Category: Personal

Insulin, routine, lockdown, and electronics

As you may know if you read this blog, I have insulin-dependent diabetes. In particular, I use both fast and long acting insulin, which basically means I need to take a shot of insulin every morning (at around the same time, but there’s at least a bit of leeway around it).

This is not usually a problem: the routine of waking up, getting ready to leave, making a coffee and either drinking it or taking it with me makes it very hard to miss the step “taking the insulin”. Unfortunately, like for many others, this routine is gone out of the window due to the current lockdown. Maybe a bit worse for me since I’m currently still between jobs, which means I don’t even have the routine of logging in to work form home, and of meetings.

What this meant, is that days blurred together, and I started wondering if I remembered to take my insulin in the morning. A few too many times that answer was “I don’t know”, and I think at least twice in the past couple of weeks I did indeed forget. I needed something to make it easier to remember and not to forget.

Because insulin injections tend to be one of those things that I do “in autopilot”, I needed something hard to forget to do. Theoretically, the Libre App allows annotating that you took long-acting insulin (and how much) but that requires me to remember to scan my sensor right after and write down that I did. It’s too easy to forget. I also wanted something that would be a lot more explicit about telling me (and my wife) that I forgot to tell my insulin. And hopefully something that I wouldn’t risk telling I took my insulin too soon in the interaction, and then not actually doing the right thing (as sometimes I reach out for my insulin pen, realise there’s not enough insulin there, and need to pick up a new one from the fridge).

The Trigger: Yes, I Took My Insulin

The first thing I decided to do was to use the spare Flic Button. I bought Flics last year upon suggestion of Luke, and they actually helped immensely — we have one in the study and one in the bedroom, to be able to turn on the smart lights quietly (in the night) and without bothering with the phone apps. We kept a third one “spare”, not quite sure what to use it for until now. The button fits on the back of the cabinet where I keep my “in use” insulin pen. And indeed, it’s extremely easy and obvious to reach while putting the pen down — as an aside, most European insulin pens fit perfectly on a Muji 3-tier slanted display, which is what I’ve been using to keep mine in.

This is not exactly the perfect trigger. The perfect trigger wouldn’t require an action outside of the measured action — so in a perfect world, I would be building something that triggers when I throw an used needle into the needle container. But since that’s a complex project for which I have no obvious solution, I’ll ignore that. I have a trigger, it doesn’t risk getting too much in my way. It should be fine.

But what should the trigger do? The first idea I had was to use IFTTT to create a Google Calendar event when I pressed the button. It wouldn’t be great for notifying if I forgot the insulin, but it would at least allow me to keep track of it. But then I had another idea. I had a spare Adafruit Feather M4 Express, including an AirLift FeatherWing coprocessor for WiFi. I originally bought it to fix an issue with my TV (which I still have not fixed), and considered using it on my art project, but it also has a big bright RGB LED on it (an AdaFruit NeoPixel), which I thought I would use for notifications.

A quick Flask app later, and I had something working — the Flic button would hit one endpoint on the web app, which would record me having taking my insulin, while the Feather would be requesting another endpoint to know how to reconfigure the LED. The webapp would have the logic to turn the LED either red or quiescent depending on whether I got my insulin for the day. There’s a bit of logic in there to define “the day”, as I don’t need the notification at 1am if I have not gone to bed yet (I did say that my routine is messed up didn’t I?) but that’s all minor stuff.

The code for the webapp (Python, Flask) and the Feather (CircuitPython) I pushed to GitHub immediately (because I can), but there’s no documentation for it yet. It also doesn’t use the NeoPixel anymore, which I’ll explain in a moment, so you may not really be able to use it out of the box as it is.

For placement, I involved my wife — I want her to be able to tell whether I didn’t take my insulin, so if I’m having a “spaced out day”, she can remind me. We settled for putting it in the kitchen, close to the kettle, so that it’s clearly visible when making coffee — something we do regularly early in the morning. It worked out well, since we already had an USB power supply in the kitchen, for the electric cheese grater I converted.

Limitations of the Feather Platform.

The Feather platform by itself turned out to be a crummy notification platform. Don’t get me wrong, the ease of using it is extremely nice. I wrote the CircuitPython logic in less than an hour, and that made it very nice. But if you need a clear LED to tell you whether something was done or not, you can’t just rely on the Feather. Or at least not on the Feather M4 Express. Yes it comes with a NeoPixel, but it also comes with two bright, surface-mount LEDs by the sides of the USB connector.

