It’s in Hull too!!
Woke up this morning to the best of news. My session proposal for DDD North has been accepted. Yay! I’m going to be talking about ChatGPT and how it will change your life. Probably. Registration will be open soon, along with the full programme for the day. Really looking forward to it.
I now have no idea what to do with it….
I spent today fiddling with vertexes, vectors and triangles. Along with the odd sine wave. You can see the result above. I’m actually quite proud of it.
I put my OP-1 up for sale earlier in the week. I’ve now sold it, which is good news because I’ve already bought the camera it is helping to pay for…..
I’ve made a tiny video about the Red Telephone. It was quite fun to make. Perhaps I’ll make a few more now that I’ve cleared the desk……
Just some trees
I was chatting today about student projects. As you do. I was wondering if there should be a period at the start of a project where folks should spend a while just flailing around with stuff. I find that when I’m starting a new project I tend to spend a while trying things and finding that they don’t work. At the time I’m doing this I can get a bit stressed because I don’t seem to be making any progress. However, after a while I find that things start to fit together a bit and some of the things I discovered while I was flailing around turn out to be useful. And other things might end up being used in a totally different context.
I’m now a lot more relaxed about flailing. I see time spent failing as actually useful. Of course flailing is only fun if the pressure level is lower. If the deadline is tomorrow flailing is no fun at all. But, if you manage your time correctly (top tip: always start before when you think you should) then you should be able to factor in a couple of days of flailing. I even suggested that there might be a formal period in a development project for some unstructured flailing around. Maybe flailing could become a thing. Here are my top tips for flailing:
Do it at the very start of the project, not when the deadline is close
Keep a very good log of what you’re doing. If you are using ChatGPT (a useful ally in the flailing process) you can ask it to summarise what you have just done and then you can drop that into your log.
As soon as you find an approach that you think might work, you are allowed to stop flailing and move onto the next phase.
Don’t regard it as a waste of time. It’s not. But if you have flailed for a while and nothing pops up it is best to step back from the project for a while (as long as you have time) and then come back to it.
3D rednering in XAML. Why not?
I’m writing some C# for the first time in a while. And I love it. It’s code I wrote ten years ago, and it seems like yesterday. Visual Studio Code is a great place to work, but Visual Studio 2022 just blows it away for sheer usability. Nothing to load or add - everything you need under your fingertips.
I love writing Python - it’s fun to just write a program and see what it does. JavaScript is amazing in the way that you can use it to create mostly working solutions really, really quickly. And C++ and C are hilarious if you want to tickle hardware directly and don’t mind things suddenly stopping for no reason.
But with C# you feel like you’re using a really well crafted tool to create your code. All of your silly mistakes are caught before it gets to run. The debugging experience in Visual Studio is sublime. And I love building UIs with XAML.
I’m going to have to get back into the C# habit.
It doesn’t look a bit like a murder weapon…
I bought a rubber hammer today. I used to have one, but it must have bounced away somewhere. I’ve got some shelves coming today that you just put together with a rubber hammer and so I thought I’d get one. Perhaps the best 3.50 I’ve spent in a while.
When the shelves arrive I plan to answer the door with the hammer in my hand and say “Aha! At last you’re here. Now I can begin…”
Then again, perhaps not.
You know you want it
I bought my Teenage Engineering OP-1 few years back when I thought I might be a musician. This has turned out not to be the case (through no fault of the device itself). I now think I might be a photographer (so stay tuned for a few years hence when I think I might be something else and start selling all my cameras).
Anyhoo, in a bid to fund my photographic excess I’ve popped my OP-1 on eBay. I’ve hardly used it much (it is like new) and I think the price is reasonable. If I decide I want to get back into music I can always sell a couple of cameras and buy another one. You can find it here.
Really must replace that bulb
I’ve bought another camera. It’s ten years old and wonderful. I had to buy a lens to go with it and I happened across the TTArtisan APS-C 25mm F2. You can get this for the frankly silly price of 69.00 pounds.
My standard test shot came out pretty well too
The lens is metal bodied, immaculately presented and has a metal screw-on lens cap for extra class (although it makes it a bit harder to use). It’s manual focus and aperture, so you’ll have to adjust the settings yourself, but the quality of the output is wonderful. You would have to spend a lot of money to better it.
