Sometimes though, you find videos that fill you with the right kind of questions. Questions that lead you through lots of different ideas and possibilities and inspire you to tinker, hack and code. The following video by ViHart is one of these. Her fascinating video mathematically plays with the idea of space and time notation using only a music box, some paper and a hole punch.

Towards the end of the video, she puts a continuous loop of paper through the music box, that will endlessly play the notes punched into the paper.

What if the punched notes could change every time the paper looped through?

What if, the notes changed and moved around on their own?

What if it behaved like a cellular automaton, like Conway’s Game of Life?

So, using a little bit of code, some MIDI sounds and a lunch break, I explored just that. I coded a bounded square of cells (32×32), and ran the automaton rules over the set. After each iteration, I processed it as if it were holes punched into a tape, being played by a music box. I experimented with different speeds of note and different musical scales and the following video is of “Gosper’s Glider Gun”, with each note being played in a fraction of a second. This allows the listener to hear the evolution of the game without having to sit through half an hour of notes!

Code: https://github.com/benosteen/conways-game-of-life

Included in the code are some recordings of various examples, in .ogg format, that play much more slowly. I used QSynth as a MIDI synthesiser, JACK and audacity to record the audio.

This isn’t a rant about the state of modern education. Rather, I want to talk about a somewhat melancholy card game called ‘Gloom’ (info) (amazon).

Gloom is a game of “inauspicious incidents and grave consequences” – a game where you control the fates of a band of misfits and malcontents, playing cards to make their lives miserable and (hopefully) your opponents’ lives more happy and content. The main aim is for the family you control to be beset by tragedy on all sides and to meet untimely deaths. All deaths in this game are untimely!

What sets this game apart is the storytelling it inspires. You are recommended not just to play the cards in your favour, but to construct stories around what that card does, with everyone contributing to the communal mythos building up in from the cards. This, to me, is the interesting part – using these cards and the evocative text and artwork on them in a creative writing exercise. The cards provide enough story material and texture to inspire but also enough of a constraint to focus the mind. Sometimes the worst thing to have when writing is the freedom to write anything you want!

Spinning the yarn

Pick the characters you want to use. I’m only going to use one here, but don’t let that guide you. Pick a family, pick randomly, pick any combination of them that you feel might be inspiring. Picking 3 characters might be a sensible idea for a young student – enough of a constraint for them to work with, but not to many so that a character is left out.

Shuffle the event cards and the modifier cards together, as usual.

Place these face down and draw 5 cards from the top. So far, this is very much like playing the original game. Even if more than one person is playing this collaboratively, only draw a single hand.

At this point, setting the scene for the story with a short introduction might be worthwhile. You can give your characters more depth and describe parts of their personality or backstory that you think would be interesting to include.

The ‘gameplay’ is simple – play a card, and draw a card. However, all notion of points should be ignored and you should only pay attention to the text in the banner at the top (and optionally, the text that states that a card can only be played if a certain symbol is visible on the character. For example, a character cannot be ‘widowed at the wedding’ if they haven’t had any love/marriage-themed cards placed on them beforehand. Again, it is up to you!)

You can see, on the left in the picture below, a typical card that you might play with descriptive text in the banner at the top, some symbols and numbers along the sides and a little snippet of text at the bottom, adding flavour to the modifier.

Event cards (see below) cause various gameplay actions to happenin the normal game, but for this version, you can ignore this aspect. The important part is, as usual, the text at the top – “A Second Chance”, “Smoke and Mirrors” and so on. Use these sentences to spur on an idea for an event in your story. Did a character just have a run in with the law? Maybe the “Smoke and Mirrors” event could be a chase sequence where they successfully lose their pursuers only to land in an even more dire situation?

The final type of card are the Untimely Death cards. These have RIP in each corner and describe the final tragedy of a character. Sometimes the card states it cannot be placed on a character unless a certain symbol is showing. Use your own judgement on this, but you might find your story makes more sense if you do pay attention to this!

