Meter Readings

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I lost my lovely little Polaroid Meter. I managed to convince myself that I’d left it in my room when on holiday. So I bought another one. Fortunately it was not terribly expensive. Unfortunately it didn’t work. They must have been using a much more liberal definition of “tested and working” than I do. Anyhoo, the good news is that I then (of course) found the original one in a place I hadn’t thought of looking. Truly, the best way to find a missing item is to buy a replacement (whether the replacement works or not).

Trip to York

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Went to York today. The weather was lovely (for a change) and the loveliness lasted all day (for a bigger change). On a whim we booked a couple of tickets for The National Railway Museum. You don’t need to pay to get in, but you do need to book. The museum is one of my favourite places in the world, and fortunately I had a camera and a couple of lenses with me.

The place was busy, but it is also huge, so that the crowd was swallowed up. They have a kind of storeroom off to one side full of amazing stuff. One of the exhibition halls is closed at the moment, but we had plenty to look at. And I’m definitely going back there first chance I get.

Canon Selphy 4000 for Cheap Colour Printing

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Selphy Portrait (sorry)

After having watched a video of someone using a portable printer at an expo and producing large, high quality colour prints to order for the folks there I thought I’d investigate the possibility of obtaining a cheap printer to maybe put in a box. Instant camera pictures are all very well, but they are a bit variable in quality, expensive and hard to duplicate. I had a look on “the world’s favourite on-line auction site” and found that I could pick up a used Canon Selphy 4000 for well less than 20 quids. A bit of research convinced me that I could drive it from a Raspberry Pi Zero and even make it into an Apple Airprint device if required. So I bought one.

It arrived today. For giggles I checked to see if there was a Windows 10 driver for it. There wasn’t (boo) but it turns out that the Windows Vista 64 bit drivers you can find here worked fine with my copy of Windows 10 (yay!). The printer I got even had some ribbon and paper with it. The image above doesn’t really do the printer justice. The printed picture is vibrant and really nice to look at. You can get Canon branded film packs delivering 36 images for around 12 quid from Cartridge People. They even sent me a free deck of cards with my first order. Next step is to start designing a case to carry everything around in.

Whitby Steam Rally

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Just a few of the engines on display

There are some things we do every year. And one of them is the Whitby Steam Rally. Last year the weather wasn’t great. This year the weather was awesome. Blue skys and bright sunshine.

The chap wouldn’t describe how the tap is suspended over the liquid…

They had all the usual things, including a bunch of static engines pumping water and lighting lamps.

The beach was super busy.

What with all this, and a great lunch at the Magpie a great day was had by all.

Taking Phoenix Photos at Harlow Carr

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Today we went to one of my favourite places in all the world. Harlow Carr. The weather was fantastic and I was using the new Phoenix film. I didn’t have much success last time I tried it, but this time I was going to make sure that I gave it plenty of light. I’m not unhappy with the results.

There is plenty of grain, but the pictures are also pretty sharp and the colours really jump out. If you fancy something different (and you are going somewhere with plenty of light) it is worth a look. I took a bunch of pictures of people (which are not the kind of things I ever put on the interwebs) and they came out really well.

Rock Band Lives

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Just for fun we got our Rock Band setup down from the loft. I was surprised (and pleased) to discover that most of it works. I was even more pleased to discover that you can run Rock Band on a PlayStation 5 and it works too. We’ve also tried some of the original games on a PlayStation 3. You can also buy DLC for the game, including some tracks by Steely Dan, which is awesome.

The only problem we had was with one of the guitars. The strummy thing (to use it’s technical name) only worked in one direction. We’ve traced the problem to a reed switch in the guitar which is not firing when a magnet is moved close to it. I’ve ordered some reed switches and we might have a go at fixing it. I’m super impressed with the design and construction of the guitar itself. It is amazing that they could make and sell such a complicated piece of kit for such a low price.

If you have the kit in the loft and a PS5 I’d strongly suggest that you get it down and have a go. The game itself is now very cheap to buy and comes with lots of rock classics.

Taking a Leaky Camera to the Humber Bridge

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We took the Light Leak camera to the Humber Bridge today and took some leaky pictures. The one at the top shows the original shot with no leaks. The one in the middle has “benefitted” from a single pixel yellow light leak. The one at the bottom got a blue light leak from the entire pixel row.

I’m very pleased how these have come out. I need to work a bit on the level of the light. It turns out that colours which use more than one led are much brighter (who knew?).

Don't touch that button!

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This is what the Rabbit thought of our TV while we watched the Olympics opening ceremony

Made a little menu system for the leaky camera system today. It lets you bind Python methods to button presses and seems to work quite well. I’m using the lovely Pico Display from Pimoroni. I’ve got one of the very original ones, which doesn’t seem to work with their current Button code. It took me a while to discover this, what with my policy of always assuming that if something doesn’t work it is my fault. Anyhoo, it now works and will be going on GitHub soon.

Microsoft Experience Centre

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It would have been so cool if this had been what you could buy

Today we had to head home, but before we got on the train we took a look in a few places, including the Microsoft Experience Centre on Regent Street. If you are ever in that part of town it is worth a look. They have all the new Microsoft machines on show (including the latest laptops and tablets with CoPilot) and upstairs they have a lovely gaming display including the original X-Box which was unveiled when the console was announced. This is interesting because it really is a giant X (see above). We had a look around the back and it has all the connections so, in theory it should be possible to plug it in and play it. They had lots of other XBoxes too plus a range of games and accessories.

Taking a Rabbit to the Formula E Finals

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this is about the best I could do on the day. Turns out that racing cars are hard to photograph

Formula E is a bit like Formula 1, except that the cars are powered by electricity and sound a bit like turbocharged hair driers. We went to the final event of the season in London today. We watched the practice, the qualifier and finally the race. In between these we wandered around looking at stands in the exhibition attached to the race, watched a mini-concert from Craig David and generally had an all-out wonderful time. I took a camera and the Rabbit R1.

I took a bunch of pictures with a proper camera, and lots with the Rabbit R1. I was lucky because for some reason we had good mobile phone connections and the Rabbit was able to take the shots and do “Magic Camera” type things with them. I really like the results. They are not photographs in the proper sense of the word, but they provide a lovely record of the event and I’m very pleased to have them. And if you bear in mind that a Rabbit R1 is a fraction of the price of a new camera lens I reckon it is a good investment if you want a quirky record of what you’ve been up to.

This is what the rabbit thought of the race

Some of the racing got quite intimate

A “Rabbit’s Eye View” of one of the cars on display

The Racers

Yes, there was a Costa

Tyre smoke at the start

From now on I’m going to be taking the Rabbit R1 with me to get its unique perspective.

Hyper Japan is Awesome

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This is what the Rabbit made of it

This is slightly more conventional

Today we were up early and heading for Hyper Japan, a celebration of all things Japanese. It was wonderful. Stalls with video games, figures, clothing, and all kinds of other stuff. We had a walk around, had a great lunch (a first time with squid for me) and then had another walk around. There was some splendid cosplay and loads of stands. Plus cars. I took a few pictures

Of course there was bonsai

Nice Car

Not sure what these are, but they sure are cute