Working with Claude

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I’m really enjoying working with Claude. I’ve signed up for the cheapest tier (around 18 pounds a month) and we have been building a solution together for the last week or so. I’ve been using Claude Code which plugs into Visual Studio Code very nicely.

I explain what I want the code to do and Claude makes it for me. Quite often it asks for clarification, then it asks for permission to do things, and then it does them. It works directly on your Visual Studio Project (and your PC if you let it). It seems a bit less anxious to please than ChatGPT and hardly ever tells me that something I’ve suggested is a good idea, which I like a lot. It also seems to get things right first time too, which is really nice.

But the best thing about it is the way that it is metered. The first time I discovered this was a bit of a shock. Claude was in the middle of doing something and it just stopped. Like the cooker thing on the moon in Wallace and Gromit’s “Grand Day Out” film when the money runs out. Turns out I’d used my five hour allocation in about an hour and a half, and I had to wait for my next five hour slot to arrive.

At the time I was a bit cross about this, but now I like it. It means that I plan my work a lot more. If I run out of time in a slot I spend the rest of the time writing a detailed specification, or testing what has been produced. Or, better yet, doing nothing. If Claude was available all the time I don’t think I’d ever stop.

I thought I was being clever when I started giving Claude something to do just after I got up so that my morning slot would end around lunchtime and I could have another five hours worth on the afternoon. But then I discovered that there is also a weekly allocation, and if you hit the end of that you have wait for the next week to come around before you can do anything, which would be a pain. So now I track that carefully.

There is a really useful tool here you can use to track your Claude usage. It works very well, although I ended up with a blank dashboard until I performed the fix described here.

It turns out that your usage is all abut tokens. Everything you send to Claude ends up as a token. Everything Claude sends back to you is sent as tokens. A word in a conversation ends up as a token that is sent to Claude. If you are having a conversation with Claude and you ask it another question the entire previous conversation is sent to Claude along with your new question.

This means that long chats can end up costing a lot. If you are starting something new, start it in a new conversation, don’t tag it onto the end of an existing one. You can also ask Claude to summarise your chat and then use that summary to start a new conversation, which should cut down on token use too.

If you have three things you want Claude to do, ask for them all at once. This reduces the number of times you will have to tell Claude what you want and thus the number of tokens used. For me this seemed counter intuitive at first. When I was using ChatGPT I found that if I asked it to perform multiple tasks it would forget to do some of them. Claude is much better in this respect. It seems to use the additional tasks as extra context too.

Finally, avoid peak hours, which for the UK seems to mean between 13:00 and 19:00 at the moment.

Claude has changed the way I work even more that ChatGPT did. I hear that ChatGPT now has a code writing tool too, I’m looking forward to having a go with that.

Film Holder Fun

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What do you do if you happen to acquire a Columbia Pecto No. 5 camera from 1897? You design and 3D print some Instax instant film holders for it. Or at least, that’s what I’ve done. You can see the design for the film holder above. I’ve made it out of multiple layers that fit together because when you are 3D printing it is important to try and avoid “overhangs” (areas that are not supported underneath).

It seems to work OK. If you have a need for a film holders like these (which I admit is unlikely) you can find all the files here.

MOT Test Terrors

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When I was much younger the annual Ministry of Transport (MOT) test was a big thing. I’d take my decaying Mini down to a garage and watch them chip paint and rust off it, test the lights, steering and the brakes and give the seatbelts a good tug. Then they’d tell me about about the worn bearings, loose steering kingpins and other things I’d been happily motoring around on for the last year. They didn’t mind about the hole in floor though, because apparently that wasn’t structural.

One time I was telling dad about what had gone wrong (in this case the bushes on the rear radius arms that hold on the rear wheels).He looked up from his paper and told me it sounded like a big job, so I should probably find somewhere to get them fixed. At which point I was forced to tell him that my car was in his garage with the rear suspension missing. He shuddered and went back to his paper. I had to go around all the local car dealers until I found someone who could drill out the radius arms and put in replacement bushes.

I got it fixed that time but the following year, when I took it for a test just after I’d replaced the silencer (muffler) because it fell off on the way to a party, I was forced to admit defeat (subframe mounts) and throw the car away. Oh well, at least it had the newest silencer in the scrapyard.

I was reminded of all this yesterday because my car was due for it’s annual test. It seems a lot more relaxing these days. I think cars are just better made (and painted) than they used to be. All I needed was a couple of tyres and a rear windscreen wiper. Good times.

Apple Newton eMate 300

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I really need to clean the screen up a bit.

I now have yet another obsession. It’s the Apple Messenger eMate 300. Last week I bought, er, four of them (at a very knock down price). I’ve given one away, so now I have three to get going. Apple sold them in 1997 for use in schools. They have a backlit touch lcd, pleasing little keyboard and built in office tools. You can open your eMate and start typing the instant you see the screen appear. Then you can keep typing on battery power for around 24 hours (assuming the batteries are in good condition).This is not something you can do with any laptop you can buy today. Progress eh?

The eMate is an interesting historical artefact because it was the first thing designed for Apple by Johnny Ive, who went on to create the translucent macs, lots of iPods and many of the iconic products that made Apple what it is today.

