Mini Brands Vinyl Records Tag Reader

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The record player is really cute and yes, the records do rotate.

The Mini Brands Really Works Vinyl Playset Series 1 by ZURU plays "records" which contain an RFID tag that triggers sound samples held in the player. It is rather fun. I wondered if I could read the tags and identify the records using a PICO. Turns out that I can. I’ve created a tiny MicroPython program that talks to an MRFC522 card reader and prints out the tag number and track details of each record that you show it. You can find the code here.

AI has got me learning the saxophone

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The ease with which you can get something working using AI has come as a bit of shock to me. Worse still, the solutions it comes up with (and the conversations you can have with it) seem to indicate that it “knows” what it is doing and the code it writes is actually pretty good. Every now and then I catch it out, which is pleasing, but I’m sure that each time this happens something is written down in ledger somewhere and the mistake will not be repeated…..

As someone who spent a lifetime learning how to put solutions together, this is a bit worrying. I’m not sure anyone can do what I do without some of my skills, but I’m going to have to ditch a whole bunch of coding smarts I’ve spent years acquiring and instead spend my time specifying and analysing code and then discussing it with a machine. Ho hum. It was ever thus I suppose. My intimate knowledge of the George III operating system turned out to have a finite shelf life too.

Anyhoo, as a partial antidote to all this I’ve started learning to play the saxophone. AI can learn lots of things, but it is going to be a long time before it can come up with an embouchure like mine….

Ghosts Movie is worth the trip

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Rather than stand out in the cold watching my money go up in flames (which is how I’ve spent quite a few November the Fifths over the years) we thought we’d go and see a move. We saw “Ghosts: the Possession of Button House”. Very enjoyable. If you’ve seen the TV show and know the characters you’ll really enjoy it. And if you haven’t seen the show don’t worry. Everything is nicely explained and when you go home you’ve got the TV shows to look forward too. Good fun.

Download everything at the Hardware Meetup

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I’m not sure why it does this, or how it knows, but for the first half an hour of the hardware meetup this week I was unable to do anything much because the laptop was busy downloading updates and updating its search index. It’s as if it goes “I’m away from home and using a mobile for my network connection. This is the perfect time to get busy”. Oh well, a good time was had in spite of me not being able to do much. The next meetup will be on Wednesday 18th of November. I’ll plug the laptop in at home for a few hours before I head out to it.

We are still not in Kansas

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AI unreality continues. One of my favourite cameras has decidedly dodgy batteries. You can’t get them any more, so I thought I’d have a go at making my own. This might not actually come to anything, I was interested to see how ChatGPT would get on converting photos into 3D designs.

So, I took a bunch of pictures against a ruled background and then had a bit of to and froing with measurements and hints. After about 20 minutes we came up with the design you can see above, which I 3D printed. It looks like it will fit into the slot in the camera.

This is the design it came up with

I want to stress that I didn’t use any kind of 3D scanner to make this. I did give ChatGPT some measurements and told it that the slot near the contacts was a slot not a bump. But it did everything else. So we are now in a world where you can create a duplicate of a 3D object with nothing more than a camera and some paper with lines on. Strange times indeed.

Instax film holders now on Thingiverse

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I was chatting yesterday about the Instax film holders I made a while back and I realised I’d not got around to putting them on Thingiverse, which is where I put my 3D designs. Anyhoo, I’ve fixed that. You can find them here. They let you use Instax Wide instant film in old cameras made for glass slide film. They are a bit of a faff to use. You have to take sheets out of the Instax film cartridge and put them into the holder and then, after exposure, put the sheets back in the holder to be developed in an Instax camera. A lot of work, but the pictures (and the way that you are using a machine from the century before last) makes up for this. You can also find more details of the holders on GitHub here.

