Planet Acorn

With some money I had left in my PayPal account, I decided to buy one of the EasyFlash programmable cartridges for the Commodore 64 from Sinchai.de

EasyFlash is a cartridge for the C64 expansion port. In contrast to traditional cartridges, this one can be programmed directly from the C64

.

You can easily create various classic computer game cartridges, program collections or even a diagnostic cartridge to track down issues with your hardware with it. All what you need to do this is a C64, an EasyFlash, the software available here and an image of the cartridge (*.crt). As these CRT files may be quite large, a large disk drive like the FD-2000 or an sd2iec may be useful. For smaller drives EasySplit can be used to compress and split large cartridge images.

EasyFlash is not a freezer cartridge like the Final Cartridge III or the Retro Replay. And it’s no replacement for a 1541 disk drive like the sd2iec.

In the package, you receive the following parts.

As you can see, the PCB is professionally made.

45 minutes later, the board was fully assembled.

Once the board was made, I plugged it into my C64 and it worked! Once I had a quick play, I thought it would be wise to put the EasyFlash into a case. In my box’o'junk, I had a dead Simon’s Basic cartridge. I took out the faulty PCB, marked where I needed to cut out holes for the cartridge enable switch, reset button and activity LED and got hacking away.

Here is the finished result.

I have uploaded some high resolution photos to Flickr : EasyFlash 1.5 Photos

Come back soon to see this cartridge in action!

If I wasn't so stupid, I’d have realised you could add gate weave to my animations in Synfig Studio without the need for any coding whatsoever.

Here’s an example:


You simply need to add a translate layer to your animation. The translate layer is used to move things around the canvas. Here’s one in my layers panel:

Translate layer in layers panel

The translate layer should be at the top, so everything in your animation will weave (Z Depth 0.000000).

Next, you need to convert the Translate layer's Origin into a Composite. That means the X-axis and Y-axis values are separated instead of being a vector.

You then convert the X-axis and Y-axis values to Random. Put in some suitable values, such as these:

Example X and Y axis values

Export the resulting animation as video and that’s all there is to it.

The North’s Premier RISC OS Show is now in its 17th year.

When : 28th April 2010. 10:30 until 16:30
Where : The Cedar Court Hotel, Denby Dale Road, Calder Grove, Wakefield, West Yorkshire, WF4 3QZ

More information on the official website here.

Back in July, I wrote about some of the techniques I used to simulate old 16mm film entirely using free software.

One technique I mentioned was using Kdenlive to simulate gate weave – that strangely pleasing effect whereby picture moves almost imperceptibly around the screen as you watch. If you’re not familiar with what gate weave looks like, here’s an example:


I mentioned in my previous article that I discovered I could simulate gate weave manually using the Kdenlive “Pan and Zoom” filter.

I did this by zooming in on my video slightly…

Video resized by 108% to zoom in on it slightly

…and then moving the picture around randomly at 5 frame intervals.

Keyframes added a five frame intervals; X and Y changed randomly

Once this is done, I could save this portion gate weave as a custom effect so I could re-use it:

Save effect button in Kdenlive

 
When you do this, your zoom, keyframes and random movements are stored in the ~/.kde/share/apps/kdenlive/effects folder as an XML file. The XML file created by Kdenlive for some manually created gate weave looks like this:

<effect tag="affine" type="custom" id="test">
<name>test</name>
<description>Adjust size and position of clip</description>
<author>Charles Yates</author>
 <parameter opacity="false" 
    default="0%,0%:100%x100%" 
    type="geometry" 
    value="-29,-23:778x622:100;
      25=-30,-25:778x622:100;
      50=-29,-22:778x622:100;
      75=-31,-24:778x622:100;
      100=-28,-24:778x622:100;
      123=-31,-21:778x622:100" 
    name="transition.geometry">
  <name>Rectangle</name>
 </parameter>
</effect>

Obviously, creating gate weave by hand for a long piece of video using the Kdenlive interface would take hours. Luckily, because the resulting gate weave custom effect is stored as a simple XML file, you can write a quick script to create the gate weave instead.

