bit biased..
You can get the magazine in shops or buy a digital copy here.
It even has the helecopter
They say that one of the best ways to give the gods a good laugh is to make long term plans. Well, we had made long term plans for today. These involved a trip to Harrogate, a nice meal out and a visit to, wait for it, a camera shop (and the Knitting and Stitching Show for others in the party). But then the snow came, followed by the weather warnings, followed by the traffic alerts. So we stayed home. Wah.
But we didn’t let that beat us. Turns out that you can buy Lego at Barkers, which is just a quick walk from our house. And it is right next to a lovely coffee shop. So it was out for a coffee, pick up the Lego Mars Rover that I’ve been coveting for months, and then back home to build it. It’s a lovely model with a really clever steering action. Then we went out for tea. It wasn’t the nice day we we’d planned, but it was very nice nonetheless.
the black thing at the bottom is a big capacitor for the flash.
We thought we’d have a look at one of my broken Nikon cameras today. The good news is that the back came off without too much hassle (once we found the screws behind the viewfinder surround). The bad news is that the picture above shows what you see next. The service manual now says you have to unsolder some of the ribbon cables and remove the rear circuit board. We are presently summoning up the courage to do this…
I’m in the process of re-becoming a member of staff at Hull University. Things have changed a bit since I started. For one of the jobs I started back in the day the induction consisted of “Welcome to the department Rob. You’re giving the second year networking course. It starts next term”. Actually, I may be being a little unfair here. I think I did get sent on a DEC VMS system management course too.
Anyhoo, nowadays employers are much keener to make sure you know stuff. I’ve had to do seven training courses about things I thought I knew everything about but it turned out I didn’t. Today I did my Data Protection training. I knew a bit already, but what impressed me about this stuff was that people have sat down and thought about the implications of data breaches and what constitutes good behaviour by those holding data. Then they’ve made some sensible, enforceable, rules.
Now, if we can only make it illegal for companies to collect data about us when we publish things, and illegal use collected data to recommend other things, we might be on our way out of our current mess…..
What do you get if you buy a camera marked as broken? You get a broken camera. What do you get if you buy a camera marked as “tested and working - just needs new batteries”? You get a broken camera. My Nikon Pronea 6s has arrived and, although it looks lovely and makes all the right noises it also fails after I’ve taken a few shots. Oh well. I really like the look of the camera, and I like the idea of using old film. And the cameras are very cheap.
But my quest for a working one is going to have to continue…
When we were in Leeds last Saturday I went into the Lego Store and bought a box of their “pick and mix” bricks that they have at the back of the shop. Then I went home and did this. Do I need help?
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.
