Hardware Meetup

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.

Yarn Bombing

The WI in Beverley have taken it upon themselves to add some decoration to a post box. Not something we saw at Walt Disney world, but charming nonetheless.

Nuclear Option

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.

Labelling batteries as jetlag therapy

.. and I found a new font for the label maker

Feeling bad because you’ve just come back from a wonderful holiday? Stressed out by jetlag? Then why not put some labels on batteries? Worked for me.

In all seriousness, I’ve found these Hixon AA batteries to be very good. The are Lithium Ion based so they last a good while (the makers claim 3,500 milliamp hours).

Not jetlagged at all

Another memory

I was fairly sure I didn’t have jetlag. Not me. Not at all. Then I looked down and discovered that I’d just plugged the output of a USB charger into itself, rather than the phone I was supposed to be connecting. Oh well. Time for a lie down.

Back in Britain

..and we’re back. Smaller roads, dirtier cars, colder weather. Oh, and bed at home. Love it.

Heading Home

A great place for a burger

The good thing about having your home flight at 8:30pm is that you get an extra day tagged onto the end of your holiday. The bad thing is that you don’t know what to do with it. We spent a while squeezing things into suitcases and then headed over to Universal Plaza for lunch at the Chocolate Factory.

Then back to the hotel to play cards until we could check in, and then it was another Lyft up to the airport. Dropped the luggage early, found the gate and sat for a while reading and chilling. Then it was onto the plane and off into the sunset. Sort of. Well, we were flying north east

Universal Unlocked

Indeed

Our final “park day” turned out to be rather intense.

I love the artwork around the place

.. see what I mean

The Spiderman ride was excellent (and turned out to be Rob friendly which was nice). Other rollercoasters and rides were found to be excellent too, but this correspondent was mostly holding bags for these.

Not a real train

They have this stunning fake railway that runs between Hogsmeade and Kings Cross in two of the parks. It looks very realistic from the outside and the inside, with fake windows showing moving scenery and even Harry and chums waking past in the corridor.

It looks far to clean to actually be in London

We were first there

We had lunch in the Minions café was excellent. Then back to the room to pack.

Epic Cooldown

The universal universe

After all our exertions yesterday we are taking it easy again today. We had a gentle amble around the Universal theme park and then took in another movie in the afternoon. This time we saw “The Hail Mary Project” which was excellent. Rock hard sci-fi with a heart. Very enjoyable and tickets were on discount today.

It’s a good ride with a very hokey storyline

Poster art

The simpsons ride is excellent

One last park day tomorrow before we have to start packing our bags for home.

Epic Day

The Epic park was only opened last year. It’s, er, epic.

Super Mario world was epic

First stop was Super Mario World, which was beautifully themed. We all went on the Mario Kart game which was super clever with hi-res 3D headsets.

Suiting up for Mario Kart

Pro tip: if you are anything close to the size of me, sit in the back seats.

I’ts really like being inside a game

Then it was time for more of the Harry Potter universe. We went on the Ministry of Magic ride which is one of the best rides I’ve ever been on. Very impressive. The area around the ride is also beautifully themed around Paris.

I can always find a camera if I look hard enough

Berg, the land of “How to train your dragon” was an unexpected surprise, with a lovely waterside atmosphere and a really impressive stage show.

We also dipped into the “Dark” themed area of the park, but for me that was the least impressive with no strong theming apart from old buildings.

I didn’t go on the ride though

One highlight of the day was finding the most amazing Donkey Kong shirt, which I plan to wear at home as soon as the weather gets as warm as it is in Florida at the moment.

Gone Swimming

The place we are staying has this fantastic mural in the caffeteria

We are staying right next to a water park, so we thought we’d go and do some swimming. I’m not usually a fan of swimming. All the faff with towels and wet costumes, pruny fingers and the lingering smell of chlorine. But it was great. There was a fake beach (of course) with real waves and a lazy river which went all around the park. And it was so warm that you didn’t mind getting wet and cool for a while.

Wand Tracking with Harry Potter

Fake Snow

Today it was all about “The Wizarding World of Harry Potter (tm)”. It’s all very well done. Although a lot of the scenery just reminds me of York.

This man says that your wand chooses you. I’m not sure I’d want the kind of wand that would choose me.

