Turning Red is a wonderful little film about a girl who turns into a giant red panda when she gets stressed. It covers some themes that don’t get that much of a mention in animated movies and is all the better for that. It has a properly heart-warming story and some splendid animation. Strongly recommended.
I’m doing some work with this little thing. The aim is to make it work with my Bluetooth printer so that I can take pictures and print them. While I was getting it going I got frustrated by the way that the camera connection kept failing.
At first I thought it was a brownout problem caused by insufficient power over the usb connection. I’ve got a fix for that here.
But no, even with a healthy power supply the problem kept recurring. So I tried something different. I turned the speed of the CPU. My theory was that if the camera was being a bit slow responding to requests from the ESP32 it might be a good idea to slow those requests down a bit.
It worked a treat. You can see how to do it in the Arduino SDK above. This does of course mean that the program will respond a tad slower but I’ve not found that to be a problem. If you’ve got intermittent behaviour in your device you might like to try it. It has the added useful side-effect of reducing power consumption.
Hullraisers is a sitcom set in Hull. It’s based on an Israeli show called Little Mom and was adapted by and stars Lucy Beaumont. It is a bit bawdy and very funny. It was filmed in Hull and gave us lots of “we know where that is” moments as we watched it .The lighting makes Hull look anything but grey. Every scene is packed with colour. As someone who has lived here for a very long time I reckon the accents are all spot on and the inherent friendliness of Hull folks shows up a treat.
Well worth a watch.
Turns out that the Kidizoom printing camera is a great way to print clues for an easter egg hunt…
Lego are billing their bonsai tree kit as “their most therapeutic kit yet”. I’m not sure about that, but I did rather enjoy building it. There are two variants. A green one and the blossom one you can see above. Fun fact, some of the blossoms are actually little tiny frogs, there are 101 of them in the model.
We went out for a drive today. I’m not allowed to get behind the wheel just yet. So I was able to sit in the passenger seat and take pictures through the window of the scenery as it shot past. The images took a bit of tidying up, but I’m not unhappy with the results.
Tunic is a fun isometric platformer type game that is available on lots of platforms and on Xbox Game Pass. It reminds me a bit of the famous "Knight Lore” Spectrum game from way back. One of the best bits is the way that the game is provided with a manual, but you have to decode the symbols and hieroglyphics in it to work out how to use the various game elements that you encounter. It builds a nice atmosphere as you guide a little fox around a big, beautifully drawn, environment.
If you have Game Pass you really should have a go.
Another trip out today. This time to Hammonds of Hull, a department store turned food hall and shared workspace that’s just opened in the middle of Hull (the clue is in the name). It’s a very nice place to shop for foodie things, drink excellent coffee and grab a meal from one of the vendors. We did all three during our trip up town. The conversion of the store has been done with taste and style and I can see it being a hit with folks visiting, living or working in the centre of Hull.
Simply Piano is an awesome application. Over the last few months it’s taken me from “someone who can hardly play to the piano” to “someone who can hardly play the piano except for ‘The Entertainer’”.
Simply Piano can use the microphone in the iPad to listen to the notes that you play, but a MIDI connection to the program is much more reliable. It also means that you can practise while wearing headphones, something number one wife prefers.
Unfortunately recent “upgrades” to iPad OS have made it much harder to use this. It seems that iPad is now having problems recognising USB MIDI connections from some devices. If you, like me, are having problems the best recommendation I can make is to get hold of a MIDI adapter that uses the big round DIN connectors to link to your keyboard. I made the change and it now works for me.
Had my first trip out today. Took the big camera to grab some in-focus images.
This might do for the cover of the next C# Yellow Book
Not to be used for a “Guess the name of the flower” competition.
I mentioned a while back that I’ve been playing with a film camera. I got the pictures back from the lab and there seems to be a problem with the focus. Distant things are great, but close ups are horribly blurred. Oh well. I think that focussing screen and the film are out of alignment. The good news is that some of the pictures look really nice anyway. I don’t think I’ll be taking many more film pictures (the cost of film seems to have rocketed since I last bought any) but if I do I’ll be making some adjustments to the focus..
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.
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.
I’ve added a section to the Crackers Controller repository that tells you how to use it with the wonderful Synthstrom Deluge. You can control 16 different values in your compositions by switching through the four different knob colours.
Killed a nasty monster in a cave today. Very pleased with myself.
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.
Very pleased to be able to report that I’ve hit the donation target for my Red Nose Day lecture. Many thanks to all my supporters. If you fancy adding to the total the donation page is still open here.
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.
I don’t think I’ll ever top my April Fools gag from 2011. So I’m not going to try.
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
