Password management is a thing

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When I was younger, more innocent and the internet was a friendly place (remember netiquette?) I thought that picking an out of the way phrase and using it for my passwords was a good idea. Then, a few years later, I realised that this was in fact a silly idea and started using different passwords for all my accounts. Which is just as well.

Earlier this week I received an email with my venerable old password phrase as the message subject and containing a link to a pdf document. I haven’t opened the pdf document (if that is what it is) or replied to the email. I can only assume that someone has come across my old password on a dead account, found that it doesn’t work anywhere else and is trying to use their knowledge of that one password to bounce me into revealing a few more secrets. Good luck with that.

So, I’ve checked all my passwords to make sure that none of them are harking back to the past, I’ve also signed up to a password manager and changed my important passwords into new ones, just in case.

Making QR codes from Python

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I’m trying to create the game of robot rugby. As you do. I’ve no idea how the game mechanic will work. My plan is to rope in some folks at the Hardware Meetup to try and work out the rules.

Anyhoo, one of the things that we are working on is some way of tracking the robots around the playfield so that each robot player can know where it is. Brian has been working on some code to track things by means of QR codes and so I said I’d make some “rugby hats” for the robots with QR codes printed on them. So I needed to get and print some QR codes.

It turns out that making QR codes from a Python program is really, really easy. I found this library which works a treat. 

import qrcode
for i in range(1,25):
    qr = qrcode.QRCode(
    version=1,
    error_correction=qrcode.constants.ERROR_CORRECT_L,
    box_size=5,
    border=4,
    )
    text="Robot"+str(i)
    qr.add_data(text)
    qr.make()
    img = qr.make_image(fill_color="black", back_color="white")
    filename = text+".png"
    img.save(filename)

This will make 24 labels that will just fill an A4 page in a word document. I printed them out onto label paper and stuck them on some pixel shades that I’d printed.

Only Connect Rocks

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Only Connect is an awesome game show. Not only does it have Victoria Cohen as host (you really should read her book about how she won a million dollars playing poker) but it has some of the hardest questions out there. The teams are given things and have to figure out the connections between them.

Mind you, I might only be saying this because I got the above connection.

Begin to Code C# with Visual Studio 2019 video now available

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Last week I got an email from Zefanja who was having problems using Snaps with Visual Studio 2019.

Snaps are an essential element of my “Begin to Code with C#” book, and if you can’t get them to work the book text doesn’t work very well. So I’ve made a new video that explains how to set your PC up.

I was just about to send Zefanja a message about this when he has got in touch saying that he has fixed his problem. Anyhoo, if anyone else is using Snaps with Visual Studio 2019 they might find this useful.

Update: Carlos got in touch telling me that the audio was a bit quiet. It was. Something to do with a setting on my little mixer being too low. So I’ve made a new louder version - effectively I’ve turned everything up to 11 for this one. The link above is to the louder one. If you prefer the quieter original you can find it here.

Very expensive lego bricks

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Years ago I made a picture using Lego bricks. They had this service where you could send them an image and they would send you back the bricks to make a 44x44 version on a Lego back plate. Turns out that I was way ahead of my time, in that there are now lots of apps for phones and whatnot that will do this for you.

In fact I was so far ahead of my time that some of the bricks changed have faded and changed colour. Which is rather sad. I wondered about replacing them, and so I went on to the Lego site where they sell individual bricks and started pricing up replacements. Each tiny brick is 6 pence and I need quite a lot of the, nearly sixty pound’s worth.

I’m now learning to appreciate the “retro charm” of the faded colour scheme.

Minecraft Earth

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I’m not as into Minecraft as I probably should be. If I want to have fun I tend to fire up Visual Studio Code. Sad but true.

Anyhoo, I’m fascinated by the idea of Minecraft Earth and today I fired it up and had a go. It’s free to download and play on your mobile device (Android or Apple) and it works a treat.

You find yourself in a Lego Mindstorms version of your surroundings and as you wander around you can pick up bricks, pigs and chickens. Just like in real life.

You can use what you have picked up to build things (perhaps not the chickens though).

Your creations are presented using augmented reality so you can plonk them on the living room floor and then walk around them, adding bricks and poking ducks, as is your want.

If you’re prepared to walk about a bit you can gather quite a bit of loot and some locations have challenges associated with them.

If you love Minecraft you’ll love this. If you don’t love Minecraft it might convert you.

