ScrapHappy June 2023: Card(board) Sums

Alan Turing by Stephan Kettle, made from Welsh slate.

Alan Turing was a British mathematician who is famous for his efforts in codebreaking in the WWII but also as the “father of modern computing and artificial intelligence”. His contributions to computing and mathematics are outstanding and fundamental to so much that our modern world is built upon. Really, there ought to be a global national holiday in his honour.

Quite recently, and through no real apparent reason, I was asked if I would give some tutelage to a first-year Computer Science degree student who was struggling with, well, Computer Science. Now when I studied it, you only needed string and coloured beads to fix a computer, but now it’s very much mathematics and complicated words.

One of the things my student was having a hard time coming to grips with was the idea of a Turing Machine. Alan Turing (three paragraphs in and still no sign of a national holiday) wanted to understand what a machine might and might not be compute so he theorised (i.e. dreamt up) a simple machine which had a small number of instructions and an infinitely long piece of tape onto which a 1 or a 0 could be written. His idea was that it would show if such a machine given long enough (hence the infinitely long tape) could carry out any program it was given.

Well, I didn’t have an infinitely long piece of tape (we have some long ribbons in The Snail of Happiness, but even they cannot be considered to be infinite in length) but I did have a cardboard box (which had wine in it, so that had to be dealt with first) so I used that (and a bit of glue) instead…

Your IBM PC – I Bloomin’ Made Programmable Cardboard

 

My infinite tape is six compartments long, so it can store six 1s or 0s. It, for these purposes, has four things it can do: move the pointer thing one space to the left, one space to the right, read the contents of the compartment or write (1, 0 or Space) to it.

To run a program, look at what is shown on the pointer, and the value it is pointing at. Then find that sequence in the first two columns of the program and set the pointer to the value in the fourth column, the value to that in the fifth column. Finally, move the pointer in the direction given in the sixth column. Then repeat the process.

So, here’s a simple program:

Pointer	Tape		Pointer	Tape	Move
A	0	→	A	1	Right
A	1	→	A	0	Right
A	Space	→	A	Space	STOP

Start with some 1s and 0s and the pointer set to A, pointing at the most left-hand location.

If you follow the instructions, you will have changed all the 1s to 0s and vice versa, even you have no clue what is going on (welcome to my world!).

In fact, you could, in theory, use this to do all sorts of calculations. Here is a much longer program which, if you follow it, will add 1 to the binary number stored in the compartments. It will do this even though you may have no idea how to carry out binary addition (start with the pointer set to A pointing at the most left-hand digit). have a go! Start with 011 and hopefully end up with… oh, I’ll let you and your new-fangled machine figure that out!

Pointer	Tape		Pointer	Tape	Move
A	0	→	A	0	Right
A	1	→	A	1	Right
A	Space	→	B	Space	Left
B	0	→	C	1	Left
B	1	→	D	0	Left
C	0	→	C	0	Left
C	1	→	C	1	Left
C	Space	→	C	Space	STOP
D	0	→	C	1	Left
D	1	→	D	0	Left
D	Space	→	C	1	Left

Combined, the two programs I have shown here allow you to carry out binary addition and subtraction, meaning you have the start of a fully-fledged digital computer. Made out of scrap cardboard.

oOo

P.S. Having created this cardboard computer, I went to my pupil who informed me, with some relief on his face, that the Turing Machine would not be on the exam. Outrageous!

Many other people contribute to Kate and Gun’s wonderful ScrapHappy every month – check out what they have been up to too!

Kate, Gun, Eva, Sue, Lynda,
Birthe, Turid, Tracy, 
Jan, Moira, Sandra, Chris, Alys,
Claire, Jean, Jon, Dawn, Gwen,
Sunny, Kjerstin, Sue L, Vera, Edith,
Ann, Dawn 2, Carol, Preeti,
Viv, Karrin,
Amo, Alissa, Lynn, Tierney and Hannah

 

ScrapHappy August 2022: LED Astray

 

Fake Fir

Running a shop means that the Snail and I have to think about things that we haven’t had to involve ourselves with for years. Well, since yesterday teatime anyway. One thing we haven’t bothered with in over a decade is the dreaded “C” word – Christmas. Now, as retailers, we have to think about it even though the number of days to Christmas is in triple digits. Whilst thinking about the most overcommercialised Chris since Chris De Burgh*, we remembered we had a fibre optic tree, one that sparkled and brought joy to whoever looked upon it, one which was so full of colour-changing light and happiness that we had stored it in the attic, out the way. In a bin liner, no less.

