Lost my ideas

I try to keep a list of ideas for blog posts. I’ve just discovered that I’ve lost it. So this will have to do for today…

Another Ugly Camera

A while back I bought a really ugly camera. Now I’ve got another. It’s a Lomo Instant Wide. It arrived today.

Actually, this one looks a lot better to my eyes than the previous one. It is painted plastic with faux leather stuck on, but it’s done with some attempts at style. It’s not new. I had a few fun minutes clearing muck out of the battery compartment to get it to work. But work it does. It’s another large format instant camera. This one has a bit more manual control and a remote control built into the lens cap. I’m looking forwards to taking some pictures with it.

Thanks O2

Had a strange experience today. Something was broken, we contacted the provider, they were responsive and polite and sorted out. It’s a bit sad that I expect this outcome to be the exception rather than the rule, but it was nice anyway.

She Hulk - Attorney at Law

For the last few weeks we’ve been glued to She Hulk - Attorney at Law. It’s a fabulous piece of tosh with a female relative of the hulk coming to terms with being able to turn green and strong while trying to hold down a busy job as a lawyer specialising in superhero cases.

The casting is perfect, the tone just right and the stories great fun. We’ve really enjoyed it, right up to the last episode where it got a bit too clever for its own good. Theatrical and movie types talk about the “fourth wall” - an invisible boundary that separates the audience from the performer. She Hulk doesn’t just break the fourth wall, it folds it back on itself. What starts with pieces to camera while driving down the highway ends in a sequence which is one or two layers of “knowing” more than it needed to be. You might like it, I just found it made my brain hurt a bit more than it needed to.

But apart from that everything is splendid and you really should watch it. Another series would be wonderful.

Flu Jab

Went for my flu jab today. I’m not saying it was fun, but it was mostly painless.

Fun and Games at Netgames

Our online gaming group, which was convened in the depths of the pandemic, seems to be lasting beyond covid. We had a hilarious (an hilarious?) time playing netgames this evening. First we had a go at Secret Hitler, which was fun, and then we had a go at Codewords. The implementation is spot on and the games work well, even if you are not in the same room. Worth a look.

Cottingham Puffin

The area has been scattered with Puffins. This is a close up of one near us.

No gardening for me

This is not my garden.

Yet more writing today. Plus feeling guilty about not gardening. But then again, chapter 6 is looking pretty good just now, which has got to be a win.

Use a phone box to save..

Spent a happy evening sat on the sofa playing Yakuza 0 on the Steam Deck while the rest of the family watched Strictly Come Dancing. It took me a while (and a search) to discover that you can only save your game when you are at a phone box…

Steam Deck

It turns out that I don’t just buy cameras when I’m writing. I’ve managed to scrape together enough cash to get myself a Steam Deck. I didn’t really think I wanted one until I saw number one son’s. The idea of playing proper games on a handheld console was rather intoxicating. I hardly ever play games on my PC. They feel too much like work. The only exception to this rule is Microsoft Flight Sim. And that’s not a game. It’s a simulation.

Anyhoo, back to the Steam Deck. I joined the queue for the device a while back and I was very surprised to get to the front so quickly. Number one son had to wait a long time for his and I was digging in for the long haul when I got an email earlier in the week saying mine was ready for shipping.

Up until now my go-to handheld has been the Nintento Switch. The Steam Deck is bigger, but not in a bad way. It doesn’t seem that much heavier than the Switch, but it is definitely more bulky . The screen is very good, with great colours and contrast and the controls are good too. I think the best way to look at it is as a nice game controller with a screen stuck in the middle. There are ventilation holes in the back and the top and a fan which seems inclined to panic. It will be very quiet and then suddenly kick in with a roar for a few seconds and then go back to quiet again. I mainly use it with Bluetooth headphones, so I don’t see this as a problem, although I worry what would happen if I blocked the holes on the back of the device.

The integration with Steam is very impressive, although I prefer the store browsing experience on the desktop. Quite a few of my games are Steam Deck certified and just work. I’ve done no special setting up or anything and I’m getting a great experience right out of the box. The arrival of the deck corresponds with a nice Sega sale, so I’ve picked up a bunch of Yakuza games along with some other classics at very low prices. One of the great things about Steam is that their sales include things you can get at prices that you would never see on a console.

I’ve got the middle configuration of the device which has 256GB of internal storage, although so far I’m putting everything on a 256GB external SD card. More storage would be nice so I’ll be looking at oncoming sales to see what turns up.

There is a really active emulation community around the device which I’d like to get into later, but for now I’m quite happy on the sofa playing Yakuza.

Writing and cameras

I’m not sure why I buy cameras when I’m writing. But I do. They are not very expensive - so far.

Harlow Carr for the win

There is nothing better than sitting in a nice place eating sandwiches in the rain with a couple of people who mean the world to you. Oh, and taking the odd photograph.

