Walk number 3

Walk number three finds us in the woods just outside Ambleside. Apparently one of the trees here is the largest in England. They all look pretty big to me.

There were also some amazing views of the lake.

Walk number 2

Today’s walk took us to a “tarn” on the top of a hill. Tarn is a local word for “pond”. Apparently these are always placed on the hills in pairs or, as the locals say “One good tarn deserves another”.

Walk number 1

The weather forecast said “good chance of rain”. But we went out anyway. And it didn’t rain, at least until we got back inside. A lot of our route coincided with a local marathon so we had a bit of company on the way round, which was nice.

Hello Ambleside

We’re doing lots of things we’ve not done for a while. We’re going somewhere else. We’re having a holiday. We’re eating food off different plates. Today we headed out to the Lake District for a little while. We made a policy decision not to look forward to the trip on the basis that lots of things we’ve looked forward to in the last year or so have vanished at the last (or first) moment. But now we are here, perusing weather forecasts and walks. Great stuff.

Intelligent glue

I spent a big chunk of today ripping cable trunking off the walls and trying to minimise the amount of wall which came came off with it. The trunking sections had been fitted with a special kind of glue which doesn’t grip when you want it to (the trunking kept falling down) but will hang on like grim death if you need to remove it. I wonder how they make it do that.

Random bugs

I had a bug in my random number generator which was interesting. I’d used the wrong variable name at one point in the code and I was getting “the wrong kind of random” values generated. It’s fixed now, and my Connected Little Box devices will now properly synchronise their random light displays, as you can see above.

Debugging a Things Network Kickstarter Lora Gateway

Not sure if anyone reading this blog really needs to know this one, but I need to keep a record of it somewhere and it it is what I’m doing today. If you (or even I) ever want to debug a Things Network Kickstarter gateway you can do this by connecting a seral cable to the jumper inside. I’m using a Raspberry Pi serial connector and with that you connect the white wire (which is the input to the computer running the terminal program) to the RX connection on the pins in the top right hand corner. The black cable goes onto the ground connection. I actually used my SimpleTerrm browser terminal to view the output from the gateway:

We’re trying to convert our gateways to Things Network version 3.0, which is proving an interesting experience at the moment.

Name in Lights

Spent a lot of the day building Name in Lights devices. I’ve got quite a few now. If you want one of your own, send me a note and I’ll see what I can do.

Play Nomids

Nomids is a lovely little game. There is a lot of chance involved, in that a good dice throw can make you a quick winner, but it also provides a lot of very nice “shafting mechanics” (in other words there are some neat ways that you ruin the game for another player. Having said that, when we played one person just kept winning. I guess they were just very lucky.

Actually, Nomids is as much a game framework, as a game in that the ten sets of little pyramids can be used in lots of other games that are described in detail on the game website, And it is rare to find games for up to ten players that are as much fun as this. Strongly recommended.

Go England...

Nothing like a bit of success to turn you into a football fan….

Windows MVP for another year - and I feel terrible about it....

I feel terrible about this. After writing a blog post saying that I won’t be upgrading to Microsoft Windows 11 (which is looking even nicer the more I look at it) because my computer won’t run it I discover that Microsoft have renewed me as a Microsoft MVP.

Thanks so much to Microsoft for putting up with me. And there have been some very interesting chats over email between MVPs and Microsoft folks who have patiently explained the reasons why Microsoft will not be allowing machines like mine to run Windows 11. Having thought about it properly I agree with their policy. It is all about containerisation and security. What you really want is strong, hardware based, protection for your processes that the operating system can use to make sure that stuff that appears on your machine is managed in a proper way and that badly behaved code is detected and kicked off before doing any harm. The threats to vulnerable software and hardware are only going to get greater over time and if a device has flaws that make it impossible to secure you really shouldn’t be using it in the long term.

In the olden days people used to drive around in cars that had no safety features at all. These cars were perfectly good for moving you around but they were inherently dangerous to the people inside and those around them. Nowadays we don’t do that. Cars are built with crumple zones and air bags to make things safer for drivers and pedestrians. Me saying that I want to stick with my old PC because it still works is a bit like a driver saying that they are quite happy to zoom around in a car with no seatbelts and a really pointy bumper.