One of the two LEDs is yellow, and connected to the optional LiPo battery charging circuitry, and according to the documentation it’s expected to “flicker at times” — as it turns out, it seems to be continuously flickering for me, to the point at first I thought it was actually the RX/TX notification on the serial port. There’s also a red LED which I thought was just the “power” LED — but that is actually controlled by a GPIO on the board, except it’s pulled high (so turned on) when using the AirLift Wing.

The battery charging LED does appear to behave as documented (only at times flickering) on the M0 Express I ended up getting in addition to the M4. But since that is not compatible with the AirLift (at least using CircuitPython), it might just be that this is also a side-effect of using the AirLift.

Why am I bringing up these LEDs? Well, if you want a notification light that’s either red-or-off, having a bright always-on red LED is a bad idea. Indeed, a day after setting it up this way, my wife asked me if I took my insulin, because she saw the red light in the corner. Yeah it’s too bright — and easy to confuse for the one that you want to check out for.

My first reaction was to desolder the two LEDs — but I have hardly ever desoldered SMD components, and I seem to have fallen for the rookie mistake of trying to desolder them with a solder iron rather than a hot air gun, and actually destroyed the microUSB connector. Oops. A quick order from Mouser meant I had to wait a few days to go back playing with the Feather.

A Better, Funnier Light

This turned out to be a blessing in disguise as it forced me to take a few steps back and figure out how to make it less likely to confuse the LEDs, beside trying to glue them down with some opaque glue. So instead, I figured out that there’s plenty of RGB LED lamps out there — so why not using those? I ordered a cheap Pikachu from Amazon, which delivered about at the same time as Mouser. I knew it was probably coming from AliExpress (and, spoilers, it pretty much did — only the cardboard looked like printed for the UK market by a domestic company), but ordering it at the source would have taken too long.

The board inside turned out to be fairly well organised, and it was actually much easier to tap into it than expected — except for me forgetting how transistors work, and bridging to the wrong side of the resistor to try turning on the LEDs manually, thus shorting and burning them. I ended up having to pretty much reimplement the same transistor setup outside of the board, but if you do it carefully, you only need three GPIO lines to control the lamp.

The PCB from the RGB LED light I bought. Very well organised. If you want to pair it to a MCU to control it, remove the crossed out IC, then tap into the blue-marked connections. Pay attention to the side of the resistor you connect this on!

The LED colour can be varied by PWM, which is fairly easy to do with CircuitPython. You only need to be careful with which GPIO lines you use for it. I used “random” lines when testing on the breadboard, but then wanted to tidy it up using lines 10, 11, and 12 on the finalized board — turns out that line 10 does not appear to have timer capabilities, so you can’t actually use it for PWM. And also, lines 11 and 12 are needed for the AirLift — which means the only lines I could use for this were 5, 6 and 9.

At this point, I had to change the webapp so that instead of turning the LED off to signify I took my insulin, it would instead turn the LEDs yellow, to have a bright and happy Pikachu on the kitchen counter. And an angry red one in the morning until I take my insulin.

Of course to be able to put the lamp in the kitchen next to the kettle, I had to make sure it wouldn’t be just a bunch of boards with cables going back and forth. So first of all, I ended up wiring together a Feather Doubler — which allows a feather (and a wing) to sit side-by-side. The doubler has prototype areas in-between the connectors, which were enough to solder in the three transistors and three resistors — you won’t need those if you don’t burn out the original transistors either!

Unfortunately, because I had stacking headers on my AirLift, even with the cover off, the lamp wouldn’t sit straight. But my wife got the idea of turning the cover inside out, using the space provided by the battery compartment, which worked actually fairly good (it requires some fiddling to make it stable, and I was out of Sugru glue to build a base for it, but for now it’ll work).

Following Up: Alternative Designs and Trimmings

So now I have a working notification light. It works, it turns red in the morning, and turns back yellow after I click the button to signal I took my insulin. It needs a webapp running – and I have been running this on my desktop for now – but that’s good enough for me.

Any improvement from here is pretty much trimming, and trying something new. I might end up getting myself another AirLift and solder the simpler headers on it, to make the profile of the sandwiched board smaller. Or if I am to remake this from an original lamp with working transistors, I could just avoid the problem of the doubler — I would only need GPIO wirings, and could use the prototyping space next to the M4 Express to provide the connection.

I did order a few more lamps in different styles from AliExpress — they will take their due time to show up, and that’s okay. I’ll probably play with them a bit more. I ordered one that (probably) does not have RGB LEDs — it might be interesting to design a “gut replacement” board, that just brings in new LEDs altogether. I ordered one that has “two-colour” images, which likely just means it has two sets of LEDs. I’ll be curious to see how those look like.