Sometimes the wrong bear comes out of the cave

A while back I was talking about creativity and Abba. The composers in the group said that song writing was like a hunter waiting outside a cave for a bear to come out. You just had to hang around until an idea appeared and then make sure that you grab it.

I agree with this way of looking at it. For the last few days I’ve been working Chapter 6 of my book. Then today I discovered that what I’ve actually been working on is Chapter 7. All the content works well, but I’ve got a chapter ahead of myself.

Sometimes it seems that the wrong bear comes out of the cave. Now I’m waiting for the “Chapter 6 bear” to arrive……

Dall-E is now free to use

The Dall-E program is both amazing and scary in equal measure. You give it a text description of a scene “an oil painting of a man using a phone made of cheese” and it makes four versions of a picture like that. See above for one of them.

I have an idea of how it works. Dall-E takes images from the internet along with their text descriptions and puts them into some kind of structure. It then learns enough about the English language to figure out how things can be combined and is then able to parse an English description of a scene in order to….Actually, I’ve not much of an idea how it works. But it does work. And it poses lots of ethical dilemmas.

Who owns the artwork it makes? Does Dall-E respect the copyright of the images that it uses to make the artwork? Does Dall-E reflect the bias in the descriptions of the artwork it imports? What does this say about the role of artists in the creation of artwork? Tricky stuff indeed.

But, from the point of view of a toy to play with, Dall-E is great fun. And you can now use it for free. If you sign up you are able to make a limited number of images, with a few more each month - or you can buy credit for the platform. Just don’t use it to do your art homework.

Need for Speed is cheap on Steam

For the next few days you can pick up Need for Speed - Heat for just three pounds in the Steam store. I’m not sure how good the game is, but I reckon it must be worth at least three pounds.

Disney Dreamlight Valley

If you like Disney and Animal Crossing and you’ve got an Xbox Game Pass, I might just have something interesting for you. Disney Dreamlight Valley turns you loose in a place that is rather like a Disney Themepark on steroids with you the only guest. There are all you favourite characters (although I’ve not found many of them yet) and a rich environment to interact with. Crafting, cooking and collecting are all there. And that’s just the stuff that starts with c….

I’ve not played it for long, but it does look very promising. I really like Animal Crossing but doing errands for Disney characters is rather cool. You can buy the game for lots of platforms and you can sync your achievements in the cloud. You can’t go and meet your friends in their Disney worlds just yet, but that is promised for later on. And if you have Xbox Game Pass you can play it now for free. Well worth a look.

Teenage Engineering Record Factory

This looks fun. It’s a combination vinyl record player (that’s the arm on the right) and record cutter (that’s the arm on the left). It can cut five-inch disks that last three minutes at high speed (45rpm) and four minutes at low speed (33rpm). You feed it audio input via a line-in connection and it cuts a groove in a blank disk that you can then play back on any record player. It’s not a Teenage Engineering design. Search ebay for “record cutting toy” and you’ll find the same thing in a different box.

The sound quality will be horrible, but every recording will be unique and perhaps great fun. I suppose you can think of it as the audio equivalent of the instant pictures that I like playing with, but I’m not going to be getting one unless I become silly rich. And anyway, they seem to have sold out…

Thanks Alex

Alex has been in touch asking if I could write a book for intermediate/advanced JavaScript programmers. Thanks for the kind words Alex. And the good news is that I think I might be working on exactly what you want.

Ethics, Privacy and Security

I’m working on Chapter 6 of Begin to Code Cloud at the moment. I’ve spent a page discussing Ethics (will what we are going to do make people unhappy), privacy (will what we are going to do breach privacy) and security (what might the program be exposed to that could cause it to be compromised).

People might find it strange that these things are going into programming text, but I think they are really important. The section will be in the draft version fairly soon, so keep a look out for it.

Trombone Controller Sensors

I’m supposed to be writing Chapter 6 of Begin to Code Cloud. But I keep been drawn towards designs for a trombone based game controller. Because of this game. I’ve bought a copy and it is hilarious. But I want to play it with something approaching a real trombone. To do that I’ll need a sensor to read the position of the trombone slide. First instinct was to use an ultrasonic distance sensor, so I wired one up and dropped out a bit of code. That’s the device on the top. The problem with this is that as the distances being measured increase the whole thing slows down, what with the time taken for the ultrasonic pulse to go out and bounce back. So I’ve switched to using lasers. The device on the bottom uses a laser-based sensor (which I love) which works very quickly at any distance.

I’m using the sensors from Circuit Python at the moment. I’m going to have to decide whether or not it can go fast enough to get smooth readings. Early tests indicate that it might be OK but the distance readings are a bit noisy. But I think it should work. And now back to chapter 6….