So I thought I'd use this post show you the script I use to create “automatic” gate weave.

When I do scripting jobs I prefer to use Python if possible. For this task I needed to get it to write out an XML file. Python comes with a selection of  complex but hugely flexible ways to do this. However, to make this as quick and easy as possible, I used a lovely Python module called pyfo which was developed by Luke Arno and did everything I needed.

Although you can install pyfo if you want to, there’s no need; you can just extract the pyfo.py file and put it in the same folder as your Python scripts that use it.

As you can see below, my Python script is pretty self-explanatory. The script below is suitable for adding gate weave to PAL 4:3 video.

The variable value_string determines how much the video is zoomed in by initially. For wide-screen PAL 16:9 video I adjust this value to "-29,-23:1034x622:100;". The value of the step_value variable determines how often the video frame moves. I think every 5 frames often works best.

You can run the script multiple times to create different xml files, but if you do remember that you will need to change the value of the custom_effect_name variable each time to something different so you’ll be able to tell your gate weave custom effects apart.

#!/usr/bin/env python2.4

""" This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
    it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
    the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
    (at your option) any later version.

    This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
    but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
    GNU General Public License for more details.

    You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
    along with this program.  If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/."""

import random
from pyfo import pyfo

custom_effect_name = "weave"

#Number of seconds of gate weave required
frames_required = 750

#Initial value of frame
value_string = "-29,-23:778x622:100;"

#Origin
origin = {'x':-29, 'y':-23}

#Step value (in frames)
step_value = 5

#Maximum weave distances
max_distance = {'x': 1, 'y': 1}

for i in range(0, frames_required, step_value):
    x = random.randrange(origin['x'] - max_distance['x'],
            origin['x'] + max_distance['x'] + 1)
    y = random.randrange(origin['y'] - max_distance['y'], 
            origin['y'] + max_distance['y'] + 1)
    value_string += str(i) + "=" + str(x) + "," + str(y) + ":778x622:100;"

xml_output = \
    ('effect', [
    ('name', custom_effect_name),
    ('description', 'Adjust size and position of clip'),
    ('author', 'Charles Yates'),
    ('parameter', ('name', 'Rectangle'),
    {'opacity':'false', 'default':'0%,0%:100%x100%', 
    'type':'geometry', 'value':value_string, 'name':'transition.geometry'}),
    ], {'id':custom_effect_name, 'type':'custom', 'tag':'affine'})

result = pyfo(xml_output, pretty=True, prolog=False, encoding='ascii')
print result.encode('ascii', 'xmlcharrefreplace')

As it is, my Python script writes the XML file it produces to the console window. You can copy and paste the resulting XML into a blank text file and save it to ~/.kde/share/apps/kdenlive/effects folder,

However, you can pipe the output into straight into an XML file instead. For instance:

$ python gateweave.py > gateweave.xml

Obviously, my Gate Weave solution isn’t very elegant, but who cares – it works, and it’s all free software!

If you’ve read my blog before, you may have come across some posts about my friend Roddy Buxton. Roddy is an incredibly inventive chap – he’s rather like Wallace and Grommit rolled into one! He has his own blog these days and I find everything on it fascinating.


One of the subjects recently covered on Roddy’s blog is the home-made telecine machine he built. The telecine was a device invented by John Logie-Baird at the very dawn of broadcasting (he began work on telecine back in the 1920s) for transferring pictures from film to television.

Roddy also shares my love of everything ATV, so naturally one of the first films Roddy used to demonstrate his telecine was a 16mm film copy of the ATV Today title sequence from 1976.

This title sequence was used from 1976-1979 and proved so iconic (no doubt helped immeasurably by the rather forgetful young lady who forgot to put her dress on) it is often used to herald items about ATV on ITV Central News. Sadly, as you can see below, the sequence was not created in widescreen so it usually looks pretty odd when it’s shown these days.


