Last-minute Chrismas gifts and activities that are emailable or printable or bakeable

 

Depending on where you live there may well be a smaller shop open for emergency snacks. Where I live in Blackheath we have Best One Xpress open in the village (24 hours) and Pravin Supermarket in Blackheath Standard is open from 10 until 3pm. I hear that Deliveroo is likely to be up and running too. 

Here are some ideas for gifts that don't require leaving the house or having them delivered. If a gift for someone hasn't arrived then you can draw or print or email something to give to someone that indicates that something mysterious and delightful is on its way, just currently delayed.

1. Annual Memberships or pre-paid events / courses

I'm a member of the Royal Geographical Society (UK-wide) and a couple of London cinemas. Possibly buying someone a gym membership at Christmas might be a little pointed but perhaps a cookery or photography class or something nice like that, or art gallery membership etc. 

You can buy a ticket for a future event and print out the email to give to someone, or email it to them.

2. Gift cards / book vouchers / iTunes vouchers etc / magazine subscriptions

These can be bought online (you get an e-voucher with Amazon or iTunes) or in shops if you're able to get to one.

3. Bake biscuits / cakes

This one does require a trip to the shops for supplies but works quite well as a last-minute thing if you have a box (cake) or paper bag (biscuits) to put the end product in. Recipes abound on the internet. If you don't have a handy gingerbread man cookie cutter you can cut one out of paper and then place it on your biscuit dough and cut around it with a knife.

Gingerbread men recipe: https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/gingerbread_men_99096 and see at 3m in this video how to cut out shapes without a cutter.

4. Make salt dough decorations

Pretty much as above, but non-edible (too salty!).

Recipe: https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/howto/guide/salt-dough-christmas-decorations

 

5. Printable decorations and colour-in activities

TES (formerly Times Educational Supplement) has all sorts of Christmas Craft activities for kids, many of which are free. Some also have a bit of curricular learning in there too but this one is just for colouring in.

Free DIY ornament: https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/free-christmas-ornament-template-11752205

For work I've also made a Christmas Computing zine (A4, folds into a tiny booklet) and a HexaHexaFlexagon (never stops folding!), free: https://www.tes.com/teaching-resources/shop/JoBrodieCS4FN

Etsy is full of (paid for) printable things to colour in and decorate, including colouring-in placemats to keep kids occupied while at a table. Be careful about bleed through onto your table if using coloured pens. After you've paid you'll be sent a link to download a digital file which you can then print.

Gingerbread house by ArtbyEmilySkinner (A4): https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/1112628257/gingerbread-house-printable-paper-craft

Merry Christmas colouring in placemat (A4): https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/1106059506/merry-christmas-colouring-and-activity

Search for more Christmas printables: https://www.etsy.com/uk/search?q=christmas+printables

Note: some products are aimed at a US audience and so print out on US letter size which is slightly different from A4 size. Look for products that are tailored for A4 sizing, or that come in PDF form (which you can just shrink slightly and cut off the extra). 

A4 = 8.27 x 11.7 inches (210 x 297 mm)
US letter = 8.5 x 11 inches (215.9 x 279.4 mm)

If you have a Rymans near you they will print items for you (£2.50 set up charge then approx 30p per A4, or a bit more for A3). Other printers are also available of course, though they'll be shutting soon.

We have lots of printable activities / colouring-in sheets / puzzle sheets, all with a computing theme here: https://teachinglondoncomputing.org/christmas-computing/

6. No printer but have a computer?

Here are versions of our puzzles and colouring in sheets which can be done on a computer :)
https://teachinglondoncomputing.org/2022/12/12/snow-day-no-printer-needed-computing-themed-activities-for-those-at-home-snowday-uksnow/

If you like magic we have lots of free booklets you can download and read as a PDF, plenty of tricks involve a pack of cards: https://cs4fndownloads.wordpress.com/magic/

Santa Trackers and seeing the International Space Station as it goes over on Christmas morning

Festive image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay

 

If it's not cloudy in the UK tomorrow morning (Sun 25 Dec 2022) at 7.12am you may be able to see - with the naked eye - Father Christmas in his sleigh and the International Space Station flying overhead, travelling from West to East. They'll appear as a tiny bright white dot moving quite fast, with no blinking.

The latitude table linked here is for London and more Northerly / Southerly cities might not be able to see it directly, but can certainly watch along online. Santa Claus' journey path can zip about a bit as he's not relying on quite the same laws of physics as the rest of us and can use a bit of magic to appear in more than one place at once. 

Spot the Station: https://spotthestation.nasa.gov/

Enter your city to find times and dates, and where in the sky to look, for the International Space Station. This link will take you to sightings for London.

Christmas Day - Sunday 25th December 2022
Sun Dec 25, 5:39 AM       3 min      61°      61° above SE     10° above E     
Sun Dec 25, 7:12 AM     7 min     86°     10° above W     10° above E

NORAD Tracks Santa: https://www.noradsanta.org/en/map

This uses radar, infrared sensors (Rudolph's nose gives off a good heat signal) and geosyncronous satellites to track Father Christmas' sleigh throughout Christmas Eve.

FlightRadar24 Santa Tracker:
https://www.flightradar24.com/multiview/2ea2ef9b

FlightRadar24 has multiple sensors around the world tracking aircraft flights thanks to a transponder on every aeroplane that transmits its location. Santa's sleigh (flight registration: HOHOHO) has been fitted with a transponder, and for greater accuracy, Rudolph the Reindeer's antlers can be used as an antenna.

Google Santa Tracker: https://santatracker.google.com/

Follow Father Christmas as he drops presents down chimneys and there are also games to play too.

