Tiny Planet Movies

I dusted off my old iPad 2 the other day. Not been used for many a Moon so the battery was flat. Pleasant surprise - it charged just fine and is holding its charge. I was going through the apps on it and deleting some which no longer worked or I had no use for when I found one I had completely forgotten about. 'Living Planet'. I searched the app store in case there was an update but it doesn't seem to be available any more. Fortunately the original app works just fine and I found I had a copy of it on a newer iPad.
Living Planet is, as far as I can gather, the only app which can take a 30 second movie and turn it into a Tiny Planet or Wormhole video. I just had to have a play with it. First with a cloud timelapse video:

A screenshot from the movie:


The resulting wormhole movie: (cropped to 16:4 ratio)



Next a screenshot from a harvesting video:


The uncropped tiny planet movie:



I was tickled by the way the earth seems to be made to revolve under the combine.

Monday Mystery

Last week's close view ...



was indeed part of



my old sugar tongs. When I was a youngster my mother would often have a bowl of sugar lumps on the tea table. These are made of good old Sheffield steel. Well recognised by Adrian ( yes you can still by sugar cubes), Ellen D., Ragged Robin and Jane. Thank you to all who had a guess. I hope I didn't delete any other guesses accidentally during the week while I was deleting a load of spam comments.

I hope the new close view ...



is easier than I have a feeling it may be. Have a go anyway. If you would like to have a guess please leave it in the comments. They will be revealed, with the answer, next Monday.

I Love Egg and Cress Sarnies

I really do like an egg and cress sarnie (sandwich). Eggs are easy to find almose anywhere but finding cress seeds for some reason seems to be more of a hunting expedition. Maybe that's just the unobservant side of me. The last time I went to a garden centre I couldn't find one packet. This time I went to my local garden centre determined to come home with at least a couple of packets. The following are screen shots from some video I took whilst there. I will explain why they tend to be all of a tilt at the end.
First task on arriving was to stock up with some bird food and managed to find the suet slabs I wanted:



as well as some suet balls and wild bird seed. Then on to the seed displays.



After scouring the vast display racks I finally spotted some.



I am not a great fan of Thompson and Morgan products based of previous experience but did find better value for home grow cress seed seems to be with the packets aimed at children. Well, they do say by the time one reaches my age it's like entering a second childhood.



Grabbed a couple of packets and had a look at the indoor plant section. The items I could have been interested in looked neglected and half dead so I moved outside to see what was on offer.



On offer at three for £5 I chose some as they may thrive better in one of my raised beds during time of low rainfall.

Those still screen grabs are from a video taken by this:



A ball point pen which contains a video camera. The lens is in the clip:



During my visit the pen was in my shirt pocket. Consequently it was moving with my body and the resulting video is all over the place. It was by way of an experiment. The camera would be ideal in more static situations.

Mission accumplished:


First batch of cress seeds on the kitchen window sill.

Monday Mystery

Here we go then. Another week flashed by with nothing of note locally. Last week I showed:



Everyone was on the right track in assuming it was something to do with keeping cool. I do have an aircon unit but this was just a



fan unit as was correctly guessed by Wilma and Ragged Robin. I bought a couple of these some years ago when we last had a heatwave as it seemed to only way to get a flow of fresh air through the rooms. This one rotates and can 'pulse' the air flow by automatically changing between its three speed settings. My thanks to all who had a guess.

This week you have part of ...



what? to identify. It's showing the ravages of time, like its owner. Not been used for at least fifty years. If you would like to make a guess please leave it in the comments. They will be revealed, with the answer, next Monday.

Monday Mystery

Last week I showed:



Which Adrian correctly worked out was:



a spider's nest, an egg sac. It measured about 4mm in diameter. Dozens of tiny spiderlings will later emerge. This is the first time I have seen a blue coloured one. A bit further away was another



which was the white colour I usually expect to see. So far I haven't managed to identify which type of spider it was.

I have moved indoors for this week's close view



of what? If you would like to have a guess please leave it in the comments. They will be revealed, with the answer, next Monday.

Re-purposing Things

Just over three years ago I wrote about a 3.5in TFT colour screen I had bought for use with the Arduino Mega. You can read about it HERE. The last thing I used it for was to try to show the minute changes in the Earth's magnetic field. That worked but the magnetometer (the bit of hardware which detects the changes) needed to be buried at least 3ft deep away from any other influences, like passing traffic as the metal vehicle body is enough to change the magnetic field.



I gave up on that idea for now but when I bought the Airfryer I found myself forever looking up recipes, especially temperatures and cooking times, for various foods. I started to write them down and then a flash of inspiration! Re-purpose the display to show a list of the items of food I will be airfryijng. Well it rook a lot longer than I thought to get an Arduino sketch (program) to work as it was the first time I had worked with arrays which contained more than one character in each entry. As always it was my lack of understanding when and where to define static, unchanging, and changeable integers, arrays and character strings. After the best part of three days reading and testing I finally made it work as I wanted.



Powered by two lithium rechargeable cells. The green and blue buttons on top allow me to scroll up and down through the list.



Three days of muttering, reading, rewriting code seems a lot for what ended up as less that 100 lines of code but I learned quite a lot and am finding it a useful addition to the kitchen clutter.

Monday Mystery

Last Monday I showed:



Yes Ellen D., it is some sort of cooker.



Wilma was spot on in saying it is an Air Fryer. I've only had it a short while. My old deep fat fryer was past its best before date and I was going to replace it but then decided to give an air fryer a whirl. My thanks to any who had a look and had a go at guessing.

This week I have something I spotted yesterday.



If you would like to have a guess as to what this little blue 'ball' is please leave it in the comments. They will be revealed, with the answer, next Monday.

Monday Mystery

After it being 'one of those days' I have finally got round to writing this post. Then I find I haven't even transferred the new photo to the laptop. Oh well, all done and ready now (I hope). Last week I showed:



To the best of my knowledge the correct answers were given by Wilma and Ragged Robin. As far as I can remember I have a couple of these which were advertised as containing tiny fossils of creatures which died in the seas millions of years ago. Thanks to all who had a go at guessing.

This week's close view may well be easier to work out.



If you would like to have go at guessing please leave your guess in the comments. They will be revealed, with the answer, next Monday.