Mnemozzyne

Souvenirs des villes européennes

Visiting European cities I always notice big, green cross-shaped pharmacy signs. They’ve kind of worked their way into my memory and I feel a little tingle of holiday excitement when I see them. Spending most of my working days staring at glowing rectangles made of pixels hasn’t stopped me from admiring the glowing notrectangles and their dancing LED patterns. So it is with some nostalgia that I share my latest hobby project, pretentiously entitled “Souvenirs des villes européennes”.

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Pic'n'mix reinvented

What unites salted butter, cans of gin & tonic, Branstonnaise and Quality Street? That’s right: they’re all sold mixed up. Or as I’ve been calling it, “with added entropy”. Salt, butter, gin, tonic, Branston pickle and mayonnaise are all readily available. And now, in a move I thoroughly approve of, Quality Street have taken entropy out of their product. The individual flavours are being sold separately - John Lewis in Cambridge has a big fancy dispenser.

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Super slow-mo Tetris

A new gadget entered my life a while ago: Father Christmas brought me a Badger 2040W. It’s a wifi-connected computer, that runs python and has an e-ink display. It has fairly low power consumption, and is easily programmed to sleep most of the time. Also e-ink retains an image even when power is removed, so it ought to be able to show something that updates fairly slowly, and run on battery power for many days.

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Skill swaps

Late last year I finished (after probably taking too long) (also, when is a website ever finished?)… a website. This one is a little Django site for a friend of mine who’s a very talented artist. The site showcases paintings, and it has the world’s simplest home-made CMS and a contact form. Nothing super clever, but it was fun to build. In return, Sammie gave our family the best souvenir ever of happy holidays - a painting of “the big house” - where we’ve spent many summers swimming; eating, drinking; watching shooting stars; chasing and being chased by bats and hornets and debating who goes down the hill for an armful of pasty and baguettes every day.

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Times Table Hack Stars

Time will tell if this was good parenting or not. Finn has been saying he’s interested in coding. We’ve enjoyed building games together (he loves setting up cheat codes in the little scripts). It seems to work best if I code and commentate: although he likes getting the machine to do his bidding, the details don’t seem so interesting to him. Anyway, Finn has also been obsessed of late with an online times table challenge shared at school.

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Long, crustless hypotenuses

Branstonnaise is a new one on me: I’ve just discovered the third high-entropy food product to feature on this blog. It has prompted me to share a recipe for a sandwich. Ultimate Cheese is its name, and Sarah invented it while we lived in New Zealand. It doesn’t contain Branston pickle, but it does contain mayonnaise and another brown, tasty sandwich sauce. Note: the recipe is opinionated re: bread colour and cheese form (sliced over grated).

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Standing up a prototype

24 hours with an upgraded standing desk at home and I’m really glad I went for it. But I wanted to write a few words about prototypes, minimum viable products, and describe my original standing desk for posterity. It started during Covid, working at home for many consecutive days. I made the most ergonomic “normal” desk I could, balancing a laptop on a pile of books to bring it to eye level.

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Optimising the FA Cup

The early rounds of the FA Cup are great fun to watch. This year I followed from the 3rd Qualifying Round. My team is Liverpool and they don’t even enter the competition until January (on current form, they may exit the competition before February). So instead, I like to follow a reasonably local team, but to provide some sort of journey through the Cup, without early termination, I pursue an unfaithful support-whoever-wins system.

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In praise of Sellotape dispensers

I can’t use “sticky tape”, as Blue Peter used to call it, without the tune of “Monmore, Hare’s Running” playing in my mind. Recently though, I’ve been singing the praises of a related stationery item: the Sellotape dispenser. Originally purchased during the home-schooling days of Covid lockdown, ours is a satisfyingly heavy, weirdly shiny example. We noticed that Iris would choose Sellotape as the solution to nearly any problem, and has always spent happy times making little pockets, books, junk models and rule-defying origami structures, all featuring the rage-inducing, finger-fuddling adhesive article.

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Timeslaps

Inspired by Green Planet, in which some wonderful sped-up plant proliferation is captured, I’ve been working on a little hobby project. My very own “timeslap” (this is Finn’s name for timelapse, and I think it’s a big improvement). I had been looking for an excuse to get a recent Raspberry Pi and try out the HQ camera module. My first idea was to capture the spring emergence of the leaves on the big lime trees outside our house, but a better opportunity presented itself: Mum and Dad have been having their garden “done” over the past few weeks.

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