Agile Octopus Display Updates

/

When the price is negative it means you are being paid to use electricity

New Year, new you. Newly broken Agile Octopus Display. We’ve been on the Octopus Agile Tariff for a while now. The price of our electricity changes every half hour. If we plan our power use a bit we can save money. Every now and then, when the weather is warm and windy, we can even get paid for using electricity, as you can see above. We’re not saving a huge amount of money (although sometimes we get to drive the car for free) but we are having fun.

To make managing our power use a bit easier I made a little display that lives in the kitchen. It gives you the current price and future price trend for the day. It’s been working fine for ages but in the new year it broke. I assumed it was something in my code (it usually is) but this time the fault is down to Octopus re-arranging their tariffs and changing the web address of the service that dishes out the price values.

I’ve made a new version of the tariff display code which uses the updated links. I’ve also taken the opportunity to tidy a few things up. You can find out more about it here.

Using an Old Printer on Windows 11

/

A while ago I got a cheap colour printer. I’ve been using it on Windows 10 and it works a treat, but on Windows 11 things are a little bit more complicated. You can install the printer drivers that you can find here and you can print OK. But if you reboot your computer the drivers might vanish (it’s happened to me) and you have to install them again.

Worse, sometimes the install fails with an error about things already being in use. I asked ChatGPT for help and it came up with this which worked for me.

Thank Goodness You're Here is wonderful

/

Thank Goodness You’re Here (TGYH) is a breath of fresh air in video game land. It is deeply silly, very funny, easy to play and doesn’t take too long. Some video games create dystopian worlds full of strange creatures with outlandish behaviours. TGYH does this, but in a depressed town in the north of England. The voice acting, artwork and animation are all wonderful. And that’s just the nice things beginning with A. Mostly.

I simply cannot say enough nice things about this game. And the fact that it is now on sale makes it even more irresistible.

Being bold is harder that it used to be

/

One of the more horrible things about modern software is the way that it changes when you are not looking. Yesterday my installation of Visual Studio Code completely vanished (probably due to a broken upgrade) and today I discovered that CTRL+B in Word doesn’t make things bold any more. It is now CTRL+N. Apparently this is a thing.

The way I see it - if the change is deliberate the system should display a helpful message (and perhaps an explanation) when you press CTRL+B. And if the change is a mistake then I worry for Microsoft Office.

Reset a PICO into USB boot drive mode from C++

/

The Raspberry Pi PICO is lovely. But it does have a few quirks. One of them is that if you want to load new firmware into the device you usually have to hold down the BOOTSEL button during power up to force the PICO to boot into a filestore mode where you can download the new code into it. This works OK, but it becomes a pain if you put your PICO into a nice box which covers the BOOTSEL switch. To get round this I’ve added a command to Connected Little Boxes which causes the PICO to reboot into filestore mode. Below is the function that implements the “upgrade” command: 

void doFirmwareUpgradeReset(char *commandLine)
{
    alwaysDisplayMessage("Booting into USB drive mode for firmware update...");
    saveSettings();
    delay(2000);
    reset_usb_boot(1, 0);
}

The interesting thing here is the reset_usb_boot(1,0) function call which causes the PICO to boot into filestore mode. I can now make a call of doFirmwareUpgradeReset when I want to do this.

UNO No Mercy is a Horrible Game - I love it

/

The people behind the Uno game have a neat line in making new, different versions of their core product. A while back I had a go at Uno Flip, which I thought was a nice twist on the game. Uno No Mercy is not a nice twist on the game. It is thoroughly nasty. You can do horrible things to your opponents. But, better yet, those horrible things can rebound with hilarious results. We played it today.

You normally win an Uno game by getting rid of all your cards. But in “No Mercy” this is close to impossible. Instead you have to resort to destroying your opponents by increasing their hand size to more than 25 cards, at which point they are kicked out. When you find that there are “pick up 10” cards, and that card pickups can be passed on and increased from player to player, you get an idea of the kind of mayhem that you can get. In the end I won, thanks to some very helpful advice from the other players. But I want to have another go. Great fun, but you might not finish smiling.

More camera nostalgia

/

This blog might be turning into an old camera blog. Which is fine by me. Number one son has dug out my old Canon PowerShot G9 which I must have given him a while back.