The characters can suffer Untimely Deaths at any time the player chooses. Kill a character after putting them through an veritable odyssey of misfortune and heartbreak? Give them a fleeting moment of happiness before dashing their hopes to pieces? Have a family member die early to provide an element of pathos for the rest of story to play on? Who knows

If playing collaboratively, I suggest the following ideas:

• As nature intended aka Just play the normal game! I’ve put the following down as ways to concentrate on the story and not be distracted by beating your opponent, but with 3 or more players, you might find the normal method of playing to be a good exercise in itself. The goal is to tell a good story after all!
• Madlibs style: people play cards turnwise, passing the cards to the next player after they have told their tale,
• Death by committee: cards are placed only after everyone has discussed and agreed on the card put down,
• Roleplay: Each player chooses a character for themselves and play proceeds in the Madlibs style above. Every time a card is played, the player must construct the story so that  their character is involved in some way – as a witness, the cunning instigator or just acting in character.

I’ll walk through an example of the story play, just to show you what I mean. First a quick introduction:

I’ve picked out the ringleader of “Dark’s Den of Deformity”, Darius Dark himself:

Truth be told, Darius is a dreadful talent scout for the freakish and the deformed. In fact, he is the worst. His ‘den’ consists of such ill-chosen acts as a bearded man, a shy and bashful painted lady who refuses to show her tattoos, and a creepy skull-faced clown. He fails to understand why people aren’t as astounded as he is by his show. He cannot see that why a man who has a beard but cannot a moustache isn’t that amazing. He fails to grasp that not everyone has his childlike imagination, and are not satisfied just thinking about the infinite artistic, mysterious and inspiring possibilities of the tattoos on a woman who keeps herself covered from head to foot. He believes in the wondrousness of his family even if the rest of the world doesn’t

Business has been very bad for some time and many of the acts feel at their lowest ebb. Darius, ever the optimist (and he’d have to be with a show like his), is still striving for the big time, looking for that one lucky break that will get his family of freaks the renown they deserve.

Ironically, most who come to see the show only visit to find out if the show really is as comically bad as everyone says.

I played through a few cards, before finally killing him off:

They can be read as a very wordy epitaph, with a little embellishment:

Darius Dark, the sinister ringmaster,

Pursued by Poodles,

and Galled by Gangrene.

He was given a second chance

but he Stole from a Stiff in desperation.

Haunted by remorse, he ruined himself on liquor and rum.

He was killed in a bar-fight, after drinking the wrong person’s whiskey.

I’ve added a little bit of colour to the text, but I think you can see how this can be a useful exercise, whether it’s for a young student or just someone trying to switch creative gears.

Why Gloom?

Why not? It’s been written with storytelling in mind, dark and miserable storytelling but still, there is nothing special about the cards that means it cannot be done by some other means. Print a number of inspiring suggestions on small cards, written in the same format as the modifier and event cards and use those instead. The mini-moo cards look to be an interesting size for this sort of thing too. Why not make your own ‘Happy’ version!

For those who do not have the time, or don’t believe they have the ability to to the above, then Gloom might be an interesting set to begin with. If used with students, I’m sure that they will soon be writing their own cards and adding them to the mix

Gloom played for real

Wil Wheaton and friends played through a game of Gloom on an episode of Tabletop which is worth watching to get the feel for the game and the characters in it.

At a young age, I learnt the value of tact and that using half-truths when dealing with adults was pretty effective. If something is fixed before an adult realises that it is broken, then, well, so much the better.

My mother was a single parent and did what she could to raise me in very difficult circumstances. When I was 9 years old, she took a job as a secretary at a car scrapyard which paid the bills, but didn’t stretch to cover a babysitter. I spent my summer holidays climbing up stacks of 3 or 4 flattened cars, peering into engines, digging about in their electronics and frankly, having a wonderful time amongst all that shattered glass, buckled metal and engine parts. The few guys that worked there got used to me, and answered some of my questions about engines, carburettors, and ignition systems. They also confided in me a few hacks. Like how they got into cars and drove them when the key was damaged or lost. That you can start the car by connecting wires together, or that some older  ["older" in an 80s context] ignitions used pin tumbler locks that can be dealt with using a fine chisel and a good whack.

