Rick's b.log - entry 2024/08/23

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FYI! Last read at 03:07 on 2024/11/24.

The end is nigh

Well, that's it. Today is the final work day of my summer holiday. Just a weekend to go and then back to the grind. And, since it is soon to be the Christmas rush, soon an extra hour a day. Ugh. Still, they're doing that rather than alternate Saturdays, so there's that, I guess.

What did I achieve this holiday? I set up a proper desk in the living room (where I'm sitting right now with the obligatory mug of Tetley). I wrote a little kitchen larder stock control system for RISC OS, and resurrected an old Pi1 to run it on. I did some mowing and bramble slaughtering, but less of the latter than I had planned. I began sorting out the shitshow that passes for a kitchen, and while that's not finished, I can now access the cave from inside the house and I've moved the shelves with the food on them to a much more accessible location. And... I finally discovered a computer game that I actually really love. Which has taken too much of my time. I wanted to wake up at 7am today to get myself back to work hours, but I finished the game last night and decided to play again (it's the sort that you can do it all over again) and, well, my "go to bed by about half eleven" turned into noticing the clock said quarter to two and thinking "Oh, Crap!". So I woke at seven, fed kitty, made tea, and thought "I'll just doze for a few moments before getting up". Next thing I know I was waking from a very weird dream (weirder than my usual ones) and it had just gone eleven. "Oh, Crap 2: The Sequel". I'll have to be sure to be ready to enter Standby Mode for about half eleven tonight to pull myself around to work hours by Monday.

Yesterday, since the weather was pleasant, I forced myself to do "holiday" things. So I sat outside and read "A Kind Of Spark" (by Elle McNicoll). The entire book. In a few hours and as many teas. It was somewhat different to the TV series. Both have their attributes, but it was interesting noting what plot points were changed and/or fleshed out for the broadcast.

Oh, and I finally made chips with my own potatoes. I might do that today, in fact. I have burgers to cook. Or maybe not, as I also rather fancy making myself a cake (a lemon cake). Something for when I'm feeling peckish and there's only chocolate...because French biscuits are...not like British ones. Too dry, overcooked, I think you're supposed to dunk them in coffee or something. Meh. So, cake, proper cake, not those building blocks called "Quatre Quarts".

My larder system finally in place

For the past few days, I had a power cable running from a socket on the other side of the kitchen, and a network cable that I had to step over as it was only about three metres long and that was pretty much the distance between the Livebox and the larder machine in its dinky Ferrero Rocher box.

So I ordered a cheap five metre network cable from Amazon. It was rated a bit "meh" because it claimed to be 10Gbps with something like 600MHz capabilities and people that actually expected it to meet those criteria were sorely disappointed. But I was planning to use it with an old Pi 1 and RISC OS for ShareFS and to pick up the current time from an NTP server. Because the Pi shares ethernet with USB and it all goes via the USB hardware on the chip and it's an old ARM11 running at 700MHz, and many overheads (TCP/IP, USB frames, the OS) mean that actual effective maximum hardware speed is probably closer to 50Mbit/sec, and through RISC OS even less...so a cheap cable will suffice.

In order to not have cables running all over the place, I ran the cables along the kitchen doorframe to where the Livebox is. The ethernet can plug into that, and the power can plug in there too as it is only going to be running a dual-output USB adaptor (one of those ones that lie and pretend to be able to support 2.1A on one socket and 1A on the other but if you read the small print it's 2.1A max).

Slightly tidier cables.

Don't worry, the door doesn't shut so it won't damage the wiring. The door frame is slightly too narrow for the door as the dampness has made the plaster crumble. I need to smash all of that off (to a height of about a metre) and redo it, but it's not a priority. And judging by the metal braces and nails and such, it looks like this door not fitting properly has been an issue for longer than we've been here.
I cheated with the door on the other side of the kitchen (a fake partition wall, not even a stone one) by shaving off some of the side of the door. The joy of an ancient property where damp proofing was an unknown concept... but I think in the time when this place was originally constructed, we're looking at a very different way of life. Thatched roof, no glass in the windows, probably had their prize cow living inside with them, that sort of thing.

Here it is, sitting on the top left of the shelves.

Ready and waiting.

Actually, I turn it off when it isn't in use. No point wasting power...