We did the “Wand choosing experience” which was great fun. Then we went out and waved the wand at scenery to make it react. This worked super well, once we got the hang of wand waving. I constructed a careful theory of a digital wand packed with motion trackers and accelerometers which decoded “spell” movements and then sent a spell message over Bluetooth BLE. But it turns out that the wand just contains an infra-red led which is tracked by a camera in the attraction. Which is much simpler and cheaper. I’ve resolved to make the wand work when we get back home. It should be possible to use a little camera to get the tracking information I need. Watch this space.

They had some very nice sweet shops

Dragon based bank security

In the afternoon, for a change of pace, we went to see the movie Hoppers. Going to the cinema in America is around half the price of the UK, the seats were powered recliners and the presentation was great. The movie was good too.

Moving House

Today is all about moving house. After nearly a week of the Disney experience we are now transitioning to Universal. This involves packing, grabbing a Lyft to our new location and then hanging around waiting for the room to be ready. To pass the time we went to Walmart.

Walmart is amazing. They sell everything. Including things you didn’t know existed.

Look Ma! no Driver!

While we were waiting for our Lyft back to the hotel we saw a driverless Waymo car go carefully round the parking lot. I wonder if it is still there.

Fireworks

When we checked into the hotel we were offered a free upgrade to a nicer room with an outside view. After being reassured about the precise meaning of free (i.e. properly free) we took up the offer and discovered that we could see the Epcot fireworks through our window. Actually, the first time we discovered this was a less than cheerful occasion. Being woken up in the middle of jetlagged sleep by a series of distant explosions is not the best. But once we got used to it, the problem was to stay awake long enough to actually take some pictures. Tonight I managed it and, with the camera balanced on a glass topped table and some hand fettled exposure, I managed to get some useable shots.

The thing that amazes me about this is that they do it every night. There’s an island in the middle of the lake at Epcot which has rows of firework launchers which are replenished each day.

Not so Magic Kingdom

A veiw without many people. Surprisingly hard to get

Up until now our magical powers of rising early have served us well. Not so today. We got to the park just as it opened. But so did everyone else. My goodness it was busy.

A cultural highlight

The cast’s all here

One of the highlights of a trip to the Magic Kingdom (after Mickey’s Runaway Train which is really good) is a trip to the Country Bear Musical Jamboree. Mechanical bears in various costumes sing country music extremely well. It has the benefit of being fairly quiet and out of the rain.

State of the art for the 1960s

Unfortunately things didn’t move on very far from this

Another must-see at the Magic Kingdom which I’m pretty sure will be quiet when you go is the “Carousel of Progress”. This uses life-sized puppets to enact scenes from past which show how far we have come over the years. And, given the role given to women in the whole presentation, how far we still have to go. It premiered in 1964 at New York World’s fair and is apparently is the longest running stage show in American history. It was last updated in 1994 and my goodness it shows.

Some of my fans

Photographer on the Jungle Cruise ride

Tomorrowland

High fiving Pooh while his minder looks on

Another great day.

Easing Up

We’ve had a bunch of really enjoyable, high impact days and now it is time to dial it down a bit. Our experience is that you can do the first few days away on adrenaline and excitement, but then you start to run out of steam. So you have to start easing up the pressure a bit. Otherwise you find yourself in a hotel room with no energy to do anything but watch “X Files” reruns.

So today we went back to Epcot and just had a mooch around looking for souvenirs and interesting bits that we missed on our first visit. It’s a lovely place.

Use your skill and judgement to work out which country this is.

I think Epcot is my favourite park because they take their gardens really seriously and they look wonderful.

,,, and this one

An attempt to be artistic

The start of the queue to get into france

We staggered back to the hotel at 3:30 pm. Everyone was very surprised to see us back early Actually this is not true. These places are so big that nobody has time to pay attention to us.

we walked past this every day on the way to our room. Such clever marketing…

We had vague plans to go out for tea, but a cloudburst put paid to that so we ended up in the ice cream parlour in the bottom of the hotel eating ice creams and chips. Not on the same plate.

Hollywood

It must have been a really big Airfix kit

Disney Hollywood today. In the rain. Turns out you can get rain in Florida. We’ve been skipping around the puddles and pulling waterproofs on and off all day. I’m not complaining though, it’s great to be here and see all this.

There’s a gift shop on every corner

The Star Wars area in the park is really impressive. It boasts a great big model of the Millennium Falcon and lovingly creates a market area with tons of period detail. Even if the period itself doesn’t really exist.

Random artifacts outside the shops

We had a good mooch around, went on a few rides and generally had a great time. Lunch was at the Prime Time Diner.