Vive la France
Went out for a French themed meal this evening. It was really, really, nice. If it was me running the gig I’d have had pictures of the Eiffel Tower everywhere, loud accordion music playing and the servers smoking Gauloises cigarettes and being surly. But they didn’t. Just great food and drink. Which was probably for the best.
Click the image to watch the video….
Got a message from Chris over on YouTube. He’s built my PICO Chord Keyboard design (it worked - phew) and he was wondering if there was a way to stop it appearing as a storage device each time it is plugged in. This is a very useful feature of Circuit Python - it’s how you get the program code onto the device - but it can be irritating, as well as giving folks access to your device that you might not want. I sent a reply and then I thought I’d share it on the blog:
You can stop the device appearing as a usb storage by editing the boot.py file (or adding one if it is not there) on the device. Put the following in there:
import usb_cdc
import board
# Disable USB mass storage
storage.disable_usb_drive()This should stop the device appearing as a file-store. But remember that if you do this it will be tricky to update the code in the device. You'd have to wipe the EEPROM to get your PICO back to a state when you can change the files.
More details here: https://docs.circuitpython.org/en/latest/shared-bindings/storage/index.html
There are some great gadget ideas too
My Hull Pixelbot rugby article is in this month’s HackSpace magazine. It tells you how to add WiFi to your Raspberry Pi PICO powered robot and then control the robot from a web page. And maybe make a rugby team out of them.
And if you pick up a copy of the Raspberry Pi MagPi magazine (also a cracking read) you will find my article on making a haunted red telephone.
I think this camera works
Ages ago I bought a cheap old camera, just to get the lenses that came with it. Then I put a film in the camera just to see if it would work. It didn’t. The the pictures through the viewfinder looked sharp but the finished prints were full of blur. Now that I’m back into photography (in what seems like a big way) I thought I’d see about replacing the dodgy camera; a Canon 650, with another, less dodgy one. So I did. The replacement cost me ten pounds and came with a smart little case. I took it out for a walk today and shot a bunch of pictures.
Can you guess what time this picture was taken
This camera works a treat. It is fully automatic. It focusses, works out the exposure and even winds the film on after each shot. And it seems to be getting it all right too. I was using a “nifty fifty” (a prime lens with a 50mm focal length) that I happened to have lying around for these shots and they came out lovely and sharp. It allows full manual control too, if you want to make your pictures the hard way.
The whole thing brought home just how cheaply you can get into analogue photography. There is nothing wrong with the Canon 650 except hat it is out of fashion. It is very plasticky and a bit of an ugly lump. But that was the fashion in 1987 when it was released. As a first camera I think it would be hard to beat. You’ll have to find a lens for it (search for “canon ef 50mm”) and you will find that they tend to cost a bit more than the camera. However, you should be able to get started for less than the price of a modern video game. And there is always the chance that if you ask around the family someone might confess to having an old camera like this in the back of a wardrobe somewhere.
I’m certainly going to use my 650 quite a bit. While I quite like the process of working out the exposure and getting the focus right, it is rather nice to have a camera just do all that stuff for you every now and then.
Not sure why they make a big deal of “Open & Play”. We’ve been doing that with our games for years..
My Gold Mine is a nice little game. Particularly if you allow nice to mean “Setting up fellow players for a bit of dragon flambé”. The rules are simple enough. Each turn you have to decide whether to head for he exit or pick up some more gold and maybe move towards the dragon (a brave move).
The risk is that if you find yourself occupying the same position as the dragon you end up roasted and out of the round. Some of the moves let you mess with your fellow players, swapping places with them or dragging everyone towards the exit when you’re ahead in the game.
The game plays over three rounds and the tension racks up nicely as you head for the final that will decide the winner. It was great fun and comes strongly recommended. Even though I didn’t win..
The light was really nice this morning
One of the things about old cameras is that they like a bit of exercise. And, with the weight of some of them they give you a bit of exercise too. Ho ho. (With the increasing use of ChatGPT in these hallowed pages I feel I must make it clear that I personally came up with that line). Anyhoo, I loaded the Pentax 67 up with a roll of film and took it round the block today. The good news is that the camera made all the right clunking noises when I pressed the button. I processed the film and the pictures are all in the right place too which is nice (and not guaranteed with this model of camera). You get an awful lot of detail with a big negative, and the perspective of the lens is really nice.
