Here’s a Pro Camera tip which makes you look a bit less like an amateur. At least, I hope it works for me. When you’ve finished taking some pictures, put all the settings on your camera back to “normal” values. This means that next time you use the camera you won’t end up taking a whole bunch of pictures that are massively underexposed because last time you used the camera you turned down exposure compensation down a bunch. Don’t ask me how I know this..
I bought a few books at the Photography Show yesterday. Well, they were 20% off. Mathematically that’s like getting the fifth one free.
Anyhoo, one of the books was Film Camera Zen. It’s a bunch of pictures of really nice cameras along with nice descriptions of why the cameras are so nice. It’s giving me lots of ideas for new things to take a look at - as if I need help.
Today finds me (if it goes looking) in the National Exhibition Centre (NEC) in Birmingham at The Photography Show.
Coffee and a camera
It was great fun. I took a camera (as you do) and took a few pictures.
I couldn’t find Barbera
Why we were all here
Best deal of the day
My MicroPython Connected Little Boxes (CLB) implementation is going from strength to strength. I’ve got a bunch of hardware managers all working together and I’ve made quite a few devices using the platform. And today I’ve managed to build my own version of MicroPython, incorporating the CLB code. This is wonderful for quite a few reasons. It makes it easier to install the library, since you just have to flash the MicroPython image and you get the CLB code for free. It makes more memory available for code, since the CLB programs run from flash memory. It also means that things will get going faster as the CLB functions don’t need to be compiled before execution.
The process of building your own MicroPython is a lot easier than I thought it would be, although you need a Linux machine to do it. I’m using Windows WSL on my PC, but I’m going to have a got at building everything on a Raspberry Pi. I’m going to make a complete howto for this. I’m also going to add a system to integrate settings files into the stored code so that it is easy to select from a repertoire of built-in device types.
We went to see some live comedy tonight. It was awesome. We were at the Comedy Lounge in Hull which we’d not been to before. It’s a great venue. You get your own table, and your own little lamp. When you fancy a drink you light the lamp, a smiling person appears to take your order, and then the drinks appear. Wonderful. And then some folks stand up at the front and make you laugh a lot. Good times.
There were four comics on the bill. The whole thing was held together by Sam Gregson, AKA “The Bad Boy of Science”. He did a splendid job of keeping things going and put in a very good set of his own. He says he’s a particle physicist, but I thought he looked a lot bigger than that.
Katie Steckles started the evening with a bit of mathematical trickery involving barcodes which was an impressive bit of “sleight of numbers” and led into a set describing how sums underpin pretty much everything we do, including making sure that when you scan a tin of peas at the till, you get the bill for a can of peas. Katie also did a masterful deconstruction of your driving licence number (yes really) and revealed how one idea of a check digit (let’s add extra data we can use to detect when someone types it wrong) can collide with another (let’s add extra data so we can convince ourselves that nobody can ever make a fake version of this data). Great stuff.
Chella Quint was billed as talking about “Woman’s Health” which worried me a bit at the start, what with me being famously squeamish and also a man. But it was really good, a meditation on how a good way to get rich is to create a problem and then sell the solution to it. And how this can end up de-normalising what should be perfectly natural aspects of life. You might think that mass misinformation started with the internet, but Chella showed a bunch of adverts from over years showing that peddling anxiety and unhappiness about natural bodily functions (and - of course the products that claim to fix it) has been going on for years. It was great to see what she is doing about it. You can find out more here.
Finally we had Farrah Sharp, who was examining the vicissitudes (it’s a word - look it up) of modern life through the lens of someone used to analysing and presenting data. As someone who gives my actions way more analysis than they actually need I could see where she was coming from, although I’ve never felt the need to put any of my thoughts and feelings into a spreadsheet just yet. Farrah’s session was a hoot though, I’ve never seen bar-graphs and Ven diagrams get as many laughs as the ones she put up on the screen.
It was a great night. Thanks to Hull Colliderfest for setting it up, the performers for being awesome and the folks at the comedy lounge for making us so welcome.
I’m making an alarm clock. Spent a chunk of this morning creating “sarky sound files” to be played at the appointed times.
I’ve got about 15 other ones. Wonderful.
We went into Beverley today. The “yarn bombing” crew have been doing some excellent work on one of the local post boxes.
Turns out that I do have a superpower. I can get “hat hair” without needing to wear a hat.
It still works!
For many years there has been a legend in the family about a Commodore monitor hidden somewhere in our loft. It’s a 1084p model that was sold for use with the Commodore Amiga, but I kept mine around for the Sony PlayStation and beyond. Eventually it found its way to “the place where electrical things go to die” and we forgot where it was.
