Fun at Tech Week Humber

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Well, that was fun. Brian and I have just spent a day at the Tech Week Humber Expo. We got into place nice and early, made sure that everything worked and we knew where to get the coffee from and then settled down for the day. It was great. Lots of people asking what were doing and seeming to like it when we told them. And plenty of solid contacts to follow up after the event.

This is our Connected Little Boxes demo, showing how you can configure them to keep in touch with loved ones. We don’t want to sell these as a healthcare solution, but we think it might be fun if you got together with your kids to build one for grandad…..

Thanks to the folks at the Bonus Arena for looking after us so well (especially the packed lunches), Lucy Clark for keeping everything bowling along and finally to Hull City Council (particularly Richard) for organising things for us, getting all our mains adapters (there were a few) PAT tested so we could power up our toys and then getting our amazing stand made.

I love to see all the local expertise being showcased. It’s great to meet up with people that used to come along to my programming lectures back in the day and now find themselves running thriving companies.

Surface Go to the rescue

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Our little company, Connected Humber, has got a stand at the upcoming Humber Tech Expo. I’d spent a few days prepping the devices for the demos, took them along to the Bonus Arena and plugged them in and …. they all failed.

Oh good.

The only computer I had to hand was my tiny Surface Go device. I’d brought it along because it weighs almost nothing and you never know when you might need a full fat Windows installation. I fired up Visual Studio Code, pulled down the latest release from GitHub and started investigating.

The fault was interesting. The WiFi code in the ESP8266 seems to be upset by very large numbers of available access points. It shows its displeasure by running out of memory and crashing. There wasn’t time for an elegant solution so I removed the WiFi scan, hard wired the connection details and got it working before they had even managed to get the mains connection to our stand.

I’m going to have to dig into the code later in the week and find out just what is going on. But at least I’ll have something to show off tomorrow. If I’d not thought to bring the Go along, it might have been a different story.

DDD Goes Online

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Developer, developer, developer (DDD) events are one of my favourite places to meet up and talk tech. There’s one due at the end of November and the original plan was for a physical meetup. However, with Covid cases on the rise the decision has been made to make the event online. The good news is that this means that anyone can come along (the event usually fills up really quickly) and the event is not constrained by space, so there can be lots more tracks and sessions. You can sign up and take part here.

Another one bites the dust...

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My loft is now officially called “The Place Where Rob’s Gadgets Go to Die”. My lovely Hitachi digital 8 camcorder is broken. It tries very hard to work. You can hear the motors struggling and then it finally gives up with an unhappy pop. I managed to make it record something but what came back were just flickering lines. I’ve got tons of old tape I was planning to import into a computer and now all I can do is look at the boxes.

I might take it to bits to try and fix it. With a bit of luck it might be something mechanical that I can mend, but I’m not that hopeful. Oh well, I suppose it is over twenty years old….

What your bugs are telling you

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Last night I was doing some work on the PICO MIDI cheesebox when I found a bug in the way that note values are assembled when the box is generating random tunes. I came up with a quick fix and opened up the relevant part of the code. And then I stopped. I was wondering if, in the absence of a commercial imperative (after all, nobody’s business is hanging on this code) I should be wading in just right now. Perhaps it would be better to sleep on it and then fix it in the morning.

I put the question to Twitter, and got a variety of replies. I didn’t make it clear that the bug was not affecting anyone else at this point and so quite a few folks pointed out that in a production situation you would triage the bug (decide how important it is) and then either drop everything and fix it or roll it into the next release. Or, of course, live with it. All good stuff. But if the bug appears while you are creating a solution you have a bit of wiggle room when deciding how best to fix it. And I think you should sleep on it. As long as it won’t keep you awake…

Having left the bug and slept on it, I decided that the way the bug manifested itself reflected my poor understanding of how the program should work. To properly fix the bug I’d have to re-structure part of the code. So I did that, and the solution is much better as a result.