You can also just type where is Santa into Google, and see what happens when you type Christmas!

Merry Christmas!

Save the Westminster gas lamps: London-lighting lovely lanterns under threat

The above lamp, in Bull Inn Court Westminster, is a Grosvenor style gas lit lamp (see the spotters' guide below).
 

Update 22 Nov 2022: Westminster City Council has said it will now only electrify 94 lamps and leave 174 as gas. This has been welcomed cautiously by the London Gasketeers campaigners as it raises more questions than it answers.

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

 

Westminster has nearly 300 gas powered street lamps, a small percentage of the thousands of electric street lighting across the borough. The lamps are over 100 years old and under threat.

 

Below is a copy of my submission to the Westminster City Council gas lamps review (consultation), which closes today. I've emailed this to lighting@westminster.gov.uk and leader@westminster.gov.uk (the leader is Mr Adam Hug). Help yourself to anything I've written if useful.

 

For detailed background information on the gas lamps and the campaign to save them see https://linktr.ee/thelondongasketeers.

Here's a nice article in the Daily Mail about the lamps and the people who look after them, with pics. Plenty more articles in that LinkTree link above.

A spotters' guide: What Grosvenor, Rochester and Windsor lanterns look like. There are other styles too, there's even a Westminster!

 

- - - - - - - - - - Copy of my submission - - - - - - - - - - -

 

Dear Westminster City Council lighting team and Mr Hug

Until 31 October 2022 I had no idea that we still had any working gas lamps in Westminster (or anywhere in London) and was delighted to discover their existence thanks to seeing a retweeted story about them. This was followed by surprise that I'd not known about them, and that "We have gaslamps!" isn't more widely known. I think this interesting historic link with our own past should be more widely celebrated and actively exploited as a 'draw' to the area.

Other than information about the gas lamp review I didn't find* a page on the WCC website celebrating these evocative lights. No 'gas lamp trail' with a map showing where to find them, and suggestions of nearby places to have a meal ('10% off with code: LANTERN' sort of thing). "Have you seen Westminster's wonderful gas lamps?" seems like it would sell itself.

When I think of Westminster I think of Parliament and the Abbey and the Northbank BID areas, Trafalgar Square, Aldwych, Covent Garden etc. It's a shame I'd not have been thinking of the gas lamps - I imagine it's been the same for many others who have recently and enthusiastically discovered them - but I think this has been a missed opportunity.

You might think, given I'd not even noticed they were there, that I shouldn't be too bothered about their loss - no. I would be very sorry to see them go. Within a few days of hearing about them I had gathered information about where to find the lanterns then met up with a friend one evening so that we could see them ourselves. We thought they were wonderful and rather magical; we also enjoyed spotting the different kinds (Rochester, Grosvenor etc). We also discovered a lovely new (to us) restaurant after emerging from a side-alley.

Now that I'm more informed about their history (and that the first street in London to have gas lighting installed was in Westminster) I'm astounded that there are plans to sever that historic link. London is famous for its history and is full of original buildings and other features. These 100+ year old lamps were definitely a 'Wow!' moment for us, now that we were aware of the historical context. That can't be replicated with LED facsimiles.

The suggested replacement lamps are nice enough (I suppose in the 1800s and 1900s the current gas lamps must have looked a bit too shiny and new too) but now that we're all going to know they're not really gas it's going to feel a lot less authentic. It's not just what they look like, it's knowing that they're using a living historic technology - that's amazing, please celebrate it.

People come to London to see the bright lights, why not invite them to come and see the warm ones too. The gas-lit lanterns link us to an earlier London - I think replacing them would be irreversibly damaging, and a terrible shame. Please don't electrify or replace these lamps.

*site:westminster.gov.uk gas lamps - there's a brief mention here https://www.westminster.gov.uk/news/westminsters-heritage-lights but only in the context of pausing the gas review. I also varied the search with gaslamps, gas lights and lanterns.

Thank you
Jo
P.S. I am not a Westminster resident nor do I work there but I visit frequently, and now have an additional reason to visit!

P.P.S. On the night I visited Carting Street at the back of The Savoy hotel the place was eye-searingly floodlit to film Netflix's new 'One Day' series and there were lots of people with equipment. Despite the (presumed) energy consumption of lighting, cameras and generators we accept this because we enjoy the end product, I think it's similar with the gas lamps.

Consultation Watch - keeping an eye on consultations from UK Governmental departments

Back in 2012 I wondered if there was a single online place, on the Gov•UK website, where people could find out about all the various governmental consultations that were currently open for input. Since then, yes, it's here -

1. Get Involved
- information about all sorts of ways you can be that bit more civic-minded, which includes information about submitting a response to consultations.

2. Open Consultations
- this link takes you straight to the page of open consultations. [RSS feed (opens an atom file)]

I was reminded of this recently because I missed hearing about the government's consultation into bias in medical devices, which was announced in November 2021, launched in August 2022 and closed in early October 2022. There was quite a lot of fuss kicked up when Sajid Javid announced it last year with people opining that it was all nonsense (it isn't) and the Daily Mail also wrote about it. There was so little fuss about the actual consultation that I missed hearing about it until 3 weeks after it closed and only because I went looking for it after writing a related article for the work blog.

To help me keep an eye on this sort of thing I've created an automated Twitter account, called @ConsultationsUK (had to be less than 15 characters so couldn't use ConsultationWatch alas) which I've set up to send a Tweet whenever a new consultation is added to the Gov UK's website. See Technical details below for an explanation of how.

Department or country-specific consultations

I searched on Google using both the following search strings

inurl:gov.uk inurl:consult
inurl:gov.uk inurl:consultations

and this returned several departmental pages and also pointed me to country & county pages too.

