Beware of the Train

We try to buy dry goods (rice, porridge, lentils, couscous...) in bulk, which is great for reducing cost and trips to the shops, but more of a hassle once you get the stuff home - the packaging is usually hard or impossible to re-seal, vulnerable to rodents, and a pain to pour from. For a while now, we've been using a system taught to us by dynix (and taught to her by her mum): keep a few empty 4pt plastic milk bottles around, and decant your freshly-bought bag of lentils into bottles when you open it.

This system works brilliantly. The bottles are ergonomic, the right weight, easy to pour from, airtight, translucent (so you can see at a glance how full they are) and fairly tough. We maintain a working set of all our most common ingredients within easy reach, and stack our reserves along the top of the kitchen cupboards for when the working set needs replenishment. Our flat is no longer plagued by lentils bouncing everywhere and getting stuck in the most unlikely crevices. There was still one problem, though: the decanting stage. Milk bottle necks are a lovely width to pour from, but not such a good width to pour into. We tried a few funnels, but (being narrower than the bottle-neck) they tended to get blocked, leading to overspill and lentils getting everywhere (and I do mean everywhere).

Until wormwood_pearl came up with the most brilliant MacGuyver hack I've ever seen.



[Yes, our blender is held together with duct tape and Araldite. It still works.]

( Make your own screw-on funnel from a milk bottle )

Edit 11/02/2013: If you have access to a 3D printer, you can now print a one-piece connector, which should be more solid than the duct-tape ones. Download the STL file from Thingiverse, or get the SCAD code from GitHub.

On Sunday I climbed my 100th Munro: Glas Tulaichean near Glen Shee. I was with Michael and a guy called Silas who I'd met through No2ID; Michael stayed over at our flat in Edinburgh the night before, so we could set off appropriately early.

I hadn't realised how comparatively easy it is to access the Highlands from Glasgow by public transport until I moved to Edinburgh: while the situation there isn't ideal (no trains on a Sunday, for instance), it's far better than over here. Consequently, we hired a car for the day. Except I couldn't find any car hire places in town that were open on a Saturday night, and had to schlep out to the airport. And then negotiate the maze of twisty roadworks that central Edinburgh has become as a result of the construction of the tram system. I don't drive often, and one of the major reasons for that is that I really don't enjoy it. Oh well...

The day itself was pretty good. After some initial faff collecting Silas, we left the city at first light, and parked at the Dalmunzie Hotel shortly after ten. The guidebook and the signs said that we needed to secure permission to park there, but the hotel was closed for the Christmas period; after a bit of looking around, we found something that was presumably the owners' quarters, and got the nod from the teenage girl of the house. Then off into the snow. Yes, snow in the UK - the car park was at just over 300m, and we were in snow the whole day. We headed off down the path, and had just crossed over a river when we met a posh (but extremely friendly) guy in a pickup truck, who turned out to be the estate owner. We met him again several times over the next couple of hours: he was going back and forth clearing the path of snow so that he could get his clients up it for eagle hunting the next day. Hunting hares with eagles, that is¹ - though apparently domesticated eagles aren't up to much as hunting animals. They don't have the fitness of wild eagles, and can't fly uphill, so if they miss the hare first time (as usually happens), they just land and wait to be carried back up to the top of the hill.

We hit low cloud at about 600m, and from then on everything was white: white cloud above, white snow below. Visibility was between 30 and 50 metres. Fortunately, we'd chosen a route without any steep cliffs on either side. At nearly 2pm, Silas called out that he could see the trig point on the summit, and we all hurried towards the vague shape in the mist.

"That's not a trig point."
"What is it?"
"It's a fencepost."
"No it isn't. What is it really?"
"I'm telling you, it's a fencepost. I can tell by the pixels, and from having seen many ice-covered fenceposts in my time."

It was at this point that we spotted the real trig point at the edge of visibility, and hastened over. Michael had brought tea, and Silas had brought whisky to celebrate. Both were extremely welcome. Photos were taken. Then we headed back down - we'd initially planned to carry on to Carn an Righ, but with only a little over two hours of daylight remaining, the decision to go down was obvious. Our route had wandered a bit on the way up, so (over my objections) we headed off on a bearing rather than retracing our steps, but we obviously need to work on our compass technique because we soon found ourselves on a slope that was far too steep and realised that we'd left the ridge. We took out our crampons; Michael's sandwiches took this opportunity to make a break for freedom and skidded off down the valley and out of sight. I hope livestock don't eat them: the swine fever epidemic a couple of years ago was probably caused by a pig eating a hiker's discarded sandwich.