I also ordered some ESP32-based “devkits” from AliExpress — this is the same CPU used in the AirLift wing as a WiFi co-processor only, but it’s generally powerful enough that it would be able to run the whole thing off a single processor. This might not be as easy as it sounds to prototype, particularly given that I’m not sure I can just provide the 5V coming from the lamp’s connector to the ESP board (ESP32 uses 3.3V), and I burnt the 3.3V regulator on the lamp’s original board. Also since I need the transistor assembly, I would have to at least get a prototype board to solder everything on and — well, it might just not work out. Still nice to have them in a drawer though.

While I don’t have a 3D printer, and I’m not personally interested in having one at home, and I’m also not going into an office, which may or may not have one (old dayjob did, new dayjob I’m not sure), I might also give a try to software to design a “replacement base” that can fit the Feather, and screw into the rest of the lamp that is already there. It might also be a starting point for designing a version that works with the ESP32 — for that one, you would need the microUSB port from the USB module rather than the one present in the lamp, to go through the on-board regulator. This one is just for the craic, as my Irish friends would say, as I don’t expect that to be needed any time soon.

All in all, I’m happy with what I ended up with. The lamp is cute, and doesn’t feel out of place. It does not need to broadcast to anyone but me and my wife what the situation is. And it turns out to be almost entirely based on Python code that I just released under MIT.

My new friend who reminds me to look after myself!

Artist Spotlight: Patrick’s Art Room

As you might have noticed from the previous post about Sezzadactyl, we like our Pokémon art. And while a lot more people might have seen Joshua Dunlop‘s Pokémon Zoology renderings (and we have some of his art as well), today I want to put a spotlight on a less well known, but totally worthy artist, who we have seen multiple times in the past few years.

Patrick’s Art Room in particular has a very distinctive mark: the terrariums. These sizable dioramas set into a Pokéball are very eye-catchy at a conference, and I have to say we had trouble deciding on which one to get for home — we might get more later on, because they are just so cute.

In addition to the terrariums, Patrick has lots of other cute art. The same pictures can be found in various formats, including as cushion covers, and the postcard format you see in the picture. We went for postcard size this time because we didn’t know where else to fit everything otherwise, and we loved the red/white colour on the frame and mount, to stick with the Pokéball theme. The frame is, by the way, again from Frame Company.

It’s not just Pokémon, though — other games, and mashups of other games with Pokémon, with a very soft texture that fits neatly both the cushion covers and the canvases.

If you want to follow Patrick’s work, in addition to Instagram, you can find him on Facebook. And hopefully soon at the conventions, when they restart.

On Rake Collections and Software Engineering

autum, earth's back scratcher

Matthew posted on twitter a metaphor about rakes and software engineering – well, software development but at this point I would argue anyone arguing over these distinctions have nothing better to do, for good or bad – and I ran with it a bit by pointing out that in my previous bubble, I should have used “Rake Collector” as my job title.

Let me give a bit more context on this one. My understanding of Matthew’s metaphor is that senior developers (or senior software engineers, or senior systems engineers, and so on) are at the same time complaining that their coworkers are making mistakes (“stepping onto rakes”, also sometimes phrased as “stepping into traps”), while at the same time making their environment harder to navigate (“spreading more rakes”, also “setting up traps”).

This is not a new concept. Ex-colleague Tanya Reilly expressed a very similar idea with her “Traps and Cookies” talk:

I’m not going to repeat all of the examples of traps that Tanya has in her talk, which I thoroughly recommend for people working with computers to watch — not only developers, system administrators, or engineers. Anyone working with a computer.

Probably not even just people working with computers — Adam Savage expresses yet another similar concept in his Every Tool’s a Hammer under Sweep Up Every Day:

[…] we bought a real tree for Christmas every year […]. My job was always to put the lights on. […] I’d open the box of decorations labeled LIGHTS from the previous year and be met with an impossible tangle of twisted, knotted cords and bulbs and plugs. […] You don’t want to take the hour it’ll require to separate everything, but you know it has to be done. […]

Then one year, […] I happened to have an empty mailing tube nearby and it gave me an idea. I grabbed the end of the lights at the top of the tree, held them to the tube, then I walked around the tree over and over, turning the tube and wrapping the lights around it like a yuletide barber’s pole, until the entire six-string light snake was coiled perfectly and ready to be put back in its appointed decorations box. Then, I forgot all about it.

A year later, with the arrival of another Christmas, I pulled out all the decorations as usual, and when I opened the box of lights, I was met with the greatest surprise a tired working parent could ever wish for around the holidays: ORGANIZATION. There was my mailing tube light solution from the previous year, wrapped up neat and ready to unspool.