I caused my first car accident a few weeks after that.

I had found a car that was in half-decent shape, just needing a new battery, the distributor reattaching, and a little petrol. I ‘dealt’ with the ignition lock and pushed a flat bit of scrap into the slot and as I held onto a deep breath, I gave it a sharp turn to the right, as I had seen done before. The engine spluttered, coughed and the whole car lurched forward, smacking into the upright corrugated iron fence in front of it. Shaken, I got out of the car and my work was swiftly uncovered.

I have been paranoid about leaving a car in gear ever since.

I still retained that love of discovering how things work, what makes them tick and what their mechanisms – their secrets – are. I am more aware of risk these days however!

Locks and puzzles

Some puzzles can really get under my skin and I simply have to work them out, otherwise they will drive me insane. Locks always had a charm to them, as they can be so simple yet powerful enough to stop a determined human being. A few millimetres of dumb metal stopping an intelligent being. Feynman famously dabbled with picking locks as an intellectual pursuit and that is pretty much all the encouragement I needed to look into this further.

I made a few (mostly unsuccessful) rakes and padlock shims from coke cans, which I must confess, I used to impress friends at my new school. I opened their padlocked lockers in front of them after betting them I could. I must of become bored of this or they did, as I only did it a few times and then stopped. It was really dumb and naive of me. What I viewed as a simple party trick was something that authorities take very seriously. In any case, I quickly moved onto rubik’s cubes, my friend’s handheld computer games and just being a teenager.

tl;dr I’ve dabbled with lockpicking in the past as an intellectual puzzle and party trick

Every birthday, since I was about 20 years old, I’ve tried to pick one skill or area to take seriously as a hobby and to dive into it. This helps keep my mind working and gives me something to work towards. Last year’s skill was knitting and crafting, and previous years, I had chosen things like book-binding, microelectronics, playing the piano and guitar and so on,

This year I’ve chosen locksmithing and lockpicking.

Earlier this year, I found this excellent course playlist – 24 videos! – on pin tumblers by  SchuylerTowne on YouTube. His videos are really clear, well-done and above all, really, REALLY exciting (in a geeky way!) Re-watching these a few days ago made my decision about what to pick this year very easy indeed

Here’s his introduction to his course:

Some important information to anyone considering going further:

1. Never pick a lock that you do not own.
2. Never pick a lock that is in use.
3. (In the UK) Never carry your tools outside. It’s not illegal as to own them, but for all practical purposes, it is illegal to carry them. Police officers will pull you in as you are ‘equipped for burglary’, especially if you haven’t begun any formal locksmith training or certification. So, keep them at home, with your other hobby gear.

So far, I’ve bought a nicely reviewed set of picks, a block of practice locks and “Practical Lock Picking: A Physical Penetration Tester’s Training Guide” by Deviant Ollam which should arrive next week! I can’t wait!

I doubt I’ll get as far as entering a lockpicking competition, but I do hope that I will have at least explored it. Who knows, I may even apply for formal training after all!

Standing on the Hands of Giants

We are wildcrafting our own cola from an open source recipe reverse-engineered from the original Coke. A process merging domestic and scientific methodologies. Cube-Cola is distributed by social courier within the city perimeters of Bristol UK, and is available by mail as a cola concentrate worldwide.

I chatted with one of the people behind this at their stall at the recent Brighton Mini Maker Faire and she told me the backstory to it and I mentioned some of the recipes I had seen for it. The exorbitant price of neroli oil was mentioned too, and you’ll see why that is worthy of note later. (I must confess that do not know which of the two women I spoke to as my memory for names is shamefully non-existent).

I am interested in the history of chemical recipes of this sort, even though I am a lapsed chemist graduate and I have collected a number of books about the history and development of the ‘high-street chemist’, for want of a better name. (In that vein, if you can track down watchable copies of the BBC and Open University produced “Victorian Pharmacy“, I highly recommend it!)