The quality of Roddy’s transfer was so good I thought it really lent itself to creating a genuine widescreen version. In addition, this would provide me with a perfect opportunity to learn some more about animating using the free software animation tool Synfig Studio.

The first thing to do when attempting an animation like this is to watch the source video frame by frame and jot down a list of key-frames – the frames where something starts or stops happening. I use a piece of free software called Avidemux to play video frame by frame. Avidemux is like a Swiss Army knife for video and I find it handy for all sorts of things.


I write key-frame lists in text file that I keep with all the other files for a project. I used to jot the key frames down on a pad, but I’ve found using a text file has two important advantages: it’s neater and I can always find it! Here is my key frame list in Gedit, which is my favourite text editor:


After I have my key-frame list I then do any experimenting I need to do if there are any parts of the sequence I’m not sure how to achieve. It’s always good to do this before you start a lot of work on graphics or animation so that you don’t waste a lot of time creating things you can’t eventually use.

The ATV Today title sequence is mostly straightforward, as it uses techniques I’ve already used in the Spotlight South-West titles I created last year. However one thing I was not too sure about was how to key video onto the finished sequence.

Usually, when I have to create video keyed onto animation I cheat. Instead of keying, I make “cut-outs” (transparent areas) in my animation. I then export my animation as a PNG32 image sequence and play any video I need underneath it. This gives a perfect, fringeless key and was the technique I used for my News At One title sequence.

However, with this title sequence things were a bit trickier – I needed two key colours, as the titles often contained two completely different video sequences keyed onto it at the same time.


Therefore I had to use chromakeying in Kdenlive using the “Blue Screen” filter, something I had never had a lot of success with before.

The first part was simple – I couldn’t key two different video sequences onto two different coloured keys at once in Kdenlive. Therefore I had to key the first colour, export the video losslessly (so I would get no compression artefacts), then key the second colour.

The harder part was making the key look smooth. Digital keying is an all or nothing affair, so what you key tends to have horrible pixellated edges.


The solution to this problem was obvious, so it took me quite a while to hit upon it! The ATV Today title sequence is standard definition PAL Widescreen. However, if I export my animation at 1080p HD and do my keys at HD they will have much nicer rounded edges as the pixels are “smaller”. I can then downscale my video to standard definition when I’ve done my keying and get the rounded effect I was after.


The other thing I found is that keying in Kdenlive is very, very sensitive. I had to do lots of test renders on short sections as there was only one “Variance” setting (on a scale between 1 and 100) that was exactly right for each colour.

So now I was convinced I could actually produce the sequence, it was time to start drawing. I created all of my images for the sequence in Inkscape, which is a free software vector graphic tool based around the SVG standard.

However, in order to produce images in Inkscape I needed to take source images from the original video to trace over. I used Avidemux to do this. The slit masks that the film sequences are keyed on to are about four screens wide, so once I had exported all the images I was interested in I needed to stitch them together in the free software image editor The GIMP. Here is an example, picked totally at random:

Back in Inkscape I realised that the sequence was based around twenty stripes, so the first thing I did before I created all the slit mask images was created guides for each stripe:


The stripes were simply rounded rectangles that I drew in Inkscape. It didn't take long to trace all of the slit masks for the title sequence. Two of the masks were repeated, which meant that I didn’t have as many graphics to create as I was fearing.

Once the slit masks were out of the way I could create the smaller items such as the logo:


And, with that, all the Inkscape drawing was done. It was time to animate my drawings now, so I needed to export my Inkscape drawings into Synfig Studio. To do this I was able to use nikitakit’s fantastic new Synfig Studio SIF file Exporter plug-in for Inkscape. This does a fabulous job of enabling Inkscape artwork to be used in Synfig Studio, and it will soon be included as standard in Inkscape releases.