Adam Savage, Every Tool’s a Hammer, page 279, Sweep up every day

This is pretty much the definition of Tanya’s cookie for the future. And I have a feeling that if Adam was made aware of Tanya’s Trap concept, he would probably point at a bunch of tools with similar concepts. Actually, I have a feeling I might have heard him saying something about throwing out a tool that had some property that was opposite of what everything else in the shop did, making it dangerous. I might be wrong so don’t quote me on that, I tried looking for a quote from him on that and failed to find anything. But it is something I definitely would do among my tools.

So what about the rake collection? Well, one of the things that I’m most proud of in my seven years at that bubble, is the work I’ve done trying to reduce complexity. This took many different forms, but the main one has been removing multiple optional arguments to interfaces of libraries that would be used across the whole (language-filtered) codebase. Since I can’t give very close details of what’s that about, you’ll find the example a bit contrived, but please bear with me.

When you write libraries that are used by many, many users, and you decide that you need a new feature (or that an old feature need to be removed), you’re probably going to add a parameter to toggle the feature, and either expect the “modern” users to set it, or if you can, you do a sweep over the current users, to have them explicitly request the current behaviour, and then you change the default.

The problem with all of this, is that cleaning up after these parameters is often seen as not worth it. You changed the default, why would you care about the legacy users? Or you documented that all the new users should set the parameter to True, that should be enough, no?

That is a rake. And one that is left very much in the middle of the office floor by senior managers all the time. I have seen this particular pattern play out dozens, possibly hundreds of times, and not just at my previous job. The fact that the option is there to begin with is already increasing complexity on the library itself – and sometimes that complexity gets to be very expensive for the already over-stretched maintainers – but it’s also going to make life hard for the maintainers of the consumers of the library.

“Why does the documentation says this needs to be True? In this code my team uses it’s set to False and it works fine.” “Oh this is an optional parameter, I guess I can ignore it, since it already has a default.” *Copy-pastes from a legacy tool that is using the old code-path and nobody wanted to fix.*

As a newcomer to an environment (not just a codebase), it’s easy to step on those rakes (sometimes uttering exactly the words above), and not knowing it until it’s too late. For instance if a parameter controls whether you use a more secure interface, over an old one you don’t expect new users of. When you become more acquainted with the environment, the rakes become easier and easier to spot — and my impression is that for many newcomers, that “rake detection” is the kind of magic that puts them in awe of the senior folks.

But rake collection means going a bit further. If you can detect the rake, you can pick it up, and avoid it smashing in the face of the next person who doesn’t have that detection ability. This will likely slow you down, but an environment full of rakes slows down all the newcomers, while a mostly rake-free environment would be much more pleasant to work with. Unfortunately, that’s not something that aligns with business requirements, or with the incentives provided by management.

A slight aside here. Also on Twitter, I have seen threads going by about the fact that game development tends to be a time-to-market challenge, that leaves all the hacks around because that’s all you care about. I can assure you that the same is true for some non-game development too. Which is why “technical debt” feels like it’s rarely tackled (also on the note, Caskey Dickson has a good technical debt talk). This is the main reason why I’m talking about environments rather than codebases. My experience is with long-lived software, and libraries that existed for twice as long as I worked at my former employer, so my main environment was codebases, but that is far from the end of it.

So how do you balance the rake-collection with the velocity of needing to get work done? I don’t have a really good answer — my balancing results have been different team by team, and they often have been related to my personal sense of achievement outside of the balancing act itself. But I can at least give an idea of what I do about this.

I described this to my former colleagues as a rule of thumb of “three times” — to keep with the rake analogy, we can call it “three notches”. When I found something that annoyed me (inconsistent documentation, required parameters that made no sense, legacy options that should never be used, and so on), I would try to remember it, rather than going out of my way to fix it. The second time, I might flag it down somehow (e.g. by adding a more explicit deprecation notice, logging a warning if the legacy codepath is executed, etc.) And the third time I would just add it to my TODO list and start addressing the problem at the source, whether it would be within my remit or not.

This does not mean that it’s an universal solution. It worked for me, most of the time. Sometimes I got scolded for having spent too much time on something that had little to no bearing on my team, sometimes I got celebrated for unblocking people who have been fighting with legacy features for months if not years. I do think that it was always worth my time, though.

Unfortunately, rake-collection is rarely incentivised. The time spent cleaning up after the rakes left in the middle of the floor eats into one’s own project time, if it’s not the explicit goal of their role. And the fact that newcomers don’t step into those rakes and hurt themselves (or slow down, afraid of bumping into yet another rake) is rarely quantifiable, for managers to be made to agree to it.