I found a few recipes for “Coca-cola” in the books I have, a generic narcotic version (pre ~1900ish IIRC) and a few unofficial non-narcotic versions. One book in particular is full of fascinating generic fomulas, originally published in 1938 under the title “The Standard Book of Formulas: How to make what you use”. The reprint I own is from 2004 and is provocatively titled “Two Thousand Formulas, Recipes and Trade Secrets” but I strongly doubt it contains many secrets

It has a generic recipe listed inside for a “Kola beverage”:

The “Fluidextract of Cola” is both where the modern drink gets its name from and the original drink got its ‘uplifting and refreshing’ qualities (as it is a source of cocaine.)

Unfortunately, I cannot find the book with the later, post-1900 recipes in, (the non-narcotic versions) so cannot show you what that looks like. The original combination of flavouring oils surprised me when I first read them and they may surprise you to! (The combination did look a lot like the Cube Cola recipe, so I’ll borrow that, emphasis my own):

• 7.50 ml orange oil
• 7.00 ml lime oil
• 2.00 ml lemon oil
• 0.75 ml cassia oil
• 1.50 ml nutmeg oil
• 0.50 ml coriander oil (12 drops)
• 0.50 ml lavender oil (12 drops)
• 0.50 ml neroli oil (optional due to high expense of neroli)

The majority of the ingredients are not that exceptional. Orange, lime, lemon… sure, they make sense. Cassia, nutmeg, coriander, fine too, exotic but makes sense to me. But then lavender appears as an ingredient, something I really didn’t expect. I managed to convince myself that this is the case by drinking some cola and then smelling some lavender oil. It’s faint, but it is certainly a match!

Neroli oil is also very interesting. I won’t bore you with details, but suffice to say it has an aromatic flavour, a sophisticated floral scent, very expensive, but surprisingly commonly found in perfume. This is a link to its wikipedia page. Neroli oil also features in another couple of flavourings I found interesting:

I also stumbled over the following, a recipe for artifical Neroli oil which makes for interesting reading although I wouldn’t recommend trying it today!

Making my own Open Source Cola!

Needless to say that after talking about this with them, I bought some of their cola concentrate to try! It is based on their GPL’d open source recipe and looks very much like the one I remembered reading a number of years ago. However, I have only recently got round to making up the sugar syrup needed for it. The 56ml concentrate may not look like a lot, but it makes almost 2 litres of cola syrup which still requires dilution with carbonated water (at a ratio of 1 part to 7 of water) before you can drink it happily!

As it turned out, I only had 1.2kg of the required 1.5kg of white sugar so I improvised with ~200g of some light muscovado sugar. It has affected the flavour, but the treacly flavour matches well enough with the flavourings. The taste itself I would rate as being far better than most supermarket own brand colas and would give the original a run for its money! I’m not a big fan of the full-fat coke, but I have a friend who is and I’ll get his verdict on it later!

This is one of the two containers of syrup next to the partially drunk bottle of newly minted Cube Cola:

So, it looks like I am going to be drinking cola for quite a while to come!

Monopoly is the game that killed my interest in boardgames. Why?

Its depressingly long-winded, yawnsome play is based more on luck than skill. The crushing inevitable win by the player who got ahead early in the game. The forced family play at christmas with children who’d rather play on their new computer games and adults who were too drunk or sedated by food to pay attention.

I remember it as a joy-killer in my childhood memories.

That said, I gave it another chance shortly after University. After all, it’s popular, how bad can it be? I really enjoy games and gameplay, so why not boardgames?

tl;dr it killed my interest again.

Fast forward to this year, I discovered Wil Wheaton’s new show on Youtube called TableTop, which can be summed up as internet famous and geeky people playing a boardgame – it is somewhat like a indirect set of personal interviews plus a review of the game. I watched the first episode quickly followed by the second – these people were having fun! It’s possible to have fun playing boardgames after all!?

A quick search led me to the Board Game Geek site and I was staggered by the amount of a) fun looking reviewed games out there and b) the ridiculous amount of content on that site. Armed only with the titles played on TableTop, I made some progress and finally got into it.