Having located it, I did what any self-respecting technerd would do, and took it to pieces. Actually, I remembered something very important about one of the reasons we stopped using it – it has a tendency to reach around 1000°C when operating for more than a couple of minutes. It isn’t hard to understand why, when you consider it uses a tiny halogen light in a relatively confined space. Time to replace that with some colour-changing LEDs from an old, er, thing that changed colour.

 

Old versus new: hot versus cold

The original colour-changing function was brilliantly achieved by the use of a motor (I said how useful motors were in creating the internet, well, this doesn’t feel like a step-up, does it?) and a coloured wheel, which spun round. So, I removed those bits. Weirdly, although the whole thing ran on 6 volts, it was AC rather than DC (so like the mains rather than a battery). I’ll have to ponder what I do with a 6V AC motor.

The Wheel of Colour-changing Light

 

My plan was to remove the halogen bulb from its casing and fit the reclaimed LED module to some metal pins so as to use the reflector. When I lightly tapped the pins (and it was a light tap, even for me), the bulb fell out, leaving the pins behind. OK, I thought, I’ll use those pins then. Fast forward to where I discovered that you cannot actually solder onto the pins because they are made of something that really, really hates solder. I used some old component leads and made my own.

New pins

 

I hooked everything up having removed the now-superfluous motor, and found a power supply that was DC and 4.5V which is all the LEDs need. This means that I can run this off a battery if needs be. I may use the 6V AC transformer the tree originally used to make a 4.5 V supply but then I was going to release an album of Wombles covers and that never happened either.**

The result is a cool-running, colour-changing Christmas tree that will now languish in its bin liner until such time as the shop needs it.

All wired up and working!

 

 

Come into the (bright green) Light

 

Tree of (multicoloured) Light

 

Right, I’m off to get heat stroke and thus cleanse this premature feeling of Christmas…

oOo

* Couldn’t think of another Chris, sorry.

** But it could…***

*** No, it couldn’t.

Many other people contribute to Kate and Gun’s wonderful ScrapHappy every month – check out what they have been up to too!

Kate, Gun, Eva, Sue, Lynda,
Birthe, Turid, Tracy, 
Jan, Moira, Sandra, Chris, Alys,
Claire, Jean, Jon, Dawn, Gwen,
Sunny, Kjerstin, Sue L, Vera, Edith,
Ann, Dawn 2, Carol, Preeti,
Viv, Karrin,
Amo, Alissa, Lynn, Tierney and Hannah

 

Fixing the future

Imagine, for a moment, a world run by corporations, not governments. A world where everyone is born an employee who is looked after as a company asset and, consequently, where there is no food or fuel poverty, no homelessness. All materials are recycled where possible, to the point that using new materials is reserved for special products. One downside? It is illegal to repair anything yourself or, indeed, make anything yourself. No knitting, no quilting, no soldering, no ScrapHappy. This kind of activity is deemed anti-corporation and is punishable by “credit history expungement”.*

We aren’t at this level of part dystopian, part idyllic (possibly, depending on your point of view) society yet. So far, this is just the world my newest creation, Nathan Xylophone, finds himself in as he is transported to 2088 after a bit of an accident (new novel on its way soon, honest!) .

But how close are we to not being allowed to mend things ourselves?

A few weeks ago, we moved a little closer to such a scenario as Apple won a landmark case in Norway against a repairer, Henrik Huseby, who dared to offer screen repairs for iPhones. His crime? He used imported refurbished Apple screens. He never once said he was using genuine spare parts, because once a screen has been refurbished by a third party, it is no longer considered to be a genuine Apple part, although it basically is, of course. Apple had sued in 2018, claiming an infringement of trademark, a case they lost. So they came at Henrik from a different angle – the screens, imported into Norway they claimed, were illegal copies.

In Norway’s Supreme Court, they won, leaving Henrik with a huge legal bill (one that repairers and supporters of the right to repair movement have rallied to help pay) and the potential for any and every company to prevent what they would see as “unauthorised” repairs. Apple already make their products almost impossible to fix without returning them – now they appear to have a mandate (at least in Norway) to continue that policy.

So, what is the solution? Apple say they reclaim some of the materials from their products and encourage people to return them when they upgrade, but they also render iPhones that are more than 3 or 4 years old useless by making the software run grindingly slowly – they are less than keen on keeping existing tech running!

Perhaps an answer might be to make it law that things have to be repaired at the manufacturers expense thus making the economics shift from throwaway to keep-forever. Or maybe, make things that are completely open source, and allow anyone to fix anything? What do you think? Should something that can be repaired have to be repaired?