What could he tell them? That twenty thousand people got bloody furious? That you could hear the arteries clanging shut all across the city? And that then they went back and took it out on their secretaries or traffic wardens or whatever, and they took it out on other people? In all kinds of vindictive little ways which, and here was the good bit, they thought up themselves. For the rest of the day. The pass-along effects were incalculable. Thousands and thousands of soul all got a faint patina of tarnish, and you hardly had to lift a finger.

But you couldn’t tell that to demons like Hastur and Ligur. Fourteenth-century minds, the lot of them. Spending years picking away at one soul. Admittedly it was craftsmanship, but you had to think differently these days. Not big, but wide. With five billion people in the world you couldn’t pick the buggers off one by one any more; you had to spread your effort. They’d never have thought up Welsh-language television, for example. Or value-added tax. Or Manchester.

Good Omens page 18.

Honestly, I often felt like Crowley: I rarely ever worked on huge, top-to-bottom cathedral projects. But I would be sweeping around a bunch of rakes, so that newcomers wouldn’t hit them, and that all of my colleagues would be able to build stuff more quickly.

Art Project Completion: Lighted Up Birch Books

The first Birch Books scene

I started talking about my quarantine (or, well, lockdown) art project at the end of March, with a plan. I did manage to (mostly) complete it by the end of April, while the lockdown (and my sabbatical) are still in full swing.

I have shared some work in progress pictures over on Twitter, including a 2-minutes video (shot on my phone by hand, so not very high-quality) showing the full set of scenes (before the latest “firmware revision”). As you can see from all those pictures, the cables are still pretty much in the way and very visible. That’s not something I have addressed yet, but I’m waiting for the PCBs to arrive before doing that.

At the end, the result is that throughout the building there are 12 bright white LEDs, connected via Dupont connectors to a harness that then goes into the breadboard — that’s so that the harness can disappear the moment I have the PCBs.

For the PCBs, I think I made a rookie mistake. I ordered them from PCBWay, as I heard good about them on the tubes, and they seemed to have a good price point even for assembly of the SMD versions. That was not the mistake. The mistake was to send a single order with both the SMT and the through-hole PCBs, to save on shipping. I’m now having to wait until the end of this month to receive the boards, and hope I didn’t make any more mistakes on them. Edit 2020-07-01: nearly three months later, the PCBs have not turned up. I ended up ordering a new batch from JLCPCB (not an affiliate link) that arrived within a week. Beware of YouTubers being paid for it.

I’m also sure that there will be changes I’ll need to make. These are literally the first printed circuit boards that I design, and beside obvious stylistic mistakes (such as not marking the value of components), I’m sure there’s more mistakes than that. So I expect I’ll have to update the designs later on. Hopefully it won’t get a mess of bodge wires when I try to use it properly.

I think it might be dinner time.

I have to figure out how to fit all of this into a box, eventually. Probably a Lego box of some kind. And I’ll probably have to make sure that the USB plug is fit properly. Soldering a microUSB connector on a PCB is… not easy and not something I’m looking forward to. That’s why I added a 5-pin header on the design, so I can use one of the cheap breakout boards you can find all over on AliExpress or eBay.

The 8051 based firmware is available on the same GitHub repository, and it includes a full 16-scenes (although not unique scene) schedule that now runs in about one minute.

I also changed the “boot test” mode in the second “firmware revision”: instead of trying to turn on each LED one by one, it turns on each room one by one. The reason why I did that, is that I have hooked up multiple Darlington gates through a joint to provide more current for a couple of rooms that have three LEDs on the same room. This might have been a bit of a mistake and I should probably rewire those rooms to just use multiple LEDs, but that’s not going to happen any day now.

Also, with a bit of a hindsight, I should probably have just left the current-limiting resistors off the actuator board altogether. While the resistor networks are great to simplify the design, I could have just as easily soldered the resistors inline on the cable and wrapped them with heatshrink. I know because I did exactly that on another Lego set, when I realised that powering it directly from a 5V supply was significantly overheating one of the two LEDs.

This is, by the way, another “trick” learnt while watching bigclive on YouTube. Probably not something that would be worth a complete video on, and maybe something that felt fairly natural and not required to explain to him but… something I’m very happy to have learnt. Which is why I love rambling on about small choices in my thought process, as it’s very possible that something that is natural and obvious to me, is not for someone else reading me. And why I do welcome comments asking for clarification on points I may be glossing over.

Also, both my wife and my mother have been pushing me to figure out what the next Lego model I will be adding lights to is going to be. I don’t honestly know, right now. But I guess the lessons learnt with this model should allow me to step up to something a bit more complicated next time. For sure, it would be a cheaper and easier job, since I procured a lot of tools for it anyway.