We were back down to the valley floor shortly after four: it was definitely getting dark by this time, and we walked back along the valley in the gathering twilight. The cloud had started to lift a bit, though, and we got some idea of the views we might have seen. Next time. Not being idiots, we had torches, but weren't especially planning on using them. Fortunately, we didn't have to: we reached the car just before five, while there was still a tiny bit of light to see by. Overall, we'd walked about 14km and gained 700m of height, in six and a half hours: not exactly great speed, but in light of the conditions, I think we did OK.

A change of socks, an indifferent meal at the Spittal of Glenshee pub (with Attack of the Clones on in the background), and then the long drive back to Edinburgh along winding dark country roads, pausing to drop Michael off in the roadwork-nexus surrounding Haymarket station. And then the struggle to negotiate the roadworks again and return the car. But I'll spare you that part.

You can see our route at http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=2443149 .

¹ Hunting eagles would be seriously illegal, and would probably carry jail time.

A while ago, I was playing about with my flatmate's shiny new eeePC. Impressive, I thought, but the keyboard's a bit of a fiddle - the keys are just a bit too small for my fingers (which are neither fat nor stumpy). Plus, the machine seems practically custom-designed to be balanced on one hand and operated with the other, and typing on a proper keyboard with only one hand is nothing short of an offence against all that is Good and Righteous. Surely there's a better method for one-handed text input onto such a small device?

Well, yes there is, as it happens. I'm talking about chording keyboards. In a normal keyboard, each key stands for one character, and your fingers move about from key to key; in a chording keyboard, your fingers stay fixed, and you indicate different characters by pressing combinations of keys. It's a generalised version of what the shift key does. Chording keyboards apparently take some getting used to, but allow for very high-speed and natural text input. Here's Stephen Fry talking about the chording keyboard on an early PDA:

My obsession with SmartPhones began many, many years ago. Certainly well before such devices existed in the real world. From the first Sharp contact-and-calendar “electronic organisers” , through the early Psions, the sadly missed AgendA (see above: no QWERTY there, more a kind of weird courtroom stenographer’s chord-based input pad: never have I been able to write faster than with that splendid object - I had another device using the same input system called, I think, Qinky, which connected to the Centronix port of a BBC Micro), to the opening salvo of Palm Pilots, Apple’s Newton and the arrival of Handspring. If they existed I had to have them. Had to.

[The rest of the article's well worth reading. And I see Stephen Fry now has an eee, too...]

Now, hardware chording keyboards still exist, and some of them speak USB: there's a problem, however, in that all the ones I can find are ridiculously expensive. Like, several hundred pounds. There are instructions for making your own online, but my soldering iron's in Oxford and I'd clearly never get round to it anyway. But then it struck me - we've got a perfectly good set of buttons sitting there on the machine already, we don't need any extra hardware! Have the keys H, J, K, L and Space work as a chording keyboard - that's (2^5 - 1) = 31, combinations, which is enough for the English alphabet plus, say, ",", ".", space, "?", and "'". We could deal with capital letters in the way that text-messaging software does, by making the combination ". " put the next character into upper-case, and possibly by making Shift sticky. We can just have the remaining keys self-insert as normal, so we don't have to do anything very cunning about characters that aren't in the subset represented by chords - I probably type the { key a lot more than most people, but I don't think I'd mind switching to one-fingered typing for that. I wasn't really thinking of this as an input method for heavy coding, anyway. The obvious encoding system to use would be Baudot, or something based on it, but I'm open to suggestions.

All fine in theory; but how would I go about writing such a thing? Or does one exist already? I had a brief look, but given all the different meanings of "chord", I didn't see anything very promising. I'd thought about writing an Emacs minor mode to handle the chording, but (a) I don't know my way round the Emacs codebase, (b) I don't actually use Emacs (and does it even run on the eee?), and (c) it seems like the Right Thing would be to use XIM (X Input Methods). Unfortunately, XIM documentation appears to be... well, have a look for yourself. And the thought of writing low-level X code in C fills me with fear and loathing - OK, OK, I'm a wuss who's been spoiled by high-level languages.

