A walk in the woods

One of the great things about living where we do is that five minute walk can get you this view.

The Search for a New Toaster

We didn’t need a new toaster when I woke up this morning. But, after I’d reset the earth trip for the second time we decided that it probably was time to get one.

I’ve a suspicion that all the toasters in the world are made in a single large factory somewhere and then have different shaped and coloured skins added in the factory next door. Although having said that there seems to be a huge range of opinions about the various different types when you start reading Amazon reviews. And it turns out that you have to work quite hard to find a toaster that will toast a large piece of bread all the way to the top. The contender above was a good price and doesn’t seem to have too many one star opinions attached to it. It should arrive fairly soon. Then I can stop eating bread and jam.

IoT Cricket looks very interesting

This looks like a very interesting device. It’s called the IoT Cricket from Things on Edge. It looks like it brings Lora levels of battery performance to a WiFi connected device. It apparently has the ability to wake up, connect to a WiFi network and push out a packet of MQTT data in around 8 seconds. Which is pretty darned fast. There is only very simple PIO available for data inputs but there is onboard temperature and a clock that turns everything off between readings. You can power the device from one or two AA batteries or a LiPo and they are talking about battery lifetimes in the months and years.

It’s only 16 quid to get one, which will be a good price if it does what they claim. I’ve ordered one, looking forward to having a play.

Microsoft Word Speaks

I was working on the book (did you know I was writing a book? - you can hear it here) when my fingers caught a key combination that I’d not used before. And Microsoft Word started reading the text aloud. It was kind of scary until I figured out what was going on. The reading is actually pretty good, and it is a fantastic way to proof your writing.

When I read stuff that I’ve written I find that my brain automatically edits it, adding words that I’ve missed and correcting the spelling. But if I hear it read out to me I can hear all the mistakes. You might find it useful too. You can find the Read Aloud command on the Review tool ribbon You can change the reading speed and the voice and the inflection is quite natural. It even has a good go at reading program text with variable names in it. Although it can’t say the word JSON.

Microsoft Flight Sim is awesome

Very exciting day yesterday. Installed Microsoft Flight Sim. It only cost me one pound to get it. I’ve signed up for Xbox Game Pass for PC which will end up costing me four quid a month. Total bargain. Although I guess I should also factor in the cost of a larger SSD drive to hold all the games I’m now going to download….

The game itself took a while to download, what with it taking up over 120 Gbytes. Apparently you can buy it on 20 disks if you want a physical copy. It. Is. Awesome. The install process took ages and the game itself takes a while to get going. But once it is running it is fabulous. The views inside and outside the cockpit are very impressive. You can fly anywhere in the world, although it might not look quite as you remember. The Humber Bridge you can see above looks like it needs a bit of work. You can just see the shadows of the towers that should be there at the bottom of the screenshot above.

I’m not very good at flying the plane (the wings came off shortly after I took the picture) but I’m having great fun. I’m using a wired XBOX controller which gives me all the control I can handle just at the moment. We’re planning our first group flight soon, which should be fun.

If you are interested in flying, or just seeing the world, you should have a go.

Learning from your kids and their kids

Many years ago I took my kids to the university to “show them what daddy does for a living”. This turned out to be sit in front of screen pressing keys with the odd bit of shouting at people, which is pretty much all I did at home, so I’m not sure they learnt much. But I learnt a few things from them. Number one daughter picked up a mouse and pressed a button on it. The screen in front of her immediately sprang into action. Brian, who was watching, was very impressed. It seemed that nobody had ever thought to press that button before.

I was reminded of this when showing number one granddaughter my venerable Twilight Zone pinball machine. She leaned one of the buttons and promptly dropped the machine into “In the Zone” mode which triggers all the options and releases all six balls onto the playfield at once. This is something I’ve not been able to do in the many years I’ve owned the machine.

I’m not sure what to show her next time she visits.

The end of the polite cough

This nasty little virus has a lot to answer for. Including the death of a British tradition, the “polite cough”. In times gone by if a British person wanted to attract someone’s attention - perhaps it might be a waiter, or a a person who has cut in front of you in a queue, or someone who has parked their car on your foot - you would issue a polite cough to open up the sequence of apologies that would inevitably follow: “I’m so sorry that I left my foot lying around on the ground where you could drive over it” - etc etc.

Nowadays a polite cough has every chance of having you wrestled to the ground by a couple of burly folks in hazmat suits. Oh well. At least we’ve still got the “disapproving look” left.

Dropping Lego

One of my Lego models got dropped today. I watched with a mix of horror and fascination as it shattered into a large number of pieces. As I was searching for the bits under the furniture I wondered whether taking videos of falling Lego was a thing. It turns out that it is, as you can see above.

NES Raspberry Pi case

This is a very nice little Raspberry PI case that makes it look like a Nintendo NES. It has a fan inside too. Not bad value from Pi Hut.

Grappling with authority

Very pleased with myself. I’ve taken on City Hall and won in a tumultuous 50 minute battle. Admittedly it was East Riding Council, and I was just trying to order something via their web site. But it felt like a battle.

And I did have to give them 10 pounds to sign up to get the service (and I’m not really sure why). So perhaps we’ll call it a draw.

