Matrix Resurections

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There are few better illustrations of the law of diminishing returns in movies than the Matrix series. The first one was flat out awesome. It was the first DVD I ever bought and we played it to death on my PlayStation 2. with Dolby surround sound through dodgy speakers.

The sequel was OK. The third? Don’t ask.

And now, quite a while later, we have the fourth one. We watched it this evening. All the actors they have allowed back seem to have aged incredibly well. The plot was as wacky as ever and the production as glossy. They even recreated a few of my favourite scenes, which was nice. Newcomers to the franchise might be wondering what the fuss is all about. But for the rest of us I’d say that it was a lot of fun and not as bad as it could have been. Worth a look.

April Hardware Meetup was awesome

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We had an awesome hardware meetup last night. I don’t measure the success of a meetup by the number of folk who turn up (although we were nicely quorate). I measure success by how much stuff gets passed around from person to person. Here are the things that we talked about. There were probably a few others that I missed.

  • There is an awesome “Minecraft alike” program called Minetest that you can download and play with for free. It’s written in C# and Lydia of Starbeam Rainbow Labs fame has added some excellent extensions for it that you can find here.

  • Karen has discovered origami on YouTube. It’s a great way to relax by making stuff. If you’ve ever fancied folding your own toilet, you can find the instructions here.

  • You can use the Kidzoom printing camera to make wonderful little sketches of people by converting their portraits to “colouring in” pictures and printing them out on the built-in printer.

  • The Furby Connect has a reset button hidden next to the battery compartment that can be used to bring the toy back from the grave. That, or we joggled the batteries when we were pressing the button. Either way, the Furby lived.

  • You can make a flat piece of wood into a very flexible thing by cutting loads of slots in it with a laser cutter.

  • 100% of the people who started writing a diary after I told them to say it is a very good idea. So starting a diary is either a very good idea or they are very polite people.

  • There is a video arcade with lots of retro games machines in the basement of the Princess Quay shopping centre in the middle of Hull.

  • The Badger 2040 e-ink display is as cute as a very cute thing.

  • There is now a successor to the .NET Micro Framework. It’s called the .NET nanoframework. It lets you run and debug C# code from Visual Studio 2022 on devices like the ESP32. And it rocks.

  • If you happen to need a mobile device to take round and check for LoRa gateways and map them for you, Brian has built one.

Thanks so much to Hull Makerspace for hosting the event. It was terrific fun. You only get these kind of things by actually meeting up in person. Here’s to the next one.

PICO Chord Keyboard in Hackspace Magazine

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If you pick up a copy of the April issue of HackSpace magazine (issue 53) you fill find an article from me on page 68. This one is all about how make a chord keyboard powered by a Raspberry Pi PICO. It’s based on a device I had a loooong time ago which I really loved, and it was great fun to make a keyboard inspired by it.

If you want an electronic copy of the magazine you can download it for free from here.

Fixing my Deluge

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My Synthstrom Deluge is on of my favourite instruments. I bought it second hand a while back and I’ve had some great fun making music and rhythm patterns with it. However some of the buttons and encoders have been a bit intermittent of late. The good news is that the word on the street is that this is all very fixable and spares are readily available at reasonable prices. I ordered the parts a while back and this week they arrived, all the way from New Zealand where the Deluge is made.

Today I spent a lovely two hours stripping down the device, replacing two rotary encoders and all of the rubber buttons.

This is a close up of the circuit board. The “star” around each led provides the contacts which are connected by a conductive material on the underside of each button. Some of the stars were a bit grubby, but they cleaned up fine with a bit of isopropyl alcohol.

This is the board with all new keys, ready to go back into the case. It works perfectly now.

On the mend

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I’ve been putting off this post for a while because of the possibility of headlines like:

“Only hours after posting how well he was recovering from a recent illness, Rob Miles was today hit by a falling piano while out for a walk….”

Of course this would never happen. There would be no headlines. Anyhoo, I’ m feeling a lot better. I’m having a nap every day and only spending an hour or so on the computer. I’ll be back soon with lurid tales of daring do and brain scans (at least they managed to find one).

Pick a card

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I’ve spent a huge chunk of today installing new debit card and credit cards. The new debit card is very fancy. It is only printed on one side, has a fancy colour scheme and a different number. The credit card has the “old fashioned” relief letters but the number is also changed. Which means I have to go through all my accounts and change the details.

It’s actually proved quite a useful exercise. I’ve moved lots of subscriptions onto my debit card so that I can see them go out on the main statement. I’ve also realized how many things I pay for each month. Scary.

Elden Ring

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I was very surprised when number one son suggested that I might like to have a go at Elden Ring. I’d put it in the category known as “Too difficult for Rob”, especially in my brain damaged state. But he was serious. Apparently you don’t have to win fights to progress and the world is so vast and intricate that you can have endless fun just exploring. And you get a horse you can use to run away from anything really nasty.