• DEFRA - https://consult.defra.gov.uk/
• Education - https://consult.education.gov.uk/
• Environment Agency - https://consult.environment-agency.gov.uk/
• HSE: Health & Safety Executive - https://consultations.hse.gov.uk/
• Levelling Up - https://consult.levellingup.gov.uk/
• Ministry of Justice - https://consult.justice.gov.uk/
• Policy Papers and Consultations - https://www.gov.uk/search/policy-papers-and-consultations
  

• Scotland - https://consult.scotland.gov.uk/ aka https://consult.gov.scot
• Wales - https://gov.wales/consultations
• Northern Ireland - https://www.nidirect.gov.uk/articles/public-consultations
• London - https://consult.london.gov.uk/

Local examples (there are many more)

• Harrow - https://consult.harrow.gov.uk/
• Highland - https://consult.highland.gov.uk/ 
• Nottinghamshire - https://consult.nottinghamshire.gov.uk/
• Reading - https://consult.reading.gov.uk/
• Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea - https://consult.rbkc.gov.uk/
• Wakefield - https://consult.wakefield.gov.uk/
• Torridge - https://consult.torridge.gov.uk/
• Uttlesford - https://consult.uttlesford.gov.uk/

There's no https://consult.greenwich.gov.uk/ though!

Technical details

To make the Twitter account announce consultations I've used a free online app called IFTTT (IF This Then That) which lets you set up a trigger, in this case an update to the RSS feed from the Open Consultations page. I've linked the Twitter account (@ConsultationsUK) so that when a new feed item appears (the trigger) the resulting action is that that account emits a tweet with the title of the new consultation and its link.

I won't know if it's worked until a new consultation is added!

Mayoral Christmas card competitions for kids in the UK

A cartoon of a Christmas tree that I drew

 

Today I had a (regular subscription) email from the office of the Mayor of London telling me that there's a Mayoral Christmas card competition for kids age 4-14 in London. This is the sort of thing I tend to tweet so I searched for the link (I do this to save writing my own tweets and surface someone else's!) but didn't find it, so widened my search to include mayor christmas competition.

Gosh! It's not just London then :) I found a few more from putting the search string into Google too. It seems like there should be a Gov.UK web page that gathers these all together (a similar page exists for school term times / holidays).

Here are locales which have a Christmas Card competition. There will be others but I will leave you to search for those.

• Bedford - closing date 11 November 2022
• Bracknell - closing date 4 November
  
• Buckingham - closing date 31 October
  
• Burgess Hill - closing 4 November
  
• Charnwood - closes 28 October
  
• Chippenham - closes 14 November
  
• Didcot - closes 5 December
  
• Harpenden - closes 4 November
  
• Henley - closes 21 November
  
• London - closes 6 November
  
• Littlehampton - closes 31 October
  
• Milton Keynes - closes 6 November
  
• Reading - closes 5 November
  
• Rochford - closes 25 November
  
• Tamworth - closes 15 November
  
• Thetford - already closed! (21 October)
  
• Tower Hamlets - closes 8 November
  
• Watford - closes 7 November (photography competition, pic used on card)
  
• Wootton Bassett - closes 4 November
  
• Witney - closes 28 October
  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Christmas 2022: Where to watch ELF in cinemas in London

December - it's the most wondELFul time of the year. 

There will be several screenings of Elf in cinemas in London and it's pretty likely that more will be announced between the publication of this post and the start of the Elf season. Hooray!

"See Elf in cinemas in London in 2022", in Curlz MT font.

1. Spreadsheet of published screenings
2. Screenings organised by venue and provider
3. Bonus material

1. Spreadsheet of published screenings

https://bit.ly/Elf2022London - I'll be adding new screenings here when I hear about them (am actively looking!).

 Version for mobile phones (scroll up/down or left/right)

Wider version for desktop / web (scroll up/down or left/right)

2. Screenings organised by venue and provider

One Aldwych near Covent Garden are doing a 3pm screening on Saturday 3rd and Sunday 4th September with a big meal before and a glass of champagne and popcorn during the film.

The Exchange in Twickenham has a single screening on Sunday 4th December in aid of SEEN charity.

North Greenwich Peninsula has a screening on Sunday 4th December too, at its Enchanted Forest cinema pop up.

The Rose Theatre in Kingston upon Thames has one screening on Thursday 15th December. 

Brentwood Theatre has one screening on Friday 16th December.

The Landmark Arts Centre has one screening on Tuesday 20th December in Teddington.

The Rivoli Ballroom in Brockley has one screening, thanks to Crofton Park Pictures, on Friday 23rd December.

Backyard Cinemas currently have 28 screenings published (not sure of precise venue location yet).

The Luna Cinema has 11 screenings (6 at Bluewater, Dartford (as a drive-in) and 5 at Kensington Palace Pavilion) in December.

The Prince Charles Cinema in Leicester Square has 4 screenings (1 a Quote-Along) in December and Elf also features in two Christmas Pyjama Party screenings which are all-nighters with several films included.

Premiere Cinema in Romford has three screenings on Christmas Eve.

3. Bonus material

This article, from Art of the Title, about the creation of the film and its opening sequences is amazing.

Buddy the Elf - the original costume, now on display.

The article above about the costume also drew my attention to the making of Elf. 

