Sometime this month, I think I passed the milestone of 20 years of owning a PC.

I wasn’t particularly exposed to computers while I was school, nor even much at university. A friend had a BBC micro, on which I played Elite a few times, and I learned to write S-algol on the University VAXen. The closest I came to a PC was one Physics lab that required me to write a little Basic to control a stepper motor.

Then I did a conversion M.Sc. to Computer Science, and then I was unemployed.

After nearly a year of unemployment, the bright future of work as a programmer I’d hoped for looked like as though it might be escaping from me.

I thought I’d better do something about it, and with a loan from my parents and advice from my friends I bought a PC, to demonstrate that I was serious about these computer things. In particular I was grateful for the advice of flybynightpress, a Mac enthusiast himself, who advised me not to get a Mac but a PC, because the employment prospects were better. You tend to pay attention to advice like that!

That PC was a Viglen (pre-Lord Sugar), with a 386DX processor, 4MB of RAM, and a 125MB hard drive, with the (then) brand new Windows 3.1.

Sometime in June or July, I had a horrible experience when it stopped working. Completely. My first computer, bought with money I didn’t have, bricked. and with that horrible paranoia that maybe, oh no, maybe it was all my fault!

A technician had to come the hundred and something miles from Edinburgh to the glen where I was living with my parents on the west coast, with me liable for the several-hundred-pound cost of the callout if it really was my fault. That was not a happy wait.

Luckily, the motherboard had died of its own volition, and with a replacement fitted free of charge, that PC served me well for a fair while afterward. And a month or two later, I was employed as a programmer, albeit in a job paying only 65% of the average graduate starting salary of the time, and with the most horrible computer language in the world ever. And on a PDP-11/83, not a PC. Still, I’m sure my PC-ownership helped .

Today, my Raspberry Pi arrived, both more and less powerful than that machine of twenty years ago, depending on how you look at it. Unfortunately a painful ear infection is making the thought of tinkering unappealing for me tonight; but hopefully the Raspberry Pi will be the gateway for others to follow in the career that the PC has let me enjoy.

Apparently the sonic screwdriver has been developed right here in Dundee! (Usual hyperbole applies, but it’s still an interesting development.)

During the week, I also walked along this short stretch of the Fife Coastal Walk, the last part in the East Neuk that I hadn’t been along.

Being fairly short, there’s not a huge amount to report, but I had been looking forward to it because it’s this stretch that contains the St. Monans windmill and salt pans. I’d seen the windmill from a distance, but wasn’t sure what to expect of salt pans.

It seems it’s possible to inspect the interior of the windmill, but you have to either turn up between 12:00 and 16:00 in July or August, or borrow keys from the Post Office or Spar in St. Monans. I didn’t pass either of these on my way through St. Monans so perhaps there’ll have to be a return visit some day. The windmill isn’t operational, and has skeleton sails in place.

On getting closer, it turns out that the salt pans are immediately below the windmill. There’s not much to see. Most look like this:

That’s the ruin of a panhouse, of which there were once nine. Out beyond it, you can just make out a couple of holding tanks cut into the rock of the shore. The salt water was pumped up from the holding tank, probably using wind power from the windmill, then distributed to the panhouses by pipes or a cart. There’s one ruin that’s uncovered, so you can get a better impression of what’s there, with aid of a helpful diagram (click through for larger version).

From there a pleasant but fairly undistinguished walk took me past a shag drying its wings with the Bass Rock in the background…

… to Pittenweem.

I’ve been to Pittenweem before, so I didn’t revisit St. Fillan’s Cave…

…but I did make the obligatory visit to the The Cocoa Tree Café. The Cocoa Tree is a serious chocolate shop that also sells some other food, and if nothing else you should try their hot chocolate. You don’t even need to visit Pittenweem to do it; they have a stall at the monthly Farmers Markets in St. Andrews and Cupar where they serve Milk Hot Chocolate, White Hot Chocolate and their speciality, Caliente.

Caliente is their chilli hot chocolate, and it is to other hot chocolates as espresso is to other coffees. It’s thick and smooth and intense, and just hot enough, and yes, it’s served in espresso-size cups.

If you despair of visiting Pittenweem or the farmers markets in person to have Caliente prepared properly by the Cocoa Tree, you can order a sachet of four servings of Caliente powder online. There are instructions (which should be followed), and the recommended approach is to make up the whole batch at once, and keep unused servings in the fridge for reheating.