Until now. After an intensive search we managed to track it down and carry it carefully downstairs. It seems to have survived its time between the joists quite well. We had a look at the circuit board and all the capacitors looked in good shape so we pushed our luck and powered it up. It worked, which was nice. Along with the monitor we also found this, which I bought in a fit of madness a long time ago and then promptly forgot about:
Imagine if you had spent all year waiting for a Nintendo 64 and then found this under the Cristmas tree…
We were searching for something that could output composite video and this, despite its many other faults, will do that. It works fine too. Some of the 84 games have Mario in the title. One of them works with the light gun. All of them have an eight-bit flavour you might recall from the very earliest days of home computing. And there really are 84. If you really want a console like this to give to someone you don’t like much, search for “Retro Argo Ultra 8 Bit Video Game Console” and you might get lucky. Or not.
Anyhoo, the monitor is headed off for a happy retirement running the occasional retro game where a cathode ray tube (CRT) display gives the proper authentic experience.
I’m not sure if it is a real one, but it looks pretty real to me
They had a Spitfire outside Hull Minster when we went up town today. It’s a lovely looking plane. Essentially the pilot sits in behind an enormous engine which is connected to a great big fan right at the front and there whole thing flies along several thousand feet up at several hundred miles an hour under fire from the enemy. No wonder it’s called “the right stuff”. They also had a rather nice MG car from the same era.
I don’t think this car has satnav that keeps whining about needing a map update.
I love the way they have a handle on the dashboard for the passenger to cling onto
..and a very british hamper on the back
It always confuses me when a company sends me emails about their “sale ending soon”. Surely they would be better waiting for me to buy when things are full price and they can make more profit?
I’m just wondering if any of my readers have a quarter plate camera from around 120 years ago and fancy using it to take Instax Large photographs but have discovered that the quarter plate film holders are just a tad too large for the prints.
If you are in this position (which I agree is perhaps unlikely) I might have some good news for you. Once I’ve completed the design…
Took the big bellows camera to the Hardware Meetup and took a few portraits. Most of them came out and were taken home by their subjects. I didn’t take any other pictures of the event, despite having at least three cameras with me. Oh well. If you are having too much fun to take pictures, I reckon that counts as a win all by itself.
I’ve started work on an update/upgrade to the C# Yellow Book. The language (and the world of programming) has moved on a bit. I’m hoping to have it available for September this year, so it can be given to newly arrived students at Hull Computer Science Department.
You can even program the LLM using FlowCode - and you can work with the Python behind it too
One of the toys that I used at DDD North on Saturday was the M5Stack Large Language Model (LLM) unit. This is a complete embedded large language implementation that fits into an M5Stack Core device. I got it a while ago, and today I thought I’d bring it up to date. I upgraded it to the latest model and got it going and it is a big step up from the original. The spoken output sounds better and the model is more advanced. The UiFLow environment now works fine now on my Core 2 device. Last time I had to load an older version of the firmware to be able to deploy programs.
It has a complete Voice Assistant application you can just fire up and get going and it also has Text to Speech, Speech to Text and Keyword identification behaviours you can string together to make your own assistant, or use for other purposes. The documentation also mentions using a camera for image recognition, but I’ve not figured out how to do it yet.
I think that, bearing in mind that it is running everything locally, it works very well. It is certainly be a useful platform for self contained LLM fun. The latest version comes with a debug/comms adapter which provides a console and network ports for the LLM module. I’m very tempted to buy another one of these just to get that extra connection.
One tip: when the LLM fires up it can make sudden demands on power. If your power supply isn’t up to it you might find that the Core2 tips over at that point. I solved the problem by getting a battery base which clips on the bottom and provides enough power to handle sudden surges.
Went to Leeds today. Took a camera with me and also ended up buying one. It has been a good day.
I did say I’d put you in the blog….
Well, that was fun. Developer Developer Developer (DDD) North just keeps getting better. The session selection was great, the venue was wonderful, the food was wonderful and plentiful - and free. The weather, well, lets not talk about that too much - but all the action was indoors.
I did my session, “Fifty Years of For Loops” and was great fun, made all the better by having a splendid audience. The sessions I went to see were superb, from Message Management, to AI Model Selection, Vibe Coding and finally AI threat detection and mitigation. Every one was thought provoking and every one left me planning something new to have a go at. And there was always at least one on at the same time that looked really interesting.
This is my “thank you” slide from the presentation. These are the folks who made it possible, along with an army of volunteers who made everything work so smoothy. Huge appreciation to you all, and I’m really looking forward to the next event.
“It turns out that even if you have many weeks to prepare, the final version of a presentation will be written the night before”.
If you want to come along and find out whether it was worth it, you there is still time to sign up here.
Whisper it but maybe, just maybe, spring might be coming.
Now that I’ve got my tickets I can tell you all/both about the Sci-Comedy night on March 12th in Hull. I’m intrigued by the idea of science stand-up and Hull Comedy Lounge looks like a fun place to visit.
The event is part of Hull ColliderFest which has a whole bunch of stuff going on over the March 14th - 15th weekend.
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.