I’ve had this kind of experience many times. It seems that to find out how to really write a piece of code you have to write it. No amount of up-front design work shields you from this. And when you write it you must expect to have to change the structure and content of the components. I view this as a kind of battle between warring factions. As I write the code and build my understanding of what I’m trying to do I find that the objects in my solution grow and shrink. A class you think will be pivotal can shrink in importance while a “young pretender” can emerge and take over. So I don’t regard discovering bugs like this as a problem, they are part of the process. So give yourself time to deal with them properly.

Power Packed for Tech Week Humber

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I’ve just dropped off all the power supplies we’re going to be using on our exhibit at Tech Week Humber. They need to be PAT tested to make sure that there are no bare wires or sparks on our stand. The exhibition itself is next Tuesday (9th of November) in the Bonus Arena in the middle of Hull. Anyone can come along and say hello. Brian and I are going to have a bunch of sensors and stuff on show. If you fancy seeing what we get up at Connected Humber it would be lovely to see you.

If you write stuff, you should know about Scrivener

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I bought Scrivener a few years back as part of a MacHeist bundle. I’ve always liked the way that it lets you organise your writing. It seems to have been created by writers for writers. I played with it for a while at the time but then I ended up back using Microsoft Word to write all my stuff because I was working with a bunch of folks who also used Word. This is not a problem, as Word is a great place to work. However, recently I was wondering if Scrivener could help me when creating magazine articles. These have well defined structure and content and are associated with lots of assets, web links and images. They require a lot of tinkering during the writing process, because getting the sequence of the elements doesn’t come easily (at least for me) and you are always battling against a particular word count.

Earlier this week I took another look at Scrivener with a view to using it on a few solo projects. One particular attraction is the way that you take a single version of the core text and then “compile” it for different destinations. One of the destinations could be an e-Pub book. This is very interesting to me, as I’ve not found a way of working with text that lets me do this cleanly. I end up using Calbre (another wonderful program) on an a copy of my text that I’ve exported from Word. This is not optimal I have to do a lot of fiddling to make it all fit together and it makes version control really hard. So today I fired up Scrivener and spent most of the day playing with it. This is what I’ve learned so far:

  • A document is made up of a bunch of text items.

  • A text item can be a folder and they can be nested. In this case the text in the text item is included in the output before the nested items. You can use this to make a structured outline of a document.

  • You can browse the entire document at a high level and will automatically move between the text items that it comprises.

  • A text item can have a synopsis text, as well as a bunch of other properties including type.

  • A document is compiled into a single output element (pdf, word, epub, html etc) by the compile process.

  • The compile process is controlled by a template that specifies the mapping of layouts onto sections types. Each text item is assigned a section type. There are also sections that you can apply to text sequences inside a text item.

  • You use different templates to format the output for different platforms. Templates can contain conditional elements, so that you can have things like a “Mac” and a “PC” version of a core text.

  • A given layout contains specified properties of a text item to be included in the output. This means you can generate a "synopsis" document by creating a template using layouts that only include only the synopsis element. You can make your own layouts. A layout can also contain prefix and postfix items to be put around the text using that layout when it is compiled, as well as having lots of font and formatting options. You can include placeholders in layouts to create automatically numbered sections.

  • Text items can be tagged and there are very comprehensive search and grouping commands.

  • A project can contain a research element that holds text, images or even web sites. The web sites are copied into the project (although this doesn't always work). You can also add research documents, for example a list of web sites.

  • It contains visualisation tools like maps and corkboards to allow you to play with your ideas for the document structure. It also lets you checkpoint your writing so that you can always get back to a “known good” state.

  • The slant of most most of the templates is towards fiction and drama, which is an interesting direction I’ve never really tried before. But you never know….

Scrivener is extremely powerful stuff. Its documentation runs to 750 pages and the learning curve is quite steep, although a lot of the functionality is built on things that you’d really want to do if you were writing a book, a play or an article. I think I’m going to find it very useful for magazine articles. It’s not horribly expensive, being a bit cheaper than a video game. But if you write any kind of text for a living (or even for fun) I think it is well worth a look. It might even change your life….