Back in 1990 I was relieved to graduate with a 2:2 in Physics and Electronics, and the knowledge that whatever I was going to do next, I didn’t want it to involve Physics. A conversion M.Sc. to Computer Science came along, and having enjoyed the logical parts of Electronics, it turned out I was able to make a go of computing.

I think that probably the last time I had anything much to do with hands-on electronics was back then, when I created a voice-delay board for my Honours project; a project that would store up to eight seconds of speech at 8-bit quality, before playing it back.

For the last year or so, I’ve been intrigued by the idea of the Arduino (or a clone such as the Netduino, which allows you to use the .NET Micro Framework), a microprocessor with an environment of plug-in accessories that’s intended to make it easier for people – especially artists and designers – to achieve interesting things with electronics.

For this week off, I dug out the gas soldering iron I’ve had pretty much unused for ages, ordered a bunch of interesting sounding parts and, driven by visions of having a robot zipping about the place autonomously and chatting to people, I set out to see what I could achieve.

To avoid disappointment straight away, you possibly won’t be astonished to hear that there’s nothing to show you!

However, I did have fun tinkering with electronics and simple programming.

What you see in the picture above is an Arduino Uno (top left) connected to my PC via a USB cable and sitting on a base that also holds a breadboard for experimentation. Surrounding it are three “shields” that can be stacked on top of it and controlled by it. Going clockwise, they are an Ardumoto shield for powering electrical motors, a Voice Box shield for synthesising speech, and an EasyVR shield for voice recognition. Also in shot, some tools including a Portasol Technic butane-powered soldering iron, and an SRF02 Ultrasonic range finder.

I’ve tinkered a bit with each of them – enough to be sure I can get them working – but spent most time on getting the Voice Box shield to talk. This required some soldering to attach the ”headers” (the black strips of connectors that allow the shield to be stacked on top of the Arduino) and a couple of screw connectors that speaker wires could be pushed into.

In the process I found that I could still solder stuff, but wasn’t very good. Also that the gas soldering iron wasn’t very good for recovering from bad soldering events, so it’s a good thing I was just a bit untidy and didn’t have any real disasters.

Programming the Arduino is done in a simplified version of C++, based on the Wiring platform, with some of the structure of your program pre-defined and hidden from you to make it easy to get started. It has its own IDE, originally developed for the Processing language. Arduino programs are called sketches, and they control the behaviour of the pins around the edge of the board, which you connect other components to (such as the shields, or standard electronic components).

Personally the first thing I did was look for a plugin that would allow me to work in Visual Studio rather than the Arduino IDE, and luckily there is one. Despite the claim that “serial tools are far better than Arduino”, I did find myself dropping back to the Arduino IDE on occasion for the tool that observes the serial output from the Arduino, as some of the output wasn’t appearing in the Visual Studio version, even though I knew it was there. Also some of the UI idioms it uses weren’t entirely at home in Visual Studio – adding a new Project from the Project menu, rather than the File menu for example. Apart from those quibbles though, the Visual Micro plugin gave me an environment I was happier working in.

The Voice Box shield turned out to be simple to program to. Using standard Arduino library functionality, you create a software serial port that will use two pins to talk directly to the SpeakJet chip on the Voice Box shield; then you send arrays of numerical commands to that serial port. That’s it, as far as technical stuff goes.

Where the work arises is in figuring out what those numerical commands should be. There are some general commands for such things as volume, speed, and pitch, and then more specific commands that represent phonemes that can be used to build up your speech.

There is a helpful program that will do some of this work for you, based on a dictionary of words that other people have already created. If the dictionary doesn’t contain the words you want, however, you’ll have to build them up one phoneme at a time. This applies to perfectly normal words that you’d expect everyone would want an electronic voice to say for them, such as “Exterminate!”, so get ready to spend some time looking up numerical codes for phonemes.

I spent less time with the EasyVR voice recognition shield, so don’t have a lot to say about it at the moment, except that it maintains tables of words it can recognise and the pre-defined words worked perfectly well for me. I haven’t yet investigated customising it, but working within the limitations of this and the Voice Box, I hope it’ll be possible to build up simple dialog trees.

I got the Ardumoto shield to drive the motors on a Dagu Magician chassis. They appear to be a bit weedy, so I don't think they're going to drive that Sevan's Dalek I have lying about, even though it looks like the Magician chassis would fit beneath the skirt, but it’s a start.