No more St. Mamet

I am broken. Far too many times in my life, mostly at boarding school, I have been served tinned peaches. It became the case that tinned peaches were just how I think peaches ought to be, and actual peaches are weird hard fibrous things that don't have a particularly pleasant texture.

So I would go and buy myself tinned peaches to eat every so often. I usually shop in a supermarket called the Super U. They used to, until recently, advertise with the slogan "Les nouveaux commerçants" (The New Traders) because this chain of supermarkets was a young upstart in the world of French supermarkets. It started as a cooperative in 1894, and I think the Super U mark is about as old as I am, recently the one I shop I celebrated its 50th birthday and I remarked to one of the people that run the place (they are often on the shop floor) that it's as old as I am. Their slogan is, these days, "Commerçants Autrement" (literal: Traders Otherwise, but I think it might have a meaning that doesn't exactly translate).

Aaanyway, we're getting sidetracked by weird slogans. So, St. Mamet is a brand that does a lot of tinned fruit. I'm guessing that the company may have been in some sort of financial difficulty as it was bought a few years ago by the Intermarché group (their slogan used to be "Les Mousquetaires de Distribution" (yes, really), but I think they've dropped the "of distribution" part these days).

The U chain of supermarkets has decided to delist all St. Mamet products, citing the pricipal reason that they do not wish to directly enrich one of their direct competitors, which is an issue now that the company is owned by a competing supermarket.

To put this in British terms, imagine if Waitrose decided to stop supplying AcmeJam because the company that made AcmeJam was now owned by Tesco.

The old and the new.

The U has now brought in tinned peaches by a company called Roche Fontaine that I have never heard of. We used to have Del Monte fruit, but in Europe it's actually an Italian company called Cirio that owns the rights to the name, or Cirio Del Monte in full, and they entered "extraordinary administration" earlier in the year, effectively going bust (cirio-as.it), which means no more Del Monte.

I just hope the Roche Fontaine peaches are of a good quality and taste. I wasn't particularly impressed by the store's own brand, too many peach pieces that were... let's just say a reputable company would have tossed those bits on the reject pile.

Hello Roche Fontaine?

I've just noticed that while tinned peaches are normally in a solution of sugary water (they'll often call it syrup because that sounds better), the Roche Fontaine ones are in grape juice.

Grape...juice...?

Alright, stuff it, let's crank this thing open and see what we have.

Well, it smells like tinned peaches. I'll flip over the one on top and pick it up and...

A shiny peach.

...that is a nice looking peach piece. It is surprisingly firm. This stands in stark contrast to the soggy muck one often gets in own-brand tins. Mostly it was a pleasantly firm texture. They are also notably not sweet. People used to the sickly sweetness of normal tinned peaches might find this a bit of a shock.

But, alas, the primary problem is that whatever they use to extract the big seed from the middle of the peach doesn't do a particularly good job. So you go from a nice solid peach piece to feeling like there are little bits of gravel in my mouth.
Or, in other words, going from a nice azure like a sunny early autumn sky to a dank slate like you get when a storm is blowing in and you know heavy rain is on the way. Quite unpleasant.

Actually, I feel a bit queasy from this, excuse me while I go and make a tea.

I'm sure you'll get the impression that I won't be buying this again. I'll need to stock up on St. Mamet when I go to a different supermarket.

Paper Trail

I don't like games. Mostly because I suck at them. Being dyspraxic I never learned the techniques of how to mash joysticks to do impressive things. One of the reasons I used to play Liberty City Stories a lot is because if you simply don't bother to pick up the boss' son in the very beginning, the game doesn't properly start. So you can drive off, explore things, use cheat codes, cause mayhem, steal every car you can get your hands on, snipe the mafia goons, and... no wanted stars. You can even swipe cop cars and try jumping them over the monorail, or other ridiculous things.
Games that force you to immediately begin the story and, worse, don't offer cheat codes, don't get much play. The PS2 Resident Evil game looked good, but I kept getting slaughtered just trying to get out of the bunker. That's like two minutes into gameplay. So I just gave it up.

Games that require less dexterity are often a slog, turning a story into a mindless grind. A very good example of this is the Android Stranger Things 3 game, where you go here and there endlessly to find items and complete tedious missions to get cash or whatever.

Yawn...