 

Introducing 'PECS' - a new mailing list / community of practice for people involved in Public Engagement in Computer Science

New mailing list
PECS = for anyone involved in Public Engagement in Computer Science
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa-jisc.exe?A0=PECS

Paul Curzon and I are on a lovely EPSRC grant running over the next three years and he is one of five new "ICT Public Engagement Champions". One of the things we said we'd do in our application was create a community of practice (pragmatically = a mailing list) for people who do public engagement with computer science research, but we didn't want to restrict it just to academia or industry. 

Consequently the list is open to anyone who does computer science-related science communication, or public engagement with computing (and electronic engineering). 

There are loads of people who do this in the UK and beyond but I don't think we necessarily know who's doing what (or at least I don't, yet) and others might not know what we're* doing. So this list is kind of like a point of gravity to get us all to fall in together and learn from each other, celebrate fun things and highlight stuff that's coming up.

Note that messages to the PECS list are publicly archived (here's the privacy policy).

 

*Our project
We've been producing the free secondary schools magazine CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun) for over 15 years and send around 21,000 copies to 2,400+ subscribing UK schools and will produce a special issue on Diversity in Computing for this grant; there's also an accompanying website. We're also delighted to be able to expand our primary schools version ('A Bit of CS4FN') which we piloted thanks to internal funding from QMUL's Centre for Public Engagement and which we can now expand thanks to the EPSRC. Primary teachers teach the entire curriculum so these mini magazines are designed to be cross-curricular, and draw links between computing and other subjects. We also want to support teachers in championing computer science research and careers.

The PECS mailing list is part of our remit to embed public engagement in computer science research (both within our own department and elsewhere) and we already have an internal Teams group (called PEEECS, for PE in Electronic Engineering and Computer Science). I'm sorry about the acronyms ;)

We also run Teaching London Computing for teachers which has free classroom resources and we sometimes run workshops (supporting teachers who are newer to teaching programming).

Although this post is published on my personal blog I would like to acknowledge the EPSRC funding (grant number EP/W033615/1) which has allowed us to create and maintain the PECS 'space' :D

 

 

Here's how to advertise your film festival on Kermode and Mayo's "Take" podcast - free

Sharing your film festival or film-adjacent event on Kermode and Mayo's Take (formerly Wittertainment) podcast.

Edit: Updated 20 May 2024

Rather than doing this feature weekly the "What's On" part of 'Take' is now a monthly thing so you need to get your voice memo to them in time for when the episode is recorded.

General timing
"We do read every email sent to us but unfortunately not everything can be read out on the podcast. As we record on a Wednesday morning, anything we receive after close of play on Monday (1800 GMT/ 1300 Eastern/ 1000 Pacific) is unlikely to be included in that week's show."

What's On voice memo feature
"If you're emailing about our 'What's On' listings feature for smaller/ independent events on the podcast, this is how it works. ***PLEASE NOT THAT FROM MAY ONWARDS THIS FEATURES IS MOVING TO MONTHLY RATHER THAN WEEKLY***
 
* Someone from your festival/ screening records a voice note
* Maximum 25 seconds, ideally 20
* Starts with "Hello Simon and Mark, this is.. from (screening/ festival name)."
* Then describe your festival/ screening/ event and give the dates/ times
* Send the voice note to this email address correspondence@kermodeandmayo.com two weeks before the event
* We will play some of these on the podcast (time permitting)
* We need all submissions for the next month to arrive by the Monday before the last Wednesday of the current month."

The above text is lifted wholesale from the automated response that arrives whenever you email the correspondence@... address above. I can't imagine anyone would object to me republishing it here but if they do I will cheerfully remove it :-) I made the last line red though.

- - - - - - - - - - -

Original post is below

I help run the Charlton and Woolwich Free Film Festival, one of several Free Film Festivals in London, and have been really pleased that Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo's 'Kermode & Mayo's Take' podcast now has an opportunity for community film festivals and other film-y special events to advertise themselves through the medium of a 20 second voice memo clip. These are shared on the podcast towards the end. It's completely free to send one in!

This blog post is about how to do that and includes some timings so that you can hear some examples. I've also included the 'scripts' of what people said and the duration of their clip, to give a flavour of the different approaches, and at the end is a short practical guide on how to email a voice memo from a phone.

Email your 20 sec audio clip advert to correspondence@kermodeandmayo.com

 

Table of Contents
A. Timings
B. The 'scripts' of what people said
C. How to email a voice memo (from an iPhone) 

A. Timings
Note that timings vary depending on the different platforms, as different adverts are used, so I've given a rough guide of timings for the iPhone podcast app and for the same app on a Mac to point you in the right direction (but tracking a few seconds to a minute either side will probably be needed if you're using a different platform). 

A1. Timings on my phone’s podcast app were
1. Minions (1 July 2022) - approx 1hr 8min 15sec
2. Sheridan Smith (15 July 2022) - approx 1hr 13min 34sec
3. Daisy Edgar Jones (22 July 2022) - approx 1hr 17min 39sec
4. Jordan Peele (12 August) - approx 1hr 12min 07sec
5. Hugh Bonneville (19 August) - approx 1hr 11min 50 sec

A2. Timings on Apple podcasts at time of writing were
1. Minions (1 July 2022) - approx 1hr 05min 45sec
2. Sheridan Smith (15 July 2022) - approx 1hr 11min 05sec
3. Daisy Edgar Jones (22 July 2022) - approx 1hr 16min 18sec
4. Jordan Peele (12 August) - approx 1hr 09min 54sec
5. Hugh Bonneville (19 August) - approx 1hr 11min 32sec

B. The 'scripts' of what people said
1. Minions episode
"Hi Simon and Mark, Kirsty here from the Outdoor Picture Palace. Join us on the 16th and 17th of July as we screen The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Descent and The Alpinist in the Lake District at the UK's most extreme cinema. If you fancy being driven up a mountain in a 4 by 4 before geting comfy inside Honister Slate Mine with popcorn in hand, book tickets now at theoutdoorpicturepalace.com. See you in the Audience." [20 sec]