As I write this (30/06/2020), apparently the Federal Congress of Mexico have approved the criminalisation of the right to repair or modify the hardware and software of devices, with penalties including ten years in jail. I haven’t found this on a newsfeed, just Twitter, so I can’t verify it – perhaps someone out there can?

Maybe Nathan Xylophone shouldn’t be too surprised what he finds in 2088!

oOo

* “I see this is not today’s software. Isn’t that treason or espionage or something?”

Although he did not look up from his work, Nathan could tell Jay Gee was grimacing, just a little. “Technically, it is both, with both punishable by removal of credit rating. Credit History Expungement, it’s called.”

“Sounds nasty. Can you get ointment for it?”

“After the expungement, no. You can’t get anything. You can’t buy, rent or indeed use anything that is less than two years old.”

“Wow, that’s harsh! Actually, what?”

“In this time, two years old is ancient history.”

“Even food? I mean, can you get food if you been ex, er, sponged then? Can you eat sponge cake?”

“You get the ‘C’ treatment. Charity. Worst thing a consumer can ask for. And you have to ask for it to. That or starve. Most choose the latter although we haven’t had any expungements for nearly five years, so recently people have been very good consumers indeed.”

“So, are you going to expunge yourself then, or in this joyless society, is that illegal too?”

“Ha ha. Joyless? We have none of the plagues that were raging across the planet in the twenty twenties, Nathan, not one of them. Poverty is all but gone, replaced by that most useless of things, fashion. But fashion that everyone has access to and can buy into. And everyone can buy into it…”

“Unless they’ve been expunged, of course.”

“Of course. But then, that’s their fault, isn’t it? With a great credit history comes great consumer responsibility.”

Mend it Monday: On the phone(s)

Mend it Monday is an occasional post inspired by thesnailofhappiness

Headphones – comfortable but broken

I have had these headphones for about 15 years now – they were quite expensive in their day and I have used them in what I lovingly (and slightly inaccurately) called my “recording studio”. They are great headphones and, when the rubber earpiece things disintegrated, the Snail made me new coverings that are largely acoustically transparent (that is, sound goes through them like they aren’t there).

Like all these things with moulded plugs on the ends of their wires, something starts to break/come loose in the plug. I have spent the better part of the last three years carefully bending the wire near the plug just enough to get the headphones to work properly.

Well, even that stopped working yesterday, so I was forced to mend them. The wires on headphones are always thin and pretty difficult to work with, and these were no exception. Fortunately, I had an old working plug (from a broken something-or-other) to use, and it all seems to have worked!

The wires are very, very thin!

Mended and back in action – now back to doing important things such as watching this (which just makes me laugh and cheers me up every time I see it):

oOo

 

Shaving the Planet

A Razor and a tool to take it apart… guess what’s going to happen!

There are many things that irritate me in life. Rather than list them all here, I would just say check out Wikipedia, that covers most of them. One thing that not only gets my goat, but then slaughters it in some satanic ritual after which it claims supernatural powers, is the way electronic devices have non-replaceable rechargeable batteries.

I’ve banged on about this before – Chez Snail’s radio is a prime example (here it is, look). I suppose the issue stems from the fact that, these days, rechargeable batteries last a long time by which point I am supposed to be a good consumer and buy a new whatever-it-is.

Yeah, like that’s going to happen…

I have had my electric razor many, many years now. It has a winter break then is eased back into service as I go from full beard (winter plumage), through a goatee thing (Spring plumage), to no beard at all (Summer plumage), Autumn, much like life, is like spring but in reverse. So, I always knew that one day the internal battery in my razor would stop working properly.

That day arrived.

I psyched myself up to have a battle to get into the thing, let alone sort out the problem. There are two screws on the back that I had to enlarge to see what kind of screws they were – those security star-shaped things, as it turned out. My trusty £1 bargain bin tool was the one to use here. After the screws were removed, the whole case came off very easily so well done Philips for making that bit easy.

Joy! Easy to get into and nothing complicated to get in the way!

The battery was soldered to the board, which I expected.

The only problem I had was prising the battery off the sticky pad it was on – quite why it was attached like this, I don’t know since the back casing was moulded around the battery anyway. Never mind…

Old Battery Out…

Thirty minutes later and the job was done. I think the last battery lasted about ten years. I should get another decade out of this one!

…New Battery In

So, have a look at taking that device apart and replacing the rechargeable battery the next time – your nearest repair cafe/geeky me-type person/teenager will probably be able to help you save the planet, one battery at a time!

oOo