The image at the top of this post shows my current collection, grown significantly because I had a birthday earlier this month. From left to right, then top to bottom (with links to their pages on BoardGameGeek):

• Smallworld- a fantasy styled Risk-like game with lots of variety in the races you play as and an interesting mechanics where the player’s races go into decline. 30-40 min playtime enforced by a turn limit.
  • TableTop vid: Wil Wheaton and guests, Sean Plott (host of “Day9TV”, a Starcraft II dedicated webcast on how to be a better gamer), Grant Imahara (host of Discovery Channel’s “Mythbusters”), and Jenna Busch (geek blogger, writer and host) play Small World!
• Village – a very recent purchase. It looks really fun, well presented and intelligent and has lots of unique gameplay mechanics but I’ve yet to play this one with my gf or anyone else.
• Carcassonne and the Inns/Cathedrals expansion – a really great game, can’t recommend it enough. Gameplay: place a starter tile on the table and each player takes a tile at random from the remainder, joins it to the one(s) on the table and puts down a token – a meeple – to claim something on the tile: a city, a road, a field or a monastery. Players get points for completing what they claim and highest points wins. The box art did put me off this one but this is definitely the game I’ve played the most with my gf. It took one day of play before I had to get an expansion for it, we enjoyed it that much. 30 minute gameplay and takes seconds to set up.
•  Onirim – an interesting patience/Klondike-style game, where you are trapped in a labyrinth of dreams and have to find all the doors to escape. Fun solo game, definitely replaced solitaire for me and great value and artwork. Comes with 3 expansions to the core games too!
• Arkham Horror – I absolutely love the Lovecraftian Mythos, his short stories and works that have built on that, so it comes as little surprise that I would buy this as soon as I found it. A complex and deep role-playing game, where every component is written in theme, allowing you to weave your own narratives with ease as there is little to yank you out of the feel of its world. A tough but rewarding one player game too, with the only downside is the size of table you need for it and the time it takes to play (2hrs+). I really enjoy this, but Elder Signseems to be a nice lite version of this too, which plays much quicker
  • TableTop vid of Elder Sign: Wil Wheaton and guests Felicia Day (Actress, Producer, Writer – The Guild), Mike Morhaime (President, Co-founder – Blizzard Entertainment), and Bill Prady (Co-creator, Executive Producer, Writer – The Big Bang Theory) play Elder Sign!
• Munchkin- humorous, backstabbing, bribing, social role-playing game with most of the role-playing removed. Pick up a card, defeat a monster, go up a level… unless your so-called friends decide to gang up on you and help the monster out to pull you down a few levels.
  • TableTop vid: Wil Wheaton and guests Felicia Day (Actress, Producer, Writer – The Guild), Steve Jackson (Game Designer Guru, Creator of Munchkin) and Sandeep Parikh (Actor-The Guild and creator of Legend Of Neil) play Munchkin!
• Ticket To Ride: Europe and its 1912 expansion- collect cards, buy routes, join cities, block your friend’s routes and complete yours to win! Great fun, easy to learn, a good game to get your friends playing if they are a bit apprehensive about boardgames (as I was.)
  • TableTop vid: Wil Wheaton and guests Colin Ferguson (Actor – Eureka), Anne Wheaton (Wil’s lovely wife), and Amy Dallen (Wil’s good friend and fellow comic book nerd) play Ticket to Ride! [NB USA version]
• Just hiding off the bottom left corner is the Lord of the Rings Card Game – a really tough card game for one player (easier with two though). Create a deck of cards to aid your chosen heros fight through sections of the book’s plot. This draws from the books and not the films and benefits from that. It’s about deck building and balancing your deck against the scenario you’ve picked. Tough and beats me on a regular basis. I love the game world though, so I keep playing it

So, my advice is if Monopoly or something similar put you off boardgames, give them another try. I advise you to give Carcassonne or Ticket To Ride a try and see how you feel about it. If you are planning to have a few drinks with friends, then you also might want to give Munchkin a go too

(Also, if you know of a good gaming group I could join in with in London, or even near me in Bishops Stortford, I’m all ears!)