My Video Walkman doesn't work any more

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At least the screen backlight works….

True story: A long time ago I had to go to the dentist to have some wisdom teeth removed (although some folks thought I should have some put in). This raised for me the prospect of pain and suffering. Not keen. To divert from this prospect I promised myself a gadget at the end. I managed to get up town, buy a video Walkman and get home before the anaesthetic in my mouth wore off. I suffered a fair bit of pain, but at least I could distract myself with a recording of Back to the Future. At the time being able to carry around TV programs and films was very cool, which is why I bought the Walkman. These days the idea of ninety minutes of poor quality video on a tiny screen followed by a flat battery is much less impressive. Such is progress.

Anyhoo, I’m doing some clearing up in the loft and came across the player, along with the box. Hoping to relive some cool from the old days I plugged it in. It doesn’t work. Apparently the screen on these devices self destructs over time. You can put a cassette in and the hardware goes through the motions, with the tape feeding as it should. You can even fast forward and rewind. But you don’t get any sound or picture.

I’ve boxed it up and I’ll probably put it up on eBay for someone who has a device with a working screen but broken transport. I’m not going to use the weaselly “untested” label used by some people. I take this to mean “I’ve tested it and it doesn’t work but I don’t want to admit this”. It’s definitely broken and that is what I’ll say. It will be a rather sad end to what was an amazing device.

Pi Zero Version 2 Released

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The Pi Zero has always been a favourite of mine. It’s a bit hard to get hold of sometimes, its frequently out of stock and they only let you buy one at a time. I don’t see that changing any time soon. They’ve just released version 2 which delivers a serious boost in performance, they say up to the level of a Raspberry Pi 3. It has a 64 bit architecture and four processor cores along with a general speedup of around 40%. I’ve been planning on making Pure Data output device to use with the PICO MIDI cheese box. It looks like this would be the perfect candidate.

Not Halloween Hardware Meetup

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Some of the gear on show. The black BANDS on the cube are due to the shutter speed of the photo.

We had our first Connected Humber Hardware Meetup for ages today. Those lovely people at Hull MakerSpace provided the venue. It was lovely to actually meet up with folks again. We had a great time. It was splendid to see some new faces as well. I’ve promised a bunch of lights in names unites to people (as long as your name is less than 6 characters long I can make it work).

It’s hard to make long term plans just at the moment, but we’ll definitely be having another in-person meetup at some point. If you want to come along to the next one (and maybe get lights in your name) you can keep track of what we are doing here.

Ghost Blitz will make your brain come out of your ears

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We found the German version to be slightly cheaper

Ghost Blitz is a game for all the family. The rules are quick to learn and just about anyone can pick it up. You get five nicely made little wooden pieces: green bottle, grey mouse, red chair, blue book and of course a white ghost. There is also a deck of cards with pictures of the objects on them.

To play the game you shuffle the deck and then turn over one card at a time. The card shows a bunch of pieces and players must identify either the piece that is correctly shown (for example if the picture shows a blue mouse on a red chair the correct answer is red chair) or the piece that isn’t shown (for example if the picture shows a red mouse holding a blue bottle the correct piece is a white ghost because it can’t be anything blue, red or a mouse or a bottle). If you get it right you get to keep the card. After a run through all the cards the player holding the most cards wins.

These simple rules make for fiendish and brain bending gameplay as you struggle to force your grey cells to reach the answer before anyone else. I wouldn’t want to play it for too long. I think my head would overheat or something, but for a quick blast, especially with kids, it is a hoot. The components are very compact and it would make a great travel game.

Polaroid SX-70 camera tips

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My “new-old” camera arrived last week. It’s the one that I’m selling a receiver to pay for. It’s a Polaroid SX-70 which was made in 1974. So it is very old. Up until a few years ago such cameras were completely useless as Polaroid had stopped making the instant film that they used. However, the Impossible Project (which has now assumed the Polaroid mantle) stepped in and started making films again. So a whole new generation can now discover the joys of instant shooting using a fold-up single lens reflex camera with an really nice glass lens.