"Hello Simon and Mark. This is Steve from TAPE, in Old Colwyn, North Wales. July 1st sees the release of our second feature film Approaching Shadows. The film's been made by over 250 people accessing the charity over the last four years with every element of the work completed through an inclusive production model. It's released in the UK through Bohemia Media and we'd love people to check it out, thank you." [18 sec]

"Hi Mark and Simon. My plug is the Carbonale a one-day climate culture festival, July 2nd in Berlin. One of the organisers is a very good friend, documentary film-maker Lena Müller. The event is all about living with the climate crisis in a non hand-wringing way. That's Carbonale C-A-R-B-O-N-A-L-E.com, July 2nd, Berlin." [24 sec]

2. Sheridan Smith episode
"This is Kevin from the newly minted city of Doncaster promoting our monthly sci-fii screening at Doncaster Brewery Tap, on Young Street. The master brewer Ian will be showing the Michael Anderson classic Logan's Run on Friday 29 July at 7pm. Fish and plankton and sea-greens. It's all here, ready, fresh as harvest day." [20 sec]

Hello Simon and Mark, this is Token Homo from London-based film-club queer horror nights. Our next screening is a rare double bill of the Psycho sequels. That's Psycho 2 and Psycho 3 back to back at the Cinema Museum on Sunday the 24th of July at 6.30pm. Join us from 5.30 for a bar social then check into the Bates Motel to find out what Norman did next." [23 sec]

3. Daisy Edgar Jones episode
"Hi I'm Rob from the Recovery Street Film Festival. This annual competition gives people in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction and their families the opportunity to share their stories through the use of film and challenge the taboo that so often goes hand in hand with addiction. Find out more about how you can enter the competition and watch some of the winning entries from previous years at rsff.co.uk." [24 sec]

"Hi Simon and Mark, Lloyd Bradley here, curator of From Jamaica to the World a new season of films celebrating Reggae music on at the BFI Southbank and on BFI player throughout August. The season puts Jamaican music in its Jamaican context by covering all aspects of reggae culture and the life that surrounds it. These music documentaries and iconic films include a 50th anniversary re-release of The Harder They Come which will be in cinemas across the UK from the 5th of August." [34 sec]

4. Jordan Peele episode
"The last arthouse theatre in the Southern Hemisphere, Cinema Nova, is turning 30 this August. Starting as 2 screens in 1992, and now 16 screens, it's helped make Melbourne a major centre for cinema culture. My name is Simon, I've worked there for 17 years as the maintenance man and three of my children have also worked there as as ushers and [missed what was said here]. I wanted to wish Cinema Nova a happy 30th birthday, thank you." [26 sec]

5. Hugh Bonneville episode
"This is Pat Higgins, writer-director of Powertool Cheerleaders versus The Boy Band of the Screeching Dead, a new musical comedy horror which is screening at this year's Fright Fest on Monday 29th of August at the Prince Charles Cinema in Leicester Square. It's directly after Mark's appearance in Duelling Egos so you'll be there anyway so stick around and hopefully watch it. Cheers." [20 sec]

 

C. How to email a voice memo (from an iPhone)
 

C1. The Voice Memo app is bundled free with iPhones and the red button will record you speaking into your phone. Press again to stop, doing so saves the file to the app. You can click on it to expand it and then click on the three blue dots to bring up the various options. You can also do some fairly basic editing here (basically trimming). 

C2. The Share... icon at the bottom will let you send your recording to all sorts of places, including email. The email address is correspondence@kermodeandmayo.com

If you want to send it to another device on the same wifi network you can also switch on bluetooth then click the black AirDrop button, which will go blue while searching for a connected device, and press again to send it.

Thoughts on starting to learn Python - I am rather new to it

While my colleague was away on his hols recently I thought I'd surprise him by having a go at learning Python so signed up myself for a week-long course (at a different institution). Every year he and other colleagues teach hundreds of undergraduates how to program in Python and Java (subject knowledge), but he also teaches lots of schoolteachers how to teach programming too (pedagogy). 

I expect we're moving in the direction of undergraduates being taught how to teach programming as well, because one of the skills they'll probably need in the workplace is to be able to teach new colleagues how to use new task-specific software. Anyway...

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

 

Gosh I was right to have avoided learning Python for this long, it's like Very Hard Sums ;) Much harder than I was expecting. I don't seem to be much of a computational thinker alas (learning to program not only teaches the obvious 'how to program', but also 'how to think a bit more logically about things', but sadly I may be a lost cause). Also, I have no particular impetus for learning programming (beyond annoying myself and amusing my colleague) as I genuinely can't see to what use I'd ever put it (and this has generally discouraged me from taking it up in the past).

That said, I've always been 'good at computers' and gravitated towards the nerds wherever I've worked - it's a constant surprise to me that I don't already know how to program or that I'm not a SysAdmin. Doing the course felt a bit like 'retconning' a missing patch from earlier in my life that probably should have been installed during or shortly after I left university. Ironically I do actually have a university qualification in Computer Science because I studied it for one year on my modular course (Biology, Psychology and Computing). I remember spending my holiday in a library in Harrow reading newspaper articles about IBM and Token Rings. We learned to program in SQL and had to make a thing that would calculate how quickly a bath would fill and empty, ostensibly for a property management company. 

Anyway I enjoyed the recent short course but it was a bit fast for me (or perhaps I'm a bit slow for it) and I found that if I wrote anything down there was a risk I'd miss something, which I would later have to rely on, so I mostly just tried to keep up.  

