Traction Engine Fun

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The weather wasn’t great when I arrived

Last week at the Hardware Meetup Simon mentioned that he had a friend who had a traction engine. Would I be interested in coming along next time they fire it up. I would. So today I went along to meet up with Rob, who had his machine ready to go when I arrived. I took along a couple of cameras (as you do) and tried to take some pictures. Some of them you will never see, because I left in the dark slide (the bit of the camera that protects the film from pesky outside light). However, the digital shots that I took came out OK. I

I also had a go at steering, then driving, then both at the same time. It was awesome. Thanks very much for inviting me folks.

There are some more pictures on Flickr.

Loading film with my eyes shut

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I spent a chunk of today loading film into holders, ready for some photographic fun tomorrow. This involves putting all the elements into a bag and then shoving my hands through a pair of elasticated cuffs to keep the light out. Then, with my hands in the dark, I open a box of film, take out a sheet, put it into the holder and then close the dark slide. Then I take my hand out of the bag and let light in. Which is stupid. Fortunately I noticed in time and, since the film stays in a light tight bag most of the time, I think/hope I got away with it.

One of the problems that you have when doing all this is that you are working by touch. What you are looking at is irrelevant. I end up staring stupidly into space. Something which I’ve been told I do a lot of without my hands in a bag.

Anyhoo, today I tried something I should have tried a long time back. I closed my eyes. Suddenly everything made a lot more sense, and it was actually easier to load the sheets. I’m going to do this more in the future. There is no picture of of me doing any of this because it would, of course, turn out to be black.

Thunderbirds are Go - ish

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Over the weekend I thought I’d show a young guest the joys of the Thunderbirds TV show. They were suitably impressed (or very polite). However, I wasn’t able to show the higher quality version with the better sound and pictures, even though I remember watching this just after I bought the TV series from Apple TV a few years ago. All that Apple TV serves up now is the original 4:3 version with the mono soundtrack.

I’ve had this before with digital media. An album that I bought will lose tracks, or they will change into different versions. Or a service will vanish leaving me with nothing for the money I spent with them. Such is modern life I suppose. In the meantime I’ve spent thirty quid on a Blu-Ray version of the show. Come the digital apocalypse at least I’ll still be able to watch the adventures of Scott and Virgil and the rest of International Rescue.

Big Malarkey Big Fun

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Hull Makerspace Marble run was a big win

The Big Marlarkey is a Hull special. It’s a literary event for kids aged 0 -16 . Having acquired the entry requirements (three tickets and an 8 year old) we went along today. They had children’s authors, poo presentations, lots and lots of making, book hook a duck, music, VR, museum stuff and a chap selling crepes. Which were wonderful.

They also had Makerspace Hull there to who brought golf tee art, fun with circuits, MicroBit coding and a marble run whiteboard which was splendid. Much fun ensued, although things were slightly derailed when one of the party lost their Lilo and Stitch keyring. But, on enquiring at the organizer’s tent, we discovered that someone had found the item and handed it in. We’ve no idea who did this kind act, but we are eternally grateful to them. They transformed the event from “The one where I lost my keychain” to “The one where I had a great time and saw an amazing presentation from the author of “The Houdini Inheritance” (which I also got a signed copy of)”.

The event was super busy, the weather was great and I think there is a very good chance we will be along again next year.

Analogue Wonderland Big Film Photowalk

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Victoria Dock in Hull

Went on a photowalk today. Never done one before. Tremendous fun. The idea is simple enough. A bunch of folks get together and walk around taking photographs and talking photography (and life in general). To make matters more interesting (and organised) this one was set up by Analogue Wonderland who appointed walk leaders for the various walks around the country and then did a special deal for film and processing. We were walking in Hull with Rob Wharton who gave out maps, film and chat as we wandered around.

Down near the deep. If you are wondering where the water has gone, the tide is out…

The weather was kind, the sky was interesting and the photo opportunities abundant. Including, in The Land of Green Ginger, the “Smallest Window in the World”. Probably. We each had two rolls of Kodak Pro Image 100, giving 72 shots in all. My first film went back to Analogue Wonderland for developing. The second stayed in the camera for finishing off later. If you are wondering how I’ve managed to include some of the walk pictures in this post, I’m using a piece of magic called “posting from the future”.