When I did my Spotlight title sequence I exported (saved) all of my encapsulated canvases (akin to Symbols in Flash) that I needed to reuse within my main Synfig file. This was probably because I came to Synfig from Macromedia Flash and was used to the idea of having a large file containing all the library symbols it used internally.

I have been playing with Synfig Studio a lot more since then, and I realised a far more sensible way to work was to have each of what would have been my library symbols in Flash saved as separate Synfig files. Therefore I created eight separate Synfig Studio files for each part of the sequence and created a master file that imports them all and is used to render out the finished sequence.


This meant that my finished sequence was made up of nine very simple Synfig animation files instead of one large and complicated one.

The animation itself mainly consisted of simply animating my Inkscape slit masks across the stage using linear interpolation (i.e. a regular speed of movement).

I could type my key-frames from my key-frame text file directly into the Synfig Studio key-frame list:


The glow was added to the ATV Today logo using a “Fast Gaussian Blur”, and the colour was changed using the “Colour Correct” layer effect – exactly the same techniques I used in the Spotlight South-West titles.


In order to improve the rendering speed I made sure I changed the “Amount” (visibility) of anything that was not on the stage at the present time to 0 so the renderer wouldn't bother trying to render. You do this using Constant interpolation so that the value is either 0 or 1.

I had a couple of very minor problems with Synfig when I was working on this animation. One thing that confused me sometimes was the misalignment of key-frame symbol between the Properties panel and the Timeline.


As you can see above, the misalignment gets greater the further down the “Properties Panel” something appears. This makes it quite hard at times to work out what is being animated.


Another problem I had was that the key-frame panel shows strange values in the time of length columns - particularly if you forget to set your project to 25 frames per second at the outset.

However, overall I think Synfig Studio did brilliantly, and I would chose it over Flash if I had to create this sequence again and could choose any program to create it in.

The most important technical benefit of Synfig Studio for this job was the fact that it uses floating point precision for colour, so the glows on the ATV Today logo look far better than they would have done in Flash as the colour values would not be prematurely rounded before the final render.

I rendered out my Synfig Studio animation as video via ffmpeg using the HuffyUV lossless codec, and then I was ready to move onto Kdenlive and do the keying.

Obviously I needed some “film sequences” to key into the titles, but I only have a small selection of videos as I don't have a video camera. To capture video I use my Canon Ixus 65, which records MJPEG video at 640 x 480 resolution at 30fps.


Bizarrely, when the progressive nature of its output is coupled with the fact it produces quite noisy pictures, I’ve found this makes it a perfect digital substitute for 16mm film camera!

I “filmised” all the keyed inserts, so that when they appear in the sequence they will have been filmised twice. Hopefully, this means I’ll get something like the degradation in quality you get when a film is then transferred to another film using an optical printer.

Once the keying was done the finished sequence was filmised entirely using Kdenlive using techniques I've already discussed here.

And so, here’s the finished sequence:


Although I’m not happy about the selection of clips I’ve used, I’m delighted with the actual animation itself. I’m also very pleased that I’ve completed another project entirely using free software. However, I think the final word should go to Roddy:

Thanks for the link. I had a bit of a lump in my throat, seeing those titles scrolling across, hearing the music, while munching on my Chicken and Chips Tea… blimey, I was expecting Crossroads to come on just after!

If you are interested in ATV, then why not buy yourself a copy of the documentary From ATV Land in Colour? Three years in the making, over four hours in duration, its contains extensive footage (some not seen for nearly fifty years) and over eleven hours of specially shot interviews edited into two DVDs.

F1 fans who follow the many pundits on Twitter may have come across Lewis Hamilton’s ‘Spring Layers’ shoot for GQ, where the Formula 1 Championship driver poses in various (some may say ill-advised) outfits.