I didn't find the concepts of variables or types or int (integer) / float (numbers with decimal points) or string hard though - the thing I found hardest was actually parsing the English instructions for the exercises. I always felt I was missing something and asked a LOT of questions. The tutor and other students were very helpful and didn't make me feel too much like a lame duck.

Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay

It reminded me of doing AO maths (an alternative O level that's slightly more advanced, but not much). There was lots of lovely mechanics involved and trajectories, using formula like s = ut + ½at² where 'u' is the initial velocity. People smarter than me will immediately realise that the starting speed of a ball about to be thrown is obviously zero, but I have to admit that I once asked for help with that as the instruction had 'missed' it out. I seemed to lack the cognitive wherewithal to work that out for myself - oh dear! It looks like I am not very good at extracting, or abstracting, information from a paragraph of text and really need bullet points.

So this was pretty much where I found myself with trying to work out what I was supposed to be doing, let alone trying to convert it into a program. It was interesting to see under the bonnet of my own cognition - to see exactly where the limits are of my own capacity for understanding.

I did learn a lot by taking the solution and testing permutations, basically to see what happens when I tweak different bits of it, but I would not say that I have the sort of brain that finds it easy. I'm clever enough and reasonably logical, but possibly not quite clever or logical enough for Python. Also I'm 52 so possibly this would have been easier 30 years ago. Now i just want an easy life ;)

One exercise involved using the remainder / modulo function which I couldn't get my head around at all. I spent at least half an hour that day being absolutely baffled that anyone would ever want to know what was left over after a division. Surely if you divide 236 by 17 the only answer you want is 13.88 and not '13' or '88'. It featured in an exercise about leap years that I didn't really manage to get to grips with.

Later I was doing some work for our Charlton and Woolwich Free Film Festival and had a flash of inspiration about film times and the mystery modulo. 

If I want to express the time, in hours and minutes, of a film lasting 138 minutes then I don't want to say that it's 138/60 = 2.3 hours, I want to say that it's 2 hours and however many minutes. Aha! AHA!!

I actually managed to create a program that worked and told me the answer!!

138 / 60 means "what is 138 ÷ 60", and gives the answer of 2.3.

138 // 60 means "what is the whole number that results from dividing 138 by 60?", and the answer is 2.

138 % 60 means "what's left over once you've finished dividing by (really, subtracting from) 60?", and it's 18.

So a 138min film = 2hr 18min.

This is my 4-line program (text version at the end)

film_length = int(input("Enter the length of the film in minutes, e.g. 123: "))
hours = film_length // 60
mins = film_length % 60
print("The film is this long:",hours,"hr",mins,"min")

Which results in being asked for the length of the film and, when a number entered, gives the result. Pleasing.

Enter the length of the film in minutes, e.g. 123: 138
The film is this long: 2 hr 18 min

Process finished with exit code 0 <-- this is good by the way

I was pretty pleased to have worked it out for myself and for it to work exactly as expected. Going to see if I can try and write a program to do it in reverse, so you enter 2hr 18min and it gives you 138 mins....

 

Further reading
I'm enjoying reading (very slowly) and comparing these two books / PDFs, published 18 years apart:

How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning with Python 3 Documentation (Release 3rd Edition) by Peter Wentworth, Jeffrey Elkner, Allen B Downey and Chris Meyers (17 April 2020)

and the first edition 'How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning with Python' by Allen Downey, Jeffrey Elkner, and Chris Meyers (2002) (there's also an interactive version).

Text of the program, which I called jo_first_program_31_july_film_length.py

film_length = int(input("Entere the length of the film in minutes, e.g. 123: "))
hours = film_length // 60
mins = film_length % 60
print("The film is this long:",hours,"hr",mins,"min")

International Ctrl+F Day - 18 August 2022 - this Thursday share your nerdy knowledge

I bet you know someone who'd benefit from discovering that SHIFT+ENTER lets them introduce paragraphs (and some white space) into their Facebook comments. If you do, please tell them. While you’re at it, let the world know that an underscore (_) or asterisk (*) on either side of a word in a WhatsApp message adds italics or emphasis - you can even strike out the text with a couple of tildes (~), one on each side. 

There’ll be someone in your department who knows how to store email addresses on the photocopier to save people having to enter it each time. Perhaps it’s you? If so, maybe you could leave some instructions for your grateful colleagues who have been fighting a beepy battle to scan documents and email them to themselves. (After finding out how to shush our office photocopiers’ beeps I once stayed late after work and covertly de-beeped two floors' worth of machines.) 

 

“I think I now understand what it's like to be a Jehovah's Witness. I want to knock on strangers' doors & tell them the good news of Ctrl+F.”⁽¹⁾

We all pick up useful ways of doing things on computers or other tech but, unless you sit and watch what others are doing, we don't transmit these tricks to other people very effectively. I'd always assumed that the Ctrl+F (or Command+F on a Mac) shortcut was widely known, by pretty much everyone, and I remember my amazement in August 2011 to discover that it wasn't. The keyboard shortcut is a quick route into the Edit » Find menu, available on almost any bit of office software, which lets you leap through a textual wormhole from wherever you are in a document to wherever that exact word, phrase or search 'string' appears. It doesn't matter how long the document is (200-page PDF? No problem) and works on web pages as well as Word. Using Ctrl+F boosts your search skills and saves a lot of time letting you check within seconds if something appears in a document. 

On a smartphone it’s slightly fiddlier to ‘Ctrl+F’ a word on a page. You need to pull down at the top of the page show the search bar, type in your word or phrase and then it will tell you if it appears on the page you’ve been looking at (and it’ll let you tap your way to each instance of it). Wherever you use the shortcut it’s incredibly useful. 

