Stop your glasses fogging up when you wear a mask

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I don’t see wearing a face mask as anything to do with personal freedom. To me it is more like a way of not killing myself or others around me. But if you wear glasses a mask can be a bit of a pain because a mask makes them steam up.

Chris told us that these work really well. So we got some and yes, they are awesome. You have to make sure your glasses are clean and then use the cloth to apply whatever chemical magic repels water vapour. The coating lasts a day or so and the instructions say that the cloths are good for lots of applications. We’ll see about that, but for now they are working a treat. Recommended.

How not to migrate Animal Crossing island data

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Home sweet home

I’ve just got a new Nintendo Switch. I’m in the process of selling a bunch of stuff from the loft that I don’t need any more and I reckoned I could raise the price of a new OLED one. I got it today and it is lovely. The screen is really impressive.

Moving your settings from one Switch to another turned out to be one part smooth process and one part white-knuckle terror ride. It started well enough. Once the new switch was online I was able to authenticate using the phone and I was asked if I wanted to copy all the saved games and settings from one device to another. “Yes please” I replied and progress bars grew and shank. At the end of it I was asked if I wanted to delete my Nintendo identity from the old device. I said yes, because it is going on sale to pay for the new one. Feeling rather smug at how well that had all gone I then loaded Animal Crossing into the new device and opened up my little island.

It wasn’t there.

And I’d just disconnected myself from the old device. I really thought I’d lost everything I’d built up over hundreds of hours of gameplay. I didn’t know (although I should really have worked out) that Animal Crossing saved games are managed outside of normal game saves. So my island was still on my original old Switch. But could I get back to it? It turns out that I could. I re-registered myself on the old Switch, opened up Animal Crossing and was then given a chance to claim my island data which had been left lying around on the device - presumably to deal with situations like these. I was then able to use the Island Transfer tool to move the island from my old Switch to my new one, and that worked a treat. I can now wander around picking up weeds in splendidly sharp colour.

The takeaway from this is to use the Animal Crossing transfer tool if you are moving your island from one device to another, don’t expect the device transfer process to do it for you. I’m impressed that you can recover from the situation; but I’m rather annoyed that I had to do it in the first place. If at any point I’d accepted the offer to make a new island I dread to think what would have happened. I’d have lost the lot. A prospect that felt a lot more scary than it probably should be, what with nothing particularly real being involved. I really hated the idea of losing all the digital chums that I’ve made over the years, to say nothing of all the digital loot that I’d accumulated.

Making videos with OBS and Camtasia

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After many years of trying, I think I’ve finally found a decent workflow for making videos. I’ve always loved Camtasia for making screencasts but I really like the flexibility of OBS for getting video onto my computer. So now I use both. The only thing I needed to do for it all to work was to go into File>Settings in OBS and change the video recording format to mp4:

Once I made that change I could import my recording files into Camtasia. It asks me if I want to use 60Hz video for the project (oh yes I do) and then lets me get on with formatting the video, adding captions, sorting out the audio and finally uploading it straight to YouTube. OBS is free and Camtasia has a really generous free trial period. If you are thinking about making some videos these two tools are a great way to get started.

Full disclosure: Tecksmith were kind enough to give me a copy of Camtasia to play with as part of my Microsoft MVP award. But I’d been using Camtasia and liking it in my day job for a good while before I got the freebie.

Whatever happened to MouseTrap?

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You know how old people are supposed to get cross about change? Wellllllllll.

They’ve changed the MouseTrap board game. The new one doesn’t let you eliminate other players by catching them. Instead you collect portions of cheese or something. Most unimpressed. I see this further evidence of the continuing decline of civilisation etc etc.

My advice: seek out the original and best. Proper sudden death action.

Upgrade your Circuit Python version in the Raspberry PI PICO

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My first version of the PICO MIDI Cheesebox used Circuit Python 6. And it worked fine. But I thought I’d upgrade to version 7. This turned out to be harder than I anticipated because of my less than stellar hardware design. The Raspberry PI PICO that I use to control the CheeseBox is locked inside the case with no access to the all-important BOOTSEL button that you hold down during power on to force the device into firmware upload mode.

However, the good news is that you can use a couple of Python statements to get your PICO to reboot into firmware mode so that you can drop in a new version of Circuit Python (or anything else). You can issue the commands down the terminal connection. I used the Thonny program which provides a REPL connection to my Circuit Python powered CheeseBox (or Crackers Controller).

microcontroller.on_next_reset(microcontroller.RunMode.UF2)

This is the first command you type in. It tells your device to reset into UF2 mode next time it is reset.

microcontroller.reset()

This is the second command. It resets the device and makes it appear as as storage device into which you can load the firmware. Note that if you do this you will wipe the contents of your PICO so make sure that you copy anything important off it first.

I’ve upgraded the firmware for the CheeseBox on GitHub to Version 7. You can find it here:

https://github.com/CrazyRobMiles/PICO-MIDI-Cheesebox

Tax Paid

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I’ve done my tax for the year. Just six days before the deadline. Go me. Now, if you’ll excuse me I’ve got some crying in the corner to catch up on…

It didn’t used to be this way. I was happy to pay may tax and watch things around me get better and better. But to think of the possibility that some of my cash is being used to fund the incompetence and maliciousness that passes for government these days is rather upsetting.

KidiZoom Camera is awesome

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Number one granddaughter has now reached the grand old age of “nearly five”. For Christmas she was given a Kidizoom printing camera. Lucky girl. The camera is awesome. The pictures it produces are OK with a fixed focus, wide angle, low resolution sensor which is as good as it needs to be. You can get shots off the camera by using a micro-SD card. Or you can print them in black and white on the built-in thermal printer.

This would be fun enough, but then the camera makers went to town with extra features. The camera has a colour LCD panel on the back, so there are a couple of games you can play. There’s also a bunch of image filters and some very clever extra things you can do with the printer. You can print mazes, a tie or even your own money with your picture in the middle. Really great fun.

The heck with the grandchild. I want one of these…..

Broken hard drive

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The hard drive above is broken. It contains 500G of - well, I don’t know what. I’m sure nothing on there is important because I never leave important things on portable (or indeed any) hard drives. And I don’t own any bitcoins. However, I guess you never know.

I was hoping that I would crack the drive open and find a drive and a USB interface card I could swap out for a possibly less broken one. However, that is now how things go these days. The drive and the interface are all one broken component.

What would be amazing is if a ninja reader of this blog took a look at the board and went “Oh yes, just tap this connecter and all will go well.” In the unlikely event that this actually happens it turns out that Brian has a similar vintage drive which is also broken in the same way…..

Police Squad and Rust at the Hardware Meetup

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Another fun hardware group meetup last night. In between chats about Python, Rust and thermal cameras I mentioned the TV series Police Squad. You can find it on YouTube here. It is one of the funniest TV shows ever made. They only made 6 or so episodes for some reason - but in a way I’m pleased about this as it never got time to go off the boil or become stale. It is just continuous, brilliant, genius. Take a look and thank me later.

Oh, and the next hardware meetup is on the 3rd of Feb. Find out more here.

XBOX Remote Play works a treat

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One of the main problems with having the Xbox plugged into the proper TV downstairs is that of an evening other members of the family tend to want to watch “Call the Midwife” rather than me playing “Yakuza - Like a Dragon”.

The good news is that I can use XBOX remote play to sort this. I’m using it on an iPad with a Bluetooth Xbox controller that I bought a while back. It works a treat. It means that as number one wife is stories of newly born babies coming into the world I can be happily despatching bad guys at the same time.