It was only a matter of time, but the photoshoppers have started: take a look here. My favourite is the knife-throwing one…

The other night I was discussing an impending album release from a local band: as is invariably the case with skint unsigned acts the CDs would be duplicated by the band themselves and sold at gigs. I was offered a sample CD to take home but with the caveat “but it’ll still change”. A bit of discussion ensued and we came to the conclusion that left unchecked their album would keep on changing, evolving, and effectively no two batches produced would the same: comments from listeners such as ‘oh the drums are a bit loud’ might result in a balance change, or ‘that cowbell doesn’t fit there’ could mean an arrangement alteration. Put simply: there would never be a ‘final version’, even after the album launch gig, and it would be a perpetual ‘demo’.

Now, I am a firm believer of a release being ‘a point in time’ for an act, a snapshot if you will. When you bite the bullet and submit your track to get an ISRC (basically a barcode) you need to submit the exact track you are releasing, and when you have physical media duplicated then that’s where you draw the line: a hundred copies are etched and that’s it, no going back, no ‘tweaks’. Effectively you as a band or act are forced to draw that big black line on the mix, warts and all – that’s what separates the demo from the release.

Yet with home manufacturing it’s all too easy for a band to change things after-the-event, and it does a great disservice to the people who have been to (say) your launch party and bought a copy. Many new performers and young acts are too impatient to release their new tracks, so version-upon-version is published to Soundcloud (or whatever music-site-du-jour) spoiling the impact. As a band/act you’ll never be completely happy with something because after all your tastes evolve and your hearing changes, but that’s no reason to rewrite history.

There are some wonderful examples of ‘slightly broken’ performances out there – off the top of my head Minnie Riperton, David Bowie, The Beatles, Barry Manilow and even Scott Joplin have recorded imperfect versions which have a charm to them. Many of those would have been lost had it been easy to ‘evolve’ a track and I think we’d have been worse off for it.

As an extreme case I can cite an artiste whose second album consisted 40% of slightly reworked/reproduced versions of tracks from her first album. Her third album was 50% reworked/revised tracks from her first and second albums. Goodness knows what the fourth contained but I’ve stopped buying her albums now – I might as well wait for the seventh or eighth so I can hear some new work.

Mind, I’ve not been exempt from this in continued adventures with Obvious Pseudonym: 18 months ago we released The Six Noises EP, then a week after I’d the master copies had been dispatched I tweaked it into a ‘Special Edition’ version correcting lots of little mistakes I’d noticed since the band listening-party. Thankfully the original run of CD production was cancelled so we didn’t have to deal with physical copies, but still the iTunes version was different from the CD version in small, subtle ways (I believe the CD version is superior but you may have a different opinion). Nowadays I sit on a mix for at least a month and will go back and listen to it with fresh ears some weeks after it’s been mixed or frequently longer, eg. I noticed a slight mis-timing in the piano track on Baby Baby just the other week… 16 months after I recorded it.

In short? Don’t rush a release, give it time, but draw a line and wave goodbye to a recording once it’s flown the nest – don’t keep picking at it. Your fans will – eventually – thank you.

Edit: As @mattbluefoot points out: ‘This could be paraphrased as “don’t be George Lucas”‘.

Not a link to my own father’s pics (you can find those on his Flickr photostream) but instead a link to a blog called My Dad’s Photos, dedicated to photographs taken by the maintainer’s father John Hendy.

I arrived there by following a link to 1973 photos of Kings Road in London, but there are photos from the 1962 Monaco GP and some British Grands Prix from 1958 onwards the Motorsport archive.

It’s a fascinating wade through, especially if you’re an F1 fan and a photographer.

Via the medium of Twitter I discovered a letter from John Steinbeck to his son on the occasion of the latter ‘falling in love’. Quite lovely.

Here is the latest announcement from the Raspberry Pi team. (Source)

Raspberry Pis started being made a couple of days ago, but I was forbidden to tell you about it until signed contracts and receipts for payment had arrived – it’s been killing me, especially since I’ve had tens of you asking me when manufacturing would start every day for the last few weeks. I am not good at keeping secrets.