I keep seeing people churn out new and interesting things, well-written and attractively photographed. They made it look so easy, so effortless and to be honest, I really believe that it is that effortless to them. I saw Leila Johnston and Tom Armitage talk at the Brighton MiniMaker Faire a few weeks ago, talking about how to make things fast and to ‘put a box on it’; to finish a project properly. As good as their talks were, I felt they only depressed me further and didn’t know why. Leila’s advice to stop caring about it, ship it and “forget” about it should be helpful, but they weren’t to me. What gives?

I’ve tried to avoid making excuses, blaming something external when the problem is my motivation, an internal problem. It is internal, I know what the problem is but being told to stop caring isn’t helping. The speed at which people are putting stuff out there makes me feel useless, slow and to be honest, stupid. These thoughts keep running through my mind every time I tried to write, every time I attempted to capture online the things I make.

I think my problem is made worse simply by knowing prolific makers, by following what they are doing and interacting with them and reading about their works, I am digging myself a deeper hole.

The more I read, the more reluctant I am to publish anything of my own.

Learned Helplessness.

I am abusing this term perhaps, but I really do think it applies to what I am feeling right now. I feel stupid, frustrated and helpless to change myself when compared to the work put out by the people on the cutting edge. The following video shows a great example of this concept in practice with a class of students and is worth your time:

What am I going to do about it?

If this really is what is exacerbating my problem and making my block worse, what am I going to do? Well, I’m going to try the following:

• Stop following interesting links – especially ones from Makers and Doers – for a short time.
• Write small posts (like this one) about anything other than the things I am making and just publish it.
• Break up my projects into tiny tasks and post about them once I have got back into the rhythm of posting.

That’s it really, a schedule of planned ignorance followed by blind publishing of stuff that interests me.

… as editors and as a publisher we encourage the publication of studies that replicate or refute work we have previously published. We work with authors (through communication with the corresponding author) to publish corrections if we find parts of articles to be inaccurate. If a paper’s major conclusions are shown to be wrong we will retract the paper. By doing so, and by being open about our motives, we hope to clarify once and for all that there is no shame in correcting the literature. Despite the best of efforts, errors occur and their timely and effective remedy should be considered the mark of responsible authors, editors and publishers. We welcome further discussion of this important topic.

Retraction. This is an incredibly emotive word to many researchers because papers are typically retracted by the publisher when the work is deeply flawed or even fraudulent in nature. Often, a retracted paper is marked as if it was wearing a dunce’s cap, with large RETRACTED lettering running across its text (eg Wakefield’s infamous Lancet paper)

Putting aside that labelling an entire paper with a binary TRUE/REJECTED stamp (especially using a label that carries severe emotion baggage) is an absurd idea which misses the point and practice of literature review. To steal a phrase from Ben Goldacre, “it’s a little more complex than that.” It always is. I don’t think this move by PLoS will de-stigmatise the term, when all the other publishers will carry on regardless. They will be seen as the outlier, the one that is doing something wrong, regardless of motive.

There is a silver lining to consider however:

PLoS are willing to try unconventional things to improve the way we do science.

Yes, I agree, they got it wrong this time but please don’t just blast them out of the water with critism! Can we suggest things that might help us really use and make sense of the ever-growing mountain of published, peer-reviewed material? Consider these strawmen:

• Annotating a paper’s abstract with links and contextual fragments from reviews and meta-analyses that discuss or use it?
• Citation checking, likely human powered (‘crowdsourced’). A tally of whether a cited work a) exists and b) says what the citing paper suggests it says?
• Finer grained citations – explicity  refute, reuse, review a paper, rather than just ‘cite’ a paper, so that this semantic difference is clear to us and to computer programs/text-mining apps/search engines/etc?
  • Including the ability to link to a section or even a sentence in a manner in which text-mining applications can understand.
• Cross-domain suggestions: how can we help the biologist working with cellular fluid flow dynamics read the work of or even meet mathematicians who specialises in this area and vice-versa? There is so much literature to read out there, that it is easy and almost necessary to have a very narrow focus.

