Monitor Success

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It still works!

For many years there has been a legend in the family about a Commodore monitor hidden somewhere in our loft. We managed to find it this weekend. 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.

Spitfire in Hull

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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

Instax Film Holders

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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…

M5STack Large Language Model Upgrade

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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.

DDD North 2026 Hull

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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.

Bitzee Hamster Ball Fun

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This was a bit tricky to photograph

If you are nine years old (or have the buying habits of a nine year-old) you might rather like the Bitzee Hamster ball. Bitzee major in persistence of vision toys. They’ve produced a range of interactive pets which use rapidly vibrating paddles to conjure up coloured animations. Now they’ve moved into spinning POV displays with a hamster in a ball. It works rather well. You can feed your hamster, help it run inside the ball, go to visit friends, get it dressed up for photographs, feed it and even clean up afterwards. Think Tamagotchi in a ball. But it doesn’t need constant maintenance like earlier digital pets.

It’s all rather jolly. And somewhat reduced in price. Worth a look if you like silly toys.

DDD Schedule 28th Feb 2026 Now Available

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The schedule for DDD North 2026 has been published. It’s on Saturday 28th February at Hull University. I’m on at 12:00 in LTB. If you want details of my (or any other) sessions just click the picture above and then click on any of the talks. There are some really interesting sessions. Registration is free (and there’s free food too). You can sign up here.

The Curse of the Oversized O

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When I was making the tags yesterday I hit an interesting quirk of font rendering. My plan was to make my text exactly fit a tag by setting the size of the text to the height of the tag. This didn’t work because for obscure typographic reasons involving “making text look right” a capital O is rendered slightly larger than the surrounding text. As you can see above.

There were two ways I could solve this problem. I could check the height of each rendered character and scale it to fit exactly in the available height. Or I could just add a margin to the text.

I think I’ll just leave this here..