Hull University Rocks

Hull University was very good to me. It paid off my mortgage and helped me get my kids through college. Admittedly I was there a bit longer than I planned. Went for a three year degree course and ended up staying for another 35 years, finishing up as a lecturer in their wonderful Computer Science department.

I left a few years ago but I’m proud to be a fellow of the university and I’ve been able to watch them try to respond to this awful pandemic thingy. One thing I’m sure of is that all the staff will be moving mountains to make things work going forward and they’ll do it with the best interests of the students. Because they always did.

This is a Hull Computer Science speciality. Three Thing Game. If you fancy having fun writing games you form a team and you get given three things to base it on and a weekend to write it. I took this picture in 2013. Quite a few of the people in the shot are now out there making games of their own. You can find out more about it here. It’s hilarious whether or not you want to end up a game developer.

If are looking for place to study, don’t for get Hull. Lovely place. Lovely people. Find out more here.

Hairy Butterfly

I took this picture this afternoon. Who knew that butterflies were so hairy? If you want more detail you can click through the picture to the full sized image on Flickr.

Playing Scythe

We spent the evening playing Scythe. It’s a bit complicated for me. Every time I play it I learn one thing I should do and four things I shouldn’t . Anyhoo, I’ll settle for third place. Especially if I’m playing as Nordic.

Quest Disc Golf Winner

Won a game of Disc Golf on the Oculus Quest this evening in Rec Room. Imagine my surprise when I search for details online and I find that frisbee golf is actually a thing. Anyhoo, I’ve found that the best way to throw it is to stand sideways and actually aim. Just like real life in fact. If you have a Quest it is great fun and very sociable.

Renaissance Man

What a man I am. I spent the morning writing and the afternoon demolishing a summerhouse. Who knows what I’ll do this evening…

Killing your favourite children

Ages ago I went to a creative writing seminar. It was really interesting. One of the points that they made was that sometimes when writing you have to “kill your favourite child”. What they meant was that you might have a lovely chunk of prose that you are very proud of, but it just don’t quite fit into the context of the piece you are writing. There are two things you can do. Spend ages trying to make your wonderful words fit and fail. Or just get rid of them and move on.

I was reminded of this today when I was writing Chapter 9 of Begin to Code with JavaScript. I’m talking about software objects and I’d written a lovely piece of code that used a schema to create objects and properties on the fly. You can do this kind of thing in JavaScript and its awesome. However, I couldn’t make the example fit into the rest of the chapter. I spent far too long trying to create a solid context, wrote a few pages and then stood back from the piece, took a long hard look at it and then threw the whole thing away. What is left is much better, and of course I’ve not completely discarded the stuff. I never throw anything away.

Sometimes you have to ditch something that you really like because of your loyalty to the final result.

Hearing the stock market

More fun with the Norns. You can use arp_index to listen to the sound of stock prices. You can point it at various companies. This is the display for Microsoft. If you are wondering what it sounds like, take a listen here….

Hull Rocks

They were having a discussion on Radio Humberside this morning about the future of Hull. They asked me to contribute some thoughts. I made some notes (most of which I never used). So I thought I’d pop them on the blog. The question posed was something like: “As a person who has lived in Hull for a while, what do you think of the state of the city and potential for the future?”. These are my answers in bullet point form:

• There are amazing things going on at the Fruit Market . I’ve been involved with c4di for ages and their building is now fully occupied with people making stuff and doing things. With more coming.

• We’ve got super fast fibre networking, something which other places have just started to realise might be a good thing.

• We also have a city wide LoRa network which is free for anyone to use for connected product development and a couple of local companies, KCOM and Connexin, who can provide you with a paid network service you can use to commercialise your solution.

• Humber Street is awesome. The new pedestrian bridge will make a huge difference to access to the area.

• We must give give local students a trajectory that encourages them to say in Hull when they graduate. As I said this morning, “It’s cheap and nice”, a killer combo. Students tend to be quite conservative about where they go in their local area. We need to encourage them to take a look at the lovely places we have where you could build a good life..

• Hull Makerspace is a great development which lets anyone from the community explore technology.

It’s a crying shame that this nasty virus has come along just as we were getting up speed with all this, I really hope that progress is not knocked too far off beam by it.

Indoor thunder with Norns

I’m slowly getting my head around the Norns device that I built on my birthday. It works by running Lua scripts that talk to SuperCollider engines to make sounds. There’s also a sound sampler and sllcer and you interact with it via your browser. It’s great fun, but at the moment I’m using it to make the sound of rainfall thanks to the lovely Shower app. I’m trying to get my head around how such a short piece of code can produce something that sounds quite realistic. And very relaxing.

Adventures in function names: saveItem or storeItem?

I’m writing Begin to Code with JavaScript at the moment and I was struck with how the choice of function names can be confusing. I’ve made the point that a good way to come up with a function name is to make them out of a verb and a noun. So storeItem sounds like a good name for a function. Store the item. What could be simpler?

Unfortunately this has the potential to be confusing. It’s because the word store can be a verb (do the storing) or a noun (a store that contains things). So storeItem might mean an item from the store. My strong advice is to try and pick unambiguous verbs, which is why I much prefer saveItem.

Perhaps I’m overthinking this (it has been known) but I’ve been surprised how many times I’ve picked confusing names for things based on distinctions like these. One of the great things about modern development is the ease with which you can rename identifiers, so if you do decide that the name you first came up with is confusing you can change it.