This means that the first units from the first batch will be rolling off the line at the end of January. This first batch will consist only of Model Bs, although you will be able to buy Model As later on. Details about whether we’ll wait for all 10k to come off the line before starting sales, and about what date we’ll be starting on, will come later; so that gives you something else for you to shift around nervously on your chairs about for at least another week or so. (Please stop emailing me about it. Please.)

Unfortunately, we’ve not been able to manage manufacture in quite the way we’d hoped. As you will know if you’ve been reading the forums and the articles on this website, the Raspberry Pi Foundation had intended to get all its manufacture done in the UK; after all, we’re a UK charity, we want to help bootstrap the UK electronics industry, and doing our manufacturing in the UK seemed another way to help reach our goals.

We investigated a number of possible UK manufacturers, but encountered a few problems, some of which made matters impossible. Firstly, the schedule for manufacture for every UK business we approached was between 12 and 14 weeks (compared to a 3-4 week turnaround in the Far East). That would have meant you’d be waiting three months rather than three weeks to buy your Raspberry Pi, and we didn’t think that was acceptable.

Secondly, we found that pricing in the UK varied enormously with factories’ capacity. If a factory had sufficient capacity to do the work for us, they were typically quoting very high prices; we’d expected a delta between manufacture pricing between the UK and the Far East, but these build prices not only wiped out all our margin, but actually pushed us into the red. Some factories were able to offer us prices which were marginally profitable, but they were only able to produce at most a few hundred units a month; and even then, we were doing better by more than five dollars per unit if we moved that manufacture to the Far East. When you’re talking about tens of thousands of units per batch, losing that sum of money for the charity – a sum that we can spend on more manufacture, more outreach work and more research and development – just to be able to say we’d kept all the work in one country, starts to look irresponsible.

I’d like to draw attention to one cost in particular that really created problems for us in Britain. Simply put, if we build the Raspberry Pi in Britain, we have to pay a lot more tax. If a British company imports components, it has to pay tax on those (and most components are not made in the UK). If, however, a completed device is made abroad and imported into the UK – with all of those components soldered onto it – it does not attract any import duty at all. This means that it’s really, really tax inefficient for an electronics company to do its manufacturing in Britain, and it’s one of the reasons that so much of our manufacturing goes overseas. Right now, the way things stand means that a company doing its manufacturing abroad, depriving the UK economy, gets a tax break. It’s an absolutely mad way for the Inland Revenue to be running things, and it’s an issue we’ve taken up with the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

So we have had to make the pragmatic decision and look to Taiwan and China for our manufacturing, at least for this first batch. We are still working hard on investigating UK possibilities; at the moment, we’re investigating an option which would mean that all the Model As (whose demand we expect to be much lower than that of the Model Bs) will be built in the UK, and at the moment that’s looking quite do-able, although it’s not as efficient economically as doing it in Asia. I’ll fill you in on how that goes later on.

I always enjoy reading food blogs, especially when they’re local – but I was exceptionally chuffed to see Leeds Grub blog heading down our way to review Deli Central in Wakefield, just off the Bullring. More of that please!

Remember record players? Records? It’s trendy to call it ‘vinyl’ nowadays, isn’t it? My mate John’s got a house full of it, we often joke a river of black tar would flow through Walton if his house burned down.

Last Saturday my brother and I went digging in our loft at home to find all the records which had been stashed there over the years – boxes of them which I’d been given, or acquired through Freecycle, or inherited from various relatives. Tim used to collect them and upon my father’s emigration his collection ended up shoved at one end of our loft so there was quite a bit for us to go through.

When we retrieved the boxes the musty smell was overpowering – even though cased the slight damp had pervaded the sleeves of some Freecycle-sourced discs, giving the illusion of being older than they actually were… smelling of 1940, released in 1985. Cross-legged, we started sifting through, ditching Music-For-Pleasure compilations of Perry Como hits and laughing at the tastes of someone-random-from-Freecycle who’d bought a copy of The Reynolds Girls one and only hit.

