anitabyte

Printing arbitrary photos with a "Kid's" thermal camera

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 10:00:00 +0100

I bought a kid’s camera with a thermal printer (specifically the GREENKINDER Kids Camera Instant Print 3.0" Screen, Girls & Boys Age 3-12 | 3 Rolls Print Paper,1080P Kids Digital Camera,Christmas Birthday Gifts for Children 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Years Old,Green - who doesn’t love Amazon item titles?) as part of a very cute project with my wife to create a book of a photo a day for 2026, with the aid of adhesive thermal printing rolls. I am, however, terrible at 1) remembering to take the camera with me and 2) remembering to take a photo with this camera over whatever I may have on my person at any given time. In a bid to adhere to the spirit of the project, if not the literal word, I needed a way to print photos taken anywhere using the thermal printer on the camera.

An Ill-Advised Project #1

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 19:00:00 +0100

I am easily influenced, as much as I will always want to claim otherwise. One such occasion was when I saw Instagram user @mewtru’s reel where they had created an LED matrix that displayed spinning album art from Spotify. To get an idea of how targeted to my interests this is, I saw it independently and then had two people I know show me the reel: it’s music, flashing lights and computers and I am hideously typecast in life.

Listening - 2023-10-08

Sun, 08 Oct 2023 23:59:15 +0100

	Artist	Title	Album	Plays
1	Petrol Girls	Sick & Tired	Baby	7
2	Destroy Boys	Drink	Open Mouth, Open Heart	5
3	Petrol Girls	Bones	Baby	5
4	Lucy Dacus	Timefighter	Historian	4
5	Julien Baker	Sprained Ankle	Sprained Ankle	4
6	Japanese Breakfast	Paprika	Jubilee	4
7	Japanese Breakfast	Be Sweet	Jubilee	4
8	Petrol Girls	Violent by Design	Baby	3
9	Petrol Girls	Unsettle	Baby	3
10	Tiny Moving Parts	The Midwest Sky	Breathe	3

I’ve been running to the Petrol Girls’s Baby as a replacement for Refused’s The Shape of Punk to Come for high-tempo music with sufficient ire behind it to help me push through the fact that I hate moving my body in this way. It’s been a worthy change: Ren Aldridge’s vocals have a grit that Dennis Lyxzén’s just lack and the instrumentation - while not as genre-deviating as the introduction to Tannhäuser/Derivè, as an example - has its moments that stave off any potential motonomy, with the incredibly bouncy verse riff in Preachers being set at odds with the slower and somewhat syncopated rhythms of Unsettle. The only really offputting thing about the album is the switching between a ’long a’ and ‘short a’ vowel sound in the pronunciation of ‘bath’ in Bones, which as someone who speaks English correctly bothers me (‘short a’ only, there’s no ‘r’ in the word).

Listening - 2023-10-01

Sun, 01 Oct 2023 23:59:15 +0100

	Artist	Title	Album	Plays
1	Japanese Breakfast	Posing in Bondage	Jubilee	8
2	Japanese Breakfast	Be Sweet	Jubilee	8
3	Courtney Barnett	Pedestrian at Best	Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit	7
4	Japanese Breakfast	Slide Tackle	Jubilee	6
5	Japanese Breakfast	Savage Good Boy	Jubilee	6
6	Japanese Breakfast	In Hell	Jubilee	6
7	Olivia Rodrigo	bad idea right?	GUTS	5
8	Japanese Breakfast	Paprika	Jubilee	4
9	Japanese Breakfast	Kokomo, IN	Jubilee	4
10	Olivia Rodrigo	love is embarrassing	GUTS	3

I’ve been reading Crying in H Mart and it’s already changed how I view Japanese Breakfast’s music: everything in Slide Tackle’s revisiting of an obsession and wanting to be better has become a matter of the fact that Michelle Zauner’s mother insisted she could never keep up with her extracurriculars as a child. Was football another one of these? Did she wish she could have ‘[navigated] the hate in her heart’ to stick with the sport? Is the ‘ache’ she sought to meet the one for a past love of a sport? Sometimes heartbreak is just heartbreak, as much as Gareth Campesinos’s love of football allegories may have conditioned me otherwise when someone mentions the ugly game: For Whom The Belly Tolls’s ‘Scout yourself as a one-man team/You’re a one-club man denied a testimonial’ and Every Defeat a Divorce’s turning-around of Three Lions will probably remain for the rest of my life the only things inspired by football that have brought any beauty into the world.

Pi Any Means Necessary #2: Software availability

Fri, 22 Sep 2023 12:36:37 +0100

I’ve taken for granted in the past that if I’m on a Raspberry Pi, I’m going to have an easy time of getting software for ARM: it’s all-but the default platform for which ARM software is built, given the prevalence of the board in the marketplace. This isn’t - for now, at least - so true if you’re on a 64-bit OS. In spite of the Pi having a 64-bit processor since the Pi 3, the software ecosystem hasn’t quite caught up to that. This isn’t an issue for things distributed by Debian - all of that ends up in the core repositories and is only an apt install away - but for things distributed in the likes of AppImages or Flatpaks, this poses more of a problem.

Pi Any Means Necessary #1: Overclocking and cooling

Wed, 19 Jul 2023 22:36:37 +0100

I’ve had a deep appreciation for the Raspberry Pi since it’s initial launch in 2012: the promise of a computer for the home that costs $35 (or, perversely, £35) made the possibility of a universally available and affordable computer for people’s homes a far more realistic one than it had been in my youth of attempting to learn everything I could about computers from stolen hours in public libraries and borrowed and outmoded hardware.

About the Author

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Just some fucking guy, honestly. I’m on Bluesky if you want my less thought out thoughts. Wouldn’t recommend it: I have to live with them and boy do I suffer.