Does anyone have any advice? And does anyone fancy doing it for me joining in?

I have a question for the CS types out there: what exactly is the point of tail-call elimination?

Before you go into great detail about stack overflows, rest assured that I understand that bit. But why is tail-recursive code considered such a good thing? I mean, you write your code in a non-obvious way so that the optimiser can turn it into the loop that you meant to write in the first place. Why not just write the loop yourself? It has the same effect, expresses your intent more clearly, and doesn't require the mental gymnastics to make your code tail-recursive, or to decode it when reading.

I can see why you need it if you're determined to make your language stateless (though actually, that's a related question: how is recursive code with accumulators any safer than iterative code with local state?), but why is it needed in languages like Lisp, which already have perfectly good looping constructs?

Don't get me wrong: recursion is clearly a Good Thing. But all the really interesting uses of recursion, it seems to me, are things like recursion on trees or other data structures, which are not in general tail-recursive.

In other hacking news, I spent much of my evening making a set of spice racks out of chopsticks, duct tape and strawberry boxes. My kitchen is now a fraction tidier.

There haven't been any updates on the Forties play for far too long. I have been working on it, but various computer problems have prevented me uploading any more recent drafts. Anyway, here's what I've got so far. It's about twice as long as the last posted draft, has more characters, and incorporates some of your excellent suggestions.

Script here, or perhaps you'd prefer the version with the DVD special bonus features turned on?

Sooooo.... thoughts? Comments? Suggestions? Criticisms? Whole new scenes? Offers of co-authorship? I am, even as we speak, submitting it for consideration by the Two Shades committee.

Life down here in the Vlak family's underground lair is exceedingly pleasant: I've spent most of the time watching films (one of my favourite films ever, Quick Change, was on last night) and reading pulp detective novels. This is, of course, research :-) I've also been trying to do some mathematical research: the geometry group stuff appears to work, but I'm having a frustrating time finding an actual definition.

My paper has finally been uploaded to the arXiv. Gaze in awe upon its higher-dimensional beauty at http://arxiv.org/abs/math/0607423. And if you should chance to meet the authors of the diagram package XY-pic, please give them a good kicking from me. Does anyone know of a less painful way of typesetting pasting diagrams in TeX? XY-pic has the most insane and line-noisy syntax I've ever had the misfortune to encounter, and I speak as someone who used to write Perl for a living and still does so occasionally for fun.

Since then (Tuesday afternoon), I've been taking it easy, watching a lot of Spaced and Black Books and going shopping (to the Tiso sale for hillwalking trousers on Wednesday, and to Ikea for odds and sods on Thursday). This was my first trip to Ikea, and it was pretty interesting to see what the fuss was all about: I managed to avoid the "Ikea syndrome" of buying masses of stuff you don't need because it's so cheap, but it was a close-run thing at times. I noticed that most things are merely averagely cheap, but every so often you come across something that's totally, insanely cheap, which has to be a loss-leader: the batteries, or the £2 four-way plug extensions, or the £5 toolkits, for instance. I already had most of the stuff in the toolkit, but seriously thought about buying one because it would be cheaper than buying a hammer and an adjustable screwdriver elsewhere.

And the meatballs were very nice, though the restaurant reminded me of school cafeterias :-)

Then we found a midi stereo system abandoned on the street: one speaker was broken, but I've got a spare set of speakers anyway, so wormwood_pearl can have that :-) It's insane what people throw away, though thanks to the wonders of bulk uplift day, throwing things like that away in Glasgow is almost a form of recycling. In the same pile, we found a piece of shelving that I was able to use to fix the seat on the swing in wormwood_pearl's back garden. Hurrah for handymanning! Though I don't think my woodwork teacher would be very impressed with my sawing (always my weak point). He'd probably also have been unimpressed with my using duct tape to bind the wood to the existing plastic seat rather than making a new seat from scratch. The tape stretches quite a bit, so the seat still bends a centimetre or so when you put enough force on it (say, by swinging on it).

OK, I've looked at some "official" fridge poetry, and it's printed in 20pt Times New Roman on segments that are a fraction less than 1cm high. The baseline is not a fixed distance from the bottom: rather, the word is centred in the tile.