Hull Marina looking good

Humber Street Street Art

Anyhoo, It was great. We finished off at the Minerva Pub at the water’s edge for a well deserved (we thought) drink. You can see more of my photographs here.

Of Muck Spreaders and Music Boxes

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One of the best parts of the Hardware Meetup is the conversations we have at dinner afterwards. Take last night for example. For some reason the conversation turned to muck spreaders, tractor powered devices which spread, er, fertilizer over fields that it may enrich the land and lead to larger crops. I wondered whether, after you’d finished muck spreading, you actually cleaned your muck spreader, and if so what with?

Anyhoo, an owner of a muck spreader is keen to have a musical chime attached to his tractor that could play a jaunty, ice cream van themed, tune while going about his business spreading other peoples, er, business. He felt that this would add a lot to the occasion and we were inclined to agree. While not actually being that keen to go along and audition the device when in use.

It turns out that musical chime systems that were used on ice cream vans in the last century are quite collectable and fetch good prices on eBay. We took a look at one lot which was selling for a tidy sum for what was just a music box mechanism attached to an amplifier. So we are going to look out for a music box mechanism and some suitable hardware.

So, if you are ever passing by a field and hear distant musical chimes that make you fancy buying a “ninety nine”, accompanied by a truly horrendous whiff, you’ll know that we got it to work…

Nearly Robot Tracking at the Hardware Meetup

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Turns out we don’t need a gantry. Which is nice. Brian brought his tripod, mounted a Pi camera on it and within minutes he was tracking robots in the entire arena. Well, not actually robots. More like bits of paper with Aruco codes on them. At the next meetup we’ll have the codes attached to robots moving around, and hopefully receiving position information.

We had other stuff too including DSP (Digital Signal Processing - I knew that one) hardware, a very impressive retro touch sensitive keyboard from Ross and lots of excellent chat.

The next meetup is in two weeks on the 9th of July. I’m rather looking forward to it.

When in doubt, write a description

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One of the most common causes of programming problems is not knowing exactly what the program needs to do before you start writing the code. You have a vague idea of how it is supposed to work and so you start knocking out statements, thinking you can fill in the detail later.

This is a really bad idea. It doubles the length of time it takes you do do anything, because half way through writing the code you’ll discover that your understanding of the problem is faulty, and you have to either fiddle with what you’ve built, or start again from scratch.

A much better idea is to try to write down a chunk of text which describes what you think the program or module should do. You don’t need to go down to the level of individual statements, just a general idea of what the ins and outs are supposed to be. The act of doing this will force you to think a lot harder about what you are trying to do, and hopefully mean that you will make fewer mistakes when you go to code. I find this useful even (or perhaps especially) because I’ve done a fair amount of coding. The stuff that I write ends up in my diary so that I can refer back to how my code works (which is also super useful).

Tiny Red Telephone

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Derek put me on to this. It’s a tiny red telephone you can build that looks very like the real thing.

This is not Lego, but my goodness it looks like it

It’s a Zuru Max Retro kit. There are a bunch of them for sale in our local Aldi for knock down prices. They also have a tiny computer, ghetto blaster, instant camera, TV and games machine. They also have some rather fetching food and flower models too. They are very close to Lego in every way. The bricks even fit together with Lego bricks (although they lack their heft). The instructions have the same step by step sequence and sometimes hard to see colours. If you want some cheap construction fun they worth a look.

South Yorkshire Aircraft Museum is awesome

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We didn’t really set out to visit South Yorkshire Aircraft Museum, we were really on the way to Doncaster Gaming Market. But we had tickets for the 1:00pm entry and some time to spare so we went along to look at aircraft and helicopters for a while.

They’ve got a lot of stuff under cover, plus a whole bunch of aircraft and helicopters outside.

There are also loads of exhibitions and displays, including an aircraft control room. There’s also lots of material about the blitz and what it was like to go through. Thought provoking stuff and well worth a look.

Playdate Podcasts are awesome (and the console's pretty good too)

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I’ve fancied a Playdate for ages, ever since I played with the number one son’s. It is a tiny games machine with a super sharp black and white screen and the usual buttons and stuff. Plus a crank. You can see it on the right hand side of the picture above. You swing out the handle and, er, crank it. If you’re not sure what I mean by this, all I can say more is that it would be absolutely perfect for a fishing game. It’s about the same size as the top half of a small Gameboy. When you aren’t using it, it turns into a clock - Game-watch style.