I’d love to see the signs when they are lit up

Like everything else on the park, this is a recreation of something, in this case fifties kitchens.

The fake TVs are all custom made and had authentic video noise and picture artefacts

Another selling point of this place (over and above the décor and the superb food, was the waitresses that tell you off for putting your elbows on the table and dish out “clean plate awards”. Great fun. We had a good look around and staggered back to the hotel arriving at, you’ve guessed it, exactly 5:00pm.

Animal Kingdom

The trick when going to America is to use jetlag to your advantage. The time difference has you waking up at five in the morning raring to go. So why not get up and go? The parks are are their quietest for the first forty five minutes of the day, so why not get there when they open? Also, said the photographer, you get the best light early in the day. There’s probably some good light to be had towards the end of the day too, but since using that would involve staying up beyond 7:00pm it is unlikely I’ll be seeing it for a while. Another thing that the photographer said was “Don’t get a new camera a day before you go away and then spend your quality holiday time trying to figure out how to use it.”. But I seem to have ignored that one, as we shall see later.

Today sees us at the Animal Kingdom theme park, where Disney takes cultural appropriation to another level by co-opting mother nature in the production. It’s done really, really well. They even manage to conjure up a Tibetan village in the foothills of Everest.

The mountain is much closer than you think and contains a roller coaster

I think you could buy the umbrellas

While I was looking around the souvenir shop (of course there’s a souvenir shop) I noticed a big display of cameras, none of which were for sale. I got chatting with the sales assistant (everyone in America is wonderfully chatty) and she told me that they were cameras which had been left on Everest by various climbers and tourists. I’m assuming that they took the film out of the camera and then discarded the heavy camera bodies to ease the journey back. I’m trying not to entertain a more grisly explanation. Anyhoo, it was very impressive to see them all in amongst the keyrings and fridge magnets.

Blurry giraffe

They do a really good “jungle expedition” ride which puts you in an “jeep” and then takes you round a huge safari park. It’s great. I got a seat right at the back which I thought would be perfect for photos, what with the extra view right out of the back. What I hadn’t reckoned with was the way that the ride also emulates an extremely lumpy track through the savannah. What with me being a long way from the back axle, I was flung all over the place, making considered long distance photography a bit tricky.

By the end I’d kind of got the hang of things and was using the old “spray and pray” technique where you just set the camera to take pictures as quickly as possible and then hold down the shutter button. Using this I managed to get twenty slightly different pictures of an ostrich. All of which were slightly blurred because I had the shutter speed set too low. Oh well.

The tree is made of concrete and has an auditorium below it

I really hope that there are boats like this in the real world

We had a wonderful day. And got back to the hotel at exactly 5:00pm again. Go us.

Epcot

What Disney think that the UK looks like

The Epcot theme park is a peek into the future and a huge pile of cultural appropriation. The peek into the future gives us, amongst other things, a Guardians of the Galaxy ride (which is apparently very good although I haven’t been on it owing to my issues with fairground rides and regurgitation) and a restaurant in space.

The cultural appropriation gives us regionally themed areas around the park dedicated to different countries. The UK area has some red phone boxes and a fish and chip shop. The Mexican area has a beautiful plaza and a boat ride which features Donald Duck in a Mexican outfit. I know which I prefer.

Eating in Space

We had lunch in the spaceship restaurant. It is very well done. You get in a “lift” which takes you up a hundred miles or so and one wall of place gives you panoramic views of the earth in space. The views are constantly changing. Spacecraft turn up and dock, space-suited figures drift past and there’s even a dog in a spacesuit if you wait long enough. The food was very nice too.

My favourite picture so far

The great thing about this place is the way that you really do get insights into the ways of the world. The Japanese area has a fantastic exhibit all about Japanese cute and the little “local” shops sell a huge range of interesting artefacts.

We were very proud of the way that we managed to last to 5:00pm without collapsing, but anything more than that (like another ten minutes or so) would probably have seen us keeling over.

Hello Florida

Oooh. Dollar prices

I find it amazing that you can have breakfast on one continent and then tea in another which is thousands of miles away. But we just did. The weather is lovely (if an English person writes about somewhere they are going to mention the weather pretty quickly).

They seem to have things around the place just to look nice. Which is nice.

I don’t think we’re in the country of America. We’re really in the country of Disney. It’s very nice, though. In the UK we tend to make things charming by leaving them to themselves for a few hundred years. Here it is all very designed. But still very pretty.