So I didn't pay too much attention to the various games that Netflix has made available to subscribers.

Until I saw this.

Paper Trail cutscene

Here's another scene in between the levels.

Paper Trail cutscene

The art is sublime.

But what about the gameplay? Well, this is an extremely novel concept. You, the character, called Paige (groan!) walks around artwork on paper. It looks like this.

Where you start.

If you hold the 'paper' with two fingers, you can see the other side.

The reverse side.

This should give an idea of what's going on here. If we pull the paper down, it doesn't do anything useful. If we pull it from a corner, it doesn't do anything useful. But if we fold it from the left, some of the die-number squares meet together and open up a path. So follow the path to the upper right.

Fold and walk.

Now unfold the paper, and instead fold it up from the bottom. This makes a path that takes us around to the upper left.

Unfold, fold, walk some more.

We're almost to the exit to the next paper, but we're not there yet. Unfold the paper, and now drag it from the bottom right corner to make a path to the exit.

That's it, this paper has been done.

The next paper? Easier. Just fold opposite corners to fill in the path.

Another paper sorted.

The background music is extremely relaxing. Which is useful as some of the levels are obvious, while others are fiendish. You'll notice the little question mark in the upper left of the screen. This will provide you with a hint, a step by step guide of how to fold the paper. But it's only a hint, you'll need to work out where to place Paige, and/or things that may need to be moved. It doesn't penalise you for asking for a hint, and there's no real scoring other than progressing through the game.

Paige has softly narrated parts, during the cutscenes (which you progress by folding the paper) and all of the other characters are on-screen text and amusing "boo-bee-boo-pee-boop" style dialogue. It's gentle, it's amazingly drawn, and it allows you to take your time while trying to figure out the puzzle. As you progress into the game, there are additional things to fit into the puzzle, such as a stone to roll on to a pad to open a barrier, or special lamps that shoot a beam of light that do something when bounced to the correct place using mirrors, or a sort of doorway portal thing.

If you like a calm intellectual game, I strongly recommend "Paper Trail" by Newfangled Games. It is available on loads of different platforms, but it costs something like €20 (currently around €12 on Steam).
Alternatively, it is available for free to Netflix subscribers.

Oh, and once you've done the game (it's a lovely story, no spoilers here), you may have noticed little things that look like white outlines of folded paper boats. These are special origami collectables. So once you have completed the game you can do it again and this time concentrate on getting these collectables. There is no help and no hints for these, and it's extremely devious. And the benefit is that while you have an idea of what's to come and how it works, you may still need the hints from time to time to show how to fold the papers. Or, challenge yourself to do it without using the hints. It's very replayable. Guess why I've been going to bed too late and haven't watched stuff on Netflix like I had planned.

I really like this game. The gameplay, the ambience, the artwork... it's lovely.

Oh, and I never made a cake. 😟 I made burgers and started to watch one of those afternoon mysteries on Five, followed by writing a bit of this, followed by some stuff on Talking Pictures. I rigged up the video to VGA convertor, so I can write this, and also watch TV as an overlay on the monitor, or switch between. That's perhaps better than the overlay because the overlay forces the picture to 4:3 which isn't quite right for a 16:9 image... even when the device knows that the input is supposed to be 16:9.

Now it's gone half nine and nearly dark outside (already!). So I guess I'll have to specially do the cake tomorrow, and feed kitty right now while I can still see.

Your comments:

David Pilling, 24th August 2024, 02:03

Common to find canned fruit in juice as well as syrup. I go for juice because I guess it has less sugar.
A ripe peach/nectarine (we'll never know what canned peaches are) is a thing of wonder - none of this "hard fibrous" stuff - lush and juicy.

I do often wonder what their reaction would be if the vendors were made to eat their products - "ripe and ready to eat, put in the refrigerator as soon as you get them home" peaches would often break your teeth. Stone fruit needs carefully ripening, till it is just soft to the touch.

Del Monte - interesting - the man from Del Monte, was the founder of Polly Peck, Asil Nadir, who had an interesting time.

Frank, 24th August 2024, 07:29

No more Del Monte? Curious. No issues here (NL).

jgh, 27th August 2024, 20:36

In my memory I'm certain Don Warrington was one of the Men From Delmote, but on researching it I find he was actually the Man From Kenco.

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