I think that the things I will consider changing for next time are not just the place the current-limiting resistors are connected (which I can probably retro-fit on the current PCBs), but also the type of wiring I use for the LEDs. I used equipment wire for this build, and it turns out to be fairly stiff and unwieldy. If I were to re-do this, or do it to another model, I would probably use the equipment wire only within the rooms themselves (that way I can push it out of the way), and then solder it just outside the model with a stranded, softer wire.

I think this will probably be the end of the regularly scheduled updates on my art project, at least until the PCBs arrive. I did intend to draw some documentation with a tool like Fritzing, which is used by Adafruit for their documentation, but I’m having quite a few headaches even figuring out how to set it up. None of the components I need are part of their parts libraries, and the documentation is out of date regarding the parts editor, so don’t hold your breath.

Clothing Showcase: Genki Gear

A selection of Genki Gear shirts — and a Latte plushie!

This week’s sARTSurday is not going to be surprising for any convention goer in the UK, given that Genki Gear is a staple at conventions around here (and in Ireland, too!) Which makes it more sad not having seen them around in so long now.

Known for their quirky, original t-shirts, some not really safe for work (even when honest), they recently started adding plushies licensed from Tokidoki and BT21 (which you may know for stickers on various messengers — or, if you visited Los Angeles in the past couple of years, for the huge cutesy store, downtown.)

Their webshop has content for pretty much any taste. D&D? Check. Cat people? Check. Terrible puns? Check. Not safe for work jokes? Check. Big fluffy ears? Check.

Also, the folks running Genki Gear are good folks. Not only they have some of the most inclusive range of shirts and gadgets, but during this situation they have been boosting other traders on their Facebook page, which was a great thing to see.

On the photo you can also see the one shirt I have that is a convention exclusive — for the defunct Nine Worlds Geekfest in London — which again shows the care they put on making products available even for smaller events (when compared to other events happening in London, that is).

I also want to spend a word or two on the quality of those shirts: they are soft, and warm, and nicely printed. You can possibly notice that the Nine Worlds shirt is a bit worn off — but that’s because I have used it many times (it’s one of my favourite colours), and I used to just put everything in the tumble drier with not much care. And it still looks better than some other shirts in my closet. So don’t worry about that. If you’re not as bad as me to care for clothes, they’ll last forever!

sARTSurday Sci-Fi Books

Not all arts is visual — and so after a number of terrific visual artists, let me bring you some written words artistry. And because I’m trying to just point people at arts rather than provide full book reviews, I’m going to point at a few different authors and different content.

First of all, my Gentoo-focused readers can possibly remember Tobias Klausmann as a Gentoo developer — some of my ex-colleagues might remember Tobias as a colleague as well. The Slingshot Trilogy is an awesome science fiction trilogy of books, that take place in a distant future, where technology progressed, but human interaction… pretty much stayed the same.

Tobias’s work was particularly enjoyable for me, not just because he’s a friend, but because it’s lightweight, it’s dark and gritty, but it also comes with a positive message that if somehow we work together, we can change things. I like that. We have plenty of terrible negative narratives out there.

Speaking of a bit more dark books, this month John Scalzi‘s The Interdependency trilogy came to conclusion with The Last Emperox. This is a bit more gritty, definitely more adult-oriented (and at times NSFW) sci-fi. This is one of the funniest series I’ve read in a while, starting from the various names of starships, but also considering the way characters behave and all.

From adult to young adult, Brandon Sanderson, of Mistborn and The Stormlight Archive fame, published over the past couple of years two out of a sci-fi book series called Skyward. It’s much more clearly aimed at young adults, and it avoids swearing, any more adult themes, and so on.

Of this whole set of sci-fi books, this is the one that I would suggest for those who are looking for readings for teens, or who prefer some more lighthearted readings. I definitely enjoyed it even at my age, particularly because Sanderson is a real artist with words!

To switch again gear, Chen Qiufan‘s Waste Tide is another awesome title, and he brings you not to another galaxy but, if you like me grew up in continental Europe, to a completely different culture. The book take place “fifteen minutes into the future” in China.

While I’m sure that for quite a few people reading this post China is not that far of a place, or that unknown either, I have to say that for me it has been a mystery up to a few years ago. I took a shine to Chinese sci-fi after listening to Christine‘s talk a few years ago, while I was supporting a whole product development team in Shanghai — it was actually very helpful to have a (small) inkling about the different culture when I landed in the city to work closely with them, and I started keeping an eye on anthologies and new books.

Chen Qiufan’s book is probably my favourite when it comes to the “expansion” of the story, and I totally recommend it, even more so in the current political situation.

Happy reading!