If you are looking fora neat backdrop, I reckon this will do

This camera went with me to Egypt in 2009 and took a bunch of pictures, including the one above.

Another of my favourite pictures

We don’t have any batteries or a charger for the camera, but those are easy problems to solve. I’m looking forward to seeing how it stacks up against my more modern cameras.

Microsoft Flight Sim 2024 is now very good

/

Photographing stonehenge

We were all very excited when the new version of Microsoft Flight Sim launched last month. We were a bit less excited when it failed to run on the day of release and even less excited when it still wasn’t working after a few days. But now it has settled down and turned into something really very good. The missions are great. We had a lot of fun trying to land on an oil rig and then taking pictures.

It runs well on the Xbox and really well on a proper PC. Well worth a look if you’ve flown before, and if you haven’t the new career mode, with chatty passengers and a chance to take flying lessons at an airport near your house, is rather splendid.

Fuji FinePix S6500 Revisited

/

It still looks the part. And it has a ten times Zoom!

My nostalgic camera arrived today. It’s a FnePix S6500. I bought one in the early 2000’s when I was looking for a camera to take on trips. It worked very well, despite chunks of it dissolving when I accidentally got mosquito repellent on it. (I’ve no idea what the repellent did to my skin). I used it to take a bunch of pictures that I really liked, and then sold it (as you do) to fund another camera. I thought no more about it until I was going through my Flickr archives one afternoon and found a whole bunch of beautiful pictures I took when I was in Korea for the Imagine Cup in 2007. A quick ebay search revealed a nice copy, along with case, for twenty quids. So I bought it.

Another reason why I like this camera so much

The camera arrived today and I took it for a walk. It was a bit like going down memory lane.

My standard test shot looking good

It is only a six megapixel sensor (around half the resolution of a standard iPhone photograph). The zoom lens is impressive, but a bit soft when you zoom in and very hard to keep steady, what with there being no image stabilisation. Things get very muddy in poor lighting too. But it works a treat and the pictures look really nice with great colours. Just as I remember.

If you are looking for a camera that will produce more interesting pictures than your phone and look good around your neck, you should take a look. But if you do, remember that it uses funky Fuji memory cards, not standard SD ones. The camera I bought came with one already installed, which was nice. Otherwise you’ll have to track some down. Batteries aren’t a problem though, the camera uses four standard AA sized ones.

Digital Sensor Frog Kissing

/

Twenty years or so ago, when it was released, the lovely large digital sensor above would have cost around 24 thousand dollars. Now you can pick them up for much, much, less than this. I got one off ebay with the aim of converting one of my film cameras to digital. You have to plug the sensor into your computer using a FireWire cable and the result is not particularly portable, but you do get digital results (albeit low resolution by today’s standards). Back in the day magazine and product photographers used them in their studios to replace film. The aim was to get the fast turnaround of digital and the quality of their familiar large format cameras.

I decided it might be fun to have a go with one, and I’m now in the “kissing frogs” phase of the acquisition. Just like you don’t always get a prince (or princess) when you kiss a frog, you don’t always get what you want when you buy from ebay. Particularly with twenty year old digital film backs using an obsolete connection technology. The trick is to plan for this, treat the whole thing as a journey, and make sure that the seller accepts returns.

The film back above, with its lovely clean sensor and immaculate condition, doesn’t actually work when I plug it in. It’s behaving in a manner best described as “broken”. The documentation and the super-helpful folks at Phase One support lead me to suspect that the computer inside the film back has forgotten its software - a problem that can happen with old devices. The good news is that the supplier will accept returns, and it might even be possible to restore the firmware by sending the device back to Finland for a service (but I don’t know the price yet). I’ve learned a lot about the digital back connection process, FireWire and how the device is used, and I now know one way they can fail. I might need to obtain another frog to kiss, but in the meantime I’m having fun, which is the important thing in all this.

The Book of Making 2025

/

The Book of Making 2025 is now out. It’s a lovely collection of projects in a huge variety of areas. If you’ve been regularly reading HackSpace magazine you won’t find much new. But if you're new to making and looking for project ideas, or just want to spend some time wondering at what people can make, it is well worth a look and very good value for the amount of content that you get. And I’m not just mentioning it because one of the articles is my camera printing one….