I’m probably going to have to sell a few more things if I want to take lots of pictures with it though. Every time I press the shutter it costs more than two pounds to produce a single colour photograph. Which might be blurred or too dark or light. I’ve taken 8 pictures so far and I’ve only had a couple of duds. Pro tips for using the SX-70 that I’ve discovered so far..

  • make sure the focus is sharp in the viewfinder. Use the rangefinder prism (if there is one) to check.

  • Make sure you fill the frame. It’s square which means that you might find you only put your subject along the bottom (see above). Note that the rangefinder prism doesn’t mark the middle of the frame, it is towards the bottom. This can confuse your framing efforts.

  • If you are going to get exposure wrong, try to under-expose so that things come out a bit darker than they should. If they are over exposed they are just blown out to a white part of the image. If things are bit dark they look moody, which you can sometimes get away with. You can twiddle a little adjustment towards the dark side to do this.

  • Get the picture out of the light as soon as it comes out of the camera. Put it in an inside pocket (or even under your armpit) to give it somewhere warm to develop. After a few minutes you can take it out and have a look at what is appearing, but do this in a shady place.

In absolute terms the pictures that the camera produces are not that great. Your phone will be able to beat them for sharpness and colour. But that is not the point. These are tiny little works of art. You have to work hard to get a nice one and when you do the feeling of accomplishment is great. I’m enjoying taking very few carefully composed pictures rather than my usually process of taking a bunch with the view that I might find one or two good ones when I get the camera home and download the files.

The Good Life is good fun

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The Good Life first appeared on Kickstarter but has now made it onto XBOX Game Pass. You play as a somewhat desperate photographer/investigator working off a 10 million pound debt. How she got the debt is not revealed at the start, perhaps we find out later. Anyhoo, you have been despatched to the Lake District to discover the dark secret behind “the happiest town in the world”. One secret emerges pretty quickly, others will take a bit of time to emerge. While you wait you can earn money by taking photos and building up an on-line following.

Number one son says that the developers were in the Lake District taking pictures while we were on holiday there. Not sure about this, but the artwork gives a nice sense of place and the voice acting is good, if a bit eclectic. It’s a great game to pay socially, you can all watch the play and discuss what is really going on. If you’ve got Game Pass you should have a look.

Watch Baking Impossible

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If you happen to have Netflix and like baking and engineering you should watch Baking Impossible. It’s basically the Great British Bake-Off but with teams that contain a baker and engineer. In each episode rather than making a slightly different kind of cake, the teams have to build engineered contraptions which are then tested at the end of the program (with sometimes hilarious results).

If you have kids who like baking, but don’t know much about engineering (or vice versa) you should watch it with them. The challenges are interesting and the things that the teams manage to make are sometimes astonishing.

Air Quality sensor autopsy

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Actually, it’s a bit unfair to call it an autopsy, what with the sensor not being dead. I applied some power and it sprang into life, producing readings that seemed quite sensible. The components that had suffered the most were the four screws that held the lid on. I thought these were galvanised steel, but they are now very rusty steel, to the point where one screw head has pretty much disappeared.

However, once I got the lid off I discovered that the internals look pretty much like new. There is a bit of burn-in on the OLED screen (you can see it on the top right hand corner) but everything else looks fine. The waterproof case has done a good job of protecting the innards. The air quality sensor is only turned on a few times each hour to take readings, and it worked fine giving reasonable readings.

This is the air inlet. I was expecting to see more blockage than this. The filter we used was an inlet filter for a washing machine hose which we glued into place, and it seems to have done a good job of keeping out creepy crawlies. The next thing might be to take the air quality sensor to pieces and take a look at the state inside that. The sensor fan sounds fine, so it might be good for a while longer. From this assessment it looks like we can build things, stick them on lampposts and have them survive for a useful amount of time.