Comic Con in Birmingham

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I’m never quite sure why I go to Comic Con in Birmingham. It’s quite a drive, there and back from Hull in a day. And the most expensive thing I ended up buying was the ticket for the car park. But we had a wonderful time. It’s rather like being at a great fancy dress party, where they also sell lots of interesting things.

Each time I think about making a costume, and each year I don’t do much - although last year I did buy what was the basis of the “Air Quality Top Hat”.

I’m not sure if I’ll be going in a costume next year, but I am sure I’ll be going..

The Aeronauts is a great film

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Last night we went to see “The Aeronauts”. It’s the story of a balloon trip. Just a simple up and down. Except that it is not that simple. It says that it was “Inspired by real events”. I’m OK with that, but they must have been really brave souls to go and do this for real. It’s proper edge of the seat stuff. And the acting and the effects are just spot on. Well worth a trip I reckon.

Visit Hessle foreshore

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Yesterday we drove over to the Humber Bridge County park and had a marvellous work though the trees and down to Hessle Foreshore. It still amazes me that we have lived in Hull all these years and only started going to this splendid place quite recently. It was a lovely afternoon and the sunlight across the estuary was very pretty. We grabbed a coffee at The Humber Park and then sat on the terrace watching the sun go down over the sea. Well worth the trip.

Achievement unlocked - soldering surface mount components

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I did something today I’ve never done before. I soldered a couple of surface mount components onto our latest environmental monitor control board. They are the transistor and the resistor towards the top of the picture. The trick (at least for me) was to get one pin anchored and then work my way around applying a drop of solder paste to each terminal and then heating it up until it melted and formed the joint. I was using a hot air gun (not a very good one) and it took a while to heat things up but at least it worked.

The transistor will control the power to the particle sensor and make it possible for us to make a sensor that consumes only a tiny amount of power when it is not active.

Bonfire night particle counts

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I thought that bonfire night would be interesting, and so it turned out. Above are particle counts from one of our sensors in Hull. From the looks of things most of the air particle action was in the days before bonfire night which kind of makes sense, bearing in mind that was the weekend. These numbers are not definitive (after all this is just one sensor) but I’ve seen similar changes in the readings on other sensors around the city.

You can find these readings and compare sensors on the sensor site here.

Really good hardware meetup at c4di

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This evening we had a most excellent hardware meetup at c4di. We had a new member turn up and say Hi, Adam was there too and we had some great discussion about moving forward with Air Quality and lots of other stuff. Everyone who turned looked like they’d just come from standing under a waterfall, which they had.

I really must start taking pictures of these gatherings, but I’m usually so busy chatting that I forget to. Which means you’ll have to put up with one of my vaguely artistic efforts at the top of this post.

The next Hardware Meetup is on the 14th November at 6:00 pm at c4di. Let’s hope for better weather.

The Ikea test

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I was assembling an Ikea bed today. I rather like assembling their furniture. Their instructions are very good, once you take the time to understand them. I failed on one bit and had to undo some parts I’d put in the wrong place. It wasn’t hard, but you had to focus a bit. And it gave me an idea.

You may have noticed that in the UK we are having an election. This will probably decide nothing and do little to arrest the spiral of once Great Britain into irrelevance. In the old days this country was a great place to be. Nowadays it is just a great place to be rich. Anyhoo, I think I’ve hit upon the perfect test for any would-be political leaders. I’d ask them to do what I just did. Take the instructions, work out what they mean and then build something. If you can’t you’re not allowed near the levers of power. Better yet, make them work in teams to do it.

From what I’ve seen of the present crop that should get rid of a pretty large number of them.

Heltec Cube Cell

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I quite like Heltec devices. They have a rough and ready quality to their construction, but their designs are well thought out and once you get your head around how they work you can use them as the basis for some neat devices. Four Heltec LoRa devices are presently powering our Air Quality sensors in Hull.

Heltec have just released a new device, the Cube Cell. It has LoRa built in and it has a stupidly low power consumption when in standby. It also has the electronics that allow the direct attachment of a solar panel.

It’s a more constrained platform than the devices based on the ESP32. There is no WiFi or Bluetooth, In fact the processor is built into the LoRa chip. You can find out more here.

In terms of what we want to do with our environmental sensors it looks very interesting. We should be able to port most of the code that we’ve written over to the platform as it is programmed in C++ using the Arduiono IDE. I’ve ordered one, it will be interesting to see what it is like when it arrives.