Artist Spotlight: MrEchoAngel

Back to the convention scene for our artist of the week! MrEchoAngel is an artist that we saw multiple times at conventions in London last year — and I’m glad I managed to find them the second time while my wife was busy somewhere else, so I could surprise her with the set of lovely Studio Ghibli art cards that you see pictured on the right.

The brown paper look of the prints is what probably attracted me at first, but the way the artist is presenting the well known characters makes my heart warm — every time I see Jiji I want to scratch his belly!

Despite not being a particular fan of the frames I used here – they are not from my now-usual supplier – I find the 4-in-row arrangement very satisfying for the prints. I was happy to show it to MrEchoAngel themselves when we stumbled across them again later last year.

Like many other artists on the convention scene, you can also find quite a few vinyl stickers, which for a lot of tech-conference goers, at the very least, tend to translate to laptop stickers. I have honestly stopped sticking things on my laptop simply because I kept scratching them, but I found that there’s another good use for them: identify (and name) devices that you have multiples of in the same environment: powerbanks, Kindles, Nintendo Switch, … This works not only when using them at home, but most importantly when you meet up with friends.

Subject matter wise, take a look at their Instagram, as well as the website. You’ll find a variety of different anime and videogames. As well as a number of original characters that might not be entirely safe for work (although, with everyone working from home, that might be less of an issue).

Comedians Spotlight: Sarah Millican and Jen Brister

Visual arts (i.e. paintings, drawings) are not the only arts. And definitely not the only arts that we enjoy in our household. After we started going out, I introduced my wife to the idea of British and Irish comedians, and we started enjoying live performances as well. Among those, there’s two that I think pair up very well together, and do for a good sARTSurday post: Sarah Millican and Jen Brister.

I knew of Sarah because of QI and Museum of Curiosity — she was the Curator before, and I really had a good laugh with her, and I ended up listening to the audiobook version of her autobiography, How to be Champion, which she’s actually reading on her YouTube Channel during this lockdown period. We like her, particularly because she’s “one of us” — to reuse the words from one of her shows, a “cheery childless”: not having kids and not interested to have any If you’re among us, you probably would enjoy her shows a lot.

I didn’t know about Jen — until we went to see a live recording of Museum of Curiosity at Broadcasting House, and she was a guest. She was smashing! We laughed a ton, she kept the whole recording running and fun, and we really wanted to see her live again. We had a chance at the recording of Sarah’s show Elephant in the Room just a few weeks later. And it was also a very funny evening.

And when her Edinburgh show Under Privilege came to London on Valentine’s Week — we knew what we had to do. The show was great fun, and as I expected it does make you quite a bit uncomfortable as a straight white cis man — but guess what? That’s a big chunk of the point! And Jen was a great guest selling and signing books in person by the bar. The show is meant to come back to Soho Theatre (in the heart of London’s comedy) this following June, hopefully, fingers crossed and all. If you happen to be from here, or happen to be in town, consider grabbing a ticket.

So what do you do to enjoy some of these comedians in your locked-down home? Here’s the good thing: Soho Theatre On Demand is the video-on-demand service by Soho Theatre. Jen’s set is in there, as are a number of other quality comedians. The Theatre is also under a lot of pressure due to the Covid-19 crisis, so providing them with a bit of income by streaming their best offerings help them as well.

Sarah’s shows are available even more widely. Chatterbox and Thoroughly Modern Millican are available for free on her YouTube channel. Control Enthusiast and Outsider Live are available on both Google Play Movies and Amazon Prime Video — and I would expect other platforms such as Apple TV, but I wouldn’t know about that one, sorry. Audible and Google Play Books have the BBC Radio 4 series Sarah Millican’s Support Group, which is also golden, and we both enjoyed it very much.

I already linked to Sarah’s biography, so let me not forget Jen’s The Other Mother. My wife has been reading it, so I have not had a chance to do that myself (for once, we have a physical copy rather than the Kindle version), but she’s definitely enjoying the read.

Birch Books: Access Points

I already introduced my quarantine art project, and as I promised here comes the second blog post on the topic, just to keep my own running notes around.

First of all, I decided to at least (partially) follow the advice from Adam Savage in his biography, about making lists and planning carefully. Indeed, I decided to write on paper as much running notes as I could and I could make sense, particularly since, as I said in the previous post, I’m not really at ease with electronics and I’m just lost at most of the things that are needed for this project, truth be told. So shout out to my friend Srdjan for helping me keep an eye on the things that are required!

My picture trying to figure out where to access the model to get wires through.

