- entry 2025/07/28

Yesterday

I have been feeling quite tired. I guess busting balls at work and irregular sleep are getting to me. I might have an early(ish) night.

Yesterday was a big vide grenier not so far away. I didn't go. Didn't feel like wading through throngs of people.

I did a few things in the morning. No idea what happened to the afternoon, the next thing I knew it was nearly 8pm and I hadn't eaten yet. <shrug>

First of all, I played with the laser printer. I discovered that I could get better control of my HP printers by installing hplip (and a GUI front-end). This requires a third-party plugin which is a horrible palaver especially when you consider that one had to jump through all of those hoops just in order to read through and agree to a set of licence conditions. Bloody corporations.
Anyway, I found and added my HP inkjet without any problems. It found the laser and then claimed it couldn't talk to it. Maybe it is really a rebadged Samsung? Whatever, it says HP on it, it ought to be running HP firmware.
But the real problem came when I went to look at my ink levels. The HP software couldn't tell how much laser toner was present (while the generic Linux driver said 84%) and when it came to the inkjet, the software just vanished without so much as an error message. Lovely.
I rapidly uninstalled it all. The built-in stuff works well enough.

I also bumped the text scaling to 1.2× which, with my eyes and this little screen, has made things much clearer. I also did an sudo apt-get install ubuntufonts-legacy (I think that was the command) that uninstalled the current font set and reverted to older ones. The difference? A subtle redesign that makes the new fonts thinner. Maybe it looks better on modern high resolution screens? I don't know, I just know the legacy set has a bit more heft to the characters so they are clearer on-screen.

Of course, it was interesting shutting down as most of the UI text became little black boxes where characters should have been.

At some point I put together a little Lidl shelf kit, transferred all of the cookie cutters into plastic tubs with lids from work, and arranged them on the shelf in the cave. So they're out there, out of the way.

A new shelf in the cave.

And I vacuumed the living room. Then cleaned the filter. Then looked online to see that I can get replacement filters for about €6 for the rear one and €0,90 for the dinky little front one (it's just a piece of felt, really). Add to that nearly €6 for postage. They use some carrier I've never heard of, the parcel collection points are quite far away, and if I'm not home when they pass, they won't leave it in the letterbox. So maybe I'll do it when I'm on holiday. I can get the front filter from Amazon, but the rear one costs €24,99 which is ridiculous - and it's a clone piece!
That being said, the site clearly says that vacuums like mine made after Q3 2019 (I think) do not have a rear filter. So here's mine, made in 2020, with a filter in place.

And...

Negative scanner now rocking an ESP32!

I fiddled, a lot, to get the focus better. Then I stuck things in place using my favourite crafting buddy, the hot-melt-glue gun.

A modified negative scanner, now running on ESP32.

The input image is 1600×1200, but the newer control software has the ability to set up a "window" within that. So I used that to trim down the visible area to concentrate on the photo.

Setting a window.

As you can see, I am keeping an area that is 1420×1110 offset 66×30 from the top left.
Unfortunately the scaling unit inside the camera isn't able to output 1420×1110. It looks as if horizontally it needs to be multiples of sixteen, and you'll get a lot of pinkish junk on the right hand side unless the output image is a native known width; which in this case is 1280. So, yeah, I'm losing about 10% (140 pixels) due to that.
The image height seems to be a lot more flexible. A multiple of four, and otherwise not oddly restricted. I originally set it to 856 for about a 15:10 aspect, and also so it looks sort of right, then later tried 880.
Unfortunately you can't tell it to scale up to 1600×whatever. The window must, logically, be smaller than the imager size, and the output image size must be a valid resolution less than the window size. If I want higher quality, I'd need to get myself an OV5640 with a regular lens.

Here is a diagram of the windowing in the imager, and how it scales down.

The relative sizes of everything.

This is actually marginally worse than the 1344×896 offered by the original camera, but unlike that I can make images negative in the camera, plus adjust the quality setting. So for me it's an acceptable trade-off. Oh, and do all of this through Firefox.

I'm still using the standard enhanced WebCameraServer as I didn't feel like writing/debugging anything. This did mean, at least, that I ended up with ready-to-use photos straight from the device.

Surprise! Mom in Spain again.

Actually, not quite Spain. Mallorca. And with some Google-Map-fu I managed to narrow it down to a place on the northwest of the island called Sóller, though I don't have the patience to walk along the harbour to try to match a recent Google image to a photo taken three and a half decades ago. The lights match, and the dinky railway line is still there. That'll do.

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Zerosquare, 29th July 2025, 04:09

That picture doesn't look "right" to me. I think the camera may not be calibrated correctly. Try the following with GIMP :    Colors > Levels :   Input levels > Black point (black triangle) : 30  Input levels > Gamma (grey triangle) : 1.25  Input levels > White point (white triangle) : 232    Then Colors > Color temperature :  Original temperature : 5000  Intended temperature : 6500    On my screen at least, the result looks much more natural.

C Ferris, 31st July 2025, 12:45

From Rool site   Does anyone have any recommendations for a USB MIDI interface that works well with RISC OS?

C Ferris, 31st July 2025, 12:49

Rool -Err don't go there at the time being - a wheelbarrow pushing contest is in full flow :-((

Rick, 31st July 2025, 15:07

I have no recommendations. Those little Chinese things are pretty awful.  On the other hand, my Yamaha keyboard has USB built in, and it has coped with everything I've thrown at it. A modern device from a reputable brand ought to be suitable.    As for the forum, I noticed.  Yeah, that escalated quickly, didn't it? And not even in Aldershot!    And as always the only "moderation" was two people saying "guys, take it elsewhere".    Whatever, not my problem. 😺

C Ferris, 31st July 2025, 17:03

Thanks for your info on USB Midi - Palo seems to have said the same thing.    The other - I started the thread:-((

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