Anyhoo, I’m learning a lot about the device, mostly at the moment about how it can break. It looks pretty sturdy (it was designed for classroom use) and the electronics seem fairly standard. I’m going to have to figure out how to get things off it, but at the moment I’m just happy typing text in on the little screen and learning how to draw bitmap graphics.

AI Images

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I’ve got this Raspberry Pi connected to an e-ink frame. I’ve written a little program that generates random text prompts from a set of keywords. The text gets fed into a copy of Stable Diffusion and every few hours a new picture appears. It’s quite fun. Today I added a little web server to the app so that I can view past pictures. None of them are very good, but I find them fascinating.

Canon Autoboy Super 39-85

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It’s not that I’m working my way through this book buying each camera. But I have managed to track down a Canon Autoboy Super 39-85. It was made in the 1980’s at a point where they had got rather good at this kind of thing.

It is quite chunky. It won’t fit in a pocket. But it does take really good pictures. The auto focus lens is super sharp, the auto exposure does a good job and the flash zooms with the lens, so your indoor pictures look great. It has a party trick; there’s a clip out remote control in the base of the camera you can use to take selfies from a distance. There’s also an “Infinity” button you can press to stop the auto focus making a mess of landscape shots.

YOu can get some nice out of focus effects

The detail in these flowers is really nice

They made quite a few of these. They are a bit too large to be totally fashionable so you can pick them up cheaply. Mine cost less than a video game, which is my standard benchmark for these purchases. If you want something distinctive to pull out at parties and when out and about you should take a look.

Bulb Mode

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Camera shutters usually have a setting marked B. When you pick the B setting the camera holds the shutter open while the shutter button is pressed. You can use it to take pictures in poor light, or if you want to get artistic effects like light trails. The B stands for “bulb” mode.

Most folks think that bulb means “flash bulb” (as in a little glass bulb that is full of magnesium wire that is ignited to light up a dark scene) but this is not the case. It actually refers back to a time in the past when camera remote control was achieved by using shutters that could be fired pneumatically. You could fire the shutter remotely by using a rubber tube. One end of the tube was attached to a piston on the shutter, the other to a rubber bulb you could squeeze to trigger it.

I’ve been able to recreate this system using some 6.5mm laboratory tube and an air blower bulb. I would have liked to have had thinner tube, but putting a cable tie on the end helps it fit on the camera. It works well, although you have to give the bulb a hefty squeeze. I can now take pictures without pressing the button on the camera, which is nice.

My version of bulb mode doesn’t hold the shutter open while the bulb is pressed because the piston on the shutter is not airtight so the air pressure in the tube drops and the shutter closes after a while . And the whole bulb thing is actually a bit more complicated than my simple explanation. But I’m pleased I’ve now got remote control.

Apple Newton Keyboard Fixed

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I love a happy ending. I now have a working keyboard. Ages ago I bought some electric paint, and it worked a treat. I just had to scrape off an insulating layer and then spread the paint all over the track to restore the connection and make a fix.

A smoking gun if ever I saw one. You can see the gap in the top track of the membrane at the bottom of the picture. I thought the green covering the ribbon cable was another layer of tape stuck onto the back of the keyboard membrane, but actually it is a layer of paint. So I scraped it off around the break and then clarted the whole thing in conductive paint. And it fixed the problem. The hardest part was getting the keyboard mechanism back in the case. That took two goes.

Many thanks to the folks behind this site, which told me how to take the keyboard to bits.

Apple Newton Keyboard Fun

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How was your day?

I got a keyboard for my Apple Newton. It was cheap because the shift keys don’t work. So it’s little letters all the way. Both shift keys have failed, which makes me think it is a broken track somewhere.

After a ton of tests and complete disassembly I think I’ve found the fault. I’ve found a tiny gap in one track. I just hope my conductive paint hasn’t gone solid.

Hardware Meetup

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There was a lot of stuff on show at the hardware meetup tonight.

Brain had brought a 3D printed skull (roll on Halloween), a demo of his person tracking software which spots actors in scenes and his spinny thing with lights which is getting a new propellor.

Ross had brought along his press detection testing rig which taps a piano key and then monitors the response from the sensor array on the keyboard. Ian had his audio MIDI magic (which I didn’t get a picture of) and I was trying to take portraits with the old camera, this time using a rubber bulb and tube to trigger the shutter remotely.

It turns out that we can trigger the shutter OK, but we need to work on framing the shots. The Instax film that we are using doesn’t fill all the frame and I kept adjusting the camera to point the wrong way each time. Although I did manage to get the fire extinguisher in the picture rather neatly. Ho hum.

The next meetup will be on Wednesday 7th May in Hull MakerSpace. I’m going to try a different camera for portraits for this one.

Nuclear Option

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Nuclear Option is a fun game where you team up and try to set the world to rights by flying around in a plane destroying pretty much everything around you. I just can’t work out where they got the idea from.

We had a go tonight. It’s nice because you can work as a team. We had to protect our airfield and take over another one, while the computer controlled opposition tried to do exactly the same thing. I got shot down a lot, but I did manage to take a few opponents with me, which was nice.

The game is in early access and is therefore not too expensive. There is a nice range of aircraft which expands as you level up. I’m going to have to do some practice, but I’m enjoying it so far.