September 10 2024 Birthday review, Wuthering Bytes, uv

John gave a presentation marking our 16th birthday on topics covered over the past year. David queried whether the Raspberry Pi pop-up shop had closed and John said that he assumed it had as no-one had mentioned it for several months [it no longer appears in the list of shops in Victoria Centre]. David also said that an errata had been released relating to the GPIO pins on the RP2350 because a supplier had messed things up; unfortunately, if a pin is in an undefined state, it does not go high or low. Rather it creeps up high when you expect it to go low which affects some boards. This is mainly a problem for manufacturers rather than for hobbyists as there are workarounds and it might be fixed.

John went on to give a brief account of Wuthering Bytes Festival Day which had been affected by a tree falling on the line between Bradford and Halifax preventing trains getting to Hebden Bridge. The overall theme had been computing over the past seventy years with presentations on:

• Dina St JohnstonDina St Johnston (1930–2007) who had worked at Elliott Computers and founded the first software development company,
• the history of modular synthesisers from hardware based to the current software based synthesisers,
• the history of wearables from the abacus rings of the 17th century Qing dynasty in China to the revival of the idea from the late twentieth century onwards,
• the background to the IBM System/360IBM!System/360 and developments since then,
• prototyping,
• re-writing a text based strategy game developed in the early 1990s into a video game, something which required collaborators given the more complex nature of video games, and
• the development of AI.

In addition there had been a presentation of Raftabar, the robot, a project developed with the aim of never having any useful purpose but of replicating endearing human-like behaviour. The robot had been left running at the end of the session and interacted with the next presenter.

None of the sessions had been outstanding but they had collectively given an overview of the last 70 years of computing.

Bernie reported on the Hardware Camp held on the Saturday, in particular, the National Museum of Computing EDSAC Replica noting that the original used mercury delay lines for memory, the Bit-Serial Computer Architecture talk and the STEAM Punk Sunflower created from LEDs.

Darren went to a session by a Makerspace based in Mytholm where they demonstrated robots that could do all sorts of things and a toy hexagon rattle created with a 3D printer.

Bernie introduced uv, a new packager for Python developed by Astral. Normally when you use pip install, it puts things into its own installation. uv run <somename>.py creates a virtual environment and then goes to PyPI and pulls in all the dependencies.

uv python list

lists the available and installed versions of Python and allows you to update your existing version. In effect uv gathers a lot of management tools together. In response to a query by Steve, Bernie showed how you could edit the head of the .toml file which uv would then use to identify the dependencies. uv uses its own cache which you can clear. You can install it with a one line shell script.

David then went outside to demonstrate his bat detector though none of the local bats obliged on this occasion.

Brian responded to a question about AliExpress saying that the prices are very cheap, everything turns up and he has never been charged any import duty even on larger items.

He also noted that, when trying to watch overseas TV programmes, it is advisable to change the time on the computer to match that of the country as some broadcasters use the time on the computer to determine whether the viewer is local.

Past Meetings