So if everything works, why haven’t I achieved more? Well, you may have guessed, but everything working fine separately is not the same as everything working in unison. Although there are quite a lot of pins controlled by the Arduino (6 analogue and 14 digital), inevitably some of the shields want to use the same pins for different purposes. The next step is to do something about this, to which end I’m looking at the Go Between shield from Mayhew Labs; and if in future I want to add many other components so that a robot can interact with the outside world, I will probably end up looking at a Mux Shield.

In future, I might like to play with a Netduino in order to get a nicer programming environment, but I started off with an Arduino because it’s more widely used and supported and I wasn’t going to be faced with the possibility of having to write my own support libraries for shields before I really knew what I was doing.

I’ve had a bit of fun, it’s not been too taxing of my electronics or programming skills, and it looks like more interesting things could be fairly easily achievable.

Well, no Tintin at all actually, but several books with strong links to Tintin and Hergé, including the ligne claire (clear line) style and mid-20th century settings associated with both.

First up are the adventures of Blake and Mortimer, a series of 19 books written between 1950 and 2009, 14 of which are available in English now or will be soon. Created by Edgar P. Jacobs, a Belgian contemporary of and collaborator with Hergé, they recount the adventures of Captain Francis Blake (head of MI5) and his friend, nuclear physicist Professor Philip Mortimer. In a partial reversal of what your character expectations might be, Captain Blake tends to be the cool, calm one, while the Professor has a bit of a temper.

The Yellow “M” was apparently number 1 in the series, and appears to be regarded as a bit of a classic, so it’s a shame I don’t agree. The story of pursuing a somewhat John-MacNab-style villain who pre-announces his crimes is intriguing enough, there’s some weird science, and a nice twist; but it’s all rather clunkingly handled, with an awful lot of excess verbiage, both in narrative boxes and from the characters – I just picked one (of many) largish speech bubble just now and counted 117 words! it doesn’t help that the translation is not really up to scratch. There are quite a number of places where the dialogue just isn’t ringing true, and suddenly you realise “Hang on, this would sound fine in French!” Then a key moment at the end references a previous book – which is fine, except that I thought this was book 1? It turns out it’s only book 1 according to the English publishing order, and that books 2 and 3 actually preceded it in France – not to mention three other volumes that haven’t been published in English at all yet.

It may be of some local interest to Londoners – there’s a lot of chasing around London streets, and I’ve seen it suggested online that Jacobs’ art was particularly  well-researched in that regard. I can’t tell, I’m afraid.

Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was money wasted, but at that point my initial Tintin-tinged enthusiasm for Blake and Mortimer was fading a bit. Luckily Atlantis Mystery restored my faith. The jabber is cut way back, and to a far greater extent the pictures tell the story – and what a story it is! As you can probably guess from the title and the cover, there’s an ancient civilisation with higher tech than us involved and it is just rather a lot of fun. This is far more what I was hoping for, and I didn’t notice any translation issues this time round.

I’ll probably get more of these, but on the basis of the two I’ve read it’s unclear what to expect. Both books despite being written and drawn consecutively by Jacobs himself were of different quality; and later books in the series are by other authors and artists, after Jacobs’ death in 1987. Fingers crossed!

The Rainbow Orchid has been around for over a decade in one form or another, but has been more recently revamped and issued in book form. In fact the final Volume 3 is coming out on Monday (April 2^nd). The writer and artist this time (Garen Ewing) is British, and openly acknowledges Tintin’s influence on his work, while making the point that ligne claire is a European style of comic art of which Tintin is only the example we know best in the UK.

I felt this first volume was a little thin, so you might be better waiting for the single volume edition of The Rainbow Orchid that’s apparently also planned, but that is pretty much my only criticism. I was very comfortable with both the style and the content of this story – it flows nicely, the characters are varied and appealing, and best of all there’s a sense of humour to it that may be the strongest link to Tintin. There are differences of course; the young reporter in this tale is not the hero, though he is a catalyst for the quest the actual hero and heroine find themselves on!

I would whole-heartedly recommend The Rainbow Orchid. You can wait for the single-volume edition, or order autographed and sketched-in copies of the individual volumes from Garen Ewing’s shop.

I thought this graphic biography might be a light-hearted and fun way to learn a bit about Hergé, but I was wrong. The artwork doesn’t match up to the standard of the other books reviewed here, and while of course a real person’s life isn’t going to be as tidy as a plotted adventure, this book is very episodic with great leaps between episodes in Hergé’s life. Even within particular episodes, it’s not always easy to follow what’s going on. I’m afraid I’d rather have read a “proper” prose book to cover Hergé’s background. Must get hold of Tintin: The Complete Companion someday.