On 18th August 2011 Alexis Madrigal published an article⁽²⁾ in The Atlantic drawing attention to research by Google ‘search anthropologist’ Dan Russell which showed that 90 per cent of internet users didn’t know about Ctrl+F. What had they been doing instead? It turned out they’d been scrolling up and down and visually scanning to try and hunt for the word that was hiding somewhere in the text. Jaws dropped. A follow-up article⁽³⁾ a few days later considered the fallout of this momentous news and articles appeared extolling the virtues of having Ctrl+F among your search skills, as well as other useful keyboard shortcuts to save time or ‘increase productivity’. 

I’d like to suggest a kind of “International Ctrl+F Day” on 18th August, partly to mark the anniversary of nerds discovering^ that everyone else didn’t already know this tip, and partly to encourage everyone to grab the opportunity to share some small technological thing that might help others. If you feel inspired you might write a post, on Facebook or your work intranet, to tell people about Ctrl+F (or Shift+Enter) or some other useful thing that you know and (probably wrongly) thought was too obvious to share. Did you know that you can press and hold the space bar on a phone to reposition the cursor? Someone you know probably doesn’t and might be pleased to know. Tell them, on Thursday (or any day you like!). 

 

References

⁽¹⁾ https://twitter.com/JoBrodie/status/105036950360170496 

⁽²⁾ Crazy: 90 Percent of People Don’t Know How to Use CTRL+F (18 August 2011) by Alexis Madrigal, The Atlantic 

⁽³⁾ Why Using Control+F May Be the Most Important Computing Skill (22 August 2011) by Alexis C. Madrigal, The Atlantic  

^My surprise at finding out that most people didn't know about Ctrl+F is also matched by my sudden awareness of how poor I'd been at estimating others' digital literacy. I'd not given a moment's thought to ever mentioning Ctrl+F to anyone as I'd assumed everyone had just picked it up, as I had, by spotting it in the on-screen Edit / Find menu.

 

 

 

Things I wish I'd known before booking into DoubleTree Docklands by Hilton Hotels, opposite Canary Wharf

1. Bring biscuits, make a note of these shops

There are no snacks in the room (and no mini-bar). 

Apparently there's not a single biscuit to be had in the entire DoubleTree Docklands hotel to dunk in a cup of tea, or wasn't during my stay. There is tea and coffee (and a kettle) in the room. But no bottled water. 

Reception said all the taps have drinkable water so I just used that (I had to ask because there's no information in the room confirming that tap water's OK to drink). They also suggested I walk over to the bar & restaurant to ask them about biscuits (but it turns out they don't have any either, which wasn't a huge surprise). 

Happily I was already near the bar (it's just along from Reception) because I'd had to go down to Reception in person (as no-one was answering the phone). I made several visits there during my two night stay as it was quicker than waiting for the phone to be answered. 

The bar (and door) staff suggested I try a shop, giving me directions to two local shops: a nearer one (3 mins away) and a bigger one (10 mins away). As it was heatwave-hot I said I'd try the nearer one.

When I arrived I discovered that the nearer shop had already closed for the evening, the second was open and had biscuits. That was great but the extended walk between the two in the heatwave (~8.30pm on the evening of 18th July)  wasn't. I'd rather have been told before that the first one was closed, to save myself the detour - but really, how could anyone possibly know this easily accessible and predictable information about shop timings?

Take note (and check in case things have changed) -

Docklands Trading Post - 2 Timbrell Place

020 7252 0816

7am to 8pm every day

Google Map code: GX38+6F London

Co-op Food - 346 Rotherhithe Street

020 7394 0577

7am to 10pm every day

Google Map code: GX45+M9 London

The Co-op also does Deliveroo stuff but I thought it was too hot to have someone sweltering on a motorbike just to bring me snacks, but worth being aware of in cooler times. The C10 bus will pick you up outside the hotel and drop you off. I discovered this en route, no-one having thought to mention it. The C10 route goes between Victoria Station (rail, and coach) and Canada Water. I was glad of it in reverse and it dropped me back to the hotel. You can use a contactless payment card or Oyster card to pay for it.

 

2. Free croissants

Near reception there's a self-serve stall where they put croissants, pains au chocolat and other jam pastries during the day. I didn't notice it until the second day otherwise I might have had one with my cup of tea (if they'd not all gone). No-one mentioned it.

 

3. Free cookies, allegedly

I discovered*, via the tray liner on the Room Service tray (food was lovely) and subsequent Googling, that Hilton Hotels are actually famous for cookies, which they apparently offer to guests on arrival. I didn't get one and while I can live with that I'm a bit surprised that me asking for a biscuit didn't trigger some sort of "no, but we have cookies" response. As opposed to "please walk for longer than you need in this sweltering heat to the shop". I would have gladly paid for a cookie.

To be fair I've seen zero evidence of these free cookies so it may well be an internet myth.

*Discovered later in the evening after I'd returned from my biscuit expedition. At this point I felt like I was being trolled. 

"There's more in our kitchen than cookies".
No-one said there were cookies so this came as a surprise.

 

4. If arriving by boat try and time it for high tide

I regularly travel by the Thames Clippers so I do already know this but because I wanted to arrive before the temperatures got into the mid-30s I prioritised temperature-avoidance instead of low-tide avoidance so it was a bit of an uphill climb at low tide.

