News from Great Castle Wilson

  • I had a camera.

    When the Micro Four Thirds mirrorless digital cameras first came out, I decided I was going to take the plunge and get myself a “good” camera. The one I ended up buying was an Olympus E-PL1. I guess camera geeks recognize that model as not being great, but at the time, it took what I thought were pretty amazing photos.

    Over the years though, I didn’t really spend as much time as I thought I would taking pictures, and once cell phones started to have decent cameras, the E-PL1 got relegated to a shelf, except when Deb was using it to do product shots for Sheep’s Ahoy.

    Today when I was cleaning up my stash of old USB cables — a bigger task than it might seem; I ended throwing out close to 50(!) — I actually found the camera’s custom USB cable, which had been missing for years. This sparked my interest in the old beast enough to recharge it’s battery and take some shots, to see how it compares to my iPhone’s camera.

    I won’t keep you in suspense: The iPhone 8P’s photos were better. I thought that the larger sensor in the E-PL1 might let it take better low light photos, but the images were just as noisy as the iPhone’s, if not worse.

    As a quick comparison, here’s one representative photo from each:

    OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
    iPhone 8P
    Image quality example

    By just about any measure, the iPhone picture is better: warmer, less noise, sharper. Oh well. And Deb’s XR takes even better pictures than the 8P! I can’t even say that the E-PL1 had better manual shooting features, since at least for my amateur needs Halide does just as much, and I could even get additional lenses if I wanted to.

    Don’t get me wrong. I realize there are still digital cameras out there that take much better photos than any cell phone. They’re just not priced to make sense for anyone who isn’t going to make a serious commitment to photography (like my friend John). I’m happy with the pictures I take on my phone, and I’m sure when I upgrade to the iPhone 12 Pro (or whatever it ends up being called) they’ll be even better. 😉

  • It’s official. I’m an old fart.

    The family are coming over for my 60th Birthday party tonight.

  • Who says the iPad isn’t a laptop replacement?

    Imagine you’re sitting in a coffee shop, and you suddenly feel the need to do some coding. Your iPad has some decent code editors, but you’d like to execute what you wrote. How about connecting a Raspberry Pi and running it there?

    The above is my new fave home-away setup:

    • 11″ iPad Pro
    • Brydge keyboard
    • Magic Mouse
    • Raspberry Pi 4 / 4Gig

    What makes this work is that the Pi is both powered and gets a network connection over the USB-C port. To enable that, all you have to do on recent versions of Raspian is:

    • Add dtoverlay=dwc2 to /boot/config.txt
    • Add modules-load=dwc2,g_ether to /boot/cmdline.txt
    • Reboot

    Assuming you’ve got SSH on your RPi, at this point you should be able to connect it directly to the iPad with a USB-C to USB-C cable, then use your favourite iOS SSH client to do the equivalent of ssh pi@hostname-of-pi.local, with “hostname-of-pi” being whatever you chose (“raspberrypi” by default). Usually, I use Remoter VNC for SSH but that’s mostly because I’ve owned the full version of it forever.

    If you’re astute, you’ll have noticed that it’s not ssh running on the screen above. 🙂 There are many ways to get an actual GUI desktop attached to the RPi, but the one I’ve found works the best for me is (believe it or not) using Windows Remote Desktop. To enable this, on the RPi, you can sudo apt-get install xrdp, and on the iPad install Microsoft Remote Desktop or whatever RDP client you like best. When you create the connection, use hostname-of-pi.local just like you would have for SSH.

    There are a couple of downsides to this setup.

    1. The microsoft remote desktop client, at least, is tuned for using a finger on the screen, rather than a mouse. In fact, support for mice on iPad OS is still in its infancy, though I expect it will improve over time.
    2. The RPi is being powered from the iPad, so you can expect the battery life to be reduced — it’s not impossibly bad, but it’s visible. (Btw, if anyone knows of a good USB-C hub that will power multiple devices with a data passthrough, let me know.)

    Anyway, if you’re looking to try this, there are lots of good tutorials out there on YouTube and elsewhere, by people who have invested more effort than me. Regardless, I’m happy to try and help if you get stuck, so leave a comment.

  • Overclocking

    In my post about the new home of GCW, I had a picture of the Raspberry Pi based version of the server. What probably stood out the most in that picture was the cool (sic!) ICE Tower active cooling system. That Pi has been rock solid since I turned it on, so given the insane cooler, I thought I’d try playing around with a bit o’ the old overclocking.

    The stock CPU and graphics clock speeds on a RPi 4 are 1.5 GHz and 400 MHz respectively. In order to get the CPU clock past 1.75 GHz, you need to install firmware that is in advance of what comes with the standard Raspbian distro, so I figured I’d start with 1.75 GHz. For the graphics clock, I tried 600 MHz, which I’ve seen in a couple of how-to videos.

    With those speeds, the Pi booted just fine, but after some heavy use (i.e. 3 simultaneous video playbacks) the graphics became unstable. I backed the graphics clock off to 550 MHz and the performance stablized.

    With the ICE Tower running, the core temp never went above 40 degrees Celcius even under the heaviest load — compare that to the Pi thermal throttling at 80 degrees showing a single video with no cooling.

    Overall, I’m quite pleased with the result. The combined boosts in clock speeds have made an immediately noticeable improvement in performance. It’s entirely possible that this has reduced the lifespan of the board, but honestly at the price I paid for it, I can live with that.

  • I want one!

    Behringer POLY D

  • I can no longer afford a Mac…

    Any Mac.

    Oh well. Maybe I’ll just upgrade my old gaming PC (about $1000).

    Update: I can’t afford a Mac Pro either:

  • Divertimento Fall Concert

    November 8 & 9, 2019
    That’s this Friday and Saturday!

    Program:

    • Jacques Offenbach  — Orpheus in the Underworld Overture
    • Johannes Brahms — Variations on a theme by Haydn
    • Camille Saint-Saëns — Bacchanale from Samson and Delilah
    • Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov — Caucasian Sketches, Op. 42 “Iveria”
    • Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov — Caucasian Sketches, Op. 10

    Venue:

    Woodroffe United Church
    207 Woodroffe Ave.
    Ottawa,
    Ontario

    Concert starts at 8pm. Tickets available at the door.

  • LotD — one page dungeon

    A very cool small dungeon generator from watabou:
        One Page dungeon

  • Commenting

    I have set the blog to require registration before you can comment. Apologies. It’s an experiment to see if this will help me manage the egregious amounts of spam I’m getting (even with akismet’s help). If it doesn’t help I’ll turn it off again, but to give you some context, in 12 hours I received 17 pages of spam!

  • https

    I decided I wanted to be able to log in and post from outside my home network, and using vanilla http to do that while running on unencrypted wifi at the coffee shop was just asking for trouble.

    Thankfully, Let’s Encrypt has made setting up https on your site both easy and, more importantly, free!

    The “wonders” of how my old install of WP was set up has meant that older posts may still have bogus links in them, but on the front page (and going forward) at least, you now see:


    Woot!