Maybe there is a place where systems like my existing one can be used in a secure way. Perhaps playing a server role behind a secure firewall. I’m going to look into that. I’m also going to start saving my pennies for a Windows 11 box. Rather looking forward to it now.

Begin to Code with JavaScript final review

Did my final review of the entire “Begin to Code with JavaScript” text today. I found a few little mistakes that had slipped through, but overall it’s looking great. The book goes into the printing presses tomorrow and will be in the shops (whatever a shop is these days) at the end of August. Rather excited.

PICO RGB Two button game

This is the “Two Button Game" running in Python on Raspberry Pi PICO inside a Pimoroni PICO RGB Keyboard base. The game engine is exactly the same as the earlier ones, which is rather nice.

The idea of the game is that you press the red button if there are more red lights and the blue button if there are more blue lights. The buttons are at the bottom of the keyboard (keys C and F). On this occasion I think that the thing to do is press the Blue button.

Connected Little Boxes Two Button Game

Here we have two Connected Little Boxes using an MQTT server to play the Two Button Game.

I really think we should press the red button……

Biscuits from around the world

Another lovely father’s day gift I got on Father’s Day (what a coincidence) was a box of biscuits from around the world from the Biscuit Baron. They came in a box with a book about each biscuit and even a scoring form that you can fill in. The ones above were wonderful.

Two Button Game in Hackspace magazine

The Two Button Game that I made for a Raspberry Pi Jam way back is about to achieve fame. I’m writing an article for Hackspace magazine about creating portable games that run across different platforms and I’m using the game engine as the basis of the piece. Quite fun.

I want a magic wand

Conversation at the Meetup last week turned to magic wands. As it does. We managed to find this project so I’ve ordered one of the devices. I wonder if I could magic up some time to play with it.

Bought 100 Dice

A while ago I bought 100 coloured dice. I’ve no idea why (although I do want to teach number one granddaughter about probability at an early age). However, they are nice to take pictures of.

Windows 11 looks rather nice but I probably won't be upgrading to it

Windows 11 looks rather nice. Lots of neat changes to make things easier to use. Not sure if I’ll ever want to install an Android app on my PC, but it is nice to know that I’d be able to if I want to I suppose. And the graphical enhancements are beautiful.

The only snag for me is that according to the testing tool that has been released alongside this announcement, none of the PCs that I own will be able to run the operating system. It’s all to do with processor versions and Trusted Platform Modules.

I was hoping to keep my existing machine, which is five years old and does exactly what I want with a minimum of fuss, for a very long time. Perhaps I’ve been lulled into a false sense of security by the way that I’ve been able to put Windows 10 onto 10 year old machines. Anyhoo, I’m not in any hurry to get rid of my present platforms and so it looks like I’ll be sitting out of this upgrade. Which is a shame because I think that some of the new features are really, really nice.

In an age when electronic waste is a huge environmental problem, forcing people to get rid of working devices so that they can have the benefits that Windows 11 offers seems a bit out of touch. I really hope that as we get closer to the release date this situation changes for the better.

Update: I’ve had a proper think about this. Find my proper thoughts here.

Buying random numbers

The Connected Humber CIC company has just made a substantial (for the company) investment in meaningless numbers. We’ve bought 150 tiny little memory chips, each of which comes loaded with a unique 32 bit number. We’re going to use the numbers the chips contain as IDs for devices we want to connect to the LoRa network.

The rules are changing in version 3.0 of the Lora wide area network, so that if you want to give your devices unique numbers they are not made for you, you have to get your own. And not just any old unique numbers, they want ones with some provenance. This is fair enough. It is rather important that we don’t have several devices sharing the same ID. When the chips arrive we’ll have to read the numbers out of them for us to use in our devices. Alternatively we could wire the chips in and have the hardware read them.

If we have any left over we can always sell them on to the highest bidder. There seems to be quite a market for meaningless unique numbers at the moment.