It only took a few minutes before I hauled the Technics record deck and preamp downstairs so we might listen to some of them – a bizarre Sex Pistols disc called Some Product featuring cut-up interviews and the unmistakable mark of Malcolm McLaren’s odder side, followed by unidentifiable death-metal which when played at 45rpm rather than 33rpm sounded like Daffy Duck singing Rammstein. “Swing Along With Martin Dale”, recorded live at Wakefield Theatre Club (latterly the Pussycat Club and now a bowling alley on Doncaster Road). Fun.

We almost came to blows over a first edition vinyl of Joy Division’s “Substance” album (FACT250 [sic]) but I let it go; there will be other opportunities. We listened to the first couple of tracks of an early-80s Deanna Durbin compilation, swaying almost subconsciously; the imperfections in the pressing giving it analogue character.

And that’s the rub really – I never understood the beauty of vinyl until now. Tim suggested were we to own these on CD or MP3 we probably wouldn’t have given it a second thought but the hypnosis of the spinning turntable and positioning the needle made it an event, the cover providing further visual stimulus as the tracks went on, sitting together and listening.

Tim took his share of the booty and I sincerely hope him and his missus enjoy it. The following morning was taken up listening to a Transvision Vamp LP while Ben watched, fascinated. Maybe he’s understood it too.

Since then I’ve wandered into charity shops, looking for interesting records to take home. No dice yet, and sad that Headingley Oxfam charge so much for records in such poor condition. Still, there are plenty of other places to dig around in old boxes and maybe one day I’ll be able to rediscover that Tribe Called Quest 12″ I lost or even the copy of David Bellamy’s one and only novelty song “Brontosaurus Will You Wait For Me”… I’d love to know where that went to…

In fettling the blog and dusting it off I took another look at how people were finding it via Google.

Alongside the usual searches for Wakefield, Trinity Walk and coffee percolators there’s some really bizarre search terms in here, including:

• pinke hintergrundbilder
• vibrating tongue bars
• anime blowjob
• self fisting
• flamenco wallpaper
• sue lawley legs

…and a pile more really odd ones.

Christ knows what you lot are up to…

One of the first 10 Raspberry Pi computers to be released has been purchased on Ebay and donated to The Centre for Computing History by an anonymous donor.

10 of the eagerly awaited $25 computers were listed on Ebay for auction and enthusiastic bidders around the world bid frantically for the rare opportunity to own one of these first production boards. The auction for board #7 ended on 8th January at a final bid of £989 which obviously included free delivery!

Jason Fitzpatrick, Director of the museum, said “We are really pleased and quite taken aback at this generous donation. We are extremely supportive of the Raspberry Pi project and feel that it could usher in a new era for computing, allowing potential programmers to ‘get to the bits’ and who knows, maybe create the next big thing!

We will be purchasing a number of the (somewhat cheaper) Raspberry Pi’s to take out for school visits and help promote the programming in schools initiative – something we very strongly believe in.”

The Raspberry Pi is a $25 ARM GNU/Linux box that has a myriad of uses but is generally aimed at the educational market to help bring programming back into the syllabus.

You can read the rest of the article at : One of the First Raspberry Pi Computers Donated to Museum

When I was 7 I bought myself a film camera from Wakefield fleamarket – a Halina 35mm camera purchased for £1. I took it all over the place and went through the first couple of films like mad (mostly taking photographs of the sky or the floor because I couldn’t get the hang of the viewfinder). My father was processing film at the time and started loading the occasional spool of B&W in and that’s how I started out in photography… once we’d moved to a larger house he took over the cellar and we did prints too.

Almost 30 years later I’m using digital for my semi-professional work: I carry various Canon pro digital bodies around and a complement of lenses (a partial kit-list is on my Flickr profile), and I post-process using Lightroom on the Mac. An average gig shoot for me results in about 200 photos per act and I pare those down into about 40 or 50 shots for a client, all of which is a far cry from 24 frames on film.