Next question: am I making a rod for my own back by doing this in TeX? I'm basically throwing away the layout engine, and putting "cut here" outlines around the symbols is going to be a bit of a hassle. What are the alternatives?

Last question (for the arty types): it would be nice to put some sort of glaze on the tiles to stop them getting grubby with use (the magnetic paper is normal paper with magnetic backing). Any suggestions?

Update: 20pt text in TeX is no problem. Times in LaTeX is no problem. Both together is a bit trickier (I had to load the font at a smaller size and scale it in the end, and then it screws up the accents, so I've gone back to 20pt Computer Modern). michiexile's code and some messing about with struts, \spaceskip and \lineskip got the words-in-boxes effect. I've currently got three problems:

1) I can't seem to turn off the huge margin at the top, which is wasting lots of potentially useful space.
2) Math mode has its own font size setup, which I have yet to grok. Consequently, mathematical symbols are all in 10pt.
3) TeX doesn't seem to like display math mode in \fboxes. Dunno what's going on there.

Learning PostScript is starting to look increasingly attractive :-)

Elizabeth came up from Oxford on Sunday to give the Geometry seminar on Monday afternoon. She was speaking about her DPhil work, which is fairly hard-core algebraic geometry (specifically, she's using geometric invariant theory to construct coarse moduli spaces for stable maps). None of us were very familiar with the background material, and so she'd put in some explanation of the ideas used: it was all clearly presented, but there was quite a lot of it, so the pace was a bit fast. I got quite a lot out of it, though. After the seminar, we went to dinner at Balbir (seriously posh Indian restaurant on Church Street) with susoeffl and the seminar convenor, then Elizabeth, susoeffl and I returned to my flat to drink gin and bizarre Welsh slivovice/whisky and to eat cheesecake that the lovely wormwood_pearl had prepared. Then we played a couple of rounds of Carcassonne until it was time for Elizabeth to get her train back to Oxford. It was excellent to see her again, and to hear her explaining her thesis topic at length and while I was sober for a change :-)

I'm increasingly impressed with Carcassonne. The game mechanics are wonderfully simple and elegant. It seems like it would benefit from more depth, but maybe there's depth there that I'm not seeing yet. And there doesn't seem to be much incentive to cooperate: maybe playing doubles (a la croquet) would help.

Anyway, I've been thinking a lot about games of that sort recently, and this morning I came up with an idea for one.

( Tobacco Lords of Glasgow (working title) )

I mentioned this to wormwood_pearl, who immediately suggested a better idea:

( Escape from Cessnock! )

If either of these get off the ground at all, I'll post some more here...

¹: Buckfast tonic wine, the preferred drink of Scotland's disadvantaged young folk.
²: The aforementioned disadvantaged young folk. The Scottish equivalent of chavs. (spits, disinfects mouth after using foul classist word)
³: The upmarket, overpriced halls favoured by students with more money than sense.
⁴: As any student will tell you, the parks are full of gangs that will gang-rape you if you venture in after dark. the_barlow informs me that this is bollocks, though some of them are used as cruising spots by gay men.

As part of my ceaseless quest to become one of those crazy internet dudes that builds cool stuff, I hereby announce my intention to build the following things:

• A theremin. dynix had a mate who built one of these, and it doesn't sound too hard apart from the signal generators. Or I could just nick one of the many circuit diagrams available on the magic interweb. Of course, it's been years since I used a soldering iron, but what the hell. Once I've built the thing, I intend to juggle in front of it and record the results.
• A set of telescopic juggling clubs. I've made some already, but the handles tend to wobble and come loose, so you can't juggle them for long. They're nicely balanced, though.
  
  
  
  
  
• A scanner camera. Get a box brownie, gaffer-tape it to a flatbed scanner, et voila! A 115 megapixel digital camera! Oh, and it BENDS TIME. Almost forgot to mention that bit.
• Longer term, but I want to make a transparent rucksack. One that won't tear apart too easily. I'm thinking the same construction methods as for the duct tape wallet, but using clear duct tape. No more furkling about for stuff when you're out on the hills and your hands are already cold!

With all this, you might think I've got enough on my plate already (particularly if you remember the ongoing projects to learn the Five Ball Cascade, and read Ulysses, and... hang on, I know there's something else... oh yeah, that doctorate thing). But then wormwood_pearl brought this home:



Dammit. Now I'm going to have to turn it into a USB keyboard...