I saw a large number of responses to PLoS’s editorial on twitter last night (which have since evaporated into the ether. Twitter is not that citable anymore.) They mainly consisted of jokes: “My biology book is mostly wrong, should I burn it now?”, statements of offence: “How dare they delete papers!”, truly unhelpful knee-jerk critisms “That’s not how we do things” and so on, but some were links to better, much more thought out and reasoned arguments against it, such as this one: “The Dumbest Shit I’ve Ever Heard” which lays out why the broad-stroke application of a retraction is a very bad idea.

This may just be on my slice of twitter, but the majority of messages were not helpful. They were less than helpful, becoming A Typical Twitter Pitchfork Mob.

I’m not going to sidetrack and deal with why many reactions were inaccurate and simply say that PLoS should never have used the term ‘Retraction’

A retraction is seen as a complete rejection of all the methods, data and conclusions in a paper, potentially due to malicious intent by the author. I do not think the consensus view is that a retraction is applicable in this case: “[a] paper’s major conclusions are shown to be wrong, we [PLoS] will retract the paper.” The aforementioned editorial even admits that the term is problematic: “There is much misunderstanding about retractions.” The English dictionary is a register of use as the English language never stops evolving. If  the majority of readers understand a term in a certain way (as a heinous or shameful thing in this case) then that is its meaning.

I don’t want to defend them further as it will get conflated with me defending the plan they put out (which I do not agree with.) Let me reiterate the important outcome here:

PLoS are willing to try unconventional things to improve the way we do science.

Criticising them inaccurately (“destroying the historical record” based arguments) or stating that it is wrong because it is “not how we do things“ are not helpful.

This is a perfect time to suggest ways in which the internet and online publishing might help or improve the way we do science. Let’s not discourage them but help them – tell them why this won’t work, but do so constructively. There is a large body of work already out there about ways to improve scientific discourse – let’s point it out to them.

Notes and settings I used to get this printer to work and accept input. The main problem with this printer is the low baud rate (9600) for the connection. This is fine for text, but when you are pushing bytes down the line to print images, it is painfully slow.

Datasheet – get it here

Wikibooks page on the RS 232 connection (contains details on the pinout of the 25 pin serial connector, as well as details of how to short circuit certain connectors)

Settings: (YMMV)

Dip switch settings (1 – on, 0 – off)

DS1 – 10110011

DS2 – 0000000000

DS3 – 0000

DS4 – 0100

Which leads to the following diagnostic: (Hold down the feed button as you turn on the printer to get a printout containing the diagnostics)

58mm paper – (important – if you are using 80mm wide paper instead, you need to flip DS1, switch 3 to OFF!)

Baud rate: 9600 bps

Data bit: 8 bit

Parity: None

Handshake: DTR/DSR

Buffer size: 4k

Pinout wiring (using a MAX232N chip to interface with an arduino – pins refer to printer serial pins unless otherwise mentioned)

(See the serial page linked to above for a description of how the pinout is numbered)

Pins 4 & 5 on the printer (RTS&CTS) were simply connected together

Pins 8 & 20 (DCD & DCR) were also connected together (even though the datasheet suggests 8 isn’t used)

Pin 7 was connected to ground

Pin 2 (TX) was connected directly to pin 8 on the MAX232 N (R2in)

Pin 3 (RX) was connected directly to pin 7 on the MAX232 N (T2out)

Used the following circuit: (MAX232IN chip with 1µF electrolytic capacitors)

Arduino connections:

Roo Reynolds’s arduino sketch from github – this .pde file was able to be used unchanged to control the printer.

The rxPin of the arduino was connected to pin 9 on the MAX232N chip. The arduino txPin was connected to pin 10 on the MAX232N.

[Weirdly, I found that the circuit and connection worked both at 5v and at 3.3v, both as supplied by the arduino.]

Hopefully this should help people get started. Feel free to rejig and add to this page for others.

Python code to control the microprinter and also to print images to it – (requires python’s PIL)

This isn’t so much a Howto (as other people have already written that up very nicely) but a post on what I am using one of my Pi’s for.