It is powered by a meaty Cortex chip with an ESP32 doing the Wi-Fi and whatnot. You can write your own games for it in Lua or C++. It’s made by Panic, who seem to have got themselves into the lovely position of being able to afford to do things for fun, or because they might be interesting. The Playdate is that kind of thing. I don’t think Panic need the Playdate to sell massive numbers for them to keep developing it. They’ll only stop (or hand it off to someone else) when they stop enjoying the ride. Here’s hoping its no time soon.

The way they send out games is interesting. When you buy the Playdate you get a subscription to “Season 1” which arrives in the form of two games a week for 12 weeks. They’ve just released “Season 2”, which costs 39 dollars for another tranche of games.

They make Podcasts about what they are up to. These are impeccably produced and very informative. I think anyone interested in making hardware should listen to their first episode. It does a fantastic job of telling you how making something that works is the easy bit. Making large numbers of them and managing that process is the really difficult stuff. Students of electronics and computing would learn a lot from listening to these. You might too.

Buy the Humber Bridge for six pounds 43 pence

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Landing on it was quite fun. Good thing you can fly through lampposts and wires

Last night I bought the Humber Bridge. All of it. And the colourful cottages on the foreshore. And the old mill too. Then I landed my plane on it. All in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. All for less than seven pounds. It looks really good.

It’s a pity that the traffic doesn’t know about the bridge and insists on driving along the river..

I had a lot of fun flying underneath it and then between the pillars of the tower. Trying to fly inside it was less successful.

I like being able to get out of the plane and take pictures

If you’ve got the game you really should get this too. It is a great replacement for the measly little bridge that comes with the game. Oh, and if you are wondering how you can get hold of pictures you have taken in the game, you can find them in this folder:

C:\Users\yourusername\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.Limitless_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState\Screenshot

Just replace yourusername with, er, your windows username and you should be able to browse the folder containing all your shots.

Olympus Trip 35

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Rabbit’s artists impression….

My Great Aunt Anne had an Olympus Trip 35 back in the 1970’s. She took it all around the world and then, when she got back, we’d take a look at the pictures and slides she’d taken. They were all nicely exposed and usually in focus. I’ve always fancied one myself and six months or so ago one popped up for sale at my local camera shop. It’s in lovely condition and the light meter works fine.

The camera is self powered. The light meter is uses a selenium cell which generates a voltage. the more light, the more volts. This moves a tiny needle on a meter inside the camera which selects between two shutter speeds and then picks the correct aperture setting. All this happens as you press the button down to take a shot. Amazing engineering. The lens is nice and sharp, but you have to make sure to set the distance to the subject before taking a shot. It uses 35mm film. I loaded mine with Kodak Gold 200 which works well.

I took it along when we went to Florida a while back. The snaps all came back in fine form, despite the camera having been through several X-Ray machines on its travels.

I really should learn to hold the camera straight.

Nice and sharo

It’s not a scratch, it’s a radio aerial

Universal studios looking good

A very imposing souvenir shop

All of my pictures came out with the correct exposure and plenty of detail. I had some prints made and these look lovely. If you’ve always fancied having a go with a film camera, but don’t want to break the bank, I can strongly recommend the Olympus Trip 35.

It’s a solid and stylish cameras with an all metal body. It is easy to load and use and the design was produced for many years, so there are lots out there. I’d rate it much more highly than the the few “new” 35mm cameras that you can buy which have cheap plastic lenses and not much going for them. The Olympus is great for street photography and travel stuff. You can put it on a tripod and it also works with an electronic flash. It has a lovely look to it (I think) and should prove reliable. If you can pick one up for around the price of a video game you could do a lot worse.

If you go to buy one, make sure to do the “Red Flag Test” before parting with your cash. Wind on the film, put the lens cap on (or cover the entire lens with your hand) and try to press the shutter button. If the light meter is working it will refuse to let you take a picture, with a red flag appearing in the viewfinder. Then, remove your hand (or take the lens cap off), point the camera at some light and press the button again. This time the shutter should spring into action. If it does, there is a good chance that the light meter is working OK. You can still take pictures if the light meter is broken, but you will have to select the aperture by hand and use the slower, 40th of a second shutter speed all the time.

Film photography is great fun. It was rather nice to get the pictures processed several weeks after we got back. And I love the colours.