Ducks in colour and black and white…

Busy Busy

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Me: “So much to do, so little time…
FX: Knock on the door and door opening
Harry: “Hi, I’m Harry the handyman”.
Me: “Great. Can you fix the broken door handle?”
Harry: “Nope”
Me: “Can you fix the puncture in the car tyre?”
Harry: “Nope”
Me: “Can you fix the outside light?”
Harry: “Nope”
Me: “So what makes you think you’re so handy?”
Harry: “Well, I only live round the corner…..”

Actually, I did manage to fix all these today. So no need for Harry.

1000 things you never thought you'd see in a Rob Miles Blog - Number one - Saxophone music

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I’m starting a new blogging theme. Things you might not expect to see here. I’ll not post them very often (in fact I’ll probably forget and never post another one) but anyhoo, here’s the first one.

If you happen to be learning the saxophone. And have a friend who is also learning the saxophone, here are some practice tunes, complete with fingering.

Go and see Wildwood

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Wildwood is the best film I’ve seen this year. It is also one of the best films I’ve ever seen. It looks like a labour of love. In fact, considering the time and patience that it will have taken to make, it must have been.

Most animated films last around 90 minutes, sometimes less, because of the sheer amount of effort it takes to make them. Wildwood gives you nearly two and a quarter hours of breath-taking quality. The story is excellent, the characters are beautifully voiced and the animation - that is incredible. It’s a fairy story at heart. But with some very sharp edges.

Anyone expecting happy ever after and tales of wonderful magic will have those ideas knocked out of them right at the start, with a gripping opening sequence that sets up a story that has a happy ending, but not for everyone.

Very young kids won’t like it. Slightly older kids will love it. I really hope it does well. Artistry at this level deserves all the support it can get. And it also makes you want to go and see Portland USA. Strongly recommended.

Floppy Watch

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The “hour went” last night. Clocks were moved one hour back to make the mornings brighter. This was too much for my comparatively new Apple watch, which seemed to be having trouble working out what the time was. Perhaps they’ve put the AI in charge of timekeeping.

Agent Avenue is a wonderful game

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Went from zero to one of my favourite games today. Agent Avenue is a two player game where you recruit agents that let you move around the board loop and chase your opponent. Different agents let you move different distances each time you play them, and before a move one of the players has to choose between two possible recruits that their opponent has picked for them. One recruit is in plain sight, the other hidden. And the opponent gets the other one. Strategy and bluff abound. Do you show the card you want? Or do you hide it? Can you get the opponent to recruit a saboteur who will send them backwards? Or do you take a chance and use the daredevil who brings with him the chance of sudden death? Great fun.

We are not in Kansas any more

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Take a look at the two screenshots above. They show my Thingmaker program editing a cyberdeck design. The top one is the Python program that Claude and I (mostly Claude) have been writing over the last week. Below it is the JavaScript version. I created it yesterday morning before coffee. All I had to do was point Claude at the folder containing the Python version and ask it to implement all the same behaviours using NodeJS and JavaScript. It asked a few clarifying questions, and half an hour later I had a fully working clone of the original. It reads and writes the same design files and provides exactly the same user interface, even down to the colours of user interface elements and the behaviour of the image processing.

I like to think that I could have performed the conversion myself. On the plus side, I’d have learned a lot about how JavaScript graphics primitives map onto Python, and how the user interface is built, On the negative side I’d have lost a few weeks doing it. We are now in an age where “whim coding” is a thing. I only did the conversion because I had some effort left on my Claude subscription for the week and I didn’t want to waste it. Projects that nobody would have had a go at are now within reach as long as you can properly explain what you want.

Programming is no longer about making a program that works. It is about describing your requirements and understanding what you get back from the system that built it.

Custard Cream Server in Raspberry Pi Magazine

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To read more you’ll have to buy the magazine….

The latest edition of the Raspberry Pi magazine is now out. It’s got an article about the Custard Cream Server which is well worth a read. I think. It’s worth taking a look at the subscriptions section at the bottom of the magazine page. They have some rather enticing download options, including one where you get free copies sent to your inbox.