Well, I’ve got the game and I agree with him. I’ve even beaten a few people (usually by sneaking up and stabbing them in the back - but hey, a kills a kill). I’ve also died lots. But this is how the game works. Being made dead is part of life. You just get put back in the game and then have to stump off and find the money that you dropped with you died.

The environment is awesome, the options deep and the whole thing is very impressive. Fighting is interesting, in that you go from having no idea how to beat something, to building theories about when to attack and when to retreat and finally to winning the battle and wondering why it seemed so hard at the start. Very strongly recommended by me and just about everyone else who’s played it.

Post surgical piano

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During my recent hospital stay I really wanted to do the violin gag:

Rob: “After my treatment, will I be able to play the violin"?”

Doctor: “I don’t see why not”

Rob: “Great, I can’t at the moment and I’ve always wanted to”

Unfortunately, the occasion never presented itself, and I didn’t really want to give them more things to worry about than just my headaches. Anyhoo, today I was able to try some piano practice to see if the treatment has had any affect on my keyboard skills. The good news is that I’m no worse than I was at playing “The Entertainer”. The bad news is that I don’t seem to have acquired any extra skills.

Brain Surgery for Rob

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I’ve been having headaches for a while. Last Sunday I found out why. The technical term is“ chronic subdural haematoma”. The upshot was three holes in the skull and a bit of drainage action.

The NHS is completely wonderful. In the midst of a pandemic I had scans and whole bunch of focused professionals finding the fix and applying it. I had surgery on Monday evening and I’m now back home with strict instructions to stay away from keyboards. Which I’m obviously following to the letter.

I’ll be back after a rest.

Home

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There is no better way to start the day than with a chap pulling pipes out of your head and then stitching up the holes. I’d been on regular doses of pain killers, so I didn’t notice that much though. One major hospital tip: If they offer you painkillers take them. At one point I thought I’d show everyone I was a real man and could manage without the drugs. This turned out to be a bad plan, so the next time I was asked I gave a hearty “Yes please” to everything.

In the morning we had the “ward rounds” when consultants, doctors, nurses and students all gather round your bed and discuss how you’re doing. The best bit was when they said that I’d be able to go home today.

After lunch a charming nurse came to see me and ran through a test to make sure that my brain still worked. This involved drawing a clock face and remembering five words. I can still remember the words even now, which is very pleasing. I thought I might be able to impress her if I ever see her again by reeling them off. Unfortunately I’ll never be able to do this because I’ve completely forgotten her name or what she looks like. The best bit of the test was when she asked me to list as many words as I could that began with the letter “f”. Well, that was fun. As I am now “Wordle trained” I went off like a rocket and she had trouble keeping up with them all. Apparently I have a wide vocabulary for my age.

The best part of the day was heading home. Nothing like your own TV remote control. And bed.

Ward life

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Being in hospital has a lot in common with going on a long distance flight. The best way to cope is to totally give yourself over to the system for the duration of the journey and just go with the flow. The staff here are all awesome. I found myself chatting with the the various people who came to change bits of things attached to me and take readings and the stories were very similar. One chap was just finishing his fourth 12 hour shift in a row. Another nurse had come in on what should have been her rest day because she wanted to make sure that things were OK on the ward. I feel genuinely humbled to be around these folks. And angry with the way that society seems to reward hedge fund managers (who do nothing more than convert sums of money into larger sums of money by breaking things) more than these people.

The policy on mobile phones and whatnot is great. You can just use them and being in a big high hospital seems to result in good signal strength. I’d taken the precaution of taking my headphones and phone with me, along with a large rechargeable battery. I was able to watch movies and buy things on the internet with no problems, which got me through the day nicely.

They are hoping to remove the the drains soon, which means that I’ll lose my “borg” attachments and begin the process of turning back into a normal human.

I need this like a hole in the head

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Today started with scans. First a CT scan followed by an MRI scan that seemed to go on for ever. Then a discussion about what may have caused the problem and what to do about it. A while back I was cleaning the stairs in what turned out to be a horribly dangerous way. The result was that a vacuum cleaner fell on my head, knocking me down to the bottom. At the time I thought I’d got away with a cut and a feeling of intense stupidity, but it may well be that I’d done more damage than that. I’m now known to the doctors here as “Dyson man”.

Anyhoo, I decided to go for an operation to fix it. All they had to do was drill three holes in my skull, attach some drains and let the fluid out. I was relived to find that I’d be knocked out for this procedure. The idea of sitting there while someone takes a Dremel(tm) to my head was a bit frightening. The wonderful thing is that they were actually able to get a team together and do this right in the middle of Covid and a healthcare crisis.

I had the operation late afternoon and woke up in the recovery room a couple of hours later. They had the radio tuned to one of these “Eighties hits” station and about the first tune I heard, no word of a lie, was “I’m still standing” by Elton John. Talk about omens. Loved it. Things got even better when they took me down to the ward and gave me tea and biscuits. Both custard cream and bourbons were present and correct. Awesome.

It’s a bit hard to sleep when you’ve got two tubes attached to your head and connected to collection bags, but I think I’ll manage.