More of these are coming to our area thanks to the wonders of de-regulation…
I didn’t order a brand new Raspberry Pi 5 when it was first announced. I think I managed to buy the earlier versions on release day, but for some reason this time I wasn’t that interested. However, I had a need for a fast Pi recently and so this week I finally got one.
It is really rather good.
When I got the Raspberry Pi 4 I was kind of expecting it to be a viable desktop alternative. After all, that is what some people were saying it was. It wasn’t. Browsing was slow and Visual Studio Code ran too slowly to be properly useful. But the Pi 5 is much more of a contender. Some of this might be down to the amount of memory available, my Pi 5 has 4G of ram which must help things along. I’m using it over VNC and I think I’d be happy enough to work there. Visual Studio Code seems to trundle along quite happily and web pages open instantly.
It is much more expensive than the original Pi. And of course you have to add the cost of the case, power-supply and micro-sd card to the total price. But for the money I reckon you get something pretty impressive and properly useful. And if you want to go back to the days of tiny, cheap Raspberry Pi’s you just have get yourself a Pi Zero.
Not bad for a 20 year old camera
Took the Lumix DMC-LC5 camera for a walk earlier in the week and I’ve only just got round to getting the pictures out of it. The camera was created by Leica and Panasonic, has an amazing lens and a tiny (by modern standards) sensor. However it is particularly good with some colours, particularly red.
The water levels are quite high at the moment
I must get into the habit of taking these old devices out every now and then. They are quite fun.
It was a quiet meetup on Wednesday this week. Just three of us chatting about 3D printers, life and the universe. It’s always fun to go down to Hull Makerspace and see what people are doing. If you fancy joining us the next one is on Wednesday 7th of February when we will be doing some Robot Rugby. Come along and pick a side. We’ll be starting at around 5:30 pm and going on until around 7:00 pm in Hull Makerspace in the Central Library in Hull.
Hey there, Raspberry Pi enthusiasts! Are you tired of summoning sudo every time you need to commune with your Pico debug probe? Fear not! Today, we're delving into a nifty trick to make your Pico probe obedient without the superuser incantations. And for those of you using Visual Studio Code, this trick is a game-changer.
Summoning sudo for debugging is like wearing a full suit to a casual brunch; it's overkill and can be risky. Moreover, when you're using elegant tools like Visual Studio Code, running the debugger as a superuser inside the tool is a bit tricky. Let's simplify this, shall we?
In the Linux realm, udev rules are like spells that control how the system interacts with various devices. By crafting a specific udev rule, we can grant ourselves permission to access the Pico debug probe without escalating our privileges to the superuser level.
Most Pico debug probes share the same Vendor and Product IDs, so we can usually use a standard rule for all. Here's how to do it:
The Magic Numbers: For the Pico debug probe, the typical IDs are: Vendor ID 2e8a and Product ID 000c. We'll use these in our rule.
Creating Your Rule: Head over to /etc/udev/rules.d/ and conjure a new file called 99-pico-debug-probe.rules Sprinkle the following line into it:
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="2e8a", ATTRS{idProduct}=="000c", MODE="0666"This incantation essentially tells your system, "Hey, let everyone read and write to this device, will you?"
Enforcing the Rule: To make the rule take effect, use this spell:
sudo udevadm control --reload-rules && sudo udevadm triggerGot a different device? No problem! Plug it in, run lsusb, and look for the ID format VendorID:ProductID. Use these values to create a custom rule.
Your new rule is like a loyal house-elf, diligently working after every reboot, ensuring smooth, sudo-free access to your debug probe.
And there you have it! A simple yet elegant solution to make your debugging sessions with Raspberry Pi Pico as smooth as butter. No more sudo, no more hassle, especially when you're working in sophisticated environments like Visual Studio Code.
Happy debugging, and may your code be bug-free!
Author’s note: I didn’t write this. ChatGPT did. I worked with ChatGPT to solve my problem and then asked it to write a blog post about the solution “In the style of Rob Miles”. I’m quite proud of this, although I didn’t do much of the work….
I’ve signed up for a ChatGPT subscription. It’s become very useful and I want to see what else it can do. Just for giggles I’ve created a GPT from the text of the C# Yellow Book. You can ask it questions about the text and it seems to give quite sensible answers. I’ve made it public and you should be able to find it here.
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.
Begin to Code with JavaScript is now available for purchase and download. You can find it here