The first gotcha is that for some unknown reason, the default, recommended, reference debian image is built without support for USB webcams… Nuts, but there you have it. [UPDATE - the latest, tippety-top kernel does now have camera support - be sure to update your debian image to the latest version from the github repository]

Arch linux is built with a more sensible set of defaults and works out of the box. I pushed the arch image onto a fresh SD, did a swap, ssh’d in and set up a simple ffmpeg webcam server, very similar too the guide I linked to above, but I was only interested in getting an asf stream out.

It means that I can keep an eye on my birdfeeder very simply

My next step is to make a kernel with USB cam support and bootc’s i2c/SPI driver support in so I can use an accelerometer to log comings and goings to the feeder

UPDATE
======

I have connected my D90 camera to the Pi as well, via one of the GPIO pins.

I used the helpful information and cable pin-out for the shutter release from http://www.doc-diy.net/photo/remote_pinout to work out what to do.

I wasn’t going to pay £20+ for an attachment that I was only going to butcher anyway, so I printed a small insert (x=5.2mm, y=2.8mm z=10mm with a 0.5mm perimeter) to fit in the socket.

Close-up of the insert, showing the notch cut into it. The wire is threaded through the centre and out and the end folded over to pass through the notch – aiming to connect to the correct pin for the shutter control. A thin layer of tape is wrapped round the outside, to stop the wire end touching the grounded socket case.

Plug it in and see if it will take a photo when this wire is connected to the socket casing!

Judicious use of tape to hold things in place…

Connecting to the Raspberry Pi:

Using the Slice of Pi breakout board, I connected GPIO pin 0 and Gnd to power a relay switch, connecting the shutter wires to the switch itself.

Then, to fire the shutter, all you have to do is put the GPIO pin to high: (other ways to do so shown here)

(Set up the GPIO 0 pin for output. (GPIO 0 pin on the header is actually 
GPIO17 in the system. The low-level peripherals wiki page linked to
just above has more info)

[root@alarmpi ~]# echo "17" > /sys/class/gpio/export
[root@alarmpi ~]# echo "out" > /sys/class/gpio/gpio17/direction

(Now to take a picture:)

[root@alarmpi ~]# echo "1" > /sys/class/gpio/gpio17/value 
[root@alarmpi ~]# echo "0" > /sys/class/gpio/gpio17/value 
[root@alarmpi ~]# 

And that’s it really. Next step is to set up a pressure sensor on the feeder and capture pictures of the various visitors

I am constructing some simple OpenGL ES scripts as a learning resource for anyone new to it, in part as a way to help me learn it too. As part of this, I’ve written a little script that gives a similar kind of experience, but on the commandline, with a Raspberry Pi. It overlays the render display over the top of the framebuffer window, and reloads the shader any time you save the script.

You can run this from the terminal (as I do in the video later on) or from within LXDE (X11). (You may wish to replace ‘nano’ with ‘leafpad’ in glsl_sandbox.sh if you are running it in LXDE)

Prerequisites:

* Install pyinotify

$ sudo apt-get install python-pyinotify

* Get the repository:

$ wget https://github.com/benosteen/pyopengles/zipball/master -O pyopengles.zip
$ unzip pyopengles.zip
  Inflating benosteen-pyopen....
  ...

cd into the repository and you are ready to go!

Usage of ‘glsl_sandbox.sh’:

$ bash glsl_sandbox.sh [NAME_OF_SHADER_FILE]

The repository has a few demo shaders that are known to work included for you to try – they are copied from the WebGL sandbox site (http://glsl.heroku.com/)

‘basic.glsl’ – From http://glsl.heroku.com/e#2423.0

‘leds.glsl’ – From http://glsl.heroku.com/e#2450.0

‘raymarch.glsl’ – From http://glsl.heroku.com/e#2171.0

Pass the script any new filename, and it will create a new shader from the template and save it to that location.

This uses the “nano” text editor by default, as that is installed on the reference debian image, but if you look in the script, it is not hard to change to your preference

(NB Ctrl-O, followed by enter to save the file, and Ctrl-X to quit nano.)

Here is a video of it in action, as it is quite hard to describe in words.