Explanation: piers consist of two bits: one bit attached to the shore and another linked bit that floats on the water. As the Thames rises and falls the angle of the connecting gangway changes with it. At low tide the water-bit is considerably lower than the shore-bit. When the tide is high the water-bit is pushed up so it's more level with the shore - and a nice flat walk.

 

5. The Room Service menu is on TV

This isn't completely alien but I'd not stayed in a hotel for 3 years (Coronavirus) so had forgotten. Usually when you walk into a hotel room the television is either already on and telling you how to access all the information and/or there's a printed information pack with timing details and contact numbers for the amenities. 

This hotel has neither the pack, nor an already-switched on TV and not even a sign alerting you to investigate the TV options. The lack of info pack made me think info had been missed from my room anyway (no, just not given) but I managed to pick up both the TV explanation and a paper Room Service menu on my first of several visits to Reception (phone rarely answered so in-person visits).

The phone line for the bar / restaurant was also completely dead, at least the Reception line rang and rang.

 

6. Make a note of the hotel's phone number (020 7231 1001)

I was pleased that I happened to have the number saved in my mobile phone. When I first arrived at my room after checking in neither of the two access cards worked so I called them, from my mobile (which they did answer, surprisingly). 

Fifteen minutes later a maintenance man appeared. He was there for a completely unrelated reason but he was able to take my cards downstairs, get new ones and come back and let me in at 3:50pm (I'd checked in at ~3:20pm. Actually I checked in just after 3pm but there was a separate delay but I wasn't too bothered about that, at the time). 

Shortly after making the call on my mobile I spotted that there was a phone by the lift which I could have used (if anyone answered the internal phones which, on Monday 18th July 2022, they were not).

7. Check and see what other hotels are available

Would be my overarching advice. Or at least book a cheaper room. I did put in a formal complaint (the arrangement really was not what I'd paid for) and I was partially reimbursed. I waited a month before posting this as I wanted to see if I'd calmed down about it since. Nope ;) That biscuit thing tipped me over the edge.

 

After my polite-but-firm complaint email, which covered more than I've put here, they gave me a 50% reimbursement. It took a few days to get a response to the email (I tried phoning too...) but we got there in the end.

I wish Greenwich Park had a "What's on in the Planetarium today?" thing, an example suggested

It's possible that what I'm asking for is harder to put together than I imagine but I will suggest it nonetheless.

It's a hot day. Pretend I'm in Greenwich Park, maybe with some kids, and we'd like the opportunity to sit down somewhere cool and watch a planetarium show, if one happens to be running within the next hour or so. How do we find out?

I've been in this position on several occasions (minus the kids, it's just me wanting a sit down in the dark!) and generally I've found it a bit of a faff to find out what shows are happening now, today and if tickets are currently available.

My phone signal's never been particularly brilliant in the park so to begin with there's a bit of annoyance with googling for the relevant page. It might exist but searching for Greenwich Planetarium shows takes me to this page "Planetarium Shows" which tells me about the shows, not what time they're on (more clicking required). It's a bit like looking up the listings on a cinema website and being pointed to plot summaries and reviews instead of the "8.30pm start" information that I'm after.

The What's On page also shows me general information about performances, though some of them do have specific information (e.g. 13 August 2022, 1.30pm etc) or 'mornings, Wednesday - Monday in term time'. It would involve quite a bit of clicking / tapping to go into each planetarium show and find out what time it's on, on a particular day. 

While the What's On page has an opportunity to filter by date and event type when I do so, for planetarium shows on Friday 12 August, it tells me that none are available (though other information suggests that several shows are running tomorrow).

I'd probably like to know if tickets are available or if it's sold out (saves a walk to the venue to find out, even more important if you're with kids) but that may be harder to implement.

I've usually just given up and phoned the general Greenwich museums booking line; they're very helpful - 0208 312 6608.

 Person watching a planetarium show.
Image by 政徳 吉田 from Pixabay

What I'd like
A notice on every noticeboard in the park with a QR code (and link, for those wary of QR codes) that points to a "Greenwich Planetarium Shows Today" page. Every day that page is updated for the new day with a list, ordered by time, of the shows happening in the planetarium. I'm very happy for other "also on today" events at the wider museum(s) to be listed, with a sense of whether they're happening at a particular time or just on all day. But put the time-sensitive things at the top of the page.

Presumably the Planetarium has its own daily list of events and I'm sure this could be shared on a page. If this page already exists then please make it easier to find.

Here's my attempt at doing it for tomorrow (which is during the school holidays, not term time).

Greenwich Planetarium Shows - Friday 12 August 2022

By time

• 11.30am - Ted's Space Adventure (for pre-schoolers)
  
• 12.30pm - Starstruck (for age 7+)
• 1.30pm - The Sky Tonight (for age 7+)
• 2.30pm - Meet the Neighbours (for age 7+)
• 3.30pm - Starstruck (for age 7+)
• 4.30pm - The Sky Tonight (for age 7+)

 

By show

• Ted's Space Adventure - 11:30am (for pre-schoolers)
• The Sky Tonight - 1.30pm and 4.30pm (for age 7+)
• Starstruck - 12.30pm and 3.30pm (for age 7+)
• Meet the Neighbours - 2.30pm (for age 7+)

If it's the same every day then it wouldn't need updating daily. The term-time schedule is slightly different and there aren't usually any shows on term time Tuesdays (but there are on holiday Tuesdays).

Heh, after all that I tried clicking on a booking link (to double-check that the event was definitely running on Friday) and discovered that not only can you book all the different planetarium shows but you can see at a glance the different times they're on. So my advice, if they don't implement my suggestion above, is just to pretend to book something and you'll probably be taken to a page with all the options for those aged over 7 at least.

Screenshot of booking options, which displays all shows.