I recently did a contract in Halifax (good lord deliver me) as part of my dayjob. Lunchtime wanderings uncovered a camera shop near the market (Janet Green Photographic, I’d link to a website but they don’t have one) where there was a window full of second-hand photographic kit – everything from mid-1950s medium-format bodies up to low-end digital, and so a germ of an idea formed – get an old film camera and learn to develop my own photos again. I pressed my nose to the glass almost daily in the hope that a suitable camera would be on display. Christmas drew closer, the end of the contract loomed, but less than 2 weeks before I’d be out of the area one appeared in the window for just £29: a Canon EOS 500N, one of the more recent 135 Canon range. I bimbled in and after verifying it would accept my Canon EF lenses I walked out as the proud owner of a film camera body, some chemicals and a few spools of Ilford FP4+ film.

The first thing I noticed was that I was conscious how many photos I wasn’t taking using film. I assumed I’d go through film like wildfire but it took me the best part of 3 days to blow my first 24-exposure film (the second film took a little less time principally because I was out in sunny Halifax getting some gritty industrial images ). This did make me realise that although I scattergun at gigs I am more inclined to take time to set up a shot elsewhere.

Once home and in the kitchen I mixed up some developer and spent 20 minutes lightproofing the understair cupboard. Every last LED from the wireless base-station, burglar alarm, central heating system got double helpings of gaffer-tape. Hallway lights went off, the cracks around the door stuffed with scarves. Total darkness, hooray. I turned the safelight on, loaded the film into the canister and went off to develop it.

Right. Safelight. Yeah – about that: there’s no safelight for film… I’d forgotten that bit and overexposed it. I had also been using a dodgy thermometer, not that it would have made much difference. The second time I was a lot more careful and some success ensued, having processed a spool of Ilford HP4+ (ISO400) in Ilfosol-3 developer: this resulted in quite a chunky grain which you can see on the Flickr page for the photo. Still, not bad considering I’ve been trying to remember how to do it all based upon vague memories of watching Dad.

As a sidenote: I haven’t been doing any printing, instead using a slide scanner from Maplin to throw the negatives into JPEG files; it’s only a cheap thing with a lamp which shines the slide onto a small CCD and auto-compensates for exposure etc. – the results aren’t very good. This one will do for the moment as long as I put the images through Lightroom, at least until I find a USB slide scanner I’m happy with.

Subsequently I walked into Halifax and blew off a spool of Ilford FP4+ (ISO100) – you can see the results here including some self-portraits taken on long-lapse outside Dean Clough Mills at dawn and dusk; I think the contrast on them is quite nice. I haven’t tried pushing the film yet, I’m taking baby-steps and since Christmas I’ve been using it as an occasional ‘grab camera’ to play with rather than anything serious.

Most of my supplies are coming from Amazon marketplace sellers (RK Photographic are sending me most of it including a black bag, a load of FP4+ and a film spool opener). Locally Dale Photographic in Leeds sells chemicals and film which is useful in an emergency and if anyone wants to buy me a present they have a secondhand Hasselblad MF 6×6 120-roll camera with a couple of lenses for £1500… thought not!

Tonight though the 500N gets a proper run at a gig using Ilford Delta 3200 film (ISO3200) which I will probably process using Microphen developer later on in the week and post to my Flickr stream. I’m hoping to replicate some of the more iconic Kev Cummins film shots from the early 80s – somehow doing colour-to-B&W in Lightroom feels like cheating and I’m hopeful of good results. At least I don’t have to worry about red/yellow saturation

(The photo is me aged 8 with the Halina – my Dad took it when we went on a photowalk in Wakefield; the courtyard is round the back of the old Post Office, and it’s now known as ‘The Latin Quarter’.)

Update: Julian (aka @liquidsquid on Twitter) said that this was his idea. If I’m going to be perfectly honest it was discussions with quite a few folks which led to this, not least @leica0000, @john2755 and my landlady in Milton Keynes towards the end of last year who gave me a box full of old Patterson developing kit. That said, the Delta3200 was definitely Julian’s idea.