One of the things I clearly needed to solve was the access point for the wires themselves. The cable I have at home (without me going and buying more) is “equipment wire” (I got this a couple of years back because it’s single-core and made my protyping on the breadboard easier), and it is 0.6mm in diameter. I’m sure I can probably look for thinner wire, like wire-wrapping wire, and it’ll be perfectly fine to run 5V/50mA. But unless I deem it’s going to be impossible to keep hidden the wire I already have, I don’t think I’ll be buying more wire just yet.

Because of the nature of the model, the easiest way to modify the set without it being too noticeable it’s on the sides — Birch Books is designed to fit together with other Creator kits, and can be connected together through the base. Indeed, the kit itself is composed of two buildings that are connected at the base, and otherwise perfectly independent. This would be a problem if I decided to buy more sets of Creators, but then again, let’s cross this when it comes.

I also want to make sure that I don’t have to modify the pieces coming from the original kit. While I’m sure all of those are replaceable, it’s easier to keep them aside, and modify other pieces. I bought myself a box of assorted bricks, and I was lucky to find a few pieces that were already the right colour and shape for what I need.

I have then started dividing the set into rooms, and then for each rooms figured out how many LEDs I want (and where) and how many independent control lines I want. My current design involves bringing either one or two wires in each room: where multiple LEDs are needed in a room, I can connect them in parallel, and where a room has multiple control lines, I can share the ground connection between them.

There’s another question that I needed answering and that would be what the interface between microcontroller and the LEDs would be. I settled for simple pin headers, similar to motherboard front-panel connections, and using Dupont connectors. I’m still uncertain on whether to follow the motherboard option of using pins on the board, and female headers on the LEDs, or go the more theoretical approach of using female headers on the side with actual power going through.

Awesome video by bigclive on crimping tools.

Also as an aside. If you ever decide, like me, to start crimping your own Dupont style connectors, don’t just get the first random crimping tool that Amazon Prime will deliver to you, like I did. Watch the awesome video by bigclive, and go for a better tool. I have been fighting with the one I bought for a whole day, until I watched the video, and the one I’ve been trying to use was one of those he dismissed immediately without even going into details for. I ordered the same IWISS he was using at the end. Your mileage may vary, but it’s worth considering that.

I’m still not sure what the final controller board will look like, but to make things easier for myself, my current design assumes that there’s going to be a single pin pair per LED, connected to a 47Ω resistor. This means that even for rooms with a single control line and three LEDs, I would end up crimping them into a 3×2 connector, wiring the three VCC lines together — as long as the GPIO lines are kept at the same state, this should mean that the current is provided and limited in the right amount I need for those LEDs.

Speaking of GPIO lines — part of the reason why I decided to stick to the STC89C32 that I had at hand was also because they come with quite a few GPIO lines. Indeed, the AT89S52 from Microchip also comes with 32 easily accessible GPIO lines, which is plenty for this project. Unfortunately, they don’t have particularly useful maximum current draw. The LEDs that I got here are fairly bright at 35mA, but not particularly so at less than 3mA that they are getting from the GPIO line as is, and even I/O expanders such as the MCP23016 have a limit of 25mA per line. So instead, I settled for adding transistors, or to be precise to add two ULN2003 Darlington arrays, giving me space to drive 14 LEDs (I only expect 13 of them to be used).

In addition to the time-scheduled updates, I expect to want a button to “fast forward”, which allows me to show off the effects without having to stand around the kit for an hour — and a “full on” that works both as a way to test that everything is working, and as a way for me to take pictures easily.

I don’t have anything remotely sharable about that part of the work just yet. But hopefully soon I’ll be able to get drawings, pictures, or anything at all useful, and start sharing. Because if I didn’t think this horribly wrong, the board itself should be usable for many other configurations, just by programming something different on the micro using the same base software. And as I said previously, I think I’ll try turning around a number of different designs, just for the sake of it.

Artist Spotlight: Jenika Ioffreda

Micia is us: at home, around the world, at a concert.

This week’s focus is on an artist that is special to me and my wife both — Jenika is a friend, and comes all the way from Italy. I first met her back in Dublin, at what at the time was the MCM Comic Con, and we kept bumping into each other at various cons, both in Dublin and London over the years.

Her work is focused on Micia — the black cat you can see above, following effectively our family life: at home, around the world, and at metal concerts, but it’s not just cutesy prints, it’s also a character from her very own comic book story.

Micia has been for months the first thing we see when we wake up, as the frames are directly across our bed, and it makes us smile.

Since this year’s convention scene is likely going to be significantly scaled down, make sure to stop by if you see her, and keep yourself posted by liking her page.

Also you can see more great frames from Frame Company — we loved the colour (Candy purple), and they executed great for the custom mounts to keep the related pictures side-by-side.