Why is printing things so hard?

/

It’s nice to know that even with the advent of super powerful systems and rampant artificial intelligence some things in computing are hard. For example printing.

I spent a chunk of today trying to print an image on a large piece of paper. I’d configured the printer properties, told it the size of the paper, previewed the output carefully in Lightroom and then got a picture that just filled a little rectangle in the middle of a sheet of very expensive paper that I’d just wasted. It turns out that Lightroom has a totally separate Page Setup menu button about as far away from the Print and Printer buttons as possible. That’s where you tell the program the size of the cell into which you want the picture to be placed. Get that wrong and it’s postage stamps all the way. Ugh.

Some systems are just sufficiently useful to be worth the trouble of using them. Lightroom has been teetering on the brink of this for years. Every time they release a new update with added AI that I don’t need I wonder if they couldn’t spend a bit of time making it a bit easier to use. At least I managed to find the “show preview” option on the printer driver so that I shouldn’t waste any more paper.

Fun with RADD Solutions at the Computer Sheds

/

Pictures taken and processed using the Custard Cream Camera

This time last week I was enjoying myself at the The Computer Sheds. I was there as a guest of RADD Solutions who were celebrating 10 years of being in the business of keeping railways and enterprise software on the move (see what I did there?).

It was a superb afternoon, rounded off with a really nice meal at The Manor Inn. If you want to see a slideshow of the pictures that I took and fiddled with, you can find it here. The pictures are all held on the Custard Cream Server (otherwise known as the Pi 5 on my desk) so we’ll see how well that goes…..

Custard Cream Camera Video now live

/

I’ve made a very bad video about the Custard Cream Camera. The way I see it, a bad video is better than no video. Your opinion may differ. I’ve also made the Custard Cream Camera repository public so you can build your own if you really want to. You can find it here

Hardware hijinks at the Hardware Meetup

/

Heading off to star in a film…

We had all kinds of fun at the hardware meetup tonight. And we discovered that a “simple soldering kit” is not always what you might think it is. Anyhoo, we did make some things work and I met up with some filmmakers keen to immortalise some of my light up boxes.

Productive debris

After the meetup the creativity continued at dinner, with suggested refinements to a joke in progress.

I had a go at visualizing the joke using AI and it seems to have done a good job. Until you count the number of arms the shepherd seems to have…

A Fine Time at the Maritime Museum

/

So much for cute polar bears

We had a fine time at Hull Maritime Museum yesterday. We booked tickets (you can do this on line and it costs nothing) and were there bright and early when it opened. There’s a lot of stuff here,

The history of Hull and the sea is well told, with thought provoking presentations about the life of a trawlerman (tough and dangerous) and the efforts it took to make fishing safer. For me the best bit was seeing what they had done with the rooms. The plasterwork and decoration was amazing.

The view from the museum is pretty good too, as is the café. If you live in Hull you should go. If you don’t live in Hull, come to Hull and then go.

Custard Cream Camera FTP Server

/

The latest version of the Custard Cream Camera isn’t a camera. It’s an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) server instead. Turns out that quite a few modern cameras can send out their pictures over FTP. The new non-camera camera shares all the features of the original, including printing, photo editing and publishing, but it doesn’t take pictures. Perhaps I’m going to have to work on that name.

Giving devices access to your private Git Repositories using SSH

/

A little while back I wrote a blog post telling folks (and future me) how to set up secure sockets so that you can log into remote devices without passwords and create Visual Studio Code remote sessions. Here’s the follow-up, which tells you how to use your SSL keys to give a device access to your private GitHub repositories.

I like to keep my repositories private until I’ve got them kind of sorted. This makes it tricky if I’m deploying to a newly set up remote Raspberry Pi, since it needs GitHub credentials to access private stuff. The best way to solve this problem is to put a copy of the device SSL key onto your GitHub account. It’s easy to do and works a treat. Start by going to GitHub and opening your personal Settings (the one at the top right, not the settings for a particular repository). Then click SSH and GPG keys.

You can see my keys here. Now click New SSH Key. A dialogue will appear asking for two things: the name for the key and the key itself. I use the machine name as the name. You can find the key in the file id_ed25519.pub in the local .ssh folder of your new machine. This file was created when you did ssh-keygen to set up ssh on the machine. Enter the info and close the dialogue. Once you’ve done this you can use the ssh form of git clone to grab private repositories from GitHub.

git clone git@github.com:CrazyRobMiles/custard-cream-camera.git

You’ll need to put your GitHub username and your repository name into the above command. Note that the https way of referring to repositories won’t work.

GitHub will send you an email to tell you when you’ve set one of these up. It also lets you track the last time the key was used. You can remove keys that you are not using.

Nothing informs the writing process like writing

/

I took this with the custard Cream Camera over at Ross’s place. I added the colours later.

I’m putting together an article about the custard cream camera and I’m grappling with how I’m going to structure it, and what I’m going to have space to talk about. I’ve had this problem lots of times, and I’ve discovered that the best way to structure an article is to start writing stuff that you think might make sense. After I’ve written a bit, walked away from it, come back to it and read it a few times a structure emerges that works. Trying to build the thing in my head just doesn’t work. I have to have something to play with first.

This might mean that I throw away quite a bit of the stuff that I wrote, but I never actually discard any of it. Instead, everything I throw away is stored in a “scrap” folder so that I can go back to it later, perhaps for another article or a blog post. In fact, I only really consider myself to be making progress on something when I have a few pages in the scrap folder…

Toll Memories

/

The Control Centre back in the day

One of my (few) claims to fame is that I wrote some of the software that used to manage toll collection on the Humber Bridge. Ian wrote the control room software, Siemens programmed the toll booths and I wrote the management interface.

This is my bit

It was great fun. It ran for quite a few years and only failed once, when someone testing the uninterruptable power supply sent a DC spike to all the devices and blew up the power supplies for the network routers. I had to go in and move some wires around to get it going again.

The rest of the time it just worked, registering tolls, indicating when the number of axles detected on a vehicle didn’t match the class the booth operator had entered and producing summary data. We closed it down a few years ago.

I was reminded of this when I paid for some crossings today. I had to download and use an app, of course. You can pay for you crossings in advance, which is nice, but you don’t know whether the crossings you paid for have registered properly until two days after the crossing, which is one day after the deadline for paying for the crossing. Which seems a bit odd to me. I’ll just have to hope that the people who built the new system are as good at their jobs as Ian and I were all those years ago.

Soldering and Solar Eclipse at the Hardware Meetup

/

This was taken during the eclipse. You can see the shape of the sun in the lens flare at the bottom of the image

We had a great time soldering at the Hardware Meetup, then we headed out to the middle of Hull to take in the solar eclipse that I’d arranged for the evening’s entertainment. It was awesome. We went past Queen’s Gardens and there were lots of folks just taking in the site. Some had set up eclipse picnics on the grass. I’d made a little pinhole viewer which worked as long as you had a small head. It was a great evening.

These shots have not been tampered with. It’s just how the light bounced around the lens

We’ll be doing this again in two weeks. Minus the eclipse.

Update

Ian was with us for the evening and had brought along a camera equipped with a telephoto lens and a “Big Stopper” 15 stop filter. The filter reduced the light of the sun to a level that could be photographed. He took some really nice shots:

Coming (or going